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ON THE BRIDGE

By Koffi Kwahulé (translated by Dominique Malaquais)

On the eve of the events I recount here,

Sma’Boy, in a dream, saw Little-Cow-Tail come fetch President on the Old Bridge. She was with General Abibi; he was driving a hearse. Sma’Boy chased Little-Cow-Tail away. She left, then returned to convince President it was time to abandon camp. Again, Sma’Boy chased her away.

                                     She disappeared,
then came back,

                           was chased away,
disappeared,
came back,

                    was chased away,
disappeared,
came back,

                             was chased away,
disappeared,
came back,

                                                  was chased away.

Up to seven times.

On the seventh go, Little-Cow-Tail turned into a vulture. The vulture swallowed President and flew off with him. Sma’Boy flew after the vulture, slit open its stomach with his machete and crawled in. He found himself in a plane. Inside, President and the General, in white doctors’ smocks, were helping Little-Cow-Tail give birth. The loudspeakers on the plane were playing white folks’ music, the kind you hear in airports and department stores, music that flatters the ears and whispers to the soul “let it go, let it go.” From Little-Cow-Tail’s stomach came streams and streams of tiny children, the size of tin soldiers, screaming and laughing. Warriors. All bore shiny new little machine guns. They were white, they were black, they were boys, they were girls and all of them, every last one, looked like President or the General. Upon exiting Little-Cow-Tail’s stomach, the children opened parachutes and flung themselves from the belly of the plane. Thighs wide open on the delivery table, Little-Cow-Tail cried with joy – a mother, she was a mother! President and the General were drunk with the thrill of new fatherhood. President told Sma’Boy to drop his machete and join them. Seeing that Sma’Boy wouldn’t budge, he explained between bouts of satisfied laughter that the war was for other people, people who didn’t “get” the movies. Sma’Boy wasn’t being filmed, President said, he was behind the camera now, so he might as well profit from the war instead of fighting it. And while President filled the plane with explanations and laughter, Little-Cow-Tail slid her hand down the front of Sma’Boy’s pants, all the way down to his prick. She grabbed him there, lusty eyes staring straight into his. For a long, long time she stroked the beast to the beat of the music coming from the loudspeakers. Music for soothing the senses, calling for abandon. Sma’Boy felt pleasure grow in him and his will seep away. So he dropped out of the bird’s belly and woke up.

It is this dream that brought Sma’Boy to our camp with nothing more than a machete. 

President, now, is talking to Sma’Boy.

He talks and talks and talks. But Sma’Boy won’t answer. So Little-Cow-Tail walks toward him. In her eyes, a little girl’s smile, happy ahead of time for the naughty thing she’s about to do. She knows there’s no point in talking, talking, talking, because Sma’Boy won’t talk back.  She rubs up against him. The dream. But this time Sma’Boy doesn’t feel a thing. Or pretends he doesn’t.  Still, he steps back, away from her. Little-Cow-Tail takes a step forward.  In her eyes a little girl is smiling – the things she knows…

Again, he steps back. Again, she moves forward. It looks like he’s running away from her in slow motion.

                                          He moves back.

                                                She moves forward.

                                        He moves back.

                                             She moves forward.

                    He moves back.

                           She moves forward.

Sma’Boy raises his machete to warn her: no more; otherwise… Not only doesn’t she stop, she sticks her hand down his pants. The dream. All of this happens before our eyes. Sma’Boy holds his machete high, just like that, while her hand slithers up and around his cock. He does nothing. Suddenly, it seems, he can’t bring the machete down. Everyone is thinking the same thing: “She is casting a spell on him. She is casting a spell on Sma’Boy.” We all understand that Little-Cow-Tail is not just what she seems, that she too is “prepared”. This is knowledge we all have: white people have the toughest juju, juju they call cha’ms, and this woman, anyone can see, has powerful cha’ms, cha’ms so powerful they are squeezing the life out of Sma’Boy’s juju. Sma’Boy feels it. He removes Little-Cow-Tail’s hand from his boner and pushes her away. She falls to the floor. Concerned she is in danger, President and the General rush Sma’Boy. Then, without even thinking, as if Sma’Boy had whispered a mysterious order to us, a whisper borne on the wings of silence, we begin shooting at them. Madmen! We have become like madmen. Eyes closed, teeth clenched, we shoot. We do not have time to remember that the General is wearing his bogolan vest, the one that protects him from bullets, and that President is invulnerable because he is Mami Wata’s lover. We shoot, we shoot, we shoot…

