1. A pop quintet in the south of the country released a catchy song describing, in the Bantu dialect of the region, the trouble that occurs when a man sleeps with his brother’s wife. The national radio station played it continuously, the disc was rapidly pirated and sold on the streets of the capital, and within two weeks the song issued from every bar and shop in the country. Men whistled it on the streets. Mothers sang their children to sleep with it. It even penetrated the expatriate community, normally immune to the local rhythms, and was played in the embassies, the expensive restaurants.
The members of the quintet, wrapped up at the time in a busy concert schedule complete with ecstatic all-night parties where the song was placed on repeat and allowed to play for hours, became the victims of hate mail and low-scale vandalism. At first they thought it the work of kids and malcontents, individuals jealous of their popularity and spiteful enough to want to tarnish it. Soon it became apparent that a larger problem existed. The lyrics to the song, innocent in the southern dialect in which they were composed, contained a line that, when translated into the dialect of the northern tribes, seemed to insult the sexual capacities of the northern men and incite the southern tribes to violence. The quintet issued a statement on the national television station explaining that none of the members of the group spoke the northern language and all alternate interpretations of their song were therefore unintentional.
At the time the country was preparing for a general election and was divided both politically and geographically. The southerners held most of the offices in the government and owned the nicest homes in the capital, located in the south. The discontented northerners were mostly subsistence farmers. The northern-based opposition party mobilized a protest, and their supporters traveled three days by bus to picket the streets of the capital. They claimed that the song was unreasonably popular. It was supported, they claimed, by either the southern politicians or the southern witch doctors, both of whom were equally untrustworthy. They showed video of masses of young people dancing frantically. Their own witch doctors testified to the power of the song’s insidious bass line. They demanded that it be banned from radio play and all existing copies be destroyed. There were minor skirmishes that the police dispersed without difficulty. The house of the quintet’s drummer was burned to the ground, but no one was injured.
The president issued a statement saying that the government had played no role in the popularity of the song. It was just an excellent song. He went on vacation to Australia.
During the following month the song, like all songs, slowly faded away. The northerners, short on money and perhaps realizing the ridiculousness of their position, likewise dissipated. The elections were held three months later without incident. The lead singer of the quintet ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the national assembly.
The international press, unable to determine if the episode was a harmless human-interest story or an example of the dangerous irrationality of African politics, ignored the event completely.
2. Along a particularly beautiful stretch of beach to the northeast of our town there is a sacred cashew tree. The people native to the area recognized its power long ago. They built their spirit house beneath it and made monthly offerings of palm wine. Only the most respected elders were allowed to touch the tree, and no one ever climbed it, because it was said that if a person climbed the tree without the tree’s consent he would lose his sanity among the branches.
Several years ago a development company discovered the beach and entered into negotiations with the locals. The company was impressed by the cashew tree and planned to make it the centerpiece of a new resort complex composed of 14 luxury cabins, a restaurant/bar, a swimming pool and boating facilities. The cashew tree would be situated in the courtyard and provide shade for picnic tables (to be constructed locally).
The population was divided into two groups. The Matavels, the largest family in the area, claimed ancestral rights to the beach and proposed to sell to the development company, provided that a suitable agreement could be reached. The Matusses, the second largest family, also claimed the beach and said that selling it was impossible, that it would represent the death of their local culture.
The families argued for many days. The issue revolved around the birth order of two brothers, Matavel and Matusse, both dead for more than 100 years. The family descended from the older brother would hold ancestral and legal rights to the land. Both families claimed that their patriarch had been the firstborn, and the elders responsible for the village history issued confused and contradictory statements.
It was decided that the cashew tree should be allowed to settle the argument. Each family chose a representative to climb the tree. One would go crazy, one would descend unchanged. The tree’s will would be determined. The two young men chosen were best friends, having played together throughout childhood despite the rivalry of their families. They arrived at the tree together at dawn of a hot midsummer day. Their families and neighbors formed a circle around the tree. The national television station had been informed in advance and a camera crew was present to film the two boys climb the tree and sit together, holding hands, in one of the lower branches.
Throughout the day the boys told each other stories, the old stories passed down through their grandparents that told of the astonishing uncertainties of the world. By noon neither showed signs of madness, and the television crew went back to the capital. At dusk the boys curled up together in a crook of the tree and went to sleep. A few of their family members kept watch from beneath them. A representative of the development company slept in a large orange tent just outside the reach of the tree’s branches.
The boys sat in the tree for a week. They exhausted all their stories. They grew tired of eating the food their families brought them, of drinking the sodas, of listening to the encouraging words. The tree refused to make a choice, and both remained sane. The boys decided to speed up the process by fasting. One of them would eventually grow weak and fall from the tree. The one that remained would claim victory. For the boys, which of them fell was of little importance.
After three days the hunger pains became nearly unbearable but they remained in the tree, still holding hands. They began to refuse water. After five days of fasting, two without water, their throats burning and stomachs clenched, one of the boys, the descendent of Matavel, counted to three and they both began to hold their breath.
It was unclear to the observers on the ground which of the boys began to fall first. It mattered little, since the boys held hands and seemed unable, or unwilling, to let go of each other. They slumped off the branch and fell limply to the ground, heads first, landing in a jumble of broken bones and starved muscles. Both died within minutes.
