Memoirs of a Porcupine

how I left the animal world

how long ago it seems, that time when I left my own habitat, and drew close to the boy child I knew affectionately as ‘little Kibandi’, it’s been many years since then, but memories remain, as clear as if it was yesterday, at that time Kibandi and his parents lived in the north of the country, far from here, in Mossaka, a wet region, with giant trees, crocodiles, and turtles as big as mountains, the time had come for me to leave the animal world, and embark on my existence as a double, I had to reveal myself to my young master, and little Kibandi sensed I was there, from the moment I started to make him feel my presence, trying to throw a little light on his existence, I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t bonded almost immediately, I came at just the right moment, he was ten years old, the required age for receiving a harmful double, and when I arrived at the gates of his village in the North, I saw the little pup, standing behind his father, like his shadow, I felt sorry for the child, he’d just had his initiation, he couldn’t control the drunkenness brought on by the mayamvumbi, his father had just put him through a great test, a new world lay before him, he had become a new creature, the fragile thing the villagers of Mossaka could see behind Papa Kibandi was only a puppet now, a kind of hollow container, the contents of which had evaporated, he was just biding his time, till he met his double, when the two would merge and become one, he couldn’t sleep, poor little Kibandi, he was so busy struggling with the effects of the ritual drink, and all this time I was getting more and more frantic out there in the in the forest, the bush pressed in upon me, I couldn’t bear to be there, I was trying to get out, so I could go and live near my young master’s village, at that time I didn’t know I would incur the wrath of the old porcupine who used to rule over us, who did nothing but rail against humans, from sunrise to sunset

this was the most turbulent time of my life, when I had to weigh up the demands of the child and our little family of porcupines, I put up with the governor’s rages, as he became increasingly intransigent, as though he had got wind of the huge changes taking place in my life, as though he’d guessed what was going to happen to me, he held more and more meetings, sneering down at us, raising his voice, with affected gestures, stroking his little beard with his claws, then crossing his front paws, his snout pointed skywards, in imitation of some human being calling on Nzambi Ya Mpunga, no point our saying anything, he always had the last word, for example, he’d tell us such and such a river used to flow round the other way and when we asked the old guy how long it had taken for the water to make this spectacular change in direction, he’d toss his worn out quills, make a show of closing his eyes and thinking, point to the sky, it made me roar with laughter, and then he got angry and began to threaten us, issuing an ultimatum we all knew by heart, ‘if that’s how it is, then that’s the last time I’ll tell you anything about men and their ways, you’re just plain ignorant’, and when we went on laughing he’d add enigmatically, ‘when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger’, but when he saw I was still keen to go check out what the monkeys’ cousins were up to, the aged porcupine flew into a rage, telling his stooges to keep a close paw on me, could he possibly have known I was due to enter upon the scene, now young Kibandi had drunk his initiatory drink, he’d no idea, my dear Baobab, when I left I did it discreetly, sometimes with the connivance of two or three sidekicks, who wanted to hear from me how it really was with humans, because the aged porcupine always tended to exaggerate, and almost seemed to be calling for a war between the animal and human species, I would vanish into the bush for whole days and nights and it got so that that I only felt at ease when I was close to my future master’s village, whenever I got back home I found the governor in a rage, calling me every name under the sun, and to further tarnish my image, he’d tell my sidekicks that too much contact with humans had sent me mad, I was heading straight for the fox’s jaws, soon I’d have forgotten our ways, I would lose touch with what made us the most noble animals in the bush, he swore, our aged philosopher, that one day I’d get caught in one of those traps men leave in the bush, or worse still, even fall into the silly traps set by the kids from Mossaka, who knew how to capture birds with one of their mother’s aluminium bowls, and the other porcupines all laughed themselves silly, because they too considered it better to fall into a trap set by a real hunter than one left by a human being who wasn’t yet weaned from its mother’s breast, you’d always see them at the gates of the village in the North, but I must say, dear Baobab, that only the birds of Mossaka got caught that way, and mostly the sparrows, who are the stupidest birds round here, I wouldn’t like to generalize and say all vertebrates with feathers, beaks and anterior limbs used for flight are that stupid, oh no, I’m sure there are some intelligent species of bird, but the sparrows of Mossaka had such a low IQ that I actually felt sorry for them, sparrows the whole world over must be the same, I can see they must be cut off from the reality of life on earth, constantly flitting here and there, that’s who the children of the North had laid their traps for, the little humans, in the middle of nowhere, had these bowls, propped up with a piece of wood, and round them they tied a long piece of string you could hardly see, and they hid in the undergrowth about a hundred metres off, and, drawn by the seed left round the bowls, the poor things jostled and chirruped up in the tree tops then would suddenly all drop to earth at once, without setting up some lookouts to tell them if something was up, then the kids would tug the string of their silly traps and the sparrows would suddenly find themselves imprisoned under the container, but what was strange, dear Baobab, was that none of them had any sense of the danger, which would have been obvious to any animal, even the ones with no common sense at all, it didn’t occur to the birds for a moment that it was a bit strange to find a container sitting in the middle of nowhere, that seeds lying on the ground, untouched by other birds, might be a bit suspicious, I never got caught out myself, otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you now, and so my fellow porcupines, indoctrinated by the governor, were convinced I would get caught in one of these traps, ‘the drum is made from the skin of the fawn that strays from its mother’, our Australopithecus was wont to say, thinking I wouldn’t understand what he meant, and this remark created a great stir within in the group, some of my colleagues repeated it everywhere they went, imitating the patriarch’s gestures, teasing me, even, calling me ‘the fawn’, until one day I got so irritated by their jokes, which did not seem in the least bit funny to me, I explained that the fawn was the young of a wild animal, a deer, a buck or roe, whereas I was in fact a porcupine, and proud of it too

