Memoirs of a Porcupine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  how disaster brought me to your feet

  how I left the animal world

  how Papa Kibandi sold us his destiny

  How Mama Kibandi joined Papa Kibandi in the other world

  how last Friday became black Friday

  how this porcupine isn’t finished yet

  Appendix

  Copyright Page

  Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in LA, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine.

  Praise for Broken Glass

  ‘Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou’s sense of humour… Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour’ Tibor Fischer, Guardian

  ‘Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur… the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator’s rhetorical extravagances… With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion’ Independent

  ‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Financial Times

  ‘An incredibly funny novel, often rueful, on the edge of tragedy and imbued with the spirit of the French classics. There’s a tremendous spirit, irreverence and humour in this book’ Boyd Tonkin, Chair of the Judges for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010

  This book is dedicated to my friend and protector, the

  Stubborn Snail, to the customers of Credit Gone West and

  to my mother, Pauline Kengué, who handed down this

  story (give or take a few lies)

  how disaster brought me to your feet

  so I’m just an animal, just a dumb, wild animal, men would say, though if you ask me most of them are dumber and wilder than any animal, but to them I’m just a porcupine, and since they only believe in what they can see, they’d see nothing special in me, just one of those mammals with long sharp quills, slower than a hound dog, too lazy to stray from the patch where he feeds

  I wouldn’t want to be a man, to be honest, they can keep their so-called intelligence, for years I was the double of a man they called Kibandi, who died two days ago, most of the time I stayed hidden just outside the village, and went to him late at night, for specific missions, I know if he’d heard me making this confession while he was alive he’d have punished me severely, free speech, he’d have said, ingratitude more like, he may not have shown it, but all his life he felt I owed him, I was just a lowly bit player, a pawn in his hands, well, I don’t want to boast, but I could say the same about him, without me he’d have been a bit of rotten pulp, his life as a man worth less than a few drops of piss, the piss of the aged porcupine who ruled over us back when I still belonged to the animal world

  I’m forty-two years old now, I still feel very young, and if Iu was a porcupine like the ones that hang about in the fields near the village I would never have lived this long, because for porcupines round here gestation lasts between ninety-three and ninety-four days, at best we live to twenty-one in captivity, but who’d want to spend their life cooped up like a slave, imagining a life of freedom beyond barbed wire, I’m sure some lazy animals wouldn’t mind, and might even grow to forget that the sweetness of honey does not soothe the bee sting, I prefer the ups and downs of life in the bush to those cages where some of my comrades are kept, only to end up one day as meatballs in some human being’s pot, it’s true I have had the good fortune to beat the survival record for porcupines, to live the same number of years as my master, I won’t say it was exactly a sinecure, being his double, it was hard work, it made great demands on my senses, I carried out my orders to the letter, even though towards the end I began to step back a bit, thinking maybe we were digging our own graves, but I had to obey him, I was stuck with my role as a double, as a turtle is stuck with his shell, I was my master’s third eye, his third nostril, his third ear, which means that whatever he didn’t see, or smell, or hear, I transmitted to him in dreams, and if ever he didn’t reply to my messages, I’d appear before him just as the people of Séképembé were going out into the fields

  I wasn’t present at Kibandi’s birth, not like some doubles, peaceful doubles they’re called, who are born the same day as the child, and watch them grow, their masters never see them, they intervene only when necessary, when their initiate falls ill, for example, or has a jinx put on them, it’s a dull life, being a peaceful double, in fact I don’t know how they stand it, they’re soft and slow, the slightest noise sends them running, a foolish way to behave, starting at their own shadow, I’ve heard it said that most of them are deaf as well as blind, but you can never catch them out, they have a perfect sense of smell, so they protect their human, guide him, follow his every move until his dying day, when they, too, lie down and die, and their power is transmitted by the grandfather at birth, the old man seizes the babe after consulting the progenitors, disappears round the back of the hut with it, talks to it, spits on it, licks, shakes and tickles it, tosses it in the air, catches it again, and while this is happening, the spirit of the peaceful double leaves the body of the old man and enters that of the little creature, the initiate dedicates himself to good works, will be noted for his boundless generosity, will give money to the lame, the blind, the poor, will respect his fellow man, study plants to heal the sick and be sure to pass on his gifts to the next generation the day his first grey hair appears, it’s a very dull life, a monotonous life, you might say, I’d have no tale to tell you if I’d been a peaceful double, with no particular history, nothing out of the ordinary to speak of

