jointly or severally

foto
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

of which I questioned the timing, since it might have seemed that this could estrange our other guest. Quinta had not known any of us for very long, but I could tell she would fit in. She was the only person who talked about her family, something Loreley and I speculated upon one time, a time when you would be sleepy if you had nothing to talk about but open to the few things that surpass the idea of sleep, whose allure is considerable.
We were to start working earnestly in the morning; today, it was important to relax and clear our heads. The two women shared a few words in their language and started to giggle, but it could have been a nervous laugh as well as a genuine one. Finding out what people are talking about when you don't understand them requires special skills if you don't want to look nosy. Trying to comment on the tone of their discussion, I could make an awkward mistake and seem insensitive.
I resumed my exercises,

vous rongez peu a peu ma vie

i could explain, but...
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

listening to the sound it made. Sounds, for me are important in that i use them to jog my memory. If I needed to remember, say in a week, what I was doing on that day, I only need to walk through the city until I hear a sound that reminds me of that day. Shopping carts clashing together could remind me of the sound of a raddle, tearing the paper off of a package, or pouring dog food into a metal bowl.
I can say now that I think every body knew well how things were proceeding, but didn't want break the film of mystification (which alone made everyone tolerable to everyone else) that englobed us.
Loreley stood up and went to carving the inscription into the wall,

celine dion

the socialist people's cameroonian liberation forces
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

at the same time as a gust of wind came, cooling their sweat slicked bodies.
This was in April, the year before the flood. I remember from that year so much complaining but it was one year I felt I was more alive.
Kensington finally arrived with it, presumably in two thick bundles under his arms. Loreley stood up and kissed him on both cheeks, in the traditional manner, and I offered him a chair. I asked him about his family and profession, then I went downstairs, leaving them alone in the room.
I bought three bottles of beer and some salted peanuts from Emmanuelle and carried them up, pausing first straighten my collar. I poured the peanuts into a bowl and started to open the beers,

hic etiam . . . sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentum mortalia tangunt

dry season
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

in the orange jumpsuit he wears to his job of freelance-transportation-consultant / black-market-bus-stop-hustler E comes through the dust and holds my hand telling me 'o bre me ko?' (you've been lost, right?), that being the common greeting for someone you haven't seen for a long time. he has been struggling, "managing," his wife gave birth, he has enough money for the plane ticket to leave, just needs an invitation letter and then a visa.

now he's my consultant for locating a woman who is dying of aids. after a series of yes/no questions he learns from me that she is a woman and she did not give birth to a baby in the past week, so she will be in the female ward. she is in the farthest bed in the corner. all the patients in good spirits are on the other side of the room. i have never heard of lonely patients in local hospitals. visiting time has to be very limited because every one has many relations and friends and doctors could never get any healing done with family members coming here and there with a flask of fufu and eru and crying relatively healthy babies.

she is asleep and she is also a stick figure. she used to be very pretty. Ondi found me when i came. her eyelashes are grey. she probably hadn't planned on burying her children. she wakes her up and she looks up at me with an ashen hopeless face that coughs and says "I am very ill. When is my brother coming?" i say that her brother is coming soon, probably the same day, and that the hospital is a very good one. don't be worried. i put a hand on her leg to add pathos to my reassurances, but my voice falters and her thigh is a pencil and her clothes and braids hang on her like misshapen ornaments on a melting snow man.

ndem a kwita go, i say to ondi and have to leave.
"massa, how fo yo own patient," E asks one of his friends or relations sitting to a smiling woman with a bandaged arm.
"no, better small."
we climb up the hill in the dust and i explain the various complications in obtaining an american visa.

back in the village her healthy baby is watching her brother, in an imitation leopard-skin cowboy hat, drink a beer and he looses cheerful shrieks and giggles at shiny objects.

the scene was so thick

we sat in the bar at that hour where sunlight refracts in dust particles that float in a dirty bar. our host said that he hadn't had time to sweep because stan came in the morning and obliged him to sit at the table drinking up until the time we found him, five o'clock. the same stan secretly paid my bill and i could only feel comfortable by vowing to find his house in yaounde, find his favorite bar, and arrange with the bartender to not allow him pay for his next n drinks, so on. duylinh was delighted with a's impression of the bilingual republic's president, who does not know english: thank you very very much at all. i am very very happy at all.

the two rabbits were worse than children because they can chew through chicken wire. children usually cannot chew through their enclosures. the pregnant mother escaped into the bush during my absence, where she was most surely torn apart by a wild or tame dog, or genetta genetta afris. this is how i justified to duylinh that i cut her husband's throat. if i let him free he would be torn apart. skinning a rabbit isn't as hard as you think. i cut off two feet for luck and threw the head and pelt into a garbage hole that i burned down.

Mbaya creation myth

When Gonoenhodi, the supreme being, decided to create men, he first removed the Guana from the earth, then removed the other tribes. To the first, he gave them agriculture to share, and hunting was for the second. The joker, who is the other divinity, noticed then that the Mbaya had been forgotten at the bottom of the hole and he pulled them out. But since there was nothing left for them, they had to take the only remaining role, oppressing and exploiting the others.

from Lévi Strauss, Tristes tropiques