No sooner said than done.
That very evening, we planned on inventing a new system with new symbols of worth and new ways of acquiring and trading.
That very evening we planned the obliteration of money.
A true “Worldwide Organization of Nations” was to propose and achieve the obliteration of money by way of a planetary referendum.
First we would burn all paper money.
The real paper money of every affluent and every impoverished nation.
The false paper money of corrupting and corrupted countries.
But would the pollution it caused not asphyxiate every creature with lungs living on earth?
Perhaps we should invent machines to reduce all paper money, true or false, along with all bureaucratic paper with the exception of books, to powder or paste, and recycle it into fertilizer and give it back to the soil.
We would organize a huge consciousness-raising campaign to limit the gridlock caused by too many machines. The human would be given more value, so that a solid part of human work would come back to human beings, and—oh, miracle—we would see lines of billions of people at work, like the Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs, handing each other rocks to build pyramids, or like the Chinese when they erected the Great Wall—men, women, and children working together again to construct projects for their own use.
We envisioned a multiracial crowd of every origin, some on the machines, others beside or behind them, renewing eroded and poor soil, seeding, creating nurseries, transplanting fruit trees, growing flowers, in short recreating paradise on earth. It was a magnificent moment of exhilaration and great love.
We took on the destruction of all metal money.
Billions of tons of coins in gold, silver, iron, bronze, or copper: We would melt all this metal in ovens that would be transparent like urns; and we’d do it in public, like the barbaric spectacles of old!
Alone or with their families, people would arrive with food and drink and material for do-it-yourself projects. They would sit down around the ovens, commenting, painting, sculpting, and laughing loudly. There would be a “something for everyone,” drawing more people than ever before. Even pregnant women and new nursemaids would bring their fretful babies to the transparent ovens, where the melting metals would stimulate the imagination and calm the nerves with the beauty of the colors and sounds. Photographers of every type would have the time of their lives.
With the help of various graphics and scale models, specialized orators would be invited to explain how other forms of exchange could be manufactured from all these liquid metals. Very special coins would be worn around the neck or wrist. Coins would be put on the wrists of newborns, who would keep them on for the first seven years of their lives. These coins would symbolize the importance that the community attaches to them. These values would allow their parents, or relatives responsible for orphans, to feed and care for them, protect them, and teach them all that they should learn. In addition, every child in its first seven years would have the right to tenderness and protection, for which the parents would remain responsible. Their only duty would be to allow the child to learn. Every adult would be requested to see it as a sacred duty, not to be ignored, to care for any child who wears this coin, without exception.
The second kind of coin is to be worn by all children from their seventh birthdays on, a day to be celebrated as a generational milestone. All seven year olds, dressed in their best finery and surrounded by their parents and entourage of whatever sort, would solemnly receive the coin, having first gone through a kind of initiation. It would be explained to the children that they must gradually come to deserve the coin through community service. In addition to learning, the children would then begin to serve the community.
Every seven years, children would learn to distinguish between what is beneficial and what is harmful. They would learn what is scientifically, materially, psychologically, or spiritually dangerous in itself and for the whole community, so that they would no longer act out of ignorance, but rather out of fully responsible choice. Passed on from generation to generation, the new traditions would guarantee the interest of all through personal evolution. The first forms of creativity everyone would need to develop would involve the invention of better living conditions for all, greater possibilities for opening up or broadening both individual and collective consciousness. Of course, the coin assigned to children at this age would provide them with the right to be nourished to their complete satisfaction, to be cared for and taught without needing to present any documentation, until the age of twenty-one.
On their twenty-first birthday, all would receive a third type of coin, with equal ceremony; but this time would be worn for the next series of five seven-year periods. The third coin would be magnetic and registered as a credit card, the dividends of the owner’s actions going to the benefit of individuals and the society, depending on the vibration of the aura. This credit card would be good for all acquisitions, trips, important achievements, designs, investments, research, initiatives, and more. Obviously, in addition to food, the care and costs of a child’s apprenticeship would be guaranteed by the earlier coins. A fourth type of coin, purple in color, would allow for the results of one’s efforts to be reaped more calmly, at the time of “retirement,” limiting duties to the relaying and sharing of knowledge and experience for the rest of one’s life.
