Seek

Denis Johnson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061869464
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

"Johnson writes with a fervor that can only be described as religious. Seek is scary and beautiful and ecstatic and uncontrolled…he elevates the mundane to the sublime; he boils things down to their essence. He's simply one of the few writers around whose sentences make you shudder." —Adrienne Miller, Esquire

Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world. And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping it, anything at all is possible.

Whether traveling through war-ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.

With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson's path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson's profoundly moving pilgrimage.

THE SMALL BOYS’ UNIT

In the winter of 1992 The New Yorker magazine invited me to travel to Liberia and write an article about what I found there.

I lived with my family in Iowa City at the time. I taught writing courses at the university. My two children walked a couple of blocks every day to what we’d been assured was one of the nation’s best public schools, and my wife worked as a volunteer there several days a week. The people around us in this small city seemed prosperous and happy. I made a great salary. And yet I agreed to go.

Two years earlier I’d published a piece about a very brief visit I’d made to Monrovia, the Liberian capital. On the strength of this experience alone, I was offered the second assignment.

Some of my creative writing students had become interested in a book called The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. In one place the book said, “Unless something is brought back from the ordeal in the Inmost Cave, the hero is doomed to repeat the adventure. Many comedies use this ending, as a foolish character refuses to learn his lesson and embarks on the same folly that got him in trouble in the first place.”

I was going to write a profile of Charles Taylor, commander in chief of the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government (NPRAG) and self-described president of Liberia. After two years of civil war, President Taylor’s forces claimed to control the Liberian countryside, all but the capital city of Monrovia. A force of peacekeepers, mostly Nigerian military, had kept him from getting this last bit of territory, where half the country’s population lived. Recently a tense peace had given way to battles between, mainly, the Nigerian peacekeepers and the NPRAG, but other factions harassed Taylor on the west and the south, and this amounted to the Liberian civil war’s having started up again.

Commercial flights to Liberia had been suspended since the start of the violence. Visitors to Taylor’s territory had to go overland from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire—the Ivory Coast.

At four o’clock on a December morning I got off an Air Afrique jet in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, having arranged to be met by representatives of the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government. I’d spoken with the NPRAG’s Foreign Minister in Washington, a gentleman named Momulu Sirleaf, and Mr. Sirleaf had assured me that everything was arranged. I had forty U.S. one hundred dollar bills stuck in the seams of my pants and a quart of clean water in a plastic canteen and the number of somebody to call if the arrangements went wrong.

With the other arrivals I moved under gray fluorescent light and down the bald concrete halls and past the jaundice-eyed men of Customs in their starched and serviced khaki uniforms. I wandered around a while smelling the tropical rot and general cologne until I was sure nobody had turned out to meet me. Then I hired a car to the Intercontinental Hotel.

The room was small and very clean and wetly air-conditioned, faintly mildewed and dimly lit by a circular neon tube. The fake marble floor had been mopped and would never dry.

I called the number I’d been given, the only local telephone number I had, the number of a Liberian national named Robertson, who was supposed to meet me at the airport. Mr. Robertson was in, but he didn’t know who I was.

I mentioned the Foreign Minister, also Mr. Taylor’s American attorney. They’d assured me, I told him, that everything had been arranged. That I’d be met at the airport, and then escorted first to Danané, an Ivoirian border town, and from there to Charles Taylor’s headquarters in the small city of Gbarnga, about a hundred kilometers inside Liberia.

Mr. Robertson seemed unacquainted with any of this, but after a while he recalled that yes, he’d heard somebody was supposed to interview the president.

I told him it wasn’t an interview, but an extensive profile. People close to the president had arranged for me to spend up to a couple of weeks at his side. I tried to imply it wasn’t anything to be casual about.

My contact promised to check with his people and meet me in the lobby in twenty minutes.

I guessed this could mean as much as two hours, and I waited that long before I went downstairs to wait some more. But when he hadn’t come after four hours, and he didn’t answer his telephone anymore, I guessed he wasn’t coming at all.

From my room I tried to call the States but was informed the long distance telephone operators were on strike. You could receive overseas calls, but you couldn’t call out. They’d been on strike a long time, and they were expected to go on and on.

I took out my correspondence with the important magazine that had promised to arrange everything, with the Foreign Minister who’d assured me that everything had in fact been arranged, with the prominent Maryland lawyer who represented Charles Taylor’s interests abroad and who had reiterated the arrangements.

