Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

While working on A Basket of Leaves, for which my goal was to find at least one interesting book about every country in Africa, a few countries were special challenges. Equatorial Guinea. Chad. But there were only two cases where I was so defeated that I ended up talking about an excerpt from a book rather than a whole book. One was the little island country of São Tomé and Príncipe. The other was Djibouti, for which I discussed a chapter from Charles Nicholl’s excellent biography of Rimbaud in Africa, Somebody Else.

It was a great pleasure, then, to find that master storyteller Elmore Leonard had set his latest novel in Djibouti. The book concerns a tough young documentary filmmaker named Dara; a 72-year-old ex-merchant sailor named Xavier (her assistant); a billionaire with a surprising knowledge of guns and explosives; some Somali pirates; a couple of Al Qaeda fanatics; and a tanker full of liquefied natural gas. What could go wrong?

Elmore Leonard isn’t known for wasting time with description. ("Don’t go into great detail describing places and things” is the ninth of his ten rules of good writing.) But along the way you do get some local color. Here is Xavier guiding Dara through the city.

“Now we comin to the Central Market, biggest one in town, the mosque standin over it. Rows and rows of stalls sellin shit—clothes, chickens, all kind of fruit and vegetables. Look at the outfits, the colors on the women. Lookit over here, the table of meat.”

Dara was shooting it.

“It’s moving.”

“That’s the flies on the piece of goat loin, all movin around to get a bite. Look at the girl there, holding branches of leaves, cellophane around the bunch. She sellin khat. Only good two days so you keep it out of the air.” Xavier reached over to touch Dara shooting the rows of stalls, the women sitting under umbrellas. “Look at those guys, the wads in their jaws. Suckin on khat, known as the flower of paradise. All day they be chewin and suckin. They fly it in from Ethiopia, deliver ten eleven tons of chew every morning. Keep the men happy.”