4

ABDO-JULIEN

ALL BLOOD IS MIXED and all identities are nomadic, Maman would have said, talking about me, Papa, herself, or the whole wide world. This business of mixed blood is a very old story, she would add, raising her voice—so old that the first traces of African migration in the Italian peninsula, to give just one example, date from the conquest and fall of Carthage. Much later, there are records of nobles with black slaves: the famous mori neri in the paintings of Veronese or Giambattista Tiepolo. All that is typical Maman—a Frenchwoman born in Rennes and attracted by the mixture of races. She came to Djibouti well before I came into the world close to two decades ago. I owe my existence to those student parties that are so popular on campuses. For a few hours, foreign students can forget loneliness, the lack of familiar landmarks, their depression and feeling of dislocation. For a few hours, native students can find cheap thrills, exoticism, the feeling of being transported far away in the sway of the music blaring as loud as possible, and the giddiness caused by the mixture of perfumes and sweat. The Zairian rumba was in full swing then. James Brown, Manu Dibango, and Miriam Makeba heated up their bodies. Later, “Rock Around the Clock” woke up the ones with a head stewing in hops. The Platters' “Only You” welded the desiring machines together again. Toward dawn, the toughest would stagger back to their rooms with a blood level of alcohol that would make Rasputin turn pale. “It's not because we went there to have a drink or do some dancing that we screwed our balls off,” said a friend of my parents who boasts of calling a spade a spade.

 

My mother, with her hair twisted together like those sentences of Monsieur Proust that no one can unravel, fears neither the sunburns that knock off foreigners with delicate skin nor the narrow little streets covered with dust. As a child I was fed on the milk of love, and reading. The big words of adults went right through my mind (picaresque, epic, tachycardia, scenography, crazy twists and turns of plot…), but the stories stayed with me for a very long time. Some day I'll tell you the story of that adventurer from Brittany, born with a fishing rod in his hand, said the novel: he hunted whales in the Bering Straits, sold real Bordeaux wine in the tropics, and took on the boldest pirates with the help of his adorable companion Louison, a royal tigress he had freed from the jaws of a Malaysian crocodile. I still remember every episode. Would you like another one? I'm hesitating between Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, Jules Verne, Scheherazade, or the snow-white beard of Charles Dickens. Are you ready to hunt the rhinoceros in the Serengeti in the company of Ernest Hemingway, become a maharaja in the country of long-haired princes, wind between the seven pillars of wisdom behind Lawrence of Arabia, follow in the footsteps of Peter Pan, or acquire bouquets of wisdom under the guidance of the venerable Tierno Bokar between Dogon cosmogony and Peul poetry? Some other day I'll tell you the life of Monsieur Henri de Monfreid in great detail: Maman loved him at the beginning of her stay in her new country. You're looking at me wide-eyed as if I were a monster, as if I were hiding some shameful infirmity in my frail silhouette. I'm just a little clever for my age, and ahead by a few books. Apparently that happens sometimes: a statistician cites the figure of 1/127, without bothering to prove anything at all. One child out of 127 is supposed to be gifted with superior intelligence—where did he get that stuff? This being said, that little figure might have the advantage of reassuring the most rational minds.