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| The Arthur Rimbaud Cultural Center, a merchant's home now dedicated to the poet and his time in Harar. |
In December of 1880, the mercurial French poet Arthur Rimbaud entered the ancient walled city of Harar, Ethiopia,
a journey that had involved crossing the Gulf of Aden in a wooden dhow
and 20 days on horseback through the Somali Desert. Several years
before, the author of the prose poems “A Season in Hell” and
“Illuminations” had abruptly renounced poetry and embarked on
peregrinations that would take him around Europe, Asia, the Middle East
and, finally, Africa. At age 26, Rimbaud accepted “a job consisting in
receiving shipments of bales of coffee” with a French trading firm in a
thriving corner of what was then called Abyssinia.
Then
as now, Harar was a market town threaded with steep cobblestone alleys
that wind between high limestone and tuff walls. Today those walls are
painted with geometric designs in green, white, pink and blue. As one
strolls down the narrow, mazelike streets lined with single-story
dwellings, the city, fortified and enigmatic, feels closed off. Donkeys
carrying bundles of firewood wait patiently for their owners near the
crenelated entrances of the city’s historic gates. In the densely
populated Old City, there are over 180 mosques and shrines, some dating
to the 10th century. Occasionally one comes upon open-air markets where
spices, khat leaves and coffee beans are sold in huge sacks.
Rimbaud
arrived in Harar “sick and completely helpless,” according to his
employer, Alfred Bardey. He rented a rough, clay-walled house with a
thatched reed roof. The man credited by many with reinventing modern
European poetry would reside in this preindustrial Ethiopian city for
nearly five years, during three distinct periods between 1880 and 1891,
the longest time he ever stayed anywhere as an adult. It was a life he
had visualized years before he began his travels. “I sought voyages, to
disperse enchantments that had colonized my mind,” the 19-year-old
author wrote in “A Season in Hell,” a hallucinatory collection of nine
poems that had been published seven years before his arrival in Harar,
featuring a narrator who rages at, and then roams, the world. “My life
would always be too ungovernable to be devoted to strength and beauty.”
Rimbaud’s
travels had been preceded by a dramatic flameout in Europe: His lover,
the French poet Paul Verlaine, had shot him in the wrist with a revolver
in a Belgian hotel room. Living with his difficult mother in a
farmhouse in Charleville, his constricting hometown in the French
Ardennes, was intolerable for the high-strung poet. It didn’t help that
“A Season in Hell,” which would later bring him acclaim, was barely
noticed at all when it was published in 1873.
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| Arthur Rimbaud. |
And
so it was that the poster child of the “decadent movement” ended up in
Harar, a city 300 miles from Addis Ababa that predated the Ethiopian
capital by nearly a millennium.
Harar
had been a Sufi Muslim center of learning closed to outsiders for
hundreds of years before the explorer Sir Richard Burton entered the
city in 1855. As soon as Rimbaud heard about the place he begged his
employers in the Arabian port of Aden to send him there. No matter that
the region was viewed as dangerous and that several other
trader-explorers had experienced run-ins with the warriors of the
Danakil desert. The adventurous Rimbaud immediately recognized Harar as
an intriguing business prospect at the edge of the known world.
“In
exile, life was a stage where literature’s masterpieces were played
out,” the poet wrote in “Illuminations,” several years before moving to
Harar. “I could share untold riches that remain unknown.” (There is no
evidence that Rimbaud wrote poetry again after his 21st birthday;
however, he sent hundreds of evocative letters about his new life in
Ethiopia to his mother and sister back in France.)
In
Harar’s Old City, now a Unesco World Heritage site with a layout dating
to the 16th century, a willingness to walk in circles, doubling back
often, is a necessary precondition for exploring. There are no signs. If
you’re lucky, you’ll come across the cheerful woman who serves cups of
milky tea made from toasted coffee leaves to patrons sitting on buckets;
or the man who feeds swooping falcons from his bare hand at the camel
market; or the lane called Mekina Girgir where tailors mend clothing on
antique pedal-operated sewing machines, and where vendors sell fritters
and syrupy, fried sweets from banana-leaf baskets.
In
the center of the Old City, called Jugol Harar, a grand merchant home
with a fine wooden facade has been turned into a museum dedicated to
Rimbaud and his time in Harar. In a room with colored glass panels and a
painted ceiling, the small but informative exhibits include
self-portraits taken by the poet with a camera he ordered from Lyon.
