Petit texte :
"Gone to Timbuctoo
Timbuctoo,
Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Tumbuktu or Tembuch ? It doesn’t
matter how you spell it. The word is a slogan, a ritual formula, once
heard never forgotten. At eleven I knew of Timbuctoo as a mysterious
city in the heart of Africa where they ate mice – and served them
to visitors. A blurred photograph, in a traveller’account of Timbuctoo,
of a bowl of muddy broth with little pink feet rising to the surface
excited me greatly. Naturally, I wrote an unprintable limerick about
it. The word ‘mice in the stew ‘ rhymed with Timbuctoo and
for me both are still inextrcably associated.
There are two Timbuctoos. One is the administrative centre of the Sixth
Region of the Republic of Mali, once French Sudan – the tired
caravan city where the Niger bends into the Sahara, ‘the meeting
place of all who travel by camel or canoe’, though the meeting
was rarely amicable ; the shadeless Timbuctoo that blisters in the sun,
cut off by grey-green waterways for much of the year, and accessible
by river, desert caravan or the Russian airplane that comes three times
a week from Bamako.
And then there is the Timbuctoo of the mind – a mythical city
in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of
beyond or a flat joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuctoo’, they
say, meaning ‘He is out of his mind’ (or drugged) ; ‘He
has left his wife’ (or his creditors) ; ‘He has gone away
indefinitely and will probably not return’ ; or ‘He can’t
think of anywhere better to go than Timbuctoo. I thought only American
tourists went there.’
‘Was it lovely ?’ asked a friend on my return. No. It is
far from lovely ; unless you find mud walls crumbling to dust lovely
– walls of a spectral grey, as if all the colour has been sucked
out by the sun.
To the passing visitor there are only two questions. ‘Where is
my next drink coming from ?’ and ‘Why am I there at all
?’ And yet, as I write, I remember the desert wind whippind up
the green waters ; the thin hard blue of the sky ; enormous women rolling
round the town in pale indigo cotton boubous ; the shutters on the houses
the same hard blue against mud-grey walls ; orange bowerbirds that weave
their basket nests in feathery acacias ; gleaming black gardeners sluicing
water from leather skins, lovingly, on rows of blue-green onions ; lean
aristocratic Touaregs, of super-natural appearence, with coloured leather
shields and shining spears, their faces encased in indigo veils, which,
like carbon paper, dye their skin a thunder-cloud blue ; wild Moors
with corkscrew curls ; firm-breasted Bela girls of the old slave caste,
stripped to the waist, pounding at their mortars and keeping time with
monotonous tunes ; and monumental Songhai ladies with great basketshaped
earrings like those worm by the Queen of Ur over four thousand years
ago.
And at night the half-calabash moon reflected in the river of oxidised
silver, rippled with the activity of insects ; white egrets roosting
in the acacias ; the thumping of a tam-tam in town ; the sound of spontaneous
laughter welling up like clear water ; the bull frogs, whining mosquitoes
that prevented sleep, and on the desert side the far-off bowls of jackals
or the guard-dogs of nomad camps. Perhaps the Timbuctoo of the mind
is more potent than one suspects."
Anatomy of Restlessness – Bruce Chatwin.
