Entry no 49

As the Crow Flies by Véronique Tadjo*

Read by Annie Gagiano

As the Crow Flies by Véronique Tadjo

This sophisticated text, translated from the original 1991 French (A Vol d’Oiseau) by the well-known translator Wangui wa Goro, is no conventional novel. Brief as it is (at just over a hundred pages), it is a dense, intense account of experiences, perceptions and relationships recorded without discernible narrative links, but presented to the reader as a sort of mosaic of many stories, or glimpses of lives at moments of intensity or illumination. The narrator in fact informs us:

Indeed, I too would have loved to write one of those serene stories with a beginning and an end. But … it is never like that. Lives mingle, people tame one another and part. (Unpaginated opening page)

What, then, holds the many sections of the text – some coherent “short stories” of several pages; some sketches of merely two to three lines in length – together? The title is linked into a small proverb-poem proclaiming that whoever wishes to love needs to be ready to do so “to the ends of the earth” and “as the crow flies”. By no means all the stories and snippets contained in this work are “love stories”, though – what most of their protagonists do share is the ability to acknowledge and articulate unexpected, even unwelcome, attitudes and emotions, such as boredom with a lover or illicit desire or embarrassment by a former benefactor or fierce hatred by an old man of a mere child seen as a competitor for charity. What they also illustrate is how, in whatever setting a person settles, even temporarily, a web of relationships with the smells, sights and sounds of that place and with the people who happen to live in those vicinities, will develop – while memories of other such relationships jostle with the newer impressions.

Glimpses of the author’s own transitions (born in Paris, an upbringing in the city Abidjan – Côte d’Ivoire – followed by studies at both Abidjan University and the Sorbonne) are reflected throughout the text, without confining this work to the limits of personal experience. Notably, Tadjo (who at present resides in Johannesburg) has lived and worked in many parts of the world, and her wide range of writing styles and interests includes (besides novels) children’s books, poetry, assessments of African crises (such as her recently published account of the Rwandan genocide) and literary translation. As the Crow Flies is one of the examples of what I like to term cosmopolitan African writing – not to suggest that an author does not live on our continent, but to emphasise that he or she writes of many societies and settings, which include those in Africa.

The text depicts numerous moments of delight and joy, but exhibits a strong awareness also of the disasters and sordid circumstances besetting what are probably the unfortunate majority of the people of our era. One protagonist suggests that “we must be living in a squalid century” before describing the mendicant and the disabled, the bored and the glossy, the suicidally despairing, as well as some of the foolishly irresponsible inhabitants of the contemporary city – which might as easily be Abidjan as Paris (21). Elsewhere, the reference seems more distinctly African:

It is definitely a century that hangs its head in shame.

Our elders have been called impotent, and we are accused
of being “limp” (although that is stretching the metaphor a
little too far).

Someone replies to this: “It is a matter of infrastructure and superstructure. The problem must be analysed in the specific
context of the country. A lot of progress has been made.
We are no longer the way we used to be.”

The young point their fingers at their “Elder Brothers”: “What
have you done to change things?” they ask.

Indeed, the town lost its scent a long time ago. We are all
sick and tired of this suffocation, of this monarch lording it
over his people. Everybody can feel that this is a sterile century.
Even love is finding it hard to thrive. (31)

A passage like the one above illustrates the wide range of social relevance of this work that, by addressing the ills of the time, pinpoints what many social scientists have been saying about many contemporary societies – more succinctly, pertinently and with a greater sense of ironic complexity than in most such surveys.

Tadjo’s work contains statements or comments that manage to straddle what is usually thought of as the divide between the African oral sphere of proverbial sayings on the one hand and the aphoristic declamations of contemporary philosophical discourse on the other. “Happiness is to be found in its absence” (81) and “There is no law. No judge. In the wilderness of the heart, you sometimes lose blood” (99) are some examples of these; or “The fighter acknowledges his adversary. … He never allows anyone to kneel before him” (43); as are the following comments – contrasting yet complementary – on the possibilities of “body language(s)”:

Is it possible to allow bodies to speak, to let them speak
their own language, which surpasses all the frontiers of
silence? How would he have ever experienced such desire
if the spinal nervous system, which transmitted love, had
never existed? (88)

and

It was madness to believe that bodies could banish loneliness, that pleasure could give birth to a fertile language. (92)

Elsewhere, a narrator says,

I want truth to convulse my whole body and rip open the straitjacket of my very flesh. (100)

The text does not drift about in any kind of never-never land, though. A vivid passage like the one cited below is very distinctly grounded in its local, African, Ivorian realities:

I think of Abidjan’s gangsters, Bouaké’s thieves, of the
organised gangs of Korhogo. And I say, “Just open your
eyes! Open your eyes! … The torrential rains will come
with the sound of machine-guns, and the roll of drums will
come with the sound of military boots.”