Rimbaud’s shot of a man sitting amid pottery in his storehouse was very
likely the first photograph of Harar. “When he was here, he was somebody
else, totally,” said the museum curator, Abdunasir Abdulahi, a Harari
whose great-aunt knew Rimbaud as a child. “She said he was a Muslim and
they used to play in his house.”
The
Arthur Rimbaud Cultural Center opened in 2000, and now “young people
are starting to believe Rimbaud was really a white man who loved
Hararis, who wanted to die in Harar, who preferred Harar to his
sophisticated, nationalized Europe,” said Mr. Abdulahi. “His mind was
peaceful here.”
Previously,
many locals had been dismissive of their famous former resident because
they suspected he might have been a spy. In fact, the French trader was
genuinely fascinated by the city and its surroundings, and set about
mastering the regional languages. “With the common people he spoke in
Arabic but with his servant he spoke in Harari,” Mr. Abdulahi said. “He
spoke Harari perfectly and he learned Amharic and Oromo as well.”
In
Rimbaud’s time, Harar was a major trading hub, where prized goods from
the highlands — coffee, animal hides, gold rings and musk of civet —
were exchanged for foreign goods that had arrived at the coast by wooden
dhows. For his job, Rimbaud spent much of his time riding to faraway
markets to source goods, or “trafficking in the unknown,” as he
described it to his family in a letter before he set off on an
expedition in 1881.
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| Harar is surrounded by walls built between the 13th and 16th centuries, with several main gates. |
“There
is a great lake a few days’ journey from here. It’s in ivory country.
I’m to try and get there. The people of the region are probably
hostile,” he informed them, before giving instructions on how to collect
his back wages if he didn’t return.
Rimbaud
highlighted the risks and difficulties of his life in Africa in letters
to his disapproving mother. “This last expedition has exhausted me so
much that I often lie in the sun, immobile like an unfeeling stone,” he
wrote. Another trip he described as “insane cavalcades through the steep
mountains of the country.” Did the author remember that in “A Season in
Hell,” he had written what now seems like an ode to the very landscape
he was complaining about? “I loved desert, scorched orchards,
sun-bleached shops, warm drinks. I dragged myself through stinking
streets and, eyes closed, offered myself to the sun, god of fire.”
Grumble
he might, but according to his boss Alfred Bardey, Rimbaud was “always
impatiently waiting for the next occasion to set out on adventures I
could sooner have held on to a shooting star.”
By
the late 1880s, the former enfant terrible of the Parisian literary
scene was at the center of much of the foreign trade in southern
Abyssinia. It didn’t always go smoothly: When the future Ethiopian
Emperor Menelik II decided he needed guns, he turned to Rimbaud, who
spent months acquiring antique European rifles for the capricious king,
only to be promptly swindled when he delivered them:
“Menelik
seized all the merchandise and forced me to let him have it at a
reduced rate, forbidding me to sell it retail and threatening to send it
back to the coast at my expense!” Rimbaud complained in a letter to the
French consul.
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| A mosque, one of over 180 mosques and shrines in the city. |
Frustration
aside, Rimbaud’s procurement of weapons for Menelik II may have been
his greatest contribution to modern African history. Scholars reckon
that the guns he sold in 1887 likely helped the emperor defeat Italy in
1896 when the country’s troops tried to invade Ethiopia. As a result of
the rout at Adwa, Italy signed a treaty recognizing Ethiopia as an
independent nation.
Rimbaud
would not be around to witness this triumph. In 1891, after the pain
from a swollen knee became unbearable, he was forced to leave Harar to
seek medical treatment. Sixteen porters carried him on a hidebound
stretcher to the port at Zeila, 200 miles and 12 days from Harar. It was
the same port where Rimbaud had first set foot in Africa, 11 years
earlier. By the time his ship reached France, it was already too late:
His cancerous leg had to be amputated.
From
his hospital room in Marseilles, the poet and explorer thought fondly
of his time in “beloved Harar.” “I hope to return there I will always
live there,” he wrote that summer. In November 1891, at 37, Arthur
Rimbaud died while dictating a note to the director of the Messageries
Maritimes shipping line. “Let me know what time I shall be carried on
board,” he requested in his letter. Until the end, the brilliant
polymath was determined to return to the city where he had finally found
a kind of peace.
http://www.nytimes.com
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