Chris Dunton
as the crow flies by Veronique Tadjo (Heinemann: African Writers Series)
‘I would have loved to write one of those serene stories with a beginning and an end. But as you know only too well, it is never like that.”
Working by collage, poet and novelist Veronique Tadjo assembles her text from 90 short pieces, some of just a few lines, disposing almost entirely with linear plot. There is an axis on which all her material turns a woman’s account of the collapse of a love affair. But from this the narrative continually breaks off into tangents tales of the city, allegorical episodes which the reader has to carefully relate to the core material.
The dominant sense is of denial, of a loss that cannot be absorbed or acted upon, as the narrator finds herself locked into a paralysis of desire: “You drifted through time as though your sleep was crumbling. You lost faith. What haunted you was the waiting. Tomorrow, everything would start all over again. You would be back and then there would be nothing. Nothing at all.”
Though set partly in Europe, most of the action takes place in the Ivoirean capital, Abidjan. Tadjo’s focus here is on the city’s callous unconcern for poverty, disability. Prescient, too, Tadjo sees the inevitability of civic disorder, the coup (“Debris will hurtle down the corridors of power”).
Throughout, her language is determinedly economical, pitched at the cool dispassion that signals traumatisation. Occasionally she lapses into the portentous; mostly though in the account of a back-street abortion, or the murder of a child beggar by a rival the speaking voice carries precisely the weight of its material and sharply conveys the narrator’s cauterized emotional state.
Some of the weightier sections (still no more than a few pages long) could be read as discrete episodes, as independent stories.
An account, for example, of the risks and pitfalls faced by an anti-establishment theatre ensemble, or the allegory (hints of Bluebeard’s Castle here) of the girl who enters a magician’s skull.
But all of these episodes (and this is what binds the collage) are to be read as having an impact on women’s experience, as informing the totality of women’s consciousness.
It is men here who make the noise, men who have wrought the damage: “I do not understand those men who want to tear women up and kick them in the gut with evil words that hurt to the depths of the soul. They ought to be told to stop, held at bay and taught the alphabet from scratch.”