  no, I’m one of the harmful doubles, we’re the liveliest, scariest kind of double, the least common, too, the transmission of this kind of double, as you can imagine, is more complicated, more tightly regulated, it occurs in the child’s tenth year, he has to be made to take the initiatory drink known as mayamvumbi, an initiate will drink it on a regular basis, to achieve the drunken state in which he produces a body double, his second self, a bulimic clone, who, when he’s not snoring away in the initiate’s hut, spends his whole time running, cavorting, leaping over rivers, burrowing about in leaves, and there I was, caught between the two, though not just as an onlooker, without my intervention my master’s other self would have succumbed to the ill effects of his gluttony, because I’ll tell you this, the parents of a child who receives a peaceful double will know all about the initiation and encourage it, but the transmission of a harmful double takes place against the child’s wishes, without the knowledge of mother, brothers or sisters, the humans of whom we become the animal incarnation will cease to feel emotions like pity, understanding, empathy, remorse, compassion, night will enter their souls, once transmission has occurred, the harmful double must leave the animal world and come to live close to the initiate, performing his assignments without protest, when did you ever hear a harmful double contradict the master on whom his existence depends, tell me that, never in living memory of the porcupine, that’s when, and elephants aren’t the only ones with perfect memories, that’s just another human prejudice

  long before my master started playing with fire, while I was enjoying a few months’ pleasant rest, just watching life unfold around me, fresh air in my lungs, a skip in my step, I ran, how I ran, and at the top of a hill I would pause, and look down at the bustling wildlife all around, I liked watching other animals, the rhythm of their daily lives, I was getting back to the bush, at times I just disappea
red, with no word to my master, I’d watch the sun go down, and close my eyes and listen to the crickets, and wake next morning to the chirrup of cicadas, and during these periods of inactivity, or respite, I was constantly feeding, the more I ate, the hungrier I got, I can’t remember now how many tuber fields I destroyed, bringing great distress to the peasants of Séképembé, who put the blame on a half-man half-animal, with a stomach as deep as the pit of their own ignorance, then at dawn I’d go down to watch the ducks bobbing about on the river, the reflection of their gaudy plumage shimmering on the swell, how funny they looked, gliding not drowning, then one of them one would give the signal for the end of play, or the approach of a hunter, and off they’d fly, up and away, then some time towards noon came the procession of zebras, followed by the female deer, then the wild boar, then the lions, roaming in groups along the river, the little ones at the front, the old ones roaring at the slightest thing, they never overlapped, they seemed to share out the day between them, and only much later, when the sun was already high in the sky, came the army of monkeys, I’d see the males fighting, usually over a question of precedence, or a female, it was quite amusing really, their gestures reminded me of humans, especially the anthropoids, poking their bogeys, scratching their genitals, then sniffing their fingers and expressing disgust, and I did wonder whether some of them might not be harmful doubles to humans, then I told myself to get a grip, I knew harmful doubles had to stay well away from communal life

