Vol. XIII contributor Tony D’Souza has graciously given us permission to reprint his essay in full. You can learn more about Tony and his work on his website.

Copies of Vol. XIII are available for purchase here.

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THERE WERE THREE of them; the driver and his two apprentices, they came from the north near Katiola with their small flatbed truck, white in the places where the original finish remained. The truck was an old Hyundai 65, somehow here now across oceans, continents, who knows from where and previously used for God knows what, beat to hell, with mismatched wheels of four different sizes, the windshield smashed in three places, the body covered in dents like scars—like a buffalo that had been lashed past all imaginable endurance.

The truck was their everything. When they sat for lunch, it was in the shadow of the truck. Often when it broke down, they slept in the cab or beneath it. When there was money for diesel, they poured half a dozen old glass liquor bottles of the stuff into the truck’s belly, then the apprentices set their shoulders against the tail and pushed, the driver urged them forward from his perch, then popped the gear and brought the truck into rumbling, smoke-belching life. The apprentices would heave themselves over the gate, tumble in the bed, and the truck would chug off on a dirt track into the bush. They’d be gone all day, or sometimes two or three, coming back again with a load of plantains, the apprentices sitting atop the great mound of cargo like flies on the back of a beast.

Les Petites Camionaires: the guys of the little truck, the guys and the little truck, the guys with the little truck; their name meant all of these and more. There was a prestige in the title that can’t be translated; to understand that, you have to be here, to see how even though the truck was a hideous piece of junkyard shit, it was more than anyone else had or could hope to have. The truck was a miracle of continuity, not a minor one, whose delicate existence depended on parts for which there would be no easy replacement, whose engine required a knowledge beyond intimacy to maintain. When they were not driving it, one of them was always in its guts, waist-deep in the motor, scraping something clean, massaging gears with thick oil. The truck gave them possibilities; that they might do more than simply put away enough food to last through the dry season; that they might save money, build metal-roofed homes back in the north, allow their parents to age without worry, perhaps make the haj to Mecca one day. These three boys had a different existence from the villagers because of the truck; they had no sure foothold without it. It’s not me deciding that or inputting too much on the relationship. It’s how they referred to themselves and how anyone who knew them and liked them put it: Celui la, il se travail deh, sont les Petites Camionaires. Petites Camionaires la, an ka bara fala deh. The truck was who they were.

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