once it becomes the harmful double of a human being, an animal has to leave its natural milieu, its family, so my separation from the members of our group occurred down in Mossaka, but considering that porcupines are reputed to be solitary animals, we were fortunate to live in a community, and every evening the old governor held a meeting, made a few general remarks, I could tell he was covertly talking about me, saying no one was irreplaceable in the forest, that he’d known a few jumped up porcupines in his time, he knew how to put them back in their place, and when I didn’t react, he became more pointed, muttering things about ‘the fish that proudly dallies in the feeder stream one day ends up salted on a slab in the market’, he hastened to remind us that I was an orphan, without him I wouldn’t have been a live porcupine at all, he said my procreators were as stubborn as me, that they left this earth shortly after my arrival, I was scarcely three weeks old, our governor boasted of how he had taken me in, along with his female mate, now deceased, and he went into how I used to defecate the whole day long, I was a lazy good for nothing, scared of baby lizards, and the others all laughed loudly, and it was from him I learned about the ways of my parents, it seemed they liked to mingle with the human race, they’d disappear by night and go wandering among the humans in Mossaka, returning at dawn the following day, tired out, with red eyes, muddy paws, and spend the whole day sleeping like dormice, the governor couldn’t understand it, I had begun to piece their lives together bit by bit, I no longer doubted it, they were harmful doubles, I reached this conclusion the day I felt the call of young Kibandi myself, I accepted the idea that I was descended from a line of porcupines whose destiny was to serve humans beings, not for better, but for worse, for the very worst, and each time I heard the governor talking about the death of my parents it made me angry, he claimed to have tried to spy on them one night, to find to where they went in such a hurry, but they’d given him the slip between two clumps of trees because the old guy already had trouble with his eyes, even back then, a week went by, they heard nothing, then came the dark day, the eighth day since their disappearance, the fateful day when an owl with an injured claw, crushed in a man-made trap, flew over our patch, come, so it seemed, to announce to the governor the sad news already on the lips of most of the animals in our region, he told him that a hunter had killed my parents not far from Mossaka, the whole herd had to move on in a hurry, and find a new patch, a few kilometres away