For weeks on end, specialists would present and explain various models so that everyone could truly understand the new lifestyle about to be launched, and how to make it last throughout each person’s lifetime. In this way, everyone would clearly have the same opportunities for at least the first twenty-one years. Any lingering differences would no longer flow from the inequalities that have dominated human life for millennia, but only from innate differences, not those imposed by administrations or politicians.
That same night, we also decided to put an end to false needs and values, if only in our dreams. We decided to destroy all toys.
We would take the tons of dreadful teddy bears with synthetic fur that invade homes, fill up trashcans, and saturate the earth, unable to absorb them; the mountains of little cars, dinosaurs, toy guns, monsters, and other metal or plastic “deadly weapons” that have emerged from the imagination of derailed minds, forced to invent whatever would sell, just to survive; all the toys of useless consumerism, damaging children by numbing and totally alienating them. We would pile them up, crush them, and turn them into a material as hard as steel, ready to be delivered in blocks like cement bricks, to be used for new buildings.
“Then, we must destroy all plastic. The little jet-black bags that have become walls and roofs in the shantytowns! The black bags that cover the bodies of millions of daily casualties, black bags, garbage bags, mysterious contraband bags! Multicolored wrapping bags, bags full of written words, the blue bags buried in the ground that keep plants from coming up again, baggies in every color caught on electric poles, trees, and shrubs in cities and villages, looking like vultures, scavengers, or other birds of prey.
“And, last but not least, we must destroy all weapons. The tons of scrap iron ready to blow up the world, the antipersonnel mines that mutilate the globe—human stupidity exploding in the faces of children!”
Ah, our discussions, our constant dreams, to be made reality according to our own opening up, our evolution. There was no problem for which our dreams didn’t find a solution, no evil without a remedy, at least in the world of dreams.
We stand there together, in the living room or the courtyard, before or after our ritual meals. . . .
Not a dream we didn’t share. Dreaming of values. . . .
The value of things, moments, and beings. . . .
Our life, an active dream we were building like a temple
With the fervor of our faith and the simple strength of our spirit!
• • •
Sometimes Professor Minlon managed to make us feel we were playing such an important role for our country that we began to take ourselves seriously. One particular evening, he spoke to his friend Singa the politician as if to explain or justify himself.
“Since I’ve been coming to the Albass home I keep dreaming of a new world. I don’t know if it’s in the spices Halla uses or in their way of living together, but as soon as I’m with them or think about them, something pushes me irresistibly toward different aspirations or keeps me from burying my dreams as, I think, I was about to do under the pressure of your government. Thanks to the two of them, I feel I will die standing, shouting at oppression, proclaiming our shared refusal to live in inner poverty. This I owe to them, and I won’t stop bearing witness to it, anywhere and at any time it may be needed. . . .”
As a result, my husband got it into his head that our love was the vessel of a great destiny. We were in service to rebirth. Almost his entire class at the university felt invested in the mission, literally creating a movement. Together with the whole group, we were becoming actual disciples of a master, whose great gift awakened an unquenchable thirst in us for ever greater knowledge and action.
Certainly, we suspected that our dreams might not please everyone, but we didn’t think we sounded like revolutionaries, more dangerous than men of arms. For us these were just dreams we tried to formulate by writing poems or composing songs, to feel more positive and more valuable to those around us. We were hoping, in this way, to influence the general development of our society—to change things not only in our own lives, but in the life of the world. Regrettably, we didn’t suspect how much the rot had already eaten away—so much that the absurd had become the rule of life, specifically where the relationship of people to money was concerned.
Money—that colossal response to every exchange.
The most material spiritual symbol ever invented,
Its symbolic value completely distorted.
By now, we had the impression that money had to be amassed in equal quantity to the weight of the desired object. Would buying a house mean you had to find a container of money at least as large? People were stuffing their mattresses with it, piling it up in safes built into walls, filling chests they buried in the ground, though it did not guarantee them any dignity.
The president of one African republic even took the time to put his personal stamp in indelible ink on several hundred million American dollars—that is to say, half of his country’s budget! Tons of money that could have fed, cared for, and taught millions of individuals who were gradually sinking into disaster were found heaped up in chests that followed him into exile. “After me, chaos,” he liked to say.
