Dances with Hyenas #2
We wait for refugees to land. We take turns with other teams; the people who reach the shore arrive so battered that any delay can be fatal.
We rush to help those who are still alive.
Alive, but zombielike, naked, pale, blank-faced.
The medical staff takes charge of offering first aid; almost all the refugees have second- or third-degree burns.
We give them water, dates, protein-rich biscuits, towels, dry clothes, and rubber sandals.
We transport those who want to go to the closest refugee camp, where they can stay as they recover, at least physically, because nobody can cure them of the horror, despair, or loss of loved ones they’ve suffered.
In the poorest areas, the Yemeni people distrust refugees, considering them an invasion and competition for jobs.
They distrust us too, for helping with the landings.
Occasionally, we receive threats or hear people shout at us, Kafir, infidel.
We neutralize the local population’s hostility through pacts.
MSF contracts some sheiks as drivers and makes agreements with the fishing tribes that they’ll inform us of any new emergencies.
“It’s nice to work this way, with international people like you,” Nader says to me.
“We come from different cultures, but we are a team. We speak a common language, we laugh together, we keep each other company. Grappling with this tragedy can be crushing, but when despondency hits, we turn to others. Without that emotional support, our work would be unbearable.”
“Doesn’t it annoy you that people shout ‘kafir’ at you because you’re with me?” I ask him.
“They’re shouting ‘kafir’ at you.” He laughs. “Not at me, I’m no kafir.”
What moors Rimbaud to Yemen, and above all to Abyssinia, that land now called Ethiopia?
The scholars who sift through every detail of his life to decode his metamorphosis believe that what spurs him here is the drive to get rich, which is constantly disappointed, as he only manages to make small deals, minor exchanges; he takes a discreet and poorly paid job at a coffee trading company.
Hope placed in the weapon trade: He sells old rifles cast off by disbanded armies to local tribes, who use them to destroy each other.
Some see him as a loser, and others, indignant, call him a traitor.
To Albert Camus, this Rimbaud who erases himself in faraway lands is an unrecognizable, unsavory alter ego of Rimbaud the poet.
His obsession with Rimbaud the adult seems proportional only to the admiration he feels for Rimbaud the adolescent.
As for my opinion, I, Bos Mutas, don’t really know what to believe, and what I think doesn’t actually matter.
Yet I wonder, Is it really a betrayal to worry about finding work and earning money so you can eat?
Aristocrats are the only ones who don’t stress over such things.
Camus looks down his nose at Rimbaud for wearing a pouch at his waist, filled with gold.
Well, doesn’t Camus have a wallet in his pocket?
I say it’s something beyond greed, the force that drives Rimbaud to risk his neck in the darkest folds of reality, pursuing athletic and aesthetic extremes that border on annihilation.
He rides hundreds of miles on horseback in hot weather, on rugged terrain; he picks up the habit of forgoing food; he defies the desert.
It’s true that these are harsh lands and climates, but not everyone who comes here flirts with death the way he did.
There has to be something more, a feverish anxiety that can’t rest, a blind search, or, as Carlos Santana might say, a thorned heart.
A poet isn’t made overnight, and no poet stops being one so quickly either.
If Clausewitz sees war as the continuation of politics by other means, why not see Rimbaud’s trip as the continuation, by other means, of poetry?
I struggle to understand. I only know one thing: To live in this place and try to put down roots here implies what he called a disorder of the senses.
To me, his adventure had the feel of a novel written in the wind.
I like this Rimbaud: moody, sarcastic, and sure of himself, handsome even toward the end when he’s already sick and heads right into an early death.
I like the self-assurance with which he escapes the metaphors that adore him.
Glory to the poet who doesn’t pursue glory.
Blessed be the saint who abandons his niche.
Valiant is he who knows his fifteen minutes have passed and doesn’t try to extend them by force.
Good health to the artist who only gives of himself what he has to give.