even so, I ignored what had happened to my parents, since I’d never known them, I let the old governor say what he wanted to the others, I went with my own instincts, and vanished from the bush more and more often, I left no gaps between trips now, and for the first time I disappeared for four days and nights running, I just kept on going straight, it was an overpowering urge, and my comrades started panicking, they looked everywhere for me, they searched the groves round where we often drank, while one of us watched out for hunters lying in ambush round about, but I wasn’t there, and finally, in desperation, they made enquiries of the other members of our kind, but they couldn’t think of any porcupine that matched their description, some said that when I moved I had a way of sniffing every square centimetre of ground, others added that I usually hid behind trees as though always on the look out for danger, and on that day the governor specified that I moved like a porcupine whose paw has been crushed in a trap of the kind laid by a little chap still sucking his mother’s breast, according to him I limped, I hobbled, and several of my comrades shouted him down, as this was a whopping great lie, and they went on looking, because they were fond of me, and as I had always liked to burrow into the hollow of trees, especially trees like you, they first went to look inside baobab trunks, then inside the palm trees nearby, and in so doing invaded the privacy of some squirrels who were quick to chuck palm nuts at their heads, followed by a string of insults in their own tongue, and meanwhile, I was somewhere near Mossaka, trying to absorb the child whose double I was going to become, I had a vague idea of what he was like because he’d appear to me in dreams at dead of night, and from somewhere would come this vibration inside of me, only known to animals predisposed to fuse with a human being, I wanted to be sure not to get the wrong kid, I didn’t imagine for a moment I’d be hanging around indefinitely in Mossaka, that I’d be leaving my comrades for ever

in fact, dear Baobab, when I left our territory I had not intended to leave for ever, I swear I liked communal life, I was convinced that I could lead a double life, one at night, and the other by day, that I could both stay close to my master and continue to hang out with my comrades, which turned out, alas, to be incompatible with the reality of being a double, and it was when I made the trip to Mossaka that I first felt the influence of the liquid Kibandi had just been made to drink, and I began to vomit, my head started swimming, my vision blurred, my quills grew heavy, I could only keep my eyes fixed straight ahead, rather as though the child was calling for my help, he needed me, I ought to be there, or something dire might happen to him, his life was in my paws, when I breathed I was breathing for him, I was him, and he was me, I had to get to him as fast as possible or something dreadful would happen, my heart was fit to burst, I’d forgotten who I was, where I was, and why I was going to Mossaka, I just had to move forward, walk, advance, follow the path before me, I had kilometres and kilometres to go, of course I couldn’t get there that day, but I needed to make a start, and as it was raining that day, once I got halfway there I was obliged to shelter for the night in a cave, till the next day, I should say that I don’t like rain much, a number of my fellows have been swept away into the Niari waterfalls and drowned, and inside I found nothing but toads and small mice, whom I was able to intimidate, I got to the outskirts of Mossaka the next day at sunset, and when I finally reached the gates of the village, exhausted, dribbling at the mouth, barely able to keep my eyes open, I went to sleep at the back of a house not far from a river which I had not seen till now, it was a branch of the Niari which cuts the region in two, and there I rested, thinking I would take my time staking out the Kibandi house the next morning, because by night there’d be the risk of hunters or Batéké dogs, and in the middle of the night I felt a strong draught of air, dead leaves were rising upwards, then a strange noise as though something was coming towards me, ‘for porcupine’s sake, it’s a man, it’s a man, he’s seen me and he’s going to kill me, I must flee’, I said to myself, panicking suddenly, I was determined to leave my hiding place as quickly as possible, and save my skin, but alas I was paralysed, I couldn’t move any of my feet, as though I’d been put to sleep, I was wrong in fact, it was the noise of an animal moving about, so I put up my quills without first identifying the animal, which was coming closer and closer, I hoped he’d be stupider than me, that he’d be scared of quills, I was ready to throw them if necessary because unlike most of my kind I know how to, but I didn’t have to go that far, the cake wasn’t worth the candle, I took a deep breath, and was reassured when I finally saw the animal before me, I almost burst out laughing, almost proved the governor right when he said that during the first few months of my life I would panic even if I saw a baby lizard, there was no need to freak out that day, it was just a lousy rat that looked as though he’d taken a wrong turning and found himself face to face with me, I took pity on him, maybe he wanted directions, I couldn’t help him, I didn’t know the place myself, and then I thought better of it, the rat seemed pretty strange, he moved at a slug’s pace, a sign of age, perhaps, which had robbed him of the use of his back legs, this was not a rat like other rats, he was there for a reason, perhaps to kill me, stop me getting to the Kibandi child, he was challenging me now, with his protruding eyes, he drew back his lips, I stayed still as marble, so he would see I was not frightened of a mere rat from Mossaka, that I’d seen far scarier ones than him in my time, and he circled round me, sniffed my sex, licked it, then vanished through a hole in a shack about a hundred metres away, and I finally realised that this was the shack I was looking for, the old rat was the harmful double of Papa Kibandi, he had come to make sure of my status as double to his son, this was the end of the transmission process which had started with the absorption of the initiatory drink, and that’s how transmission takes place, first between the humans, from initiator to initiate, with the absorption of the mayamvumbi, then between the animals, the animal double of the initiator must lick the sex of the animal double of his young initiate, in fact the double of Papa Kibandi had wanted to make sure that the animal who would live with his son was courageous, an animal who could keep his cool when faced with danger, if I’d had shown the slightest sign of panic, if I’d tried to make a run for it he’d have wiped me out, not a moment’s hesitation, and things had turned out well for him, dear Baobab