Now incomprehensible incantations covered the pages. The words of the messages, the names, the places, even the letterheads pulsed with mystery and a joyous insanity.

I had visited West Africa only once before, but I had a good idea what was happening. And I knew it was useless and idiotic to try to resist it.

On a circular couch in the center of the lobby a dozen coal-black whores waited almost motionlessly, and I thought I should go get one and come back to the room and just stay here until I’d spent all my hundreds and then go home. But after another hour Mr. Robertson turned up. He phoned me from the lobby and I went down to meet him, a friendly middle-aged Liberian in loose sports apparel and sandals.

“Everything is arranged,” he told me happily.

I would travel to the border by commercial bus, accompanied by Mr. Robertson’s son John. I’d be escorted across the border into Liberia, met by a presidential staff car, and taken to Gbarnga and to Charles Taylor.

But first, tomorrow, I’d have to meet with a press officer, a young woman named Miss Raefley, who would give me the background. I wasn’t interested in meeting her, but I knew it would be impossible to skip any steps or find a shorter way.

The next morning I had breakfast in the hotel’s dining room with Miss Raefley, a woman in a pink pantsuit, late twenties, more articulate and clearly smarter and more seriously educated than the folks I knew back home. She told me that right now the biggest problem for Greater Liberia—so Taylor’s sector of the country was called—were the Nigerians and their heavy-handed efforts to impose a peace. Because they couldn’t seem to extricate themselves without losing face, Liberia had become known as “Nigeria’s Vietnam.” Their peace-keeping efforts didn’t exclude random bombing raids on the Liberian countryside. I already knew all of this. My question was, was Charles Taylor expecting me, had it really all been arranged? Everything had seemed so simple: Hop over to Abidjan, to the border, to the headquarters. Now I couldn’t even get out of this hotel.

Miss Raefley spoke of Charles Taylor with obvious respect. She and all the Liberians I met on this trip referred to their president as “Charles Taylor” or “the President” and never “President Taylor.” I make nothing of it but only observe the fact. She listed his accomplishments: consolidation of the countryside, elections and a democratic government, general peace and order interrupted only by outside factions.

I didn’t know much about him really, and neither did anybody else, it seemed. I’d made the acquaintance, on my previous visit to the region, of a French journalist who’d been ordered executed by Charles Taylor. But the gun they put to his head wasn’t loaded. It had been a kind of joke. Early in the war Taylor’s faction had captured Monrovia’s AM radio station. He delivered a report at six each evening, saying things like, “We now have one thousand prisoners of the peacekeeping forces and already I have personally killed seven hundred and fifty-three of them and they die easily, it takes only one bullet to finish two of these cowards and murderers who think they can stomp all over Liberia.” He gave these speeches in a loud, high-pitched voice. Maybe this was just a style of oratory, but it got him a doubtful reputation.

Miss Raefley the press officer admitted it: “We’ve definitely lost the propaganda war.” But she insisted the Reconstruction Assembly Government was actually that—a true government—bicameral, consisting of representatives democratically chosen in a recent election. By the will of the majority, Charles Taylor was the president.

I agreed that to the little extent he’d been noticed, Charles Taylor had been demonized by U.S. journalists, myself among them, but here came a chance to fix that, if somebody would only get me back on track to write this profile. I would write up to ten thousand words. The magazine had a huge U.S. circulation. President Clinton would probably read it.

“And,” said Miss Raefley, “I understand they’ve worked out your itinerary.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “There were just a few hitches.”

Mr. Robertson’s son John Robertson was a sincere young man in a tight striped long-sleeved jersey, although, to me, the weather seemed very hot. His father had told me we’d be leaving the hotel at 8:00 A.M. to make the first bus for Danané, the air-conditioned luxury bus. The two men arrived at my hotel about one in the afternoon and took me in a cab to a terminal in a muddy market downtown where long-distance buses stopped. The air-conditioned bus had left at eight, unaccountably right on time, so on an open-air transport we bought three seats for the two of us, which gave us room to lay our packs aside and keep a breeze between us.

The driver refused to estimate our arrival time in Danané. He said, “It’s bad luck.”