The Rimbaud who moves me most is the one who intuits that there is no worse prison than your own style.
Speak, then be quiet. Hats off to the superstar who descends from the sky and lands right on earth.
But . . .
As soon as you start looking for buts, you find them.
Not every part of the Rimbaud who roamed here is ideal, nor are his deeds always those of the lone hero.
It’s not so simple, not really, because he colludes in the colonialist framework of control and exploitation of these lands, he, one of so many Europeans—generals, bureaucrats, merchants, or fortune seekers—who came to take advantage of a carte blanche for plunder.
Enid Starkie, Irish biographer of Rimbaud, found proof—is it valid?
—that he even stained his hands in the slave trade. 3
Did he come here to sink into ruin? Did he leave the glitter of Paris to rot in a hell of alienation and neglect?
It depends on the color of your glasses, because the Ethiopian friends I’ve made here hold a different opinion: For them, Paris is no center of paradise, and they see Rimbaud as one more person among them; they love and admire him and feel connected to him, some of them confusing Rimbaud with Rambo, the one played by Stallone.
“Between us, Rimbaud didn’t succeed in making a fortune,” they tell me, “but he had the world at his feet. He’s our poet, he loved us and we love him. He fell in love with our language and our ancient songs, and we fell in love with his language and his verses.”
Standing in front of that scrappy little altar in a ramshackle room of the Grand H?tel de l’Univers, I pray to a Rimbaud that, to me, embodies The Fool in the tarot, an unstable figure, a great fury of opposing forces, with one foot in the air about to step toward the abyss.
What if Abyssinia wasn’t an abyss, but a threshold?
Stubborn and tough as a Somali camel, Rimbaud crosses the Devil’s hills to arrive here, where his experience turns dizzying.
His business ventures were just the visible thread of a more secret, complicated search.
But better not to sing victory; could that leg with which The Fool takes his great step be the same one they’ll later have to cut off the poet?
Nader and I couldn’t keep up with the landings, which had become more frequent.
The refugees themselves anoint their tragedies with names in English: landings, new arrivals, smugglers.
Months go by, I’m already far from there, but I continue to hear the voices of the boat survivors.
My head rings with the pale thoughts of the drowned.
Over and over, the same stories, the tears in the sea, the thousand versions of one single horror.
“When the boat capsized,” the echoes say in my ears, “several had already died on the journey, especially those who were below, in the hole for fish.”
“The smugglers threw the dead into the sea, and the rest of us felt sorry for them. In that moment, we didn’t suspect that we’d soon be in the water ourselves too.
The sky and the sea were a single black mass, as dark above as below, with no dividing line.
We had to get to shore, but where was the shore?
Each person swam in one direction or another. Some, though, didn’t know how to swim.”
“We were crammed together so closely in the boat that we couldn’t lower our arms, and we were beaten with a belt buckle if we tried to move.
We stayed sitting in the same position, under the hot sun, without food or drink, for four days and nights.
We were finally arriving when the smugglers got word that the Yemeni patrol was close by.
The detour they took to avoid them prolonged our pain. ”
“They were merciless, they whipped us like animals.”
“Our behinds and genitals are wounded from so many hours of salt water and urine.”
“The hold of the ship is for storing fish, but that’s where we were, Ethiopians, pressed in, unable to move, crouched with our legs against the back of the person in front of us, and the legs of the ones behind us against our backs.
We, Ethiopians. Not fish but human beings.
Down in the hold, like sardines in a can, we died, suffocated.
The smugglers, who are Somali, discriminate against us and abuse us, and once we’re dead they throw our bodies to the sea. ”
“A woman was carrying a crying child in her arms, and they ordered her to silence him. She said, ‘No, I can’t silence him, he’s hungry and thirsty.’ So they threw the child into the water. That woman’s name is Ayanna and she’s here with us, one of the new arrivals.”
“When the trafficker grabbed her baby and threw him to the sea, he said: ‘He’s got water now.’”