This Translation Tuesday, we are pleased to present new short fiction from the Montenegrin author Tijana Rakočević. A surprise awaits—for this story takes place not in contemporary Montenegro, as one might expect from the author’s identity, but in Tanzania’s colonial past, during the Kashasha laughter epidemic of 1962. This hypnotic tale describes the outbreak of the epidemic in remote Tanzania following the arrival of a British agent. As the narrator returns continually to the central image of a vitiligo-mottled fawn, whose coloration is mirrored by that of the disabled protagonist, Andwele, a haunting parable of illness, dehumanization, and assimilation emerges, rendered here in elliptical but powerful English by Will Firth.
Wache waseme nimpendae simwachi.[1]
If you never leave the house, no tragedy can befall you.
The edges of Tulinagwe’s purple khanga danced in the air as she kneaded a ball of risen dough. Whenever eight-year-old Andwele, as piebald as a scrofulous calf, stuck his finger into his mouth so far that he could touch the back of his throat, she would snarl, You sure know how to get on one’s nerves, boy, but this time she held her tongue. He tested her patience by rocking on a loose wooden board on the ground that moved to the rhythm of his round heels, and he only stopped when his mother glanced at him; in those moments, he felt I’m the center of the world, but she—if she had the strength to speak—would have called it asking for a hiding. It was a holiday in all Kashasha: the white man, Sir Jonathan, had returned—a dissolute English bon vivant, who their Baba wa Taifa, their savior Mwalimu, Julius Kambarage Nyrere, had befriended in Edinburgh during his studies. Tulinagwe saw him out of the corner of her eye as he ambled along the main road escorted by a gaggle of black girls, and, if she had not been busy rolling the dough for the family, which was so thin that it kept breaking in the middle, she would have said, not particularly handsome, not particularly tall; instead, she decided, I’ll save salt; if they still like it, they can ask for more.
Andwele slipped and fell. It was a tragedy.
He remembered that Mwanawa had given him five shillings and he limped off through the yard. The women wanted him to leave the village, which he sensed in the way they prepared him for the trip and because they had whispered ever since Kyalamboka lived in Sir Jonathan’s house. The man’s collection of romantic safari oddments in his private residence—photographs with animals, human animals, and human humans—seemed a grotesque combination to him, who imagined Muleba district as a mind-bogglingly vast Tanzanian shilling: go banana picking, they would have advised him if he were older, I’ll go cotton picking like Ipyana, my dad, he thought, but he lacked the courage. After that unusual visit, he believed Muleba was a heart broken. Hidden in the bushes near the house, he tried to get a glimpse of the vitiligo fawn that bwana had brought as a trophy from Europe, a fawn they called Sekelaga, Joy, but it was not there; he just heard the titillated giggles of his elder sister that vanished in the warm breeze. What did he promise her, he wondered, and will he take her with him? He would notice a villager and hire them to scrub the floors, and he would look on that troglodyte as human—that was the fortunate circumstance that made them dignified in their own eyes. The foreigner, always well-meaning and amicable, as if his earthly life depended on that handful of semi-savages, offered him Abba-Zaba chocolates so he would keep the secret; Andwele first spoke hapana, hapana, later nasikitika, but he was captivated by the sweet pain in his throat: asante sana, he repeated more and more often, thank you very much. He went away calm and beaming, his face radiant like a young idiot, dragging along his leg that they broke four more times after the accident, only to conclude it was better to leave it. Kyalamboka watched her disfigured brother and snorted spitefully in her rich lover’s ear, that little freak—sometimes I’d like to trip him up.
Rumors spread that Julius Kambarage Nyrere was about to stage a revolution, but that did not matter now. Two months after bwana’s return, a girl from Kashasha had a fit of laughter; she was Kulwa, the first-born daughter of Mwamba, who, like Andwele’s father Ipyana, worked in the cotton-fields in Mwanza. Her teacher thought she was laughing at him, and, unaware that Kulwa had last tasted food the morning before, sent her home for punishment; only when her mother, Suma, had given her a good thrashing and the innocent child pounded her chest and muttered u-ma, uuu-ma, did Suma doubt that her daughter was possessed by a mashetani. A day later, Kulwa’s classmate Ngabile broke a pot of fresh milk, and instead of crying she broke into a strange chuckle: her nails dug into the flesh of her palms, and it seemed they would sever the nerves—never had she been so sad and yet so happy. Kashasha soon became the center of a contagion, where the half-empty stomachs, struck by cramps of laughter, rolled on the hard, dry earth of their impoverished village. Dawn found the few healthy-cum-wealthy ones—meaning they did not have to worry about food and water—in prayer and utter self-abnegation: mungu ndiye tegemeo letu,[2] the admonished wheezed in their affliction, mungu ndiye tegemeo letu, and the rich understood again how the majority lives.
