The Poisonwood Bible
Page 178
If God is someone who thinks of me at all, he must think of me as a mother. Scraping fiercely for food and shelter, mad entirely for love, by definition. My boys all cry,”Sala mbote!” as they run out the door, away from my shelter and advice but never escaping my love.
Pascal has gone farthest—for two years he’s been in Luanda, where he studies petroleum engineering and, I sincerely believe, chases girls. He reminds me so much of his namesake, my old friend, with similar wide-set eyes and the same cheerful question breaking like a fresh egg upon every new day: “Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?”
Patrice is just the opposite: studious, sober, and an exact physical copy of his father. He wants to study government and be a Minister of Justice in a very different Africa from this one. I go weak in the knees with dread and admiration, watching him sharpen his hopes. But it’s Martin-Lothaire who’s turning out to be the darkest of my sons, in complexion and temperament. At twelve, he broods, and writes poetry in a journal like his father’s hero Agostinho Neto. He reminds me of his Aunt Adah.
Here in Kimvula District we’re working with farmers on a soybean project, trying to establish a cooperative—a tiny outpost of reasonable sustenance in the belly of Mobutu s beast. It’s futile, probably. If the government catches wind of any success here, the Minister of Agriculture will rob us out of existence. So we quietly plant our hopes out here in the jungle, just a few kilometers from the Angolan border, at the end of an awful road where Mobutu’s spies won’t often risk their fancy cars.
We count our small successes from day to day. Anatole has reorganized the secondary school, which had been in pure collapse for ten years—hardly a young adult in Kimvula village can read. I’m busy with my ravenous Taniel, who nurses night and day, riding in his sling on one side or the other so he won’t have to pause while I boil his diapers. Patrice and Martin have been commandeered by their father to teach French and mathematics respectively, even though this puts Martin in charge of children older than himself. Myself, I’m just happy to be living among fruit trees and cooking with wood again. I don’t mind the satisfying exhaustions of carrying wood and water. It’s the other exhaustion I hate, the endless news of Mobutu’s excesses and the costs of long-term deprivation. People here are instinctively more fearful and less generous than they were twenty years ago in Kilanga. Neighbor women do still come calling to offer little gifts, a hand of bananas or an orange for the baby to suck on and make us laugh at his puckery face. But their eyes narrow as they look around the room. Never having known a white person before, they assume I must know Mobutu and all important Americans personally. In spite of my protests, I think they worry I’ll report to someone that they had an orange to spare. There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist. Zaireans are tired to death, you can see it anywhere you look.
Our house here is mud and thatch, plenty large, with two rooms and a kitchen shed. A happier place, for sure, than the tin-and-cement box that packaged us up with all our griefs in Kinshasa. There, the cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge, and Anatole swore if he lived through ten thousand mornings in Kinshasa he would never get used to defecating in the center of his home. Honestly, a latrine does seem like a return to civilization.
But our life in this village feels provisional. We have one foot over the border into the promised land, or possibly the grave. Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.There we’ll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own. We’ve been leaning toward Angola for ten years now—Anatole had a chance to serve in the new government there in 1975, right after the treaty that gave Neto the presidency. But Anatole wasn’t yet ready to abandon the Congo. And then Neto died, too young. In 1982 another invitation came from the second President, Jose dos Santos. Anatole was prevented from accepting that post by the inconvenience of living in a two-meter-square room with a bucket of his excrement for company in the Thysville penitentiary.
I don’t believe Anatole has many regrets, but he would have been proud to work with Neto or dos Santos. Thanks to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died on the way, Angola has wrested itself free of Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oil wells. The industry of Angolans doesn’t subsidize foreigners, or any castles “with moats, and their children are likely to get vaccinations and learn to read. They’re still desperately poor, of course. They kept their diamonds and oil at a horrific cost. None of us predicted “what came to pass there. Least of all Neto, the young doctor-poet who just meant to spare his people from the scarring diseases of smallpox and humiliation. He went to the U.S. looking for help and was shown the door. So he came home to try to knock down Portuguese rule on his own and create a people’s Angola. Then he got some attention from the Americans. For now he was a Communist devil.
