“There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is agape, his wings are spread. This is how the Angel of History must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, wake the dead, and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which is back in turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
— Walter Benjamin
Young Djibril (“Call me Djib”) returns to his native Djibouti after a long voluntary exile in Montreal. He returns for professional reasons, he says at the outset, in the first of his blue moleskine notebooks carefully numbered 1 to 10.
The details of his operation remain obscure. He tells us that his contract is with a Denver based economic intelligence firm – Adorno Location Scouting – a firm once known for scouting film locations but which has, since 9/11, focussed on providing intelligence from some of the most volatile places in the world.
Djibouti, a tiny country jutting into the Red Sea at the edge of the Horn of Africa, has since ancient times been a strategic connecting point between Africa and Arabia. Now, the powers that be deem it to be of some importance and the uranium magnates are interested in the country. Djib's mission is to “feel the temperature on the ground, make sure the country is secure, the situation stable and the terrorists under control”. He does not operate in the open; mobility, discretion and efficiency are his firm's key words.
It’s not a thriller, though
If this is beginning to sound like the next Ian Fleming meets John le Carré mission (Jonathan Pine-type played by Idris Elba, anyone?), take a look at the villain: an Islamic terrorist on death row incarcerated in a high security prison who spends his time taking dictation from his venerable master who is imprisoned along with him. The prisoner seems to know every movement of Djib's even though he claims that his only contact with the world outside is a plate of food shoved under the door of his cell everyday.
This shadowy scribe's ramblings are what you would expect from your stereotyped loony fundamentalist, and he makes it clear from his first entry that Djibril will be taken care of in the coming days; he will not leave the country alive. So now Jonathan Pine meets The Reluctant Fundamentalist! Where on earth does Walter Benjamin fit in this narrative?
Everywhere. What is soon apparent in Abdourahman Waberi's poetic Passage of Tears is that despite appearances, the book is not quite another spy thriller set in a geographically sensitive area. (This book has been translated from French to English by David and Nicole Ball, and the translation published by the reliably brilliant Seagull Books.)
Passage of Tears is an interesting and surprisingly effective experiment that explores Benjamin's idea of modernity in a distant land – alien to Benjamin; Waberi is a French-Djiboutian who, like his protagonist, has chosen to live in the West – caught between a nomadic past and the globalised future with the chaotic present controlled primarily by external forces. Djib's views on “progress” is clear from the outset. Take his description of an upcoming industrial project:
“Welcome to the new industrial park desired and designed by Dubai. The showpiece of the United Arab Emirates in the Horn of Africa. A haven of peace with a scent of salt. Projects, projects and more projects. The country has caught this new fever. It even has a truly Pharaonic project: the construction of the longest bridge in the world. Yes, right here, in this corner of Africa that looks the the American Far West in miniature. Everything has been decided: the blueprint, the budget, the material and the rest. We are told that the bridge will be built in less than two years for sure. It will rescue thousands of people from unemployment. It will flatter the bottomless pride of two heads of state. It will cross the Red Sea, and connect Yemen and Djibouti, in other words, Africa and Asia. Twenty-nine and a half kilometres long, it will see the light of day with the help of the Bountiful, without Whom, nothing is possible. More prosaically, it will be the creation of the famous Middle East Development Corporation, the BTP company of Saudi Tarik Mohammed bin Laden. Its technical design and construction has already been given to Noor City Development, a firm of architects based in Silicon Valley. A new city called Madinat an-Noor or City of Light will arise. It will have a twin on the Yemenite side. More than Cleopatra's nose, this bridge will change the face of this region of the world.”
Djib's views on the old French colonialists and the “new Rome” and their high-security base at Camp Lemonier are no less cutting. Even before he begins his investigation in earnest, Djib begins to identify himself with Benjamin Klee's Angel of History. Yet, he is in Djibouti after fifteen years working to gather intelligence for a covert American firm. Why? What is his motivation?
Estrangement and returning
It is never explained entirely but under pretext of his investigation, Djib visits the places of his childhood – the beach, the islets where the prison is housed, the new industrial parks – all of which takes him back to memories and the people of his past. His twin brother Djamal, whom he was never close to and with whom he has lost in touch with since he left; Grandpa Assod, a nomad who lived many lives travelling across the earth, skies and seas and who tells Djib haunting stories of his people and the many Messiahs keen to convert them to their ways; David, a friend from school who takes the place of his brother, later revealed to be one of the last of the Jewish minority in the country.
Meanwhile, Djamal, as it’s clear by now that the scribe in prison is none other than Djib's twin brother, remains steadfast in his fanaticism and continues to take dictation from his Master diligently until, one day, he sees a different text appear in his manuscript. Curious, he starts to reads The Book of Ben, written by what must have been an old/long dead prisoner in the same cell.
The book inside the book narrates events in the life of Walter Benjamin, whom the writer claimed to have met briefly at an internment camp in France. Benjamin was released a few weeks later but his respite did not last long; with the Gestapo in pursuit, he left Paris like many of his friends and made for Portugal, from where he planned to leave for the New World.
But he was refused a transit visa by Franco's authorities, and he committed suicide in a village in the Pyrenees, left with no other option. The author meanwhile was shipped to what was then a French prison in Djibouti, and spent the rest of his life there writing about the life of Ben in the hope that a future reader would one day find it.
Djamal is disinterested at first but slowly the book wins him over and towards the end, he is obsessed by it to the extent that not only is his religious fervour greatly reduced but he also starts to doubt his Master. But it is too late for his twin as there is no dearth of willing assassins in the fold, and one of them successfully takes aim at Djib.
What is left beautifully (and deliberately) unsaid by Waberi is whether Djib would have wanted it any other way. He postpones his return supposedly to follow up on leads even though he knows his investigation is going nowhere. His contract has run out and he is on his own but he does not want to leave to the safety of North America.
The years in the new world may have given him a new lease of life but he seems to have concluded that it was transient, and is built upon the ruins of other less important lives. He may as well have created Djamal in one of his detailed notebooks as an alter ego.
Each one of us have to make our own peace with the price we and the world pay a for progress. In Passage of Tears, Waberi's protagonist just cannot keep looking at the wreckage that is piling up anymore; the price of progress, if it can be called that, proves to be too much for him. How much is too much for the rest of us?
Veena Muthuraman’s short story collection, A Place of No Importance, has been published by Juggernaut Books. She lives in Edinburgh and is working on her first novel.
