Illness as subject is a challenge to writers not only for its dense manifestations and distinct physical consequences, but also for its realization of the physical body within the interconnected terrain of politics, relationships, and community. Originally published in 2017, Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men takes as its subject the West African Ebola epidemic, choreographing a motley of voices in a humanizing portrait of how disease can define and obliterate boundaries both known and unseen. Instead of rendering the epidemic into metaphor, Tadjo realizes its immediate and tangible presence in our lives.
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In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author, Other Press, 2021
Côte d´Ivoire, where Véronique Tadjo grew up, borders two of the three West African nations that suffered the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak. She wasn’t there at the time; she had finished a teaching position in South Africa and began to share her time between London and Abidjan. Tadjo is a chameleon of an artist. She works across genres, speaks various languages, and traverses cultures. At once fact and fiction, myth and reportage, the novel meets this contemporary moment in which borders and boundaries can feel like anachronistic global millstones and “some lives seem as worthless and irrelevant as the bruised fruit left over at the end of a market day.” Her amoebic narrative voice, both one and many, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and its aftermath, singing an ominous warning and calling for a modernized version of our lost solidarity cultures.
Many comparisons come to mind in describing the narration of In the Company of Men, which she recently self-translated from the 2017 French edition: a Greek chorus that guides the reader’s emotional responses, invoking the primordial without entangling itself in the individual; a spirit that possesses one after another; a mycelium with distinct fruiting bodies. We hear from, to name just a few, a Baobab tree, a gravedigger, an NGO volunteer, a woman who adopts an Ebola orphan, a researcher, a bat, and the virus itself. Though the writing inhabits so many different bodies, the voice still feels somehow cohesive, characterized by lyricism and gore, anger and compassion, helplessness and resilience. It rails and it soothes. The gravedigger reports quite literally, “The path ahead of us has been doused with chlorine,” and his words resonate with accounts from other narrators. Disinfectant becomes the flashlight that precedes each step in the dark and unfamiliar wood of the epidemic, the loitering of its scent paralleling most of our own accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other features of the metaphorical wood include dangerous rumors. A medic laments, “the President of the Republic had supposedly paid the large sums of money to reduce the local population and thus get rid of the poor. Ebola, they said, didn’t exist.” It is populated by ghosts of the hastily laid to rest: “Actually, they’re lost souls, reluctant to leave the earth, hoping we’ll help them to return.” Resonance between the novel’s narrators replicates the resonance between them and the readers, reinforcing themes of interconnectedness and appeals to solidarity.
The narration jumps from body to body just as the disease does, just as people—Tadjo and her characters included—similarly move between places and languages. The fallacy of the isolated incident elides into the fallacy of the national, cultural, and linguistic border. A father sends his daughter to the city to escape the virus, telling her, “The village is cursed.” He cannot yet imagine that curses are uncontainable and that his daughter is already infected. The medic reflects: “I’m a trespasser in the kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine, just like him, I’m lost too.” The equation of trespassing with danger becomes laughable; the “kingdom of Death” is the doctor’s clinic. His protective layers are the site of his greatest vulnerability.
Tadjo’s act of self-translation of this story, in this moment, becomes performative. The retelling is also a re-experiencing, re-processing, reflecting, reinterpreting, and reminding. This artistic act exposes the cyclical nature of history, rejecting notions of separation between art and life just as the text itself rejects notions of the separation between human and nature, past and present, one country and another. The conversation between Tadjo and herself mirrors the conversation between the natural world and itself, humanity and our own history and future. An outreach worker sent to educate citizens about the virus cloaks and urgent plea in humility. His call remains unanswered, and therefore begs repetition.
I’d tell them that fear can provoke a strong reaction, which will in turn free up enormous resources and placate public opinion. But the outcome will not necessarily be the best in the long run. True solidarity is meant to be durable. And in that respect, if I may offer the international community a further piece of advice, I would ask them to investigate how the aid payments were managed.
It calls for the revival of meaningful unanimity, but not necessarily the preservation of the old ways. It respects the wisdom of elders, but doesn’t know quite where to place traditional healers. It exposes contradictions within a society without fracturing that society into factions, masterfully applying the act of retelling to smooth the sharpness of these incongruities.
The virus, personified, foretells the astrological end of the planet, the similarity of which to the horrific death of an infected person creating a sense of inevitability:
The earth’s blood will spill into the atmosphere, and the globe will be emptied and become a shriveled fruit with no juice, an empty shell. Then the regal celestial body will turn into a freezing, indifferent mass, and that mass will gradually dissolve into space. And the universe will forget that there was ever a time when a sun seething with energy had reigned supreme.
In fact, while the other nonhuman narrators hold space for other emotions, the virus is instead the carrier of anger. His scathing rant against humanity’s choices unleashes all of the fury that we might hold against him, ourselves, our governments, or our gods.
It’s time for people to realize something: they aren’t good, they’ve never been good. Never, at any time! Let them get that straight, once and for all. They’re imperfect and incomplete. They’re mortal. Everything rots. Everything disintegrates. Everything merges with the ground. Sometimes, their God sprinkles a handful of hopes onto the world and then goes back to His bed in the glowing darkness.
As such, his maleficence becomes somehow righteous. The part of us that sympathizes echoes his accusations.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
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