  yes, I was a happy porcupine back then, I’m putting up my quills as I say this, that’s our way of swearing a pledge, another is to raise the front right paw and wave it three times, I know humans swear on the heads of their ancestors, or in the name of the God they’ve never seen, the one they worship with their eyes tight shut, they spend their whole lives reading His word in a big book which was brought here by white men in the days when the people of this country hid their absurd little organs under leopard skins or banana leaves, unaware that over the horizon there lived other people, not like them, that the world stretched on, far beyond the seas and oceans, that when night fell here, elsewhere the sun still shone, and as it happened, my master, Kibandi, owned this book of God, with all the stories men have forced themselves to believe, on pain of not deserving a place in what they call Paradise, you won’t be surprised to hear I had a look at it myself, out of curiosity, since, like my master, I was a good reader, sometimes I would read for him, when he was tired, I had a good look at the God book, whole pages at a time, some thrilling, some touching, I underlined some passages with my quills, I’d already heard some of the stories with my own little ears, from the lips of some pretty respectable people, with little grey beards, who attended the village church on Sundays, told with such precision, with such great faith, you could only think they must have seen these things with their own eyes, I should add that the bit of the story they tell most often, these bipeds, is the one about this mysterious guy, a kind of wandering charismatic, the son of God, they’ll tell you, how he came to be here was all very complicated, there’s nothing about how exactly his parents mated, he’s the same guy that walked on water, and turned water into wine, and multiplied the loaves to feed the crowd, and gave respect to the prostitutes, when everyone else threw stones, and made the lame to walk, even the hopeless cases, and the blind to see, and he came down to earth to save the whole of humanity, including us animals, because, get this, even back then they wanted to preserve at least one sample of every living species, we didn’t get forgotten, they put us all into this cage called Noah’s Ark, so we’d survive a torrential rainfall, for forty days and forty nights, the deluge, it was called, but then many centuries later God’s only Son was sent down to earth, men didn’t believe him, they persecuted him, the bad people whipped him, crucified him, left him out in the blazing sun, and the day of his trial, at the hands of the very same people who accused him of causing a public nuisance with his spectacular miracles, they had to choose between him and another man, a wretch they called Barabbas who feared neither God nor man, they chose to set the brigand free and kill the other one, the poor son of God, but believe it or not, he came back from the dead, like someone just waking up after a quick siesta, and the reason I’m going on about this mysterious guy is not to get away from the subject of my confessions, but because I’m quite sure this guy, the son of God, really was something special, an initiate, like my master, but he must have been protected by a peaceful double, he never hurt anyone, it was others went looking for lice in his tonsure, well anyway, Kibandi had stopped reading those stories, and moved on to more esoteric things, probably because he thought the book of God would condemn his beliefs and practices, and seek to divert him from teachings of his ancestors, so my master didn’t believe in God at all, particularly since God always put off answering his prayers till tomorrow, when he wanted concrete results today, to hell with the promise of paradise, that’s why sometimes he cut short the hard core believers in the village, saying something like ‘if you want to give God a good laugh, just tell him your plans’, and it’s all very well men swearing on the heads of their dear departed, or by the name of the Almighty, which they’ve done since the dawn of time, they never keep their word, in the end, because they know very well that a word means nothing, you only have to keep it if you believe

  back in the forest after a mission, I’d go and think things over for a while in a burrow, at the top of a tree, in a hollow trunk, or even by the river’s edge, far from the parade of ducks, the procession of animals, I’d review what we’d been doing, me and my master, while he slept long and deep, recovering his strength after an exhausting night, I might think and think till the evening of the following day, it never tired me, in fact I enjoyed grappling with the abstract world, and I learned early on to discriminate, to look for the best solution to a problem, I don’t know why men think themselves so superior, I’m sure they’re not born intelligent, they may have a certain aptitude for it, intelligence is a seed which must be watered if is to flourish, and grow into a well-rooted fruit tree, some people will always be ignorant and uncultivated as a flock of sheep, following one of their number over the edge into a ravine, others will always be fools, like a certain astrologer, a poor cretin who fell down a well, or the old crow who snatched a sheep because he saw an eagle do it, and others will cling to their stupidity, like the agama, that excitable lizard who tosses his head from dawn till dusk, such humans will always live in the twilight zone, their sole consolation being their humanity, the aged porcupine who used to govern us would have snapped ‘they’re all cretins, their bottom line is we’re humans, but a fly’s not a bird, just because it can fly’, what I’m saying is that while I sat there thinking, I was trying to understand what lay behind each idea, each concept, I know now that thought is of the essence, it’s thought that gives rise to human grief, pity, remorse, even wickedness or goodness, and while my master brushed these feelings aside with a wave of his hand, I felt them after every mission, many’s the time my face was wet with tears, because, for porcupine’s sake, at times of great sadness or compassion, you get a lump somewhere right near your heart, your thoughts turn black, you regret your actions, the bad things you’ve done, but as I was only carrying out orders, devoting my life to my role as a double, I managed to get a grip on my black thoughts, and tell myself, by way of comfort, that that there were worse things you could do in this life, I’d take a good deep breath, gnaw at a few manioc roots or palm nuts, try to get some sleep, tell myself tomorrow would be another day, and soon I’d be given a new mission, and I’d have to prepare myself, leave my hiding place, make my way to my master’s house or workshop, receive his instructions, of course, I was free to rebel, I did sometimes dream of escaping my master’s clutches, it sometimes crossed my mind, the temptation was strong, there were certain acts I could perhaps have avoided, but it was like a kind of paralysis, and I didn’t act, even yesterday, when the only option was the cowardly one, to flee like a peaceful double, as my master breath
ed his last and passed on to the next world, I waited and watched while he endured his final death throes, a scene which stays etched in my mind, pardon my emotion, the tremor in my voice, I’ll just pause here, take a few deep breaths

