Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou

tells me how, on the night when I started kicking like a little bandit to be let out of her womb, she walked all the way to the central hospital in Mouyondzi. Inearly didn’t make it into this world because I was afraid of the men and women sitting round chatting in the delivery room. I thought that when I arrived on this earth there’d be silence, that I’d be all alone with her, like I was inside her, when I swam around holding on to the tube that sent me my food every day. But there you go, I didn’t want my mother to be unhappy, I didn’t want to go to heaven like my sisters. If people were sitting around talking, then there must be something wrong, and I wanted to know what, because no one was going to explain to me up in heaven why people like sitting around talking on earth, even when they’re in a hospital room. I wanted to see these people’s faces with my own eyes, hear their voices with my own ears. In fact, the people sitting round talking in the delivery room thought I was going to be silly enough to go the same way as my two sisters. But I wanted to live, I wanted to follow my mother wherever she went, I wanted to protect her against all the policemen on earth who threaten their wives with pistols when they’re meant to be threatening criminals. So the nurses watched me round the clock. I watched them too, with one eye, and on their sad faces I read that they were expecting the worst, because they’d already seen my mother in this hospital, in this same room, seen her leave in tears with a stone-cold baby in her arms, heading for the morgue, where she leaves the baby in the fridge. Some of the nurses were checking to see if I was breathing still. I said to myself: ‘I’m going to have a game with these adults, I’m going to show them I know their language, I know what they’re thinking.’ I had this little game, where I held my breath, closed my eyes, squeezed my lips and my buttocks, and sometimes went so pale I looked like the corpse of a white baby, since black babies, when they come into this world, are generally all white. And only turnblack afterwards. Otherwise their parents will argue and think the real father’s a white man from up town. Thinking I was truly dead, the nurses rushed towards me. They started whimpering with my mother. Suddenly I opened my eyes. I felt like shouting: leave me alone, can’t you see I’m breathing? Can’t you see I’ve been alive for three days now, and my sisters were not even here for one day? If I really wanted to go to heaven would I be hanging around here all this time like an idiot who doesn’t know what he has to do to die? I may be a baby, I still know how to die, but I don’t want to stop breathing! I want to live! Let me rest now, I’ve come a long way! And let’s have a bit of quiet please. We’re in a hospital here!
    Maman Pauline came home with me a week after I arrived in this world. Her policeman’s never shown up, though he must have heard of me. My mother heard he was already going round saying he wasn’t my father, that she’d made this child with some local guy, the postman, maybe, or the palm-wine tapper, who, like the postman, passed by our house each morning. That’s what they were saying, all over Mouyondzi, and people came to spy on us. But they never found a man living in our house, or who came round at midnight and left in secret at five in the morning. In the market some of the women said that my mother had had a child with a devil who came to our house at night. I don’t think anyone there ever saw my face. When we went out, my mother covered my body from head to foot, leaving just two little holes so I could at least see the colour of the sky, because up there no one’s wicked.
    Maman Pauline left the district two months after my arrival. No way was she going to spend her time arguing with women who said untrue things about