it was now four days and four nights since I left the bush for Mossaka, and the news spread among the animals in our neck of the woods, then a rumour went round about a dead porcupine under a palm tree, my colleagues rushed to find it, returning several times to the body, which had been half eaten by red ants, but they decided this porcupine didn’t look anything like me, it had a something wrong with its face, they gave up trying to convince themselves, they weren’t going to spend their entire lives looking for me, they must just face the facts and accept them, they trooped off into the bush, in single file, I could see the governor already informing my peers of my death, telling them I must have been caught in the traps set by the kids of Mossaka, he’d probably told them I was stubborn by nature, proud, like humans, talked too much, brought down by my own arrogance, preferring life as a tame animal to the freedom of the bush, I imagined him launching into the usual sermon, no doubt giving me a good kick when I was down, like the idiot creature in the story, known to humans as the ‘ass’, it was a tale he loved to tell, a tale intended as food for thought, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, he probably told them how one day the Town Mouse invited the Country Mouse for a meal, and the two of them were busy eating in the house of some humans when they heard the master of the house returning, whereupon they swiftly scarpered and when the noise stopped and the danger seemed to have passed, the town mouse suggested to his country cousin that they go back and finish their meal, but the country mouse declined, and reminded the town mouse that in the bush, no one would interrupt you while you were having your bite to eat, and then, dear Baobab, I expect our aged governor would have probably have summed up the moral of this story in one withering phrase, since the majority of my peers would have failed yet once more to grasp it, despite my numerous attempts to explain it to them quietly while the old chap was summing up, with a detached air, ‘away with feasts, however great, that may be spoiled by fear’, adding in a murmur, no doubt, ‘fine food’s worth zilch’, thereby proving once and for all that a fate such as mine might befall any animal tempted to stray into the world of men, ‘thus ended the life of a foolhardy creature, I saw him enter this world a mewling babe, I took him in when he was orphaned, even then he was scared to death of lizards, shitting everywhere, a little guy who never counted for anything, since nature decreed we’d be stuck with these quills, men made drums from deerskins, now let that be a lesson to you’, he probably concluded, and I expect it was a sad day for my fellow creatures, but the aged porcupine didn’t let that stop him, because in his voluble way, he liked to illustrate his remarks with at least two or three fables, stories his grandparents had told him, I expect he would have referred to my comrades’ favourite tale, The Swallow and the Little Birds, it seems there was once a Swallow who had travelled far and wide and had seen many things, learned and remembered many things, to the point where she could even warn the sailors of a coming storm, and the Swallow in question, who was knowledgeable and experienced in matters of migration, spoke to the little birds one day, warning them to beware the sowing season, the sowing of the seed could mean disaster for them, said the Swallow, they must take care to destroy the seeds, eat them, one by one, or they would be sure to end up in cage, or in a pot, not one of the little birds listened to the wise Swallow, they covered their ears to block out the reasonings of their feathered friend, who, in their opinion, had spent too much time wandering around the world aimlessly, and lost all judgement, and when her prediction came to pass, much to the surprise of the little birds, several of them were captured, and made slaves, and I expect at this point the governor would have wound up his story, saying, ‘we only believe evil when it is upon us’, and no doubt he ventured several other allegories while he was on the subject, which, in my absence, went undeciphered, since, as I said before, I was always the one who tried to reveal to the others the hidden sense of the aged porcupine’s parables and symbols, and when he’d finished showing off his wisdom with his telling of The Swallow and the Little Birds, he’d announce, with the solemn air he liked to affect, ‘I am that Swallow, and you are the little heedless birds, these, my words of wisdom and you my uncomprehending listeners’, and if my fellows were still puzzled, our aged friend would have treated them to an even more withering remark along the lines of ‘none of you understands all this, when the cricket ejaculates, only the old sage hears,’ but this time he probably said, in a more serious tone of voice, ‘and now let’s talk of other things, no one in the bush is irreplaceable, he was a deer calf who acted like a human, it’s his own funeral’

