MY LATE FATHER, COME BACK

"Death has a gaze for all.
Death will come and it will have your eyes"
Cesare Pavese

All that the old timers of the district have to do is keep quiet under the solar yoke: they are already sparring with the great reaper, the only beloved up ahead. My father will return to give them a good kick up the coccyx. These bedizened bullocks want to take my widowed mother in marriage again, as tradition would have it. Then, what will the future be for me? All that will be left for me will be to don the tunic of Nessus. My late father come back quickly. Here, the night is more impenetrable than a Nomad virgin. My great tightrope walker of a father used to exorcise, by his voice and his music, what is unbearable, ignoble, wintry, and tedious in life. He used to say that silence made up a large part of conversation but no one understood it. Before being slain by the nervus of the well beloved tyrant, my father, the healer of souls, was tender childhood past, singer of guux, the blues in our culture. He had interpreted all the leading lights of the country, from Sayyid to Abdi Qays passing by Omar Dhoulee or the Hamarkodh brothers.

Boozer on days of high sun, a God among the local beefies, he sang of the impure past from time beyond time. Barely ten days of absence and the sky has taken on an aged look, my mother is engulfed in the afterpains of silence- at a remove from life. And I, just ten years old, and already a real up-and-coming piece of crap. Come back, my father, come back. Shake the stones of the cemetery, break through the earth, shake off the dust, arise, and walk. Come back, come back if not.I will become like them. Here, life is a fluvial stain that none know how to restrain. The mountains burn like straw foetus, the rivers threaten to fade away and the dogs no longer bark. So, come back, if not I become like them. I wish to remain whole like you. I want to stay your voice, your shadow, your excrescence, your blood, your splendid texture, your saliva, your hairy arms. I want to sing like you Burti Caareey; I will awaken Furshed, Aden Farah, Abdi Bow Bow and Qarshileh. I will call to the rescue, Ahmed Naji, Hadraawi, Hamed Lacde and Timacaade, Nima Djama and Atouma Ahmed. They have to play with me and for you. I will spend my time proclaiming your name. I am fully your suffering. Here, patriarchy has written everywhere (in letters of blood): "I am the future," with, in guise of warning, "If I go to hell, we will all go together". Siad is dead, he left us hell, as usual, before being buried in his village of Geedo. What a tender chief! B.W Andrzejewski, the eminent taster of our delicate languages, died yesterday in London. Amin! Everywhere there are bloodshot eyes spying on me. Everywhere outbreaks of flesh which mean to me, "Hush, sleep, child, and leave the dead in peace". Come back father! come back! if not, my death will come of it. My life hangs only on a slender thread: I am dying of fear. For ten days, I have been holding, in my head, the great ledger: the seconds are piling up on the froth of days, the minutes are flocking one by one, the hours.

Yes the hours are congealing like mercury drops. The hours, wisely deaf, are marked eternally on the marble of my memory. Come back father, come back if not it is I who am coming to huddle in your fold. For always.

For a long time, we used to sup on hope, and a lot of hope and euphoria, with a cloud of anxiety but no critical or backward looking glance. That is, the hardest part is ahead of us. Ruin to get round and rounding night's cape. Come back my father come back! The sun no longer cools off. Distant is your star, the upper storey from which one descends no more. Tomorrow is black, the horizon free.

Life is a tissue of dream, the whip of laughter.a thought is a fiction that is offered to put a little order in happy confusion. All that remains is to forge.the sewing machine of dreams. Tomorrow is black, but I do not want to leave. I do not want to scamper away, at least not today. One evening when the moon was made up like a Geisha, you said to me, in a moment of premonition, these unforgettable words:

"You said: 'I will go into other countries, across other seas, another town will be better than this one.' You will not find new countries or new seas. The town will follow you. You will wander along the same street, in the same districts, you will grow old, and in these same houses, you will turn white. You will always arrive in this town. For the elsewhere- do not hope -no ship for you, no road*"

Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will carry your country on your back and whether or not those who want to try and to convince themselves otherwise, you cannot exile yourself from yourself. This was your credo, I used to listen to you. However many the number of years spent abroad and the charms of exile, nostalgia will prod you and the draw of the country is stronger that the temptations of the run of the mill. Seduced and steeped, I would drink in your words. No, you did not know how to resonate for the big magic formulas like "tribal essence", "honour of the clan", "genealogical tree", or even "fatherland". "Your people" who were they? Where were they? You would always add doubt on doubt. Your abrasive life was well worth its high price, mine is already in bits. I was told that in your youth, you devoured virgins. You were ravenous for these bunches of young girls- rimmed mouths, cheeks of purplish petals, breasts swollen with desire, long eyelashes and eyelids open on almonds.

Girls in poems, yes, fruits grow under their armpits. At the start, it was this drop of milk that gave me life. I want, now, to witness, hide nothing, have ring out, in memory and on the page, your sweet words and your oblong face. You remain my memory beyond-womb, the heady scent of your body- dry and singular. Come back, my father, come back to piece back together the pieces of my wandering copybook. I am in the process of writing your epitaph. Come back, your logic no longer terrifies me. I will no longer go and disguise myself in my childhood drapes, in the scorn of your patience. Winkler out of thoughts, come back. I now speak the simple words of adults: feed, run, die. My mother is more a shadow of a woman than a woman. I would prefer to paint than to write to describe you, Mother. I have no paintbrushes, I get astride eloquence. The result, does it make the slightest difference? I doubt it. His shadow vanishes along the lines, it absents itself, it becomes history. Should one approach it, grab it surreptitiously to diagnose its immense sorrow? Stale pain. Its trace is dislodged, its look furtive and as it were chopped up. It has signed an armistice with the present and no longer speaks a word to it. Is it parentala with a military look? Disappeared, no more traces in my brain. Time has passed. My memories are just growing grey. All that remains is you. As long as there is a question mark, there is doubtless hope. If suffering could be changed into francs, I would surely be a millionaire. I clear my throat-my voice lacks timbre-and beg you once more: come back, come back. I pass alongside your tomb, I live alongside. I can describe it to you because the clouds of crickets are piling up above, they are making the ants dizzy that venture there. In a corner, an acacia, a very gnarled one, stretches forth to speak softly to the forbidden moon. Its obstinacy makes me dizzy; at its age, is it hoping for an epiphany return to life? It must be mutual, for it turns away as soon as our eyes meet.

*La Ville by Constantin Cavafy, poems (translation into French by Ange S.Vlashos) editions Icaros, Athens 1983

                            Abdourahman A. Waberi

Abdourahman A. Waberi est écrivain. Il est né à Djibouti en 1965 et vit en Normandie depuis une quinzaine d'années.

©A.Waberi