historical divides, cultural bias, identity thinking, and conventional wisdom that circumscribe our everyday lives.5 In a Nigerian prison cell, Wole Soyinka scribbles fragments of plays, poems, and a memoir between the lines of books smuggled to him from the outside. “In spite of the most rigorous security measures ever taken against any prisoner in the history of Nigerian prisons, measures taken both to contain and destroy my mind in prison, contact was made.”6 In a novel decreed obscene when first published in 1856, Gustave Flaubert writes Emma Bovary into existence, famously declaring, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” For thirty-one years, Marcel Proust commutes in his imagination to Illiers-Combray, and the year he dies (1922) James Joyce publishes Ulysses, his epic return through lost time to the Dublin of his youth.
After many years of searching for the opening sentence of the book he wanted to write, Gabriel Garcia Márquez realizes “in a flash” while driving to Acapulco with his wife and children, that he would “tell the story the way [his] grandmother used to tell hers,”7 and so emerged the figure of José Arcadio Buendía, who dreams and then builds a luminous city of mirrors surrounded by water.8 Coincidentally, the story of Macondo, which is also the story of Columbia, recalls a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a stranger disembarks one night from a bamboo canoe on an island in a river, wanting “to dream a man with minute integrity and insert him in reality.”9 This “magical project” exhausts his soul, and leaves him wondering whether reality is brought into existence by our dreams or we the dreamers are the dreamt.
In the act of writing, as in spirit possession, sexual ecstasy, or spiritual bliss, we are momentarily out of our minds. We shape-shift. We transgress the constancies of space, time, and personhood. We stretch the limits of what is humanly possible. And we overcome the loneliness of being separated from the other, the stranger in whose shadowy presence we dwell. “Again and again, writes Octavio Paz, “we try to lay hold upon him. Again and again he eludes us. He has no face or name, but he is always there, hiding. Each night for a few hours he fuses with us again. Each morning he breaks away. Are we his hollow, the trace of his absence?”10
These boundless waters into which writers, like fishermen, cast their lines or, like shipwrecked mariners, consign their bottled messages, are the haunts of lost soul mates, remote societies, other epochs, myriad divinities, half-forgotten events, and unconscious processes. But in every case, what moves us to write (and read what others have written) is an impulse to broaden our horizons, to reincarnate ourselves, and “satisfy our perpetual longing to be another.”11
Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of literature12 and Walter Ong dismissed the writer’s audience as “always a fiction,”13 the passion and paradox of writing lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible14—a leap of faith that bears comparison with the mystic’s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, or an ethnographer’s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. For every writer—whether of ethnography or fiction—presumes that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.
For Orhan Pamuk, a writer “is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table and alone turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.” But no sooner have we shut ourselves away, Pamuk says, than we “discover that we are not as alone as we thought.” We are in the company of others who have shared our experiences. “My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine—that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.”15 Asked whether solitude was essential to a writer, Paul Auster answered in a similar vein. “What is so startling to me, finally, is that you don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection.”16
D. H. Lawrence pursues a similar train of thought in a letter to his friend the barrister Gordon Campbell in March 1915.
I wish I could express myself—this feeling that one is not only a little individual living a little individual life, but that one is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind, and one’s charge is the charge of the whole of mankind. Not me—the little, vain, personal D. H. Lawrence—but that unnameable me which is not vain nor personal.17
In the same letter, Lawrence says, “each of us is in himself humanity,” an opinion shared by some anthropologists,18 myself among them.
But the gap between particularizing and universalizing perspectives is notoriously difficult to close. How can we be sure that the connections and continuities we posit between ourselves and others are not projections of our own limited view of the world? And how can we overcome the suspicion that often stays a writer’s hand, that the words and ideas he or she deploys with such artistry constitute a sleight of hand that creates the appearance of connectedness where there is none?
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.19
TWO
The Red Road
I WAS NOT THE FIRST ADOLESCENT POET, nor will I be the last, to adopt Arthur Rimbaud as an alter ego. In Rimbaud’s resolve to be other than he was, I found legitimacy for my own revolt against bourgeois values. Oft en drunk and confrontational, and possessed by a perverse desire to be different, I cultivated an uncouth and anarchic persona, yet all the while unclear as to what kind of metamorphosis I wished for myself.
It is not possible, of course, to simply walk out on yourself, discarding your first identity as a snake sloughs off its skin. You do not know the secrets for changing your life; all you can do is search for them.1 What governs you is a craving for “new affections, new noises”,2 and you are aware that this work you do on yourself is more fundamental than any work of art. Indeed, Rimbaud’s writing may be read as a commentary on this oeuvre vie, in which poetry will be written only for as long as it takes for the personal change to be effected, whereupon the work of language will come to an end.
For several years you are in limbo. Breaking free, hitting the road, living rough, only to return to the place you set out from to lick your wounds and prepare for another journey into the unknown. But you are stricken by the realization that no matter how far you travel from home, the old self goes with you, refusing to be shaken off by the trick of changing your environs. As Horace put it, ‘Those who chase across the sea change their skies but not their souls.’3 And so you resemble one of Joseph Conrad’s restive characters, drifting from one remote island or port to another, no sooner arrived than departed—whether in flight from or in search of something, no one knows.
At twenty-four, Rimbaud is working as an overseer in a quarry on Cyprus. “The heat is oppressive,” he writes in a letter to his family, and the work is hard—dynamiting rocks, loading stones onto barges, living miles away from the nearest village, tormented by mosquitoes, sleeping in the open by the sea. His life is like a rehearsal for Africa.4
At twenty-four, and without the benefit of any rehearsal, I went to Africa as a volunteer with the United Nations Operation in the Congo. I had expected some kind of conversion. Watching the lurid sunsets from the Stanley Memorial
