Somebody Else

Written by Charles Nicholl

Narrated by Will Howard

Length

13h 35m

"In his extended prose poem from 1873, A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud claimed that ‘il faut être absolument moderne’ – one must be absolutely modern! But the last 11 years of Rimbaud’s life were far from what most would imagine as the ‘absolument moderne’. In 1880 Rimbaud travelled to Aden (now in Yemen) and then on into east Africa, where he was to spend most of his time for the next 11 years working as a trader and definitely not writing poetry – becoming ‘somebody else’. So a greater proportion of Rimbaud’s life was spent in the Arabian peninsula or in the interior of what is now Ethiopia than it was in the ‘modern’ bars and dives of Paris, London or Brussels. In Somebody Else, those 11 years are Nicholl’s focus – years about which the little that had been previously written was often misleading or downright wrong. Looking for answers led Nicholl to follow in Rimbaud’s footsteps in the early 1990s, finding traces and hints in Aden, on the coast of east Africa, and in the city of Harar in Ethiopia. As well as an account of literary detection, Somebody Else is a fascinating glimpse into areas of the world often given little attention, evoking their colours and smells, their complexities and their histories. Both Rimbaud’s experiences and Nicholl’s give such a striking sense of colonialism and its effects – from the life of King Menelik of Shoa to the lives of contemporary sex workers in Djibouti. Will Howard reads with a seductive calm that draws attention powerfully to the extraordinary, barely believable twists and turns of Rimbaud’s life. Cover: Liana Finck"