The families agreed to give the tree and the length of beach on which it stands to the development company. The resort opened last fall. Many of the guests comment on the tree. Cashew trees do not normally grow near the ocean. Management forbids the staff from telling the story of the two boys, but occasionally they break the policy for one of the more inquisitive guests. On these occasions the members of the staff like to re-enact the scene, two of them hopping from the lower branches and sprawling together on the ground. The guests—and I have been one of them—rarely know how they are supposed to feel.
3. A journalist friend of mine, the writer of several novels, was on assignment at an orphanage with the national television station. He fell in love with one of his subjects. She worked at the orphanage and was an orphan herself, only 18 years old but with the self-possession that dramatic loneliness can give. She was the only good thing, he said, produced by 16 years of civil war.
The difference in their ages was no obstacle in their culture, but the journalist was sensitive to the international perspective and regarded his own emotions as foolish, or, when in the depths of his obsession, depraved. He watched the film of her relentlessly. He listened to the tape of their interview until he knew every word, until her answers to his questions seemed to be the only possible answers. He thought that, if he could just have her, if he could know her story and perhaps be her story, there would be no more questions to ask. He visited the orphanage five times that month. The girl, for her part, treated him with the same gentle empathy that she distributed to the orphans in her charge.
He decided to propose to her, but first invited me to join him on a visit, wanting, I suppose, the opinion of a foreigner for either validation or censure. I went, and I saw why he loved her. She was like one of his novels: delicate, peaceful, naive, morally clear. The way she looked at him said that love was not impossible. But she was also uncomfortable; she was aware of being evaluated. She saw how the journalist watched me watching her. The orphans, experts at observation, watched us all.
She asked for some time to consider his offer, and two weeks later sent a short note. It said, “I’m sorry but I can’t.” Requiring explanation, my friend went to the orphanage, but the girl had quit the previous week and had not left an address. He took on more assignments from the television station and allowed a busy schedule to hide his disappointment. He did not allow me to speak of her.
It was a surprise, therefore, when three months later he looked out the fourth-story window of his office and saw her there, on the pavement looking up, small and foreshortened, more of an orphan now than she ever was in the orphanage. When he reached the street, after rushing blindly down the stairs, she was gone. It was as if she were a goddess, he said. A minor goddess, one who wants no sacrifice.
4. The oldest man in our town was also, before his stroke, the best storyteller. The neighborhood children gathered each day at dusk to sit in the dirt around his straight-backed chair. His house is next to mine, and at times I went to crouch among the children and listen to him chant his stories in a language I don’t understand. He was spectacular. He hid inside his hut until the children were assembled, then limped out, bent over his cane, his eyes on the dirt, looking all of his 90-odd years. It was an act. He sat on the edge of his chair, collected himself, allowed the tension to build, and then burst into a story with the bright eyes of a teenager. He spit and waved his cane.
He told the old stories: why Rabbit has long ears, how Snake lost his legs, the importance of love, the first meeting of Earth and Sky. But he had modern fables as well. Monkey fell from a speeding train. Crocodile stole Heron’s cellular telephone. I understood nothing he said, of course, but I listened to the way his voice embraced the story and I watched the point of his cane punch the air. When one of the older children gave me the translation it always, somehow, was exactly what I expected.
He was in the hospital for two weeks after the stroke. At first, perhaps from habit, the children still came to sit in the dirt of his yard. Other adults tried to tell stories, but the children complained, cried, beat the dirt into dust. They wanted the old man.
His daughter, herself an old woman, was unable to deal with the flood of rowdy children that arrived each night, demanding to be entertained. She asked for my help. I have a television that I don’t use. We set it up in the yard where the old man used to sit and ran an extension cord into my house. The children gathered as usual and, while still complaining about the absence of the elder, seemed to be content with the national television station.
There was an enormous crowd of children on the day the old man returned from the hospital. Adults came as well—and old men that rivaled him in wrinkles and baldness. I stood in the back. The elder was helped to the chair by his daughter. The crowd was silent. He began his favorite story, the one about the contest between the rat and the frog to see who could hold his breath the longest, but his words were barely audible, there was no expression on his face, he slumped in his chair like a sack of rice. Midway through the story he paused, and the pause lengthened, and at some point he began to snore. Some of the children cried.
The old daughter came to me and, with a look that might have been sadness, perhaps shame, asked for the television set. I brought it out and set it on a table next to the sleeping old man. Some of the audience melted away. Some stayed for the evening news program.
The old man is encouraged to rest as much as possible, and spends the majority of his day inside his hut. But he always gets anxious at dusk, and if kept inside becomes irritable and mutters insults at his relatives. So each day his daughter helps him outside to sit before the semicircle of children, in front of and to the side of the television. He seems happy there, an audience facing him and blue television light at his back. The children, understanding that they owe him something, do not complain that he partially blocks their view of the screen.
JACOB DOLL, '02, recently returned home to Westmoreland, Kan., after a stint in the Peace Corps. He taught biology to eighth and 10th graders in Chicumbane, Mozambique. A biological sciences major and a creative writing minor, he is applying to medical school.