When the guns go quiet, when the last bullet

has been spit out, President and the General are lying on the tarmac, dead. So it was we, in the end, who executed them.  We who’d been so scared of them, what with the bogolan and Mami Wata.

While President and the General are lying there

dead, Little-Cow-Tail gets up, terrified. For the first time, she is afraid. She realises this isn’t an act. She begs Sma’Boy not to kill her. But the machete, which until then he has held high, all of a sudden comes down. Violently. Little-Cow-Tail’s head roles around at Sma’Boy’s feet. Meanwhile, her body flails. The body is looking for the head. It runs here. Runs there. It stops, shaking, shaking, in one spot. Apparently it is trying to chase from its veins an evil genius. The arms go like this, like this, like this.

Like it’s dancing. The body without a head is dancing. It is a dance. A possession dance. She is possessed by her own cha’ms. They refuse to leave the soul though the head is severed. She dances.  Without music. Or else she hears a music our ears cannot. The music can only come from her, resonate within her, beat rhythms inside of her, for her alone. She dances.  And her dance transports us, far from the rotting corpses that cover every inch of the bridge, far from the vultures, far from the war, out of the city, beyond the walls that hold the country fast, to the other side of the world. It is prodigious. She dances. And her dance stops time. We are happy. We feel better for watching her dance.

                            She dances.

                                          She dances.

                                                               She dances.

Brutally, the charm is broken. The body without a head has hurled itself at Sma’Boy.  It was a ruse. While we were letting ourselves drift along gentle waves on the underside of the world, Little-Cow-Tail has thrown herself at Sma’Boy and now she is trying to strangle him. The two of them are fighting, rolling around on the ground.  We don’t know what to do. Scream at her to let Sma’Boy go? At a body without a head? Without ears? Shoot her? But it’s a body that has already died! And we might hit Sma’Boy. Sma’Boy is dying, strangled by Little-Cow-Tail’s hands, which suddenly have grown the strangest strength. What should we do?

Among us there is a sergeant called Tchakaly. An upright man. Since the General’s death today, he has become our leader. He comes from the centre of the country. Like many people who hail from there, he is “prepared”, and he is something of a sorcerer too. Everybody knows this. He doesn’t hide it. He “sees” what is happening and what must be done. And so he begins to chant, a deep, guttural chant, with endless phrases full of harsh sounds, not a pleasant chant, a male chant; he chants in the ancient language of the central province, a heavy language, a language that only initiates understand and that is heard only in sacred groves – a sorcerer’s tongue. No one understands what Sergeant Tchakaly is chanting, no one except the body, which loosens its grip around Sma’Boy’s neck the better to take in the sounds of Tchakaly’s song.  The body listens with absent ears, through its pores, through its nails, through the blood, perhaps, that froths at its neck – listens, you can see it listening. All at once, wracked with sobs, the body falls to its knees before Sergeant Tchakaly, swearing allegiance to him, as the chant ripens, wedding its notes and its words to colours always harsher, ever more male. For a second the body stays there, kneeling, then it collapses, appeased. Little-Cow-Tail’s cha’ms deliver her soul and at last they leave her body.

“Now give me the head! Quick, the head!”

Sergeant Tchakaly cries. Too late. Under our very eyes, the head morphs into a vulture and, despite the howls of our kalashnikovs, dissolves into the river of vultures that, since the beginning of these bitter times, has wrapped the skies over Little-Manhattan in a night bereft of stars.


This piece features in the Chimurenga Magazine 12/13 – Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber (Double-Issue March 2008). To purchase as a PDF head to our online shop.

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