When the deposed dictator fell seriously ill, members of his own entourage swiped several chests each and got away. Some were caught and killed. Others fled with their cursed chests into the virgin forest, where they buried them. When these thieves were finally able to open the supposedly impenetrable locks with acid, they found the stamped bills, which had been rendered totally useless. Until the end of the century, these people could still be found in various world capitals, still trying to find a specialist who might literally “clean” these stacks of money, erase the damned ink from the bills for which they had sold their souls.
Of course, these were only folkloric African flourishes, not comparable to the feats performed by cartels of thinking minds in the West, which in a matter of seconds seize the world’s money with a few clicks on a computer keyboard.
Nevertheless, I wondered whether, with all that money, they were any happier, any closer to God. No? So?
So. . . .
Our evenings certainly were festive, but they were celebrations that ended in nights of anxious and feverish dreams rather than in the sleep of oblivion. Some nights Master Minlon literally crushed our naive enthusiasm by shoving our noses into the fact that our situation stood at a dead end. We could see no signs of progress; we no longer knew on whom we could count. As it was, the powerlessness of African politicians who were heads of state was increasingly deplorable, and all the more so because our leader was one of them. For simple budding poets like us, the objectives diminished with every passing day because of the population’s growing illiteracy. As a result, our infrequent publications, which might have tweaked their consciousness, seemed very ineffective indeed, and doomed to failure.
One evening the party ended in a mournful mood, and Master Minlon’s voice trickled away like a funereal chant. “When you come to power, your hands are already tied.
“Pacts have been signed by uneducated, if not totally illiterate, predecessors.
“The interests of the most powerful require unbelievable conjuring tricks.
“Corruption comes through bogus needs, and you are stuck in it up to your ears.
“Financially speaking, they have you, with money that isn’t yours.
“Blackmail, pressures, partial satisfaction of your new desires, promises. . . .
“Philosophically and ideologically speaking, the traditional ideas have been so cheapened that it occurs to nobody to look to them for a solution to our problems, even though you and I know that, sooner or later, those ideas are the only way out!
“Spiritually speaking, you come from a race that has not had any ‘Revelation.’
“You will not be saved either by your culture or the color of your skin.
“Your ancestors have never known any ‘True God.’
“Your redemption depends on revelations and saviors that hail from elsewhere.
“So, verily I say unto you, if Christ himself came back to earth today and wanted to help Africa out of its hole via politics, he would not even have a cross on which to be crucified, but would be shamefully stoned instead, like any adulteror of his own era! And I ask you, who would want to wear common stones in his memory?
“How else, then, can you feel like the son of God except by going ‘undercover’?
“How can you convince anyone to be the creator of his own destiny and responsible for it?
“Merely with our words and scribbles, without being thought of as mad, as a traitor, or anything else equally humiliating—without dying more than once?
“All of this to tell you, children, that for now, shockingly, it can still cost you your lives if you want to offer ideas that allow Africans to believe in themselves, through avenues liable to liberate them from the stranglehold of those currently in power! If I am lying, take a hard look at me, and you will see what will befall me, for I still intend to keep trying, to speak up loud and clear anywhere there’s a need, even if no one will publish me. . . .”
• • •
We did, indeed, witness how those in power plotted against these “pseudo-masters of knowledge, who set fire to the minds of the young, just to strengthen their hold over them and better negotiate their privileges,” as the communiqué stated that dismissed every professor from his academic position, requesting that his car be turned in and the house assigned to him be vacated within forty-eight hours. . . .
And you, who so wanted human worth not to have any price:
The politicians put a price on your head,
Offered a job to anyone who would humiliate you,
An endowment for anyone who would ensnare you and drag you toward immoral or illegal actions.
And plenty of people came running to destroy you. . . .
You resisted so fiercely that you lapsed straight into indigence, and we were outraged!
In your fury, you decided to become a merchant: They ruined you.
You decided to become a parliamentarian: They shouted you down and poisoned your life.