as you see, my disappearance caused a lot of grief, especially among those who liked to listen to my tales about humans while the old man’s back was turned, pretending to enter a state of deep meditation, he’d bid us leave him to his patriarchal contemplations, go up to the top of a tree, close his eyes, stumble through his prayers, it really was like listening to the genuine first cousin of the monkey, the groaning and mutterings of the porcupine are remarkably similar to human utterance, but to this day, I’m proud to say, I’m pretty sure some of my fellows never gave up hope that one day they’d see me again, I was too careful to get myself captured by the kids of Mossaka like some naive booby, they must have remembered I’d warned them a thousand times about the little traps we liked to sneer at, they admired my lucidity, flair, intelligence, speed, cunning, they knew I could outwit them with one flick of the paw, so it could be my fellows had already begun to imagine the day I’d come back, a great day, they’d laugh in the face of the governor, tell him his sermonising was pure eyewash, ask a thousand questions about my disappearance, my incursion into the world of the first cousins of the monkeys, let’s be honest, the first question they asked would have been about the human condition, about how men relate to animals, my fellows had always wondered whether the first cousins of the monkey believed we were capable of thought, of conceiving an idea, pursuing it logically, always wondered if men were conscious of the harm they do to animals, if they realise how arrogant they are, with their self-proclaimed superiority, many of them, in fact, knew nothing of humans beyond the prejudices spouted by the governor, they’d never set paws in a village, they only saw men from a distance, they laughed at the thought of these poor creatures who only used their lower limbs to get from a to b, using only their feet for walking, just to show other species how superior they are, my fellows listened with interest to the caricature presented by our governor, Man he declared, was indefensible, deserved no absolution, was the wickedest of all creatures on earth, attenuating circumstances there were none, and since humans give us animals such a hard time, since they are hostile and deaf to our calls for peaceful co-existence, since they are the ones who come into the bush to hunt us, since they only grasp the need for harmony once they’ve been decimated by a long battle which is indelibly printed on their memory, well then, we should do likewise, and strike out at their children, even the newborn, because ‘the tiger’s young are born with ready claws’, so spoke our governor, and you see, my dear Baobab, that he had no sympathy for humankind

my death quickly became an accepted fact in our little community, I presume it was the governor who decided that the group must relocate without further delay because, dear Baobab, when one of our number died, we’d set off at once, on a two or three day journey, in search of a new homeland, there were two reasons for this painful migration, first it was thought that a change of place was the only way of shaking off our fears and anxieties, which lay largely in our terror of the hereafter, in the fact that we believed that the next world was populated entirely by terrifying creatures, the governor turned this to his advantage by telling us that when a porcupine dies he revisits his former fellows again a few days later in the guise of an evil spirit, but this time giant-sized, with his quills raised, longer and sharper than the hunters’ javelins, and, again, in his version, the quills of such a porcupine scraped against the clouds, darkened the horizon, stopped the day from breaking, so we lived in fear of this phantom coming back from the kingdom of the dead to terrify us, stop us sleeping, pull out our pretty quills, threaten us with its long poisonous spikes, but the second reason for emigrating after the death of one of our number had more to do with survival instinct, we were convinced that a man who had slain an animal in one place would be tempted to return, ‘forewarned is forearmed’, the governor would say, if he felt that the fear of the phantom of an ill-willed porcupine was insufficient to persuade us of the necessity to move on, and if he saw we still weren’t happy with his decision, despite his threatening talk, he would say mysteriously, ‘trust me, I’m like a deaf man running till he’s out of breath’, adding, ‘and if you do see a deaf man running, my dears, don’t ask questions, follow him, because he hasn’t heard the danger, he’s seen it’, and this is possibly why my fellow porcupines had left the place where we’d been living for some time, leaving no clue as to how I might find their new territory, and even if some of them had thought of guiding me towards it by whatever means, by, for example, leaving palm nuts along a path, or quills on the ground, strewing excrement, or spraying urine as they went, marking the trunks of trees with their claws as they passed, it wouldn’t have helped, the governor would have destroyed the signs, he probably posted himself at the rear so as to keep a watch on the migration and above all, to destroy any such clues

