Dances with Hyenas #3
“They forced me to jump. When I refused, they took my baby and threw him into the water. I leapt after him, leaving my other two children in the boat. The water wasn’t deep and I was able to save my baby.
But what became of the other two? Praise be to God!
One of the migrants traveling with us helped them to shore.
We’ve arrived alive, my three children and me.
Someone gives me water for the baby. The two others eat the crackers they’re given. We’ve arrived, I can’t complain.”
“I’m stiff from all those days without moving, with my legs pulled in. I can’t move and they throw me to my death. They push you into the water, it’s not their problem if you drown.”
“The boat could only fit thirty or forty people, but they crammed in a hundred and twenty of us, a hundred and fifty.”
“My husband and I arrived hurt and exhausted. I embraced him and we fell asleep right there, on the beach. When I woke up, I saw my husband had died by my side.”
“When we set out on the journey, we already knew about the suffering and risks that awaited us. Relatives who’d done it before had warned us.
Even so, we were willing to do it, and we spent months raising the eighty dollars per head the passage costs.
We had one single thought in mind, the same thought as everyone in my country: It’s possible you’ll die at sea, but if you stay in Somalia, you’ll die for sure. ”
Rimbaud, the stranger. Explorer without a helmet, traveler without luggage, he loses money on each business venture and risks his life in every fix he gets himself into.
Far from Verlaine and wild parties, safe from his mother’s Catholic prudishness, Rimbaud has a seal made for himself with the inscription Abdo Rimbo, equivalent to Absallah Rimbaud, or Rimbaud, servant of Allah; some believe he may have embraced Islam.
4 He communicates in Arabic, Amharic, Harari, Somali, and Oromo; it seems he really had a gift for languages.
He holds his silence, though, on his travels through the desert.
He’s developed the habit of talking inward, to himself.
He’s learned it from the nomads, along with how to endure heat, want, and hostility.
How not to complain, how to control his instincts and ignore thirst. And if these nomads, who are fierce people, don’t attack and kill him, leaving his body in the sand, it’s because he himself is also fierce and earns their respect; he doesn’t show them the crying boy side of him revealed in his letters to Mom.
I can’t stand the Rimbaud who writes, pitifully, I’m so alone, Mother, I end up going where I don’t want to go and doing what I don’t want to do, I get bored, I can’t sleep, I lose my appetite.
I also can’t stand his mother, a disaster of a woman according to Pierre Michon.
5 The son infantilizes himself and launches a jeremiad to move that woman of steel, Do you see, Mother?
I could disappear in this godforsaken place and you wouldn’t even know.
And she? She clings to her religious beliefs, unable to show affection.
Cold as ice, that lady, there in Charleville, as her son offers his tears.
Take joy in my pain, Mother, it’s a sign of remorse, I strayed from the good path and now I’m paying dearly for it, I, your son Arthur, penitent in this unwholesome land, among weird people.
But I’m good, Mother, you’ll see, I’m going to pull together the money to return with what’s mine like a worthy man, turn a deaf ear to the gossip you hear about my days in Paris, that’s all behind us now, what’s more, it never happened.
The Rimbaud I like is Arab and African and travels extensively through Yemen, Somalia, and Abyssinia, the three territories that formed the ancient kingdom of Sheba.
But what can he tell me about the mythical queen?
Nothing, it seems. As far as is known, he never speaks or writes about her.
Other great French thinkers succumb to her charms—Flaubert, Nerval, Malraux—but that’s not the case with him.
Still, there is a kind of connection, even more intangible than the others had: Rimbaud manages to befriend the Abyssinian nobility, flesh-and-blood people who claim direct, formal descendancy from Solomon and Makeda.
The other authors toy with legends, while he leaps over legends and connects with the blood of their blood: the grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren of Makeda, monarch of Sheba.
One of these offspring is Ras Makonnen, the first cousin of the supreme Emperor of Abyssinia.
This Makonnen—immensely rich, a renowned military leader and governor of the province of Harar—is a slight, refined, and cultured man, versed in French literature and no doubt aware of Rimbaud’s secret prestige as a poet.
A genuine affection grows between them, and they mutually enjoy each other’s company, and if Makonnen, the old fox, tolerates the fickle, sulky, temperamental young man, it’s because he finds him smart and a good conversationalist, with a sharp and cynical sense of humor.
