Where the road began

Togo and other stories

You stepped onto the damp tarmac of Lomé airport, in Togo, on a July morning. Your eyes, still tired, lifted toward the rays of sunlight breaking through the low clouds. It was 2009. You were eighteen and, for the first time, you were walking on a continent other than your own. This new reality felt so distant that you barely thought about what was waiting for you.

Immediately, you felt yourself shrink beneath the dense, suffocating air of the tropics. On the way to the hostel, through the open window that swept your hair back, the landscape drifted past in a haze: roads lined with red earth, puddles still fresh from the night, open porches of houses with faded walls from which scooters and women in bright headwraps came and went. That evening, slightly dazed, lying on a damp mattress, you watched a cloud of insects spin noisily above your head before crashing against the mosquito net. Nearby, the others were already asleep. A smell of frying oil and insect repellent lingered in the room.

It was only the next morning that the place took shape. Standing motionless on the roof, you contemplated the houses with palm-shaded courtyards where wood burned here and there, the distant noise of horns and trucks, shiny billboards rising from the dust. Later, you would learn to lose yourself in those cities filled with mysteries that left you both fascinated and helpless—and you would come to enjoy it. But in those early days, wandering aimlessly, looking away, avoiding the vendors who called out to you, you must have looked like a lost creature.

This journey, which seemed to last a lifetime, was to carry you across the country for a month, a narrow strip of land between savannah and tropics, its borders once drawn with a ruler on a map somewhere far from there. Blurry lines, tangled histories whose complexity you barely understood.

From one town to another, from the coast to isolated inland villages, always aboard an old bus that struggled at the slightest strain, you absorbed the crushing light, the pale green of palm trees against the brown soil, buildings bleached by the sun, the vivid colors of a dress suddenly emerging from a cloud of dust. You tried to enter this new density with surprise, fascination, and impatience. At every breakdown, you climbed down to the roadside, and the waiting hours filled with lively conversations with whoever happened to pass by.

In the village where you stayed for several weeks, the tent had been pitched at the foot of a banana plantation. You rose from it at six in the morning, already sweating beneath the first rays of sun. The days stretched between the construction of a new building among cassava fields, long walks to the well several kilometers away, and slow hours spent in the shade of huts scattered across the plain, small islands of red earth. Around noon, you sought refuge in an open hut where a few tables gathered card players before work could start again. There were also the days by the ocean, and along Lake Togo watching fishermen pull in their nets beneath gathering storms. Time seemed to stretch endlessly then.

Always, you raised your camera toward whatever appeared along your path. But if you took notes, none remain. What is left of Togo now anyway, beyond a few photographs and scattered sensations? How can you know whether the stories you tell today were not created to give your memory what it expected from the journey?

The problem was that you did not know then what you were trying to hold onto, nor what separated that world from your own. Arriving with certainties, you left with clichés. That day, you had not come to encounter a country, but to confront the place from which you were looking at it. It was not the country that resisted your look; it was your look that struggled to let go of its habits. And how irritating that ignorance felt.

You returned ill and very tired. Perhaps you thought you would never take the road again. Only years later, when your photographs had remained hidden, did you measure the mark that journey had left on you—and understand how, far from pulling you away from the road, it had simply set you down at its beginning.