Je vous souhaite des estomacs moins en danger que le mien et des occupations mois ennuyeuses que les miennes. So wrote Rimbaud to his mother from Aden. I pulled his Correspondence off the shelf in the library (it was right beside my head) and found Rimbaud the kid poet turning into a disgruntled and desperate traveller, a pioneer of the fringe. He signs his letters home as simply “Rimbaud” and wrote, The only country more boring than this is yours. But even his laundry lists attract me more than the “finest” of the modern Arabic drama we read in class.
-Letter Home, October 19, 1978
Rimbaud called himself Somebody Else when a fellow passenger on the steamer to Aden asked if he was Rimbaud the poet. He was on his way to Harar up on the Ethiopian plateau via Tadjoura and Lake Abbe where I went later. The farther away from Paris he went, the more he complained. Heat, unclean water, flies, varicose veins. He wrote to his mother to send him special stockings. And he sounded a bit like me in Cairo that year, complaining about class, classmates and roommates, the Americans on my good days and the Egyptians on my bad. As much as I tried, I never became somebody else.