Andwele was spared this fate, and he washed his sticky hands after the sweets.
Many fathers returned to the village after the outbreak of the laughter epidemic. When Ipyana set foot in the house, he saw Andwele sucking his livid thumb, and since it was day he noticed straightaway that he now had much more white skin around the eyes compared to when he saw him last, even on his arms, where he had become conspicuously pale, and at the same time he was grubby and his manner as unpleasantly brisk as bwana’s dog with the cropped ears. Tulinagwe lay by the neglected fire, her horselaugh as obtrusive as a misaligned cogwheel; but what is a cogwheel, where did I get that word from, she thought, why don’t the animals laugh, she asked herself, as her body exuded sweet female sweat. Ipyana lay down beside her, his mind insulated her completely from the rasping sound she produced, and she shimmered in his eyes like a small copper-red float until he fell asleep. Heavy and feverish was his sleep, and he dreamed of a ceremony with dramatic pauses in which dry breadcrumbs seemed to scratch him in his sleeves; he was immediately relieved when he woke, not because his smiling wife was dead but because, at the end of the dream, black, nyeusi, and white, nyeupe, merged into one being—Andwele—and he was now prepared to interpret that as a ritual recipe.
Msaada, the breathless villagers yelled, msa-a-da, as he disappeared into the vaulted brushwood, as ebullient as Mungu ibariki Afrika, the anthem he had never heard, or could he have, a hulk doomed to drudgery in the cotton fields, msaada: he recognized all their voices, although they were behind him his back, but several of them—those who instead called out tafadhali—later claimed that the long gleam of a blade had trailed behind his shadow; yes, they were quite sure. Andwele had followed him, furtively, convinced nothing new could happen there, nothing he had not already witnessed many times, nothing that came close to the tusks of a felled elephant in its own blood; strutting, vitiligo Andwele thoroughly forgot that his mother Tulinagwe had kneaded dough for the last time that morning—who will make chapati now flashed before his mind’s eye and filled his stunted body with horror. He looked at the split core of the cane that clacked to the ground while his tongue hunted the warm remnants of sugar between his teeth; oh, poor mother Tulinagwe, he whined, and Ipyana turned. He stood as motionless as the great Uhuru.
The news of Sir Jonathan’s death had a salubrious effect on the people of Kashasha, and there was no longer any trace of the epidemic that had sent them to the sickbed. Ipyana is guilty, it was him, they said, even in front of him, and in those moments, knowing they would take him away and shoot him, he looked on his daughter Kyalamboka with feigned sympathy, almost happy that he was guilty—and as despised as the laughter that had killed Tulinagwe. When they discovered a fresh mound behind their hovel with hidden Abba-Zaba chocolates, and there were just tano, five, two well-nourished white lads took him away for good; the little black heads of Ipyana’s children glistened in the gloom, reminiscent of the bronze reflection of black Nyanza.
Oh, who will make chapati now, Andwele wondered, as the gangly vitiligo fawn named Sekelaga turned aside, into the forest, and the night grew ever darker.
To Saramago,
in gratitude for not telling this story first
April 1, 2019
[1] Let them speak, I will not leave the one I love (Tanzanian saying).
[2] We depend on God (Swahili).
translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth
Tijana Rakočević was born in 1994 in Podgorica, Montenegro. She is a PhD student at the Department of Montenegrin Language and South Slavic Literature at the University of Nikšić. She has published a book of poetry, Svi blistavi kvanti (All Those Shining Quantums), and a collection of short fiction, Intimus, as well as various essays, reviews, poems, and stories. Rakočević won the Central European Initiative’s Award for Young Writers in 2023. She is currently employed by the government of Montenegro.
Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. He lives in Berlin and works as a translator of literature and the humanities (from Russian, Macedonian and all variants of Serbo-Croatian, aka “BCMS”). His best-received translations of recent years have been Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una and Tatjana Gromača’s Divine Child.
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