The ancient stone city walls of Harar have five arches with large doors that close at dusk to protect its people from the assaults of enemy tribes, and also from the hyenas and lions that, according to Philipp Paulitschke, an Austrian explorer and ethnographer, abound in the surrounding hills and often slink into the city, where they make easy prey of the sick, who are put out on the street to heal or die.
After the doors are locked, the keys are ceremonially handed to Governor Makonnen.
He keeps them until dawn, when the doors reopen to let in caravans that have spent hours waiting outside.
Between closing and opening, the city’s night sinks into the slow quiet of a great peace, and the two friends, Makonnen and Rimbaud, sit together by the fire.
They no longer drink the green poison of absinthe, but rather the milk of paradise.
They listen to tales of warriors on horseback and join rounds of improvised Amharic poetry, Save me, my love, save me, I am lost, I am lost, I entered this house of death and I cannot find my way out.
Outside, lions roam, and the laughter of hyenas—iiyaaa, rihiyiii, rihiiihiya!—rings out. Light glimmers in the beasts’ eyes.
Later, when Rimbaud leaves Harar to die in his native France, Ras Makonnen will send a handwritten note to Isabelle, the poet’s sister, saying, I am ill of the death of your brother and it seems to me that my soul has left me.6
Rimbaud also strikes up dealings with the big boss, the one and only, most direct, notable, and memorable scion of the Solomonic and Sheban dynasty, the reborn embodiment of the sovereigns of Jerusalem and Sheba: Menelik II, Emperor of Abyssinia; Negus of Shewa; future executioner of the invading Italian army, which he defeats in the Battle of Adwa; hero of the only African nation that throughout its history has stayed free of imperialist chains.
A magnificent figure, this Menelik II, survivor of smallpox and countless conflicts and attacks, crowned monarch in a feather headdress, hero festooned with insignias and legends, with a bejeweled mantle of animal skins and a wide-brimmed hat that hides his face, pocked by the variola virus.
Menelik the dreadful, the powerful, original and authentic.
After vanquishing all his rivals, unifying the empire, and modernizing the land, Menelik II the Fierce sits on a gold throne with a living lion at his feet that is as splendid and bored as the emperor himself.
In the midst of the apathy of power, the great negus suffers fits of melancholy that are eased by the company of that young, foreign ex-poet who insists on making absurd business propositions.
The trust between them, however, doesn’t stop the negus negussie, the negus among all neguses, from taking the French pup down a notch when he tries to be too clever for his own good.
Rimbaud—a newbie trafficker—endures hellish conditions in the months it takes him to cross the desert in a caravan bearing a load of obsolete weapons he wants to sell to Emperor Menelik.
But he tries to charge too much for them in hopes of making a fortune, or at least of paying off the exorbitant cost of the journey, which has wiped out his savings.
Menelik, who has a powerful and well-equipped army, shows little interest in acquiring those relics, let alone for a high price.
What do I have power for? the monarch says to himself, and he orders the weapons seized from Rimbaud, forcing him to sell them for cheap.
Little to nothing is known about the woman or women who may have lived with Rimbaud during those years.
No more than gossip, speculation, a few photos, nothing certain.
On the fly, I take the first chance I get to cross the strait and visit Harar in Ethiopia, that place Rimbaud loved; I’ve heard people there might know something.
So I head for Harar in search of a highly improbable, slippery Queen of Sheba: the Abyssinian lady of Arthur Rimbaud.
Harar, in the heart of old Ethiopia: hic sunt leones, “here there are lions,” a signal on maps of a land not trodden by Christians; in fact, for centuries, they were forbidden entrance to the city, which enclosed its mysteries in a high round wall.
At an elevation of two thousand meters—sixty-five hundred feet—on a high plateau swept by winds and ringed by mountains turned blue by the air, the Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrean, Muslim, Christian, Harari, Sidama, Gurage, and Wolayta people all coexist. Harar, the utopian and mystical city, place of gnosis, a hundred mosques, Christian crosses, Sufi spirituality, hermetic philosophy .
. . in the end, it may indeed be true that the center of the world is not Paris, but Harar.