Nothing had any value anymore except money, and everyone ran after it like a donkey after a carrot on a stick attached to its head, while poverty came pelting down ever harder on the whole world, and human beings became rabid beasts again, senselessly tearing each other to pieces in civil wars and fratricide.
Yes, Master Minlon and all you intellectuals like him, we witnessed the intolerable humiliations inflicted on you, and the youth who idolized you lost their desire to learn. Under our thunderstruck gaze, knowledge became a symbol of futile efforts and a source of pointless frustration, so that only some colorless functionaries and a few vile careerist politicians emerged from our entire generation, which had been so hungry for knowledge and so creative in our dreams of new worlds. The few unrepentant souls were condemned often to a lifelong exile.
It was then that a string of reproaches and regrets galloped through my head like an incoherent old tune, and deprived me of all desire. A despairing old refrain from my Aunt Roz inspired me to write this song:
For want of any great faith,
We have wasted a great deal of time,
And here is our bygone generation.
Misery brings the generation back again.
We race and compete;
There is no recourse left.
We buy and resell;
Bankruptcy waits in the wings.
Alcohol bonds us like glue,
As do cigarettes and cigars.
Fat joints undo us;
Misery has no solution.
We eat, we drink, we go to bed, we sleep,
And wake up at the door of death.
On the horizon, only six of one, a half dozen of the other;
Here and now, always and everywhere, more of the same.
Please let me have one great dream, just one more,
Or else offer me an alternative, at least,
Gbagbo, Zadi, the system makes us desperate and bogs us down, oh dear!
Have our masters really fallen permanently silent?
Must sorcery decimate each chosen figure?
What do our genies say, the righters of wrongs, Ngué Ndjông and Oum Inkora Intong?
My heart was leading me astray, and I had the impression that everything I did was foolish.
“Catch me before I go insane,” I heard myself shriek, though no sound would come from my hopelessly clogged throat. . . .
And so I fled!
• • •
Yes, I fled!
What else can you call the deliberate wish to fade away, to vanish from your own sight—in other words, to withdraw because you don’t want to go forward any longer? To refuse the changes and the successive moments of which eternity is made? Believing, for example, that you have everything you want, that you want nothing else, or that you are so miserable it cannot possibly get worse, you’re convinced any further effort is pointless. Is that not the same as the wish for life to stop moving, to die, to flee?
On the one hand, I was much too fond of my little home, my little bit of personal happiness, which I didn’t want to lose for anything in the world. On the other hand, I was angry with all my friends, Albass included, and with myself for not having done anything more for our dear fallen masters. I felt we had surrendered, that we had already been crushed like yam stalks without stakes; and an untenable sensation of failure—or worse, of betrayal—was tugging at my insides.
No one in our group spoke of dreams anymore. No one wrote poems anymore, or organized “nights of imaginings,” as we had christened our meals. The team stopped all its research in the oral traditions, which had always driven us to question ourselves. Progress now only implied an unimportant administrative job one could pursue, some political person one could bribe for a less punitive assignment. All our words and gestures seemed insipid and ineffective, and to me it was as if a closing parenthesis had been placed behind the progress we had so coveted, as if we had been devoured by a multiheaded monster and been turned into zombies by its saliva.
The most depressing thing was that no one spoke about it, no one complained about anything at all. We were all doing our best to live as if nothing had happened, hauling our existential anguish around in muffled silence. Women retreated imperceptibly into an artificial quest for luxury: They tried to dress more expensively, show off their cars, their new complexions flogged with photographic developer, chemical whiteners, even if it meant arranging for secret and devious little trades to obtain them. Men grew bigger bellies because of the thousands of types of beer they tried, and equipped themselves needlessly with pipes and cigars as large as their sex organs. We found ourselves in a kind of indescribable mire, all of us disgusted with ourselves and yet unable to admit it.
I fell ill without quite knowing what was wrong, and had to go through several operations in which I lost important organs, never understanding why each surgery caused more harm than the previous one; in the end, they had to evacuate me to the West. And so, like a coward, I departed on a stretcher, leaving behind everything that was dear to me; I left for an exile of no return and without any farewell.
But as you, Grand Madja, used to say: “The secret of the eternity of life is that everything has a beginning and an end! Everything must die to be reborn.”