We headed north and west on the four-lane highway, the driver gunning his motor and, like everyone else, honking his horn—celebrating the miracle of automotive transport. People staggered wearily along the margin while down on them looked a billboard that said, GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU. Côte d’Ivoire has many good roads, and in 1992 this was the best of them, passing as it did alongside Yamoussoukro, once the tribal village of the aged President Houphouët-Boigny and now the site of his vast palace and also of the monument to his spirituality, the Basillica, which was built for half a billion dollars, to some people’s great disgust. The Pope visited it reluctantly, viewing it as a symbol of top-heaviness and African big-man excess. But the people loved their president, had loved him ever since he took power in 1960. He kept crocodiles in the man-made lake alongside the palace. Attendants fed them live chickens in a small ceremony each day at dusk. Our bus sped alongside the high concrete walls of Yamoussoukro and into the surrounding arboreal chaos, the people in the towns and along the country roads so thrilled by its passage—even though there were six a day, and plenty of other traffic—that they howled and shouted greetings and the kids leapt in the air as it flew past. When they actually wanted the bus to stop, they stretched out an arm and silently waved it up and down as if petting an invisible pony, looking completely bored.

After dark we came to Danané, the border town, which really did feel perched on the edge of an immensely different zone. We stopped at a kiosk cafe—a bare bulb dangling, a tape blaring, and one child dancing in the dust. Herdsmen and their lanky Brahman cattle were settling down for the night on the highway’s tarmac, which still held the heat of the sun. The pavement ended here and a dirt track headed off toward Liberia, a region three hundred miles long and half as wide without electricity or running water or commerce to speak of, a land fallen into the hands of wild young men with automatic rifles.

We were supposed to go the Hotel Lianes, an adobe place in a dirt yard, very inexpensive, and there rendezvous with a man named Winston Holder. In the night, with only a few lamps burning here and there in the town, it was impossible to tell who among the shadows wandering around might be Winston Holder. John asked but nobody could tell him. Information came his way that maybe we should actually be looking for a guy named Lincoln Smythe. About midnight we turned in having found nobody at all.

“Everything is arranged,” John Robertson told me.

“Thank God.”

“I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem,” he said.

“Okay…”

“Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in.”

“A journalist? Who?”

“I don’t know who. They thought it must be you.”

“But it wasn’t me. I’m me,” I said, though from the first hour in this country I’d begun to doubt it.

“I have Lincoln Smythe’s address. He’ll put us right. Everything will be arranged promptly, and we’ll work out your itinerary.”

“I thought everything was arranged,” I said.

By the bare bulb hung above our straw beds I saw, far back in John Robertson’s eyes, the eternal West African question: What is this guy going on about?

“Naturally,” he said, “but we just have to work out your itinerary.”

Everything is arranged doesn’t mean you should expect to get anywhere or accomplish anything. In fact, for sanity’s sake, those two ideas have to be banished: the idea of getting somewhere and the idea of accomplishing something. Everything is arranged means that all is complete, the great plan of the universe is unfolding before our eyes. So eat, drink, sleep. Everything is arranged.

As we drove around the next morning in a hired car, looking for Lincoln Smythe or Winston Holder or somebody who could help us find either one, it came clear that Danané, a town of about a thousand serving to administrate a larger surrounding population whose number I couldn’t guess at, hosted a sizable bunch of Liberians who did not enjoy much status here. Some served as agents for Taylor’s faction, others just preferred a place where a few things worked and people lived in peace.

The second time we visited his address, we found Lincoln Smythe at home. He answered the door in his underwear. He didn’t know who we were, or who Winston Holder was. He asked us for cigarettes. He got dressed and took us to a kiosk cafe where I ate fried eggs, and he and John turned me over to a new man.

The new man was in his thirties, well spoken, neatly dressed, ready to take me to Liberia to see what he called “the situation on the ground.” He shook my hand and introduced himself as Augustus Shaacks. He spelled his name. I didn’t ask him who the hell he thought he was because John was gone, and Lincoln was gone, and Winston Holder had never materialized. Augustus Shaacks was all I had.

“I understand one of Charles Taylor’s staff cars is waiting for us at the border,” Augustus said. “We’ll pick it up, go to Gbarnga, and meet with the press officers and get you immediately to the President.”

“Can we hire a car to take us to the border?”

“Most definitely.”

“Well—” I...