My Son My Dictator

Postcolonial Gothic

The moon has dipped behind the hills in the east
This is the ideal time for big man daddy to still the ghosts

The wind is whistling and the sparks are flying
The closed windows allow in cold and blighting noise

The rain clouds had been gathering all day
This is the time for big man daddy to give his lectures

Taban Lo Liyong “The nights when Arube shakes the refrigerators”

It's night in the Presidential Palace, and all the babies sleep soundly. They'd better. Untoward things can happen to undisciplined infants who won't knuckle down and sleep when it's past time for them to go bye-byes.

It's night in the Presidential Palace, and guards have swapped their snappy jackboots for soft-soled sneakers as they slink down the hallways with assault weapons slung on their shoulders. They scarcely breathe. The whites of their eyes shine smart and alert.

It's night in the Presidential Palace, and the moon wavers in her support for the rainswept night, excusing her reluctance to make a stand behind veils of broken stormcloud. At least the thunder has not yet stepped in to make itself known.

Hush now. Don't disturb either children or guardsmen as you glide soft down the corridors. Rousing the babies will bring only weeping, and incur the displeasure of the nannies who sleep by the bassinets.

Alerting the guards will get you a 7.62mm hollow-point slug through the brain, and a bill for that bullet sent to your next-of-kin. And the babies will wail in any case, and the nannies will then become irate. The President would wake and seek his vengeance, and more than one might die as a result. So it's best to be quite quiet.

Over in the east wing, where the President's elder offspring have their rooms, all but one of those children are sleeping. Only the eldest, Jerome, is still stubbornly awake, his nightlight glowing and the assigned guard sweating hard in his doorway. Jerome is fourteen and going through that time. You know, the stage of life. Difficult time. Difficult boy.

His mother Polly is trying to get him to sleep. This is an effort with diminishing returns, not to say with negative and unexpected outcomes.

Verschlimmbesserung, the Germans call it: an attempted improvement that only makes things worse. Whatever you can think of, the Germans have a word for it, as well as a terrifying sexual fetish. Mama Polly doesn't know German, though Jerome has classes with a tutor from Düsseldorf, a balding and aging pedant who sniffs snuff huffily. I know him well.

Polly is an unschooled beauty from the lakeside people who caught the President's eye one day, and then got lucky enough in the race of motherhood as to bring forth the heir apparent before all his other wives. Her charms charm the President less and less these days, but her status as mother of the eldest child does make her first among equals in the scrabbling snakepit that is the President's wifely establishment.

As previously stated, Polly's maternal efforts to soothe her son to sleep bring scant results. The more she attempts to placate him, the more he resists her coaxing. At that well-known age, Jerome feels nothing but contempt for his parents, a loathing for every molecule of their being. But there is a wrinkle in this common adolescent disgruntlement and sourness. Namely, that his father the President has undisputed power of life and death over everyone he knows, and exercises that right without hesitation.

Both Polly and Jerome have witnessed the liquidation of inconvenient individuals in a presidential index-finger-flick. One moment the person is there in all their annoying vitality, griping, bellyaching, or being generally awkward to deal with. The next they lie dead with a bullet in the temple, or with their throat slit like a goat at a festival, and the cleaners are moving in discreetly to minimize the damage to the carpet.

It's a shocking moment, but it's surprising how quickly you become accustomed to the suddenness of it all. Though you never forget that it could be you who in the very next moment is being hauled out on a plastic sheet. Hence my insomnia.

Who am I? I’m the son's personal advisor. Tutor or what have you. My name is not memorable. Unimportant.

Pleased to meet you. Sit here, and please remember to be quiet. By now you must understand full well the necessity for hush, and further tedious explanations would be nugatory and even counterproductive.

The little spyhole onto my charge's room was made by me for just such contingencies. I'll keep my eye to the chink and keep you posted. Snuff? No? Very well, I hope you won’t mind if I indulge.

Let the mother and the son next door pursue their frustrating back-and-forth. You and I may take a whiskey, a 30-year-old Macallan single malt, and soak up the atmosphere of the palace and the city all round it, as it writhes in the unsteady drizzle and the broken moonlight.

Ours is not the city that never sleeps. It's the city that sleeps fitfully in a fever dream and then wakes screaming from a nightmare. This capital was built by a Belgian architect with the skimmed cream of an IMF loan that will never be paid, but will haul our country further into the slime of international finance until it drowns on accumulated interest. The city was made angular and brutal in the sun's heat, white and grey under the on-piling of heavy equatorial clouds, and it is our heaven and our hell.

You may well call me cynical, yet at the dawning of independence I was just as idealistic as anyone here. He who today is our President was then just a young subaltern, fresh from European military academy, bursting with pride and hope for the newly liberated land.

The President of that time, our first, was a tough former freedom fighter, deft with an AK-47 and quick with quotations from Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Frantz Fanon. Arduous struggle of the cadres. Negritude. Self-reliance and scorn of neocolonial coercion. He couldn't last. They brought his plane down one morning and an Air Force colonel took his place. We never speak his name now. In fact I've forgotten it.

