Dec 16th 2005
Locust Withdrawal and preparation for the Congo.

Most of this afternoon I lay in bed reading King Leopold's Ghost, which details the formation and exploitation of the Congo Free State roughly one century ago. After finishing the book I stood up and stretched; I felt the blood draining from my head and managed to say, "Whoah, Blackout" just before falling to the ground. The sound of my skull's impact with the bathroom door was sharp and prolonged. It echoed as I struggled to understand how Sean and Tuuli were suddenly in the room (they had been there all along). I thought the loud noise might have been the sound of their appearing. Then I realized that I was on the floor and they were staring at me; so I wondered if I had drunk too much and somehow lost consciousness. But I didn’t remember drinking anything and they were both in the middle of reading and writing and would not have left me on the floor. Tuuli rushed over and ended my confusion by asking me if I had really blacked out. That connected the head rush, the loud noise, the pain in my back and the stunned look on Sean's face. Then I had to convince them that I hadn’t performed a stunt for their amusement, which was possible in large part because of the induplicable look of total bewilderment on my face. Perhaps it is necessary to mention that this has never happened to me before. When I said "Whoah, Blackout" what I was intending to say was "Whoah, Headrush." My body just intervened at the last second with a clearer understanding of what was happening.

A few seconds of daytime unconsciousness are far more disorienting than a month's worth of waking from accidental naps, which impresses me.

This showing of physical strength infused my personal aftermath of Hochschild's fairly devastating book with thoughts of my own mortal trajectory and world contribution. I was glad that Sean and Tuuli felt the need to go and eat since it gave me the opportunity to absorb the book more completely. Like Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States", which is an unparalleled must read for every literate American, "King Leopold's Ghost" left me shocked by my interest in and ignorance of history. Like Zinn's work it also demolished the barriers that are frequently erected in between periods of history for our own referential convenience. I mean that these works so successfully avoid the standard narrative and focus of world history that the distinctions that we are taught to believe in between one ruler and another, one era and another come to seem like a costume. Wearing this costume is a remarkably consistent chain of manipulation and dissimulation perpetrated by the most successful accumulators of power and wealth. I finished both of these books with the sense that I had never been introduced to the truly heroic figures in my culture’s history and like I had never been introduced to its villains. Learning that the rich and powerful of the United States facilitated the devastation of the Congo did not fill me with new pride. These books are not about conspiracies.

Usually, most of what I know about an African country before I enter it comes from books in the Heinemann African Writers Series that I read while teaching in the Gambia. The books I read were generally written in the sixties and seventies and are typically infused with a wounded disappointment that grew out of "independence" going wrong or proving false. They prepared me for slang, names of food, neighborhoods of featured cities and other trivia. The worldview they presented, in general, does not remain. None of them for instance, feature NGOs or development or disaster relief, at most they contain an occasional parody of a missionary.

I felt the need to read up on Congo a bit more thoroughly, since it boasts one of the most prohibitive reputations in the world and since it is always in the news. Though I was aware that King Leopold's Ghost would confront me with the atrocious, I was not prepared for the source of the atrocities and I was not prepared to be totally embarrassed by how inadequately I taught Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"while in Lebanon.

The book held me supine and captive for five or six hours, after which it released me to enjoy a tremendously pleasurable head rush just prior to collapsing in front of my friends just after announcing that I would do so. In the following minutes, laughter completely obscured their concern, probably because I appeared to have suffered no major damage.

We need to eat more vegetables.
* posted by Nathaniel at 4:59 AM