Pascal has gone farthest—for two years he’s been in Luanda, where he studies petroleum engineering and, I sincerely believe, chases girls. He reminds me so much of his namesake, my old friend, with similar wide-set eyes and the same cheerful question breaking like a fresh egg upon every new day: “Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?”
Patrice is just the opposite: studious, sober, and an exact physical copy of his father. He wants to study government and be a Minister of Justice in a very different Africa from this one. I go weak in the knees with dread and admiration, watching him sharpen his hopes. But it’s Martin-Lothaire who’s turning out to be the darkest of my sons, in complexion and temperament. At twelve, he broods, and writes poetry in a journal like his father’s hero Agostinho Neto. He reminds me of his Aunt Adah.
Here in Kimvula District we’re working with farmers on a soybean project, trying to establish a cooperative—a tiny outpost of reasonable sustenance in the belly of Mobutu s beast. It’s futile, probably. If the government catches wind of any success here, the Minister of Agriculture will rob us out of existence. So we quietly plant our hopes out here in the jungle, just a few kilometers from the Angolan border, at the end of an awful road where Mobutu’s spies won’t often risk their fancy cars.
We count our small successes from day to day. Anatole has reorganized the secondary school, which had been in pure collapse for ten years—hardly a young adult in Kimvula village can read. I’m busy with my ravenous Taniel, who nurses night and day, riding in his sling on one side or the other so he won’t have to pause while I boil his diapers. Patrice and Martin have been commandeered by their father to teach French and mathematics respectively, even though this puts Martin in charge of children older than himself. Myself, I’m just happy to be living among fruit trees and cooking with wood again. I don’t mind the satisfying exhaustions of carrying wood and water. It’s the other exhaustion I hate, the endless news of Mobutu’s excesses and the costs of long-term deprivation. People here are instinctively more fearful and less generous than they were twenty years ago in Kilanga. Neighbor women do still come calling to offer little gifts, a hand of bananas or an orange for the baby to suck on and make us laugh at his puckery face. But their eyes narrow as they look around the room. Never having known a white person before, they assume I must know Mobutu and all important Americans personally. In spite of my protests, I think they worry I’ll report to someone that they had an orange to spare. There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist. Zaireans are tired to death, you can see it anywhere you look.
Our house here is mud and thatch, plenty large, with two rooms and a kitchen shed. A happier place, for sure, than the tin-and-cement box that packaged us up with all our griefs in Kinshasa. There, the cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge, and Anatole swore if he lived through ten thousand mornings in Kinshasa he would never get used to defecating in the center of his home. Honestly, a latrine does seem like a return to civilization.
But our life in this village feels provisional. We have one foot over the border into the promised land, or possibly the grave. Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.There we’ll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own. We’ve been leaning toward Angola for ten years now—Anatole had a chance to serve in the new government there in 1975, right after the treaty that gave Neto the presidency. But Anatole wasn’t yet ready to abandon the Congo. And then Neto died, too young. In 1982 another invitation came from the second President, Jose dos Santos. Anatole was prevented from accepting that post by the inconvenience of living in a two-meter-square room with a bucket of his excrement for company in the Thysville penitentiary.
I don’t believe Anatole has many regrets, but he would have been proud to work with Neto or dos Santos. Thanks to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died on the way, Angola has wrested itself free of Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oil wells. The industry of Angolans doesn’t subsidize foreigners, or any castles “with moats, and their children are likely to get vaccinations and learn to read. They’re still desperately poor, of course. They kept their diamonds and oil at a horrific cost. None of us predicted “what came to pass there. Least of all Neto, the young doctor-poet who just meant to spare his people from the scarring diseases of smallpox and humiliation. He went to the U.S. looking for help and was shown the door. So he came home to try to knock down Portuguese rule on his own and create a people’s Angola. Then he got some attention from the Americans. For now he was a Communist devil.
