Black Bazaar by Alain Mabanckou

big Congo.
    â€œIs he baptising the little one or something?” wondered Willy.
    Roger the French-Ivorian took off my daughter’s woollen bonnet to get a better look at her. Then, pulling a face, he stood up again:
    â€œHold on a minute, Buttologist, this child in question, is it yours?”
    â€œIn your opinion, who else would make a child like that here, eh?” Yves the just-Ivorian fired back to his half-compatriot.
    The two of them are always feuding, sometimes they go off to fight by the fountain at Les Halles.
    Roger the French-Ivorian stood tall, giving a dirty look to his perennial enemy:
    â€œYves, am I even talking to you? Have you ever shown your child here? I am directing my comments at Buttologist, not you! You do not even exist in my eyes! Go and wait at home for France to pay you compensation for being colonised, as if your own parents hadn’t cooperated and benefited from the system! If I were the Minister for Immigration and National Identity in this country, I’d have taken away your resident’s card!”
    Yves retaliated by insulting his half-compatriot as he walked out of Jip’s:
    â€œThis White-Negro is starting to get on my nerves! I’m going to have to leave, or things could turn out nastily for him. It’s not with half-castes like him that we’re going to win the case in this country. While we’re busy defending our rights, White-Negroes are auctioning us off the way they did back in the days of slavery. This man will never understand our struggle because he has sold out like all the other half-castes. When the system is anti-Blacks he calls himself White, and when the Whites remind him that a half-caste is just another negro he rejoins the negro crowd! This Roger you see in the bar is French by day and Ivorian by night, never the other way around! I want him to be Ivorian twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and for him to stop playing out his little hypocritical game! Sell-out! Pro-slaver brown-nose!”
    Roger the French-Ivorian didn’t respond to these attacks. It was business as usual.
    He turned towards me:
    â€œAren’t you warm-blooded, or what?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œHow can you have a child who doesn’t look like you?”
    Calmly, I told him to have a good look at my daughter. I took off a shoe to show him my foot.
    â€œLook, we’ve got the same toes …”
    â€œToes and all that nonsense is for when the grandparents want something to cling on to. We need something concrete, a signature that’s authentic and indelible. Are you sure this is your child, eh?”
    Just then the little one woke up and started crying. I picked her up to soothe her …
    Paul gave me several bottles of perfume for Original Colour and tried to cheer me up in a corner:
    â€œDon’t listen to that crackpot of a French-Ivorian! It was King Solomon who said that a child is still a child, be he red, yellow or brown. I heard that in a Francis Bebey song. There is also someone who said that woman is the exact place of our birth, and he was right. I can’t remember who said it now, but it must have been someone with a brain in his head. People can always argue about the father of a child, there’s nothing new there. Take Roger, can he really say that he is his father’s son?”
    Pierrot the White came over to join us in our corner with the three Pelforts he’d bought me. He put them down on the table:
    â€œDown these three beers for me! One for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Spirit!”
    He reminded me that in the beginning, there wasn’t just the Word, but also the verb and the subject and the direct object, and that it was Man in his wickedness who introduced the indirect object. And it was thissame wickedness that motivated some of my pals at Jip’s. I couldn’t make head or tail of his argument, but I found his words comforting compared with what the others