  by rights I should have left this world by now, I should have died the day before yesterday, along with Kibandi, there was total panic, total shock, we were caught short, we had no contingency plan for an event of this kind, I turned back into a wretched little scarpering porcupine, in fact at first I didn’t realise I was going to survive myself, and since a double normally dies the same day as his master, I thought I must be just a ghost, and when I saw Kibandi gasping his last, surrendering his mortal soul, I was immediately thrown into a panic, because, as our old governor used to say, ‘when the ears are cut off, it’s time for the neck to worry’, and I didn’t know what to do, where to go, I was running round in circles, space seemed to be shrinking around me, I felt like the sky was about to fall in, I couldn’t get my breath, everything was terrifying, I told myself I needed immediate proof of my existence, but what proof is there ever that one exists, that one is not just an empty shell, a shadow without a soul, well, I had picked up a few handy tricks from the men round here, I just had to ask myself what the difference was between a living being and a ghost, first I told myself that I thought, therefore I must exist, now I’ve always said that men don’t have the monopoly on thought, anyway, the inhabitants of Séképembé, in any case, say that ghosts can think too, since they come back to haunt the living, and have no problem finding the paths which lead to the village, they wander around the markets, go and look round where they used to live, announcing their death in the villages all around, sit down at a roadside bar, order a glass of palm wine, drink like old soaks, settle the debts they ran up while they were alive, and yet as far as the eye is concerned, they don’t exist, so one couldn’t be sure of anything, I needed a different sort of proof, so I tried an old trick, I waited till the sun rose on Saturday, that was yesterday, and I came out of my hiding place, I looked left, looked right, sat down in the middle of a sort of empty space, waved my front paws, crossed them, uncrossed them, and seeing that, praise be to porcupines, who’d have believed it, my shadow moved, and its movements corresponded to those of my limbs, I was alive, no doubt about it, and I could have just stopped there, you would have thought, but no, I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to do anything dumb, I wanted still further proof – the surest kind – that I was alive, so I went to look at myself in the river, and again I waved my front paws around, and crossed, then uncrossed them, I saw my reflection mirror my movements, so I couldn’t be a ghost, because what I’ve gathered so far, what I’ve picked up from the humans in Séképembé, is ghosts don’t have reflections, they lose all physical presence, become immaterial, but I still wasn’t convinced of my existence, despite all these irrefutable items of proof, which would have been quite enough for your average villager, I had to do one more test, a more physical one this time, so since by now I was walking along by the water’s edge, I dropped down and scrabbled in the dust, took a running jump then flung myself into the water, I felt its chill, and then I knew, this time for certain, that I was still alive, the worst thing is, I would have drowned if I hadn’t quickly got out of the water, and straight after that I went back to my master’s house, to see how things were developing over there, I hid behind the workshop, and was amazed to see the body of Kibandi, lying under a cover of palm leaves, he had departed this world, for sure, but what shocked me most was that, from a distance, it looked as though his corpse had an animal head, a head looking something like mine, but ten times bigger than mine, or maybe it was the fear of my own demise that conjured up this illusion, it was death, that was clear, death lay here before me, with a heartbeat like my own, ready to pounce on me, maybe in a minute, maybe in an hour, several questions occurred to me, for example ‘what if a hunter set upon me’, or ‘what if there was a flood and I was swept into the turbulent river Niari?’, with questions like that going round in my head I just couldn’t stay calm, I felt nervous, anxious, at the slightest noise I dashed for cover, like a coward, like a peaceful double, and I went and hid myself in a lair, the first time I’d set foot in it, I was right to be frightened too, because straightaway I heard a reptile hissing, no time to work out what species it was, out I came, rolled up in a ball, terror in my gut, and I said to myself a reptile that hissed like that must be deadly poisonous, I came hurtling out of the lair, I had to cross the main road to get to the houses at the edge of the village, and that was dangerous