A biting satirical essay by Octave Mirbeau from 1900, where a Dahomean man at the Paris Exposition laments the loss of his country’s ‘glorious’ traditions of human sacrifice under French colonial rule. Mirbeau’s sharp irony exposes the absurdity of both ‘civilising’ colonialism and romanticised barbarism.
I have made the acquaintance of one of those Dahomean fellows—tall, slender, handsome and lithe—who cause such a stir amongst white visitors at the Trocadéro. He is a charming chap, terribly gentle and cheerful, and like all black men, an inexhaustible storyteller… Unfortunately, the Dahomean—at least if I’m to judge by my friend—is a symbolist, and I can’t make head or tail of his stories… They strike me as so disjointed, pointless and childish that I might as well be listening to verses by M. Vielé-Griffin, if one can even call verses those inarticulate bleating sounds that M. Vielé-Griffin insists on producing from time to time in magazines and books.
Yesterday, this good fellow—I mean my Dahomean friend—wanted to sing me some songs from his country… They are terribly old songs, their authors utterly forgotten. Some are rather lovely and quite expressive… Like this one, which distinguishes itself from M. Vielé-Griffin’s usual output by its touching naïveté:
I went into the forest: In the forest there are trees, In the trees there are branches, In the branches there are leaves, And in the leaves and on the branches There are birds, And in the birds there is music, A sort of little flute That goes, morning and night: "Peep... peep... peep!"
I asked him whether, amongst these folk songs, there were any that evoked the horror of the massacres and human sacrifices so popular not long ago in Dahomey.
“Oh no!” he replied… “Sacrifices and massacres are far too splendid to be put into songs!”
For my friend is terribly nationalistic. He complains bitterly—but with that innocent bitterness peculiar to black people—about the upheaval the French have wreaked upon his country since the conquest… seven years ago…
“It’s not the same at all!” he tells me, not without sadness, a gentle, resigned sadness that brings a lovely melancholy to his merry black eyes… “And I no longer recognise Dahomey… I feel as though I’m living in some unknown, colourless country, subject to stupid laws and barbarous customs. In my own hut, or in our marvellous palm forests, I feel like a stranger to myself… We don’t massacre anymore, or so little it’s hardly worth mentioning. Those splendid, magnificent human sacrifices that made our people the most beautiful, the greatest people on earth, are now abolished! All we have left is the regretful memory, and those pious relics you admired just now in our exhibition hall: those long cutlasses, so heavy, that spilled so much blood and severed so many heads… And those terrible fetish masks, now museum pieces, evidence, as it were, of our sublime history. Alas! Nothing is respected anymore. Everything’s going to pot!… When I take my evening stroll in Cotonou, where I live, along the path by the town ditches, I no longer breathe in that good, fortifying smell of decapitated corpses that used to rot there in great heaps for months on end… Now it’s military bands playing ‘Haydée’… and the scent of a few scrawny rose bushes that fierce cosmopolitanism is trying to acclimatise there… It’s disgusting!…”
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these words, which were being translated for me as my friend spoke them by M. de Wyzewa, who knows all manner of blacks and who perhaps takes advantage of his unverifiable knowledge to present us with languages as they are never actually spoken!…
The three of us—my friend, M. de Wyzewa and I—were sitting by a Dahomean river on seats obligingly lent by Messrs Allez Brothers. It was frightfully cold. A canoe rested on the greenish water, motionless and without reflection… And I was trying to conjure up the bloody mysteries of the bush, the rough paths strewn with thorns where amazons run barefoot to train themselves for pain, the plains all red, the houses of pink mud, the palaces and temples with their flat roofs paved with human skulls… But it was terribly difficult. The crowd wouldn’t stop invading—curious, intrusive and chattering—the narrow paths and little lawns surrounding the structures of fine barbaric design that my friend was guarding. And every time he spotted a visitor with a cigarette, he would leap up, rush at them and shout, with strange gesticulations:
“You, sir, no smoking!… You, sir… if you smoke… me break sir’s face!…”
And the savage poetry and red visions with which I had wanted to fill my brain would fly away…
Towards evening, when bizarrely ululating music began calling the crowd to different spectacles, calm returned around us. The black man could speak, and here’s how M. de Wyzewa translated his words:
“You can’t possibly imagine what our great king’s palace was like in the old days—the one this characterless building has the shameless audacity to represent… That palace was incredibly beautiful, especially the roof, entirely covered, or rather, entirely paved with severed heads… Mind you, it took skilled carpenters who knew how to arrange those heads like marquetry, like mosaic, because the king wouldn’t tolerate rain falling into his palace… He demanded, on pain of death, that these heads be as waterproof as European tiles or Hindu thatch… Oh, what fine work, sir!… It looked truly magical and smelled delicious… When certain winds blew, the scent would spread over the town like a rain of perfume falling from M. de Montesquiou’s atomiser (still M. de Wyzewa translating). But this type of roofing wasn’t terribly solid, or at least it didn’t last long… Either the heads would start to rot and disintegrate through putrefaction, or vultures would manage to pinch a few—gaps would soon appear. And then our good king (ah! why don’t you have a king?…) would send his most terrible fetish priests throughout the kingdom… And they, covered in their horrifying masks with red horns, would cry: ‘The king’s roof is coming unpaved!… The king’s roof is coming unpaved!…’ Immediately, massacres would be organised everywhere, and the earth of our country, already so red, would redden further under floods of blood… And the king’s roof would quickly regain its brand-new appearance, gleaming, truly royal!… Alas! all that’s gone now. Vile cosmopolitans have come and destroyed this national beauty forever!…”
“Don’t despair, good fellow,” I said through M. de Wyzewa’s obliging mediation, for if M. de Wyzewa knows black languages, he also knows French, sometimes. “Don’t despair… and don’t weep for your homeland’s misfortunes… They’re only transitory and temporary… Nothing dies down here and everything that seemed most dead returns… Perhaps you’ll soon see again the red horn and massacre mask of your fetish priests; you’ll also see, believe me, those fine severed heads blooming once more on your king’s palace!…”
“God hear you!…” said my friend with a gesture of prayer…
“God always hears those who speak to Him according to His eternal heart!” I replied fervently.
And my friend, comforted, rose, left us and walked away singing:
I went into the forest: In the forest there are trees, In the trees there are branches, In the branches there are leaves, And in the leaves and on the branches There are birds, And in the birds there is music, A sort of little flute That goes, morning and night: "Peep... peep... peep!"
1900.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 