I am not sure I ever really knew him. We were both intimate and distant. Intimate, because I had always felt his eyes watching me, accompanying me every step of the way, anxious I might stumble or fall, concerned I should choose the path he had opened up for me. He seemed distant, too, not because he wasn’t my biological father, but because I knew nothing about him, never having met a single member of what I might have considered my ‘paternal family’, even if, to do him justice, his relationship with my mother had never been sealed at the mairie. Their union was an unspoken agreement, made material by the fact that a man and a woman lived under the same roof with a child, in a society where the collective opinion was more important than any signature on a piece of paper, or vows before a public authority. Sometimes, even when a civil marriage had taken place, a few wise old men would mutter among themselves: ‘So what, they just want to be like white people, those papers don’t count in our eyes, what matters is the word of the ancestors, they don’t need papers, people tear them up, anyway, after a few months’ marriage.
What do You think about The Lights Of Pointe-Noire?
