Le Président: Seven Days

In the beginning, Le President, flattened his ancestral village[1], to create his idea of heaven. "Let there be no jungle"; & there was no jungle. He razed the earth with excavators to make space for his creations. & He made the low-lying metal sheds & maquis disappear. & He cloaked the land in roseate dust. & a wind swept over the land like water. & that was the first day.

 

                                                        *

 

"Let the earth yield mangos & pineapples & bananas & fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." & He transformed the jungle & the dark loam of the land into plantations, as geometric as a French garden. & it was so. & there was evening & there was morning.

 

*

 

& "Let there be a church in the midst of this cleared wilderness that can seat 18,000 people in pews made of Iroko wood. & let there be a stained-glass panel of myself beside Jesus ascending to heaven.” So He imported architects & builders from France & Israel & Lebanon — from everywhere, but Africa& He sent for Italian marble columns & French stained glass. & so the “Basilica of the Bush”[2] was built. & it was so. & there was evening & there was morning, the third day.

 

*

 

“Let the remains of my ancestral village & its palaver tree now reside behind palace walls & out of sight. & let the waters under the sky be gathered around this palace." & so He built a behemoth & furnished it with two gold-plated rams at the door, gilded furniture & hundreds of servants. & the waters that were gathered together, he called artificial lakes.

 

& it was so.  “Let the boulevards of my kingdom be as grand as those of Paris. & let those boulevards swell with adoring throngs, who come to pay their respects to their founding father. & let the tourists follow the swagger of the sun to a twelve-storey hotel at the end of an eight-lane highway, to marvel at the city of my birth.” & there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

*


“Let the lakes bring forth swarms of living creatures." So He delivered crocodiles & carnivorous turtles to populate the lakes. & it was so. & He blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful & multiply & fill the waters of these lakes so that I might be protected as the chief of Yamoussoukro. "Let the earth bring forth chickens to sate these starving reptiles. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

*


Then "Let me find a caretaker to have dominion over the dragons of the sea. & may he be a native of our neighbour, Mali.” & so He hired a man to keep vigil over the crocodiles as the crocodiles kept vigil over Their One & Only King. And there was evening & there was morning, in all of its excess.

 

*

Thus, His heaven on earth was finalized. And He rested on the seventh day. But who else would ever rest?

[1] Houphouet-Boigny was the Baoulé chief of his ancestral village

[2] Also known as the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix or Basilica of Our Lady Peace.

The Crocodile Feeder

for Dicko Toki,

Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa

 A piece of wood may sit in the water many years, but it won’t become a crocodile.

   ~ Malian proverb

i.

a palace ascends from ochre earth, its artificial lake 

ornate with imported reptiles:  

leathery sentries that have weathered millennia, 

meteorites, extinction

 

the crocodiles scull from the shallows with checkered tails,

shearing their path to an embankment

sullied by blood; a seething phalanx

inhaling feathered angst

 

pharaonic, they amass like an avalanche

of uprooted trees with thistled claws

and olive-streaked backs,

their pale underbellies pebbled yellow

 

their eyes see the world brambled with veins,

mouths emit an oily gleam;

their rocky hides and tides of teeth

tear the lair of men’s dreams 

 

ii.

At Ramadan’s end, riveted tourists scrum

above sawdust banks, anticipating crimson

 

& rubbled bone, their cellphones ready

for the daily feeding ritual. Dicko,

 

the caretaker, plucks a bill from impatient fingers

& descends to the strand, a machete tucked

 

under one arm, a dingy chicken under the other.

Each squawk punctures the postmeridian torpor.

 

Rows of obsidian eyes vein the lake’s drab skin.

Dicko swings the hen twice by its legs

 

wings frantic in the pitiless light. A trill

soaks the air amid shutter clicks.

 

Glutted, the crocodiles doze as Dicko tugs

one by the tail for the thousandth time & poses.

 

He taps the twisted snout of Commandant 

& skips over the last of the reptiles 

 

when the hem of his boubou snags in its jaw.

He trips over its tail, machete flailing,

 

stabbing the air as Capitaine drags him away.

Onlookers shriek, their eyes drown in jaws,

 

opaque with want. But no sound from Dicko. 

No wail wedged between waves & stained teeth

 

as the beasts fissure water and sun, sinking

into a lake, reflecting nothing

                                                  and no one.