“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 forbuts, 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 Hôtel 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 tragedieswith 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. Thatwoman’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.’”
“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 inscriptionAbdo Rimbo, equivalent toAbsallah Rimbaud, orRimbaud, servant of Allah; some believe he mayhave 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 moreintangible 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.