Our man took power some years later - wait, here he is now. He enters his son's room as the bickering mother and son have reached the point of bitter tears and thoughtless words. He is vast in a green velvet robe, which curves for acres around his body like meadows.

He is drunk on power - but also on fine brandy, Hennessy VO. He carries a bottle in the pocket of his robe and takes a slug now and then. He is irked. The kind of irked where people die quickly. A guard waits out in the corridor, stone faced but mortified with anxiety.

He addresses his wife and son in the language of their people. Do you know it? No? Well, allow me to interpret for you.

What's all this kerfuffle about? Slap. The wife, Polly, she gets a playful love-tap. She knows better than to protest. She simply says that the boy will not sleep and she's trying to get him to lie down and be calm.

What's up with you? the President asks Jerome his son. His tone is frustrated but much more moderate than when addressing his wife. The boy does not answer. Again, I ask you: what ails you, my son?

There is silence in the room. Out in the corridor the guard shuffles nervously by the open door. It is taboo among his people to eavesdrop on the private conversations between a man and his wife. But his duty obliges him to stand there, rifle held at port arms, fidgeting. He will not last many days, this one.

Speak, my boy, says the President, now a loving father. He sits on the edge of the bed and it creaks beneath his weight. I smell the stale sweat and the brandy off him from here, across the room and through the hole in the partition wall. Ganja and khat and the steely scent of methamphetamine pills. Witch-herbs and the sex of ifa women.

How do I scent all that? I have a good nose and an even better imagination. Have some more Macallan.

The boy remains sullen. Raindrops drip whisperingly out in the courtyard in time with his hesitancy. Finally he speaks. Nobody here respects me, he says.

Who disrespects you? demands his father. It's clear he envisions an instant way to resolve this issue. Someone will pay and family peace will be restored. Simple and direct, just like the man himself. It also occurs to me that if I were to be described as the disrespectful one my life expectancy would be measured in seconds.

No. it's not that, says Jerome. You don't understand me. No-one is rude to me, exactly. Just that nobody shows me any respect either. It's hard to explain. You just don't understand me, he repeats.  You’re not listening. The snivelling tone has intensified.

I know this lad and I know he's trying hard not to whine. He knows his father can't bear it and that gripers can be punished in brutal summary ways. But he just can't stop himself. Over and above self-preservation, even, is the urgent necessity to be an adolescent brat. It's in his hormones and may not be denied.

Let us get comfortable now. Polly the mother goes to sit on the loveseat on the north wall of the room. She is perpendicular to the brass-accoutred bed where Jerome and his father are sitting, which in turn is opposite my peeping-hole or spy-chink.  I am squatting up against the hole, clutching a glass of scotch and sweating at the thought that I will be named as humiliator and thorn-in-the-side of this troubled pudgy youth.

The guard is outside the door, opposite Polly, trembling now a little in the corridor with the burden of carrying the assault rifle that will be used to end my life should I be named. You are seated at the table, looking down on me as I provide you this edifying commentary of murmurations and equivocations.

I cannot see if you have taken a glass of that good scotch or not. You really ought to. Somehow it is important that we are all clearly situated as this quiet moment goes by in the night. The wind is still only for a moment. Only the soft rain still drips from the eaves and rafters. Then the wind resumes its sibilant song.

---

The rain clouds had been gathering all day
This is the time for big man daddy to give his lectures:

The frigidaire is choked full with his pupils
Their heads are stuffed there from bottom up
There is a particularly portent one called Arube
Whose body was burnt, heart and liver baked and eaten

Big Daddy President speaks up. He's taken a slug of Hennessy VO cognac and his breath is rich and sweet, his vocal chords caressed by the finest grapes of the Aquitaine sun. He speaks in English as he often does when he is drunk in dead of night.

My son, you are my greatest joy, my future and the reason for all my striving. Do you think I struggle like a rabid hyena to achieve greatness for myself? No, this animal struggle is for you, my son. For you, boy, for you the future of my lineage and my name. Now, it may so happen that you do not live long enough to succeed me, as nobody can know the workings of God's merciful will...

This moment of philosophy or threat, this serene acceptance of providence or this hint of filicide, is left to hang in the air for the moment like the rich odour of brandy. Polly on the settee by the north wall has locked up rigid like a stone. The guard in the doorway opposite has shuffled his way to a standstill, the gun lowered now to his side, and his head lowered and listening for the order.

...but it may well be that the normal course of events takes place, that I go to my rest in due course and you become my heir. May God will it, inshallah.

He beams now, his orotund laugh unfurls, and Polly and Jerome both smile with relief that it will not be now, or at least not right this second. I suppose too that the guard grins also though I cannot see his face. There is a general loosening of shoulders, an unlocking of postures.

