Harar had all the fascination of small-town life with the added charm of exoticism and routine atrocity.
-Rimbaud: A Biography, Graham Robb
Harar, le 20 fevrier 1891…Ma chere mere,…je vais mal a present. Du moins, j’ai a la jambe droite de varices qui me font souffrir beaucoup. Voila ce qu’on gagne a peiner dans ces triste pays…J’ai demande a Aden un bas pour les varices mais je doute que cela se trouve. Ces bas pour varices se trouvent peut-etre a Vouziers. Assurez-vous-en et repondez-moi. Rimbaud.
-Rimbaud’s letter to his mother complaining about varicose veins, asking her to buy a pair of support stockings in the town of Vouziers and send to him in Harar on the Ethiopian plateau. “This is what you get for struggling [to make a living] in these sad places.” He lived in Aden and the Horn of Africa for eleven years and died of complications from bone cancer in his right leg while trying to return, nine months after first mentioning his pain in this letter.
“Not a single book, not a single bar…nothing happening in the street”, Rimbaud complained, not about Harar as a grown man but rather about Vouziers when still a teenager. Harar in fact besides qat chews has a lot going on, including the hyenaman who hand feeds his pets everynight on the outskirts of town and asks tourists to join him. (You can read about him in Among the Bone Eaters by anthropologist Marcus Baynes-Rock.) I volunteered to help, kneeling and bending over so a hyena could jump on my back to reach the piece of meat he was dangling from up high. I have the picture to prove it, both my eyes and the hyena’s glowing red from the camera flash.
Our group had a bit of a medical emergency too while there, but unlike Rimbaud no one died. The Norwegian almost fainted, weak from dehydration, stomach troubles, and maybe the sudden change in altitude. We had just come up from the coastal plain. Luckily the Norwegian was attended by Dorothy, who before this some in the group were grumbling about because her bad leg was slowing us down they thought. Dorothy took charge in the hospital and insisted that the doctor give the Norwegian a new glucose bag, needle, and intravenous tube, this being Harar.
When Rimbaud was asked in Africa by a new acquaintance if he was not the famous poet, his Une Saison en Enfer having been published to great acclaim in his absence from Paris, he said no- “I is an other”, somebody else. Dorothy with her limp, the Norwegian in her full length black hijab lying on a hospital gurney, me as the tour leader supposedly with every answer on my first visit to Ethiopia- in Harar we were all somebody else.