too, it was a road used by transport trucks once a week, I couldn’t remember which day they came roaring like mad things though our region, I decided I wouldn’t cross the road, you never know, and I just wandered around where I was, unable to shake off the image of my master with my head on him, I lost a few quills along the way, and then I began to feel ashamed of myself, I was letting my human side get the better of my animal nature, you scumbag you, I said to myself, coward, selfish bastard, I told myself I couldn’t just run away like this, and yet I didn’t see what else I could do at this point in the proceedings, if I wasn’t careful I’d attract the attention of the Batéké dogs and then the whole village would come running after me, to kill me, there was a little voice I couldn’t resist, though, that spoke to me, chided me, called on me to show some dignity, to make some gesture which would have pleased my late master, so I went back to Kibandi’s hut a bit later, despite the danger of being picked upon by those tailed vigilantes, the Batéké dogs, fortunately they were off duty then, I just had time to make out what was going on in my master’s yard, they were preparing to take him to the cemetery, he didn’t qualify for the kind of village funeral that lasts at least five or six days, he’d be buried within twenty-four hours of his death, I saw a small group of men carrying the body to the graveyard, I recognised the Moundjoula family, who had been the cause of my master’s death, their two children, the twins, Koty and Koté, it was more of a formality than a proper burial, I swear, no one was crying, for porcupine’s sake, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the villagers murmuring ‘all bad deeds on earth are punished, at last the wicked Kibandi is dead, let him burn in hell’, my heart ached to see the way they dragged his coffin along the ground, I’m quite sure the only reason they went through the motions of giving him a final send off was because, even though they may not feel like it, humans will bury even the wickedest man, and the witch doctor gave a funeral oration even though he didn’t want to, two guys hurriedly moved to fill in the grave, the cortege left in silence, while I stayed there, staring at the cross they’d cobbled together from two branches of a mango tree, it leaned a bit to the left, stuck on top of a mound of earth which was now my master’s tomb, I could make out an old storm lantern that the villagers had left by the tomb so the deceased would be able to find his way in the deep darkness of the next world, and more to the point, so he would never show up again amongst the inhabitants of the villagers, worming his way into the belly of a pregnant woman, what’s more, the villagers are convinced that if the dead don’t have a storm lantern by their tomb they may go walking over the bodies of the other dead souls, to whom they should show respect because they died before them, which seemed quite considerate of them, considering Kibandi had given them nothing but grief, I saw the group coming back towards the village in single file, I heard their whispers, their conjectures as to the cause of my master’s death, I blocked my ears because they were saying things I could scarcely believe, in fact what I wanted was to get closer to Kibandi’s last resting place, sniff the earth where he lay, but I didn’t, I left, weeping bitterly, angry with myself for fleeing like a coward, I turned round to take one last look at his tomb, then finally left, but with no thought where I might go, night fell upon the village, shadows loomed before me, I could see nothing, by chance I found a place to spend the night, between two large stones, I’d had to scratch way at the earth for quite a while to make a place for myself, I knew it would only b
e a temporary shelter, I wasn’t going to hang around there forever because it’s the place where some of the villagers sharpen their hoes before going out in to the fields, and during the night I fought off the desire to sleep because my feeling was that the night and death go together, always have, and when I did actually nod off for a bit, forgetting for a moment that I was under sentence of death, forgetting the image of the corpse with my own head grafted onto it, I dreamed that I was falling into a great hole in the ground, and I also dreamed that I was surrounded by flames, which swept through the bush, throwing even our eternal enemies, the lions, the leopards, the spotted hyenas, the jackals, the cheetahs, the tigers and the panthers, into a panic, I woke with a start, astonished to hear my quills rustling, surprised I could still see things, ‘I’m still alive, I’m still alive, I’m not dead, for porcupine’s sake’, I said to myself, but I had to get out of there fast, so that’s what I did