I live on Brazzaville Beach. Brazzaville Beach on the edge of Africa. This is where I have washed up, you might say, deposited myself like a spar of driftwood, lodged and fixed in the warm sand for a while, just above the high tide mark.
The beach never had a name until last year. Then they christened it in honor of the famous Conferençia dos Quadros that was held in Congo Brazzaville in 1964. No one can explain why but, one day, over the laterite road that leads down to the shore, some workmen erected this sign: BRAZZAVILLE BEACH, and written below that, CONFERENÇIA DOS QUADROS, BRAZZAVILLE, 1964.
It is an indication, some people say, that the government is becoming more moderate, trying to heal the wounds of our own civil war by acknowledging a historic moment in another country’s liberation struggle. Who can say? Who ever knows the answers to these questions? But I like the name, and so does everyone else who lives around here. Within a week we were all using it unselfconsciously. Where do you live? On Brazzaville Beach. It seemed entirely natural.
I live on the beach in a refurbished beach house. I have a large, cool sitting room with a front wall of sliding screened doors that give directly onto a wide sun deck. There is also a bedroom, a generous bathroom with bath and shower, and a tiny dim kitchen built onto the back. Behind the house is my garden: sandy, patchy grass, some prosaic shrubs, a vegetable plot and a hibiscus hedge, thick with brilliant flowers.
The beach has seen better days, true, but I feel its years of decline are over. I have neighbors now: the German manager of the bauxite mines—my boss, I suppose—and on the other side a droll, beefy Syrian who runs an import-export business and a couple of Chinese restaurants in the town.
They are only here at weekends, so during the week I have the place more or less to myself. Though I am never alone. There is always someone on the beach: fishermen, volleyball players, itinerants, scavengers. European families come, too. The French and the Portuguese, the Germans and the Italians. No men, just wives, many of them pregnant, and noisy young children. The children play, the wives sit and chatter, smoke and sunbathe and scold their kids. If the beach is quiet they will sometimes slyly remove their bikini tops and expose their soft, pallid breasts to the African sun.
Behind my house, beyond the palm grove, is the village—an attenuated shantytown of mud huts and lean-tos, occupying the scrubby strip of ground between the shore and its tree line and the main road to the airport. I live alone—which suits me fine—but there is enough life around to prevent me from ever being lonely.
I even have a boyfriend, now, after a fashion. I suppose you could call him that, although nothing remotely carnal has ever happened between us. We dine together once or twice a week at the Airport Hotel. His name is Gunter Neuffer; he’s a shy, morose, lanky man in his mid-thirties with a hearing aid. He is a sales director at the bauxite mines. He has only been here six months but he seems already haggard and tired of Africa, of its rabid energy and bustle, its brutal frustrations and remorseless physicality. He pines for cool, ordered Göttingen, his hometown. I remind him of his younger sister, Ulricke, he says. Sometimes I suspect that is the only reason he goes out with me: I am a spectral link with his old life, the ghost of Europe sitting opposite him.
But I mustn’t digress: Gunter has no significant part to play in this story. I introduce him only to explain my present circumstances. Gunter gives me work. I earn most of my living working for him as a part-time commercial translator, for which he pays me far too well. Indeed, if it wasn’t for Gunter I couldn’t live on Brazzaville Beach. What I will do when he goes, I have no idea. In the meantime a melancholy meal in the Airport Hotel is no penance.
I love the beach, but sometimes I ask myself what am I doing here? I’m young, I’m single, I have family in England, I possess all manner of impressive academic qualifications. So why has the beach become my home…?
How can I explain it to you? I am here because two sets of strange and extraordinary events happened to me, and I needed some time to weigh them up, evaluate them. I have to make sense of what has taken place before I can restart my life in the world, as it were. Do you know that feeling? That urge to call a temporary halt, to say: enough, slow down, give me a break.
Two sequences of events, then. One in England, first, and then one in Africa. Two stories to tell. I fled to Africa to escape what happened in England and then, as the continent will, it embroiled me further.
But that’s not the way to start.
Another problem: how do I begin? How do I tell you what happened to me?
My name is Hope Clearwater…or, “Hope Clearwater is that tall young woman who lives on Brazzaville Beach.” It’s not so easy. Which voice do I use? I was different then; and I’m different now.
I am Hope Clearwater. She is Hope Clearwater. Everything is me, really. Try to remember that, though it might be a little confusing at first.
Where shall I begin? In Africa, I think, yes, but far from Brazzaville Beach.
A final note: the important factor in all this is honesty, otherwise there would be no point in beginning.
So: let’s start with that day I was with Clovis. Just the two of us. Yes, that’s a good place…