Allah is Not Obliged Read Free

that I ateand slept best. It’s called a natural habitat and every animal has one; maman’s hut with her smells was my natural habitat.
    I think it’s a pity we don’t know how the world was before we get born. Sometimes, I’d spend the morning trying to imagine what maman was like before her circumcision, the way she sang and danced and walked when she was a young virgin before her excision. Grandmother and Balla always said she was pretty as a gazelle, pretty as a
gouro
mask. I only ever got to see her lying down or crawling around on her arse, I never saw her standing, but I knew she must have been charming and beautiful, because even after thirty years of shit and stink, of smoke from the hearth and suffering and tears, there was still something beautiful about the lines on her face. When the lines on her face weren’t brimming with tears, her face shone with a kind of glow. A bit like a lost blemished pearl, (‘blemished’ means ‘marked by imperfections’). Her beauty was decaying like the ulcer on her leg, but the glow just shone right though the smoke and the smells of the hut.
Faforo! Walahé!
    When maman was pretty and charming and virginal, people used to call her Bafitini. Even now when her body was all fucked-up and rotting, Balla and grandmother still called her Bafitini. I’d only ever seen her at her worst, in the last stages of her multifarious, multicoloured decay, but I called her
Ma
. Just Ma. African people would say it came from deep in my insides; French people in France would say it came from my heart.
    Grandmother says maman was born in Siguiri, one of thehundreds of shit-holes in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone where miners and rock-breakers dig for gold. Grandfather was a big gold trader. Like all the other filthy rich traffickers, he bought himself lots of women and horses and cows and big starched
bubus
(a
bubu
is a long tunic worn by Black Nigger African Natives). The women had lots of babies and the cows had lots of calves. Grandfather needed somewhere to put all the women and the kids and the cows and the calves and all his gold, so he bought lots of houses and lots of concessions, and when he couldn’t buy more, he built more. Grandfather had concessions in every settlement where there were fortune-hunting gold miners.
    Grandmother was my grandfather’s first wife and maman was one of his first children, that’s why he sent grandmother to the town to look after the family business. He didn’t want her hanging around some mining outpost full of bandits and cut-throats and liars and gold dealers.
    Besides grandmother had to stay in town so maman didn’t die of her heart stopping dead or the ulcer rotting her completely. Maman used to say she’d drop dead from the pain if grandmother left her to go out to the gold-mining camps where grandfather did his business and where there were cut-throats lying in wait for women.
    Grandmother really loved my mother, but she didn’t know what date she was born, or even what the day of the week it was. She was far too busy that night, the night my mother was born. Balla says it doesn’t matter what date you’re born, or what day of the week you’re born, seeing as how everyone has to get born some day or other, somewhere or other, andeveryone has to die some day or other, somewhere or other, so we can all be buried in the same clay and rejoin our ancestors and discover the ultimate judgement of Allah.
    On the night maman was born, grandmother was far too busy on account of the bad omens that were happening all over the universe. There were lots and lots of bad omens in heaven and on earth that night—hyenas howling in the mountains, owls crying on the roofs of the huts. The omens signified that maman would have a life that was tremendously and catastrophically catastrophic. A life of shit and suffering and damnation, etc.
    Balla said he and grandmother offered up sacrifices but they weren’t enough to undo maman’s terrible