WHAT SHOULD I CALL IT? Jungle? Rainforest? Forest? Wilderness? Luxuriant foliage? There is definitely no word that can precisely define where I am heading to in Liberia. Countryside could be an option, but that doesn’t quite do it for me either. Jungle? No, impossible, I can’t call it the jungle. That would be over the…
I have often felt that I was going to climb the wall in Liberia. On some occasions I see her. The lady, who every night slightly commits suicide on UN Drive. She intentionally subtracts minutes from her life. That’s her, the woman wearing three rags and short hair. She throws herself onto the Ocean View…
GOAL. Goooal!!!! That was a goooooal !!! Goooooooal!!! The whole Samuel Doe Stadium erupts. It’s party time. We embrace, we’re all Liberians today and we are dancing with everyone. Gilberto is engaging in consensual fondling with the girl sitting behind us and someone is slapping me on the back as if they’d known me their…
“I have typhus, not today.” “Cool, come and watch the match then.” The first message is from Jacques, implying we will not be playing our usual game of tennis at the Ocean View compound at Mamba Point today. The second message is from Gilberto after finding out that I no longer have any plans. Rousseau…
HE SPEAKS CALMLY, KEEPING THE SAME TONE OF VOICE THROUGHOUT. He moves his hands slowly, only half looking at you, steadily interrupting your rushed arguments and shakes his head a couple of times as you speak. Every two or three minutes, as we talk over dinner at the Royal Hotel sushi restaurant, the UNMIL policeman…
BUT LOOK WHO’S THERE. As I walk into the Red Lion I spot Ramon sitting opposite a German donning a dirty and scraggy beard. Only a tiny table separates them, and they are there, forehead to forehead, as if they were playing a decisive chess game – the round of chess that will save the…
“IT’S IN A STATE, MAN, GREECE IS IN A STATE,” says Frankie, a Liberian, as he noisily walks around his Portuguese friend, Gilberto’s kitchen in his kiwi green, scraggy shirt. “It’s in a state, man, Greece is in a state! I just got back from there and Jesus, it’s all stress and pressure; the bank…
I can’t help it. I am reading an interesting novel about a violinist who loses his talent out of the blue, but I cannot help it. Pages fourteen and fifteen have been violently wiped off the screen that is my eyes and I can no longer breathe. The pages are suffocating under the weight of…
It’s the brakes. A steel voice informs me that something is wrong with the brake fluid. My car is not up to it, or perhaps it’s just melancholic. And since then, I walk. Now I am a white guy whose soles tread upon the tarmac of Mamba Point and who’s covered in sweat by the…
At first we did not talk. Never ever. Not even whenever I’d set foot in his motley Nissan Sunny, which was attempting to be yellow and I’d make some friendly, open comment. Now, I am not saying that I’d come out with harmless banter about the weather, no, it gets worse than that; my tongue…