My son, here is the problem: you cannot go on with your life in this state. When you were born there was great jubilation. I wept with joy to see you in this world, your mother wept, your aunties all wept. The nation celebrated, all the people too, they wept with joy. Can you imagine it?

This time he expects an answer. Yes, Papa, says Jerome. He is not disposed any more to whine.

Can you really imagine so much joy? If you can't I will order another such celebration tomorrow. Work will stop across the country, the people will celebrate your existence anew, your mother and your aunties and I will all weep again with joy. Shall that be necessary?

No Papa. I can imagine such joy at my birth.

Then you know what great jubilation and enjoyment your very being brings to me, to her, to all of us. This is why you may not carry on in this way. So. You have love but you demand respect. What have you done that you should be so respected?  Speak, my boy.

I... I don't know.

Just so. A man commands respect by his deeds, by his actions. When people know what that man can do, what he dares of doing, then they can respect him. Do you follow me?

Yes Papa.

The boy's voice is tiny now, I must imagine his words for myself. Fortunately I know his lily heart so well, I could write his words for you like a book. I know what he says though I do not hear it. As his words diminish in scale, the President's voice grows large as to fill the room, the palace, all the world with its portent and gravity.

The time has come my child to prove that you are indeed a man to be respected. Not prove it to me or to anybody else. Prove it to yourself. Come, get off the bed.

The President rises from the bed, sways a little, then finds his footing. The boy also gets out of the covers and slowly places his feet on the floor. The President walks out to the doorway and murmurs a little in the ear of the petrified guardsman who has returned to stiff attention.

He comes back holding out the soldier's bayonet, a wicked-looking 8-inch blade with a curved point like one of those knives named after the English pop singer David Bowie. It glints in all the ways that are necessary and appropriate at such moments.

Take this knife my son. He passes the bayonet to Jerome.

Polly stands up, though she doesn't mean to. Certain actions at this time are automatic, foreordained. All sounds have stopped, even rain, even breaths. The moment stands still and heavy, waiting for its next move.

For now all the actors in this play have taken a pause and perform a tableau, composed perfectly for my viewpoint in the peeking-hole in the wall. It is sublime and terrible and I am grateful to have seen it, though I fear the unveiling of the next minute's mystery.

The child stands in the lamplight clutching the bayonet and gazing at its blade, the fated point. His father stands beside him and hangs his heavy arm on the boy's narrow shoulder, green and somber in his velvet gown. The woman stands to the left, her red dress and matching vermilion headwrap marking an omen for the time to come.

The moment goes on for seconds, for hours. I catch my breath and watch.

An owl on the rooftop shrieks once. Twice. Time stirs back into motion and there is yet a third shrieking from outside. There must be three.

Well, Jerome, says his father the President, big daddy of this land and of us all who are his sons and daughters, all.

Well, boy, here is what you must do. To show yourself you are worthy of respect and to still this doubting devil in your heart. Here is this woman, Polly. Your mother. You must take her life so you might live.

There is no crying, no hesitation, no fuss. It is not that sort of tale. The boy Jerome shoves the blade deep into his mother's heart and she screams once and starts to fold. He does it again.

He draws out the knife and she kneels and whimpers slightly. He strikes a third time, this time into the nape of her neck. She is on the floor and says no more.

Her blood, his mother's blood, has found its loving way onto his face. He wipes it across his cheeks like war paint. His eyes shine and he smiles in pride and accomplishment.

His father takes the knife from Jerome and embraces him. The green velvet stains carmine and black. Outside the guardsman has fainted and lies in a heap. Other guards pad up silently in their sneakers and gawp through the doorway.

I straighten up from my peeping place and begin to pack my things. Have the rest of the Macallan single-malt scotch, my friend. Go quietly again from here.

I too must leave here now. There is nothing further I can teach this man Jerome.

---

When it rains, mangoes and lemons shiver quietly in your soft beds.
It is Arube who is shaking the refrigerator;
it is Daddy who lectures the senseless heads.

---

But then I turn and look back for just another peek. The scene is different. Now I see Jerome, still with the bloodied knife, but his mother Polly stands living beside him. She smiles proudly.

On the floor is our Big Daddyman President-for-Life. Now no longer president.

The guard knows how these things are handled, these moments of succession. It’s like he’s not the same timorous man of before, but a new emboldened fighter stepped out of the fire.

He lays down his rifle and gently takes the dripping knife from Jerome’s hand. He kneels and does something to the gross body lying there. Polly flinches and looks away, but Jerome stares fixed and impassive on the guard’s officiating.

When he stands back up, the guard holds the scepter. He passes it to Jerome, who takes it in his left hand. He takes the bayonet in his right, and the guard takes off his own red guardsman’s beret and places it on Jerome’s head.

The guards, the nannies, and the mothers and the children, begin to file in to the room so they can kiss the hand of their new king.

Perhaps I will stay after all. Perhaps I have to. I’m afraid to look away again and have to see a different scene play out if I put my eye once more to the peephole.

---