I speak of Cocody, where the air is cool, where flowers bloom
faster than in our pathetic neighbourhoods. I speak of the
inequalities that breed like geckos under the ruins of slums. (73)

Such writing juxtaposes natural fecundity with the way our continent seems to breed war and violence, and contrasts the social disharmonies we live with, with the beautiful, orderly rhythms of nature. Although we know next to nothing about the speaker of these words, we can sense their combination of compassion and indignation at the anguishing paradoxes of African life. Elsewhere, too, Tadjo places a narrator’s desire to listen to the “seasons exhale” and to watch “the sun’s birth” with the awful sound of machine-guns and of “a final groan”, when (nevertheless) “fear starts to lift and hope returns” (58). Her writing in this text is suggestive and potent, eschewing the need of a “normal” narrative thread.

Some of the sections of the text, as I indicated earlier, do present themselves as brief short stories, though. There is, for instance, the surreal, myth-like tale of two lovers, one of whom (the woman) is dying, who attempt, not to transcend death – like Orpheus and Eurydice, explicitly alluded to – but to maintain their intensity of love and mutual desire unto the very brink of death and to the very edge of the known geographical world (45-47), with its “romantic”, operatic integration of landscapes and seascapes, into the final scenes of the lovers’ time together, that is nevertheless tinged with irony. Or the shocking realism of the tale of an old beggar man who beats to death the deaf boy who innocently intrudes on his “turf” and outperforms him in this “trade” (25-29).

Then there is the story of a couple who attempts to transmit their own profoundly moral value system and deep mutual commitment to their miraculously-born son, only for this young man to betray all they stood for and violate a too-young woman with whom he is obsessed, unleashing infernal violence on the world (77-80) – a story strongly reminiscent of some of the similarly surreal, short sketches that Dambudzo Marechera wrote early in his brief writing career.

Possessiveness features often in Tadjo’s pieces as a malignant force; perhaps the equivalent, in personal relationships, of the misuse of public power (see, in this regard, another strange story of an older, powerful male and a younger woman, both trained in magic, on pp 81-84).

Other stories in the text capture the way an initially benign relationship can be ended with mysterious, bewildering suddenness, perhaps because of the always inherently resented role (because of its dependence) of the poorer and less able person vis-à-vis the financially independent and secure one – this is not a lovers’ relationship, but depicts a young woman with an initially reluctant social conscience, and a disabled boy whom she assists (49-52).

In one section a speaker advises a rejected and dejected friend: “No, love is the colour of hope. Bitter today, sweet tomorrow” (59). This could stand as a description of Tadjo’s oscillating evocations of exhilaration and despair brought about by commitment, fulfilment, thwartedness or loss in the many vivid glimpses of love relationships, partnerships or affairs that she provides throughout this text.

Tadjo’s perspective is ironic, understanding, but often cuttingly unsentimental. The opening “tale” of As the Crow Flies (1-8) may be one such fragmented anecdote of a particular relationship as it goes through various stages. Here, too, for instance, are the words assigned to a lover drawn by desire or fidelity to the partner’s place:

Life is a trap. I am going crazy in this city that revolves
around you, where my life has taken on the allure of a
promise. I am suffocating. Love brought me here and has
left me comatose till daybreak. (63)

Settings, as I have intimated, are mostly urban in this text and some are indeterminately so in terms of cultural or geographical references – such as the glimpsed image, ridiculous yet full of pathos, of a man selling umbrellas in the rain, clutching an unopened one against himself in the downpour (60), or the horror of being “felt up” by a stranger in the midst of a city crowd or audience. The sufferings of the urban poor (depicted on p 23, for instance) are not restricted to any particular country. Yet it is hard not to imagine that a narrator’s lament about being “trapped” and feeling “constricted” in an “odourless city” (71) does not reflect the alienation of an exiled West African in a European city.

Other passages clearly articulate the difficulty of feeling torn between the home continent and the beloved’s home turf: “An urge to go, to stay. A desire to love just you alone, and yet not leave everybody behind” (56).

Once in the far country, one narrator testifies: “I dream of my country, which obsesses me all the time. I carry it with me all day. At night, it lies next to me, making love with me” (72). It is hard to think of a more vivid and poignantly convincing expression of nostalgia than the latter image.

I conclude with Tadjo’s depiction of a particular African setting at a moment when it is far distant:

I need to feel the heat and sweat running down my back,
feel warm nights humming with insects, the dust and the
mud. At home, life sprouts everywhere. You can never
forget that there is still much to be done. (62)

This evocative description – encompassing the warmth (both human and climatic) that is loved and missed as well as acknowledging the harsh local conditions at home – can serve as a cameo representation of the elegance and power of Tadjo’s writing in As the Crow Flies. The translator is to be commended for the intelligence with which she transferred Tadjo’s French into English without any sense of awkwardness or distortion of the original.

A last detail that will interest many readers is that Véronique Tadjo herself designed the cover for this Heinemann English version of her book – a most attractive, appropriate image.

* Véronique Tadjo is the recipient Le Grand Prix d’Afrique Noire for 2005.

LitNet: 07 February 2006

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