Lines from the Zanzibar Chest

The tableau was more sublime to me than the cityscapes of Florence, or Paris, or Manhattan. I’d hear the muezzin pipe up from a dozen mosques for asr, afternoon prayers, caressing the broken lines of the city with Kufic arabesques of sound. The amplified cries to God, impact explosions, sea breeze, softening light, and my heartbeat wove together.

Farther on down the path in the emerald filtered light of the banana grove, I dropped my trousers and squatted. My heart pounded. I stared up through the jungle into the sky. “What if there is only this?” As if in reply, my bowels loosened. How was it that I came to be stuck inside this strange, involuntary body? It seemed to me that there was no heaven or hell, right or wrong. There was only this.

And I remembered how Carlos had once said, “in the midst of carnage, you will see the utter evil and the supreme good, side by side.” Carlos spoke for all of us who long for such clarity. We will rarely find it in the so-called normal life. I know that the privilege of witnessing the extremes stretches something inside the heart or the soul or the mind, so that there is a void we cannot ever hope to fill again in ourselves. In all my pained imaginings of how Carlos had come to his final moment, only one thing really matters. Carlos was on the story, looking for the utter evil and the supreme good.

It rained and hordes of cracked feet churned the ground into a quagmire. “It’s Woodstock without the music,” said one nurse I talked to. Only a handful of foreigners were there to help at the start but they quickly crowded in. Every humanitarian disaster is a golden fund-raising opportunity for the charities.

Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of subways and spilled like ants down pavements. The crowded bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes-to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail. In an art gallery I saw a tank of formaldehyde in which was suspended a shark. In another was half a pig. I thought of the soap gorilla at Kigali airport. Waiting for the Underground train, I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. Hello boys, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a place where evil stared right at you from the sockets of a child’s skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lives of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the fucking and killing on the big screen. So, here then was the prosperous, democratic, and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they’re lucky.