Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused. This was before, before I allowed myself to think anything I want. If I had been then what I’ve become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned toward me, his left hand in my right.

God’s truth, if I’d already become then what I am now, I would have slaughtered him like a sacrificial sheep, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

I know, I understand that I should not have pushed him with my words to demonstrate a kind of courage I knew he already possessed. I know, I understand that it was because Mademba envied me and loved me at the same time that he went out first, as soon as Captain Armand blew the attack whistle on the day of his death. It was to show me that you don’t need beautiful teeth, you don’t need beautiful shoulders and a broad torso and very, very strong arms and thighs to be truly brave. So in the end I think it wasn’t just my words that killed Mademba. It wasn’t just my words about the Diops’ totem, as hurtful as those grains of metal that fell on us from the sky of war, that killed him. I know, I understand that all of my beauty and all of my strength also killed Mademba, my more-than-brother, who loved me and envied me at the same time. It was the beauty and strength of my body that killed him, it was the way all the women looked at me, at the middle of my body, that killed him. It was the way their eyes caressed my shoulders, my chest, my arms, and my legs, the way they lingered on my well-aligned teeth and my proud, hooked nose that killed him.

Ma let me know: “Heavens child, a horse is too big to bury, but your father battled for a week to have a large enough hole dug.”

She snapped the book closed, put it on the fridge, screwed the Marmite a bit too aggressively tight and put a doily over the jam. “It is difficult to describe now, but you felt like you were seen as a one-dimensional being, as if you had no roots, no culture that could give you depth or complexity. When you did something unusual, it was simply luck, and you would soon be exposed as the fraud and thief you really were.”

“Was it not perhaps a kind of inferiority on your part that was in fact not the fault of the English?”

My mother sighed. “It probably played a role. But if inferiority is a given and you want a healthy country, then the elimination of that inferiority must be part of everybody’s plan, not the naked intensification thereof.

“You must have no illusions about this: those people are masters at the art of belittling. They loosen in you a weathervane of hate. They decapitate you with one sentence, with a single adjective sink deadly poisonous teeth into you. You fight futilely for your life . . .”

“I don’t want to shower. I want to smell the whole day of river mud and my youth with your father.”