and so it was that on the fifth day, when I returned to our territory to rest after my first contact with young Kibandi, I found no one from our group, all was calm, the burrows were deserted, and I realised at last that the governor must have given the order to clear out and I had been declared dead by my own people, faced with this emptiness, I started to sob, the slightest noise in the undergrowth revived my hope that I might find one of my fellows coming to embrace me, rubbing his quills against mine by way of joyful greeting, teasing me, calling me ‘little fawn’, and when at last I did hear something, my quills began to tremble for joy, alas, my enthusiasm was short lived, and I realised that it was only a palm rat venturing forth, his sinister laughter said it all, even now I don’t understand why these lovers of palm nuts hate us so much, obviously I did not respond to his challenge, his silly snickering, I stayed there alone for six days, on the seventh day I noticed a squirrel of a fairly advanced age hanging about, and since at least squirrels are rather friendlier towards us, and we’ve never actually come to blows with them, I asked if he’d seen a bunch of porcupines leaving the region a few days before, he burst out laughing too, and did all the things we most dislike about his species, dashing about wildly for no reason, rolling his eyes, twitching his nose, bobbing his head about in an epileptic fashion, all of which looks quite ridiculous, but having said that, these tics are often what saves them from the humans’ rifle, and I noticed that his tail, which dragged behind him, was damaged, perhaps he had narrowly escaped a human trap, the wound was still gaping, I had no wish to dwell on the origin of his misfortune, then, after sniggering, and performing a series of absurd tics, he scratched his behind and mumbled, ‘I’ve been spying on you, I wondered why you were crying like that, it’s because you’re looking for the others isn’t, it, well I can’t say I’ve seen any porcupines round here for a few days, it’s been rather quiet round here just lately, it’s as if there’s nothing more left to eat, so everyone’s gone, but anyway, if you’ve got nowhere to live, you can come and join us, if you like, I’d be delighted to introduce you to my fellows, particularly since the rainy season’s coming up and it looks like it’s going to be a really tough one, judging by the heavy clouds hanging low as an ass’s belly, come with me, we should help each other out, lend one another a paw, know what I mean’, I couldn’t see myself living with squirrels, putting up with their tics, sharing their nuts, intervening when they fell out over a rotten almond, climbing trees all day, so I shook my head, he tried to persuade me, I didn’t waver, I’d rather die than stoop that low, I said to myself, and he went ‘who d’you think you are, eh, pride won’t find a vagabond shelter when he’s wandering about in the rain’, and I replied, ‘a vagabond’s shelter is his dignity’, and that silenced him, he looked me up and down and then said ‘listen, my spiky friend, I offered you hospitality, you’ve refused it, I’d like to help you find your friends but I’m in a hurry just now, the others have been waiting for me all this time, they sent me out to find some nuts, but I can at least tell you your family went the other way, behind you,’ and he pointed with his snout towards the horizon, where the earth meets the sky, where the mountains merge like a little heap of stones, I knew he was teasing, that it gave him a thrill to see me in such a state, ‘I’m sorry, I have to be off, good luck, be brave, and let’s hope your dignity finds you a home’, he said, and off he went, without turning round, I looked at the horizon, then at the sky, I wiped my tears, I dithered about for a few minutes, emptiness all around, still, as though the silence was looking back at me, watching me, knowing which way my fellows had gone, I could picture them exactly, the governor speaking, praying, muttering orders, I stopped crying there and then, and taking a large gulp of air, my quills at half-mast, I said to myself ‘too bad, now I’ll live on my own’, and after two more days of gnawing loneliness and misery, I set off on the path to the village of my young master

and that, dear Baobab, is how I left the animal world and joined the service of young Kibandi, who had just received his initiation in Mossaka, the boy I would later follow all the way to Séképembé, the boy I would stick to for decades, up to last Friday, when I could do nothing to save him from death, I’m still feeling sad about it, I’d rather you didn’t see my tears, so I’ll turn my back to you, out of decency, and rest for a moment, before I carry on