The God Child

by Nana Oforiatta Ayim

  I looked at the producer and Ben who had put their heads together and were talking about me.

  ‘Quite wonderful,’ the producer said.

  I wanted to shoot them both. Instead I got up to go to the bathroom.

  After Ben dropped Bernie off, we drove back east on the flyover past King’s Cross and the new British Library, through the still-Dickensian streets of Islington, past the Old Street roundabout, into the heartland of abandoned warehouses.

  At Mungo’s warehouse building, the sound of music and voices reached down to us from the fifth floor. People piled through the open door, and up the stairs.

  I turned to Ben. ‘How could you be so cruel?’

  He was silent for a while. ‘I think she had a good time.’

  ‘She is in love with you.’

  ‘So? I’m in love with you.’

  ‘It’s not the same. She’s only eighteen. You are twenty years older than her.’

  ‘She’s only a couple of years younger than you.’

  ‘I know, but she’s so much younger than me.’

  ‘She’s a country girl, who wants to get married.’

  ‘And you are a dirty old man.’

  His hands were gripping the steering wheel and he was frowning.

  Good, I thought; I wasn’t finished. ‘She couldn’t even look at me.’

  ‘That’s because you intimidate her.’

  ‘I intimidate her? Why on earth would I intimidate her?’

  ‘Because you’re beautiful. You’re clever. And you don’t doubt yourself. That gives you power.’

  ‘Do I intimidate you?’

  ‘You scare me shitless,’ he laughed.

  How could anyone who laughed so limitlessly be so callous?

  ‘Can I kiss you?’ he asked.

  I said nothing.

  He leant over and kissed me. ‘Can I come up?’

  I shook my head, looked at how his open heart came through in his face, thought of how I liked how he kissed me, of how I wanted to journey with him, but of how my power, what I had of it, would be squashed under the weight of his money, houses, cars and his ready-made place in the world; of how I was still an unborn foetus to his grown boy-man.

  ‘How’s your work going?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been given all this money. I would have made it on my own.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. Not about the money, but the weight of obligation. To have been given, and to feel the need to give back. To have to be bigger than yourself, even when you needed to be small.

  ‘Why don’t we drop all this? The rat race. Trying to be like everyone else. Let’s go away. Go and live in the sun somewhere. You’ll write. I’ll make art…’

  I smiled. ‘It’s easy for you.’

  ‘I’ll look after you.’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  The look in his eyes made me hurt for him, and for myself.

  I wanted to tell him that I would never be like him, that my obligations were deeper, and the wounds far harder to quell.

  25

  Death is an absolute necessity, because it defines life. The writer and film-maker Pasolini said this in an interview shortly before his own.

  The loss of connections we fight all our lives to find.

  The inevitability of death. The necessity of it as it defines life. If time is linear, the possibility of growth. If it is cyclical, the continual realisation of our smallness in the face of all things. Fragments of time. Glimpses of knowledge through that love which illuminates us and makes us known. Consciousness in the place of imagination.

  If different deaths define a life to differing degrees, then my grandfather’s defined my mother’s the most. Kojo’s caused a visible weakening. My uncle’s wake brought about her final collapse.

  Then: ‘You all love me, after all.’

  Hope of a reality, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin describes, in which succeeding generations wake into more and more profound levels of awareness. Our continual striving – towards knowledge, towards connection, towards sight. Our eternal ignorance in the face of life and death.

  ‘I am so excited,’ I said to her on the phone the day before. ‘I can finally work on the book.’

  ‘Do you have enough money to go?’ she asked, as she always did.

  My last ever words to her on the phone, as always: ‘I love you.’

  Still, the paradoxes and imperfections of love. The mistakes we learn from, the pain we do not forget.

  Out of the window now, velvety moss on craggy mountains and trees that grow out of the rocks as in my grandfather’s appellation, oboo petepre ma nase apom, and all those flowers and all those shrubs for which I have no names.

  I read of the love the Greeks called agape, described as the highest known to humanity, as self-sacrificing and all-encompassing. It reminds me of my mother and the space her love gave me to define myself.

  It was also stubborn and tempestuous. Often it shone so loud, I had to escape its noise to find my silence.

  I think of the man my mother wanted me to marry, whom I could not even try to love however much I wanted. Of the coldness I saw in him that she did not.

  How still my wedding day was always to be hers.

  Her dream of a bombastic glamorous affair, instead of mine, candle-lit, with only the most cherished friends and family. A bargain for her happiness.

  A dream I dreamt when my mother was still alive, the man I love dancing with her, holding her hand as he walks to our house framed by mango trees and frangipani. We live on one side of the courtyard, she on the other.

  My life inextricably entwined with hers.

  The bus halts; a mother and her teenage daughter get on. The evergreens spread up and out like fish spines, and I no longer feel the life-stopping pain I did when I watched a mother and daughter’s mutual tenderness not so long ago. The only comfort then being that soon these mothers too would die, and leave their daughters.

  26

  Ben announces his engagement on Facebook. There is an album full of pictures of his new fiancée, Bernie – the very same girl who was in love with him when he was in love with me. They are happy, as evidenced by a series of photographs for public private consumption. I feel a sepia-coloured joy for them; envy for the lives I have chosen not to live, for those girls at school named Lucy, Diana and Chloe, who saw their fulfilment so early, in the dream of marriage, children, a house in the countryside. ‘Let’s give up this race,’ he said to me, ‘and run away.’

  But it has never been enough.

  I wanted this happiness.

  Of trying to find truth through words on the page.

  Nothing else, however hard I have hidden it, has ever mattered as much.

  I have come to this small farm on a mountain alone; the nearest person is a twenty-minute hike through the forest. Before the owner of the house leaves to go back down the mountain, he installs a projector with a large screen, tells me in the winter he will project films from Africa onto the snow.

  He has restored the house so that it is just as it was when the farmer who last lived here died; so that the memory of him lives on in its patterns.

  Why do we hold so keenly on to the past; build museums, write books, preserve? So as not to die? To look back and have something alive of that person? When I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, do I think of Joyce? The House of Hunger, of Marechera? A Room of One’s Own, of Woolf ? Yes, but not of their corporeal forms, not of what they had for breakfast, who they loved, how they hurt.

  The light comes in now, and it is dawn. I put on a long cardigan over my white nightdress, the blue wellington boots I got from Portobello Market in London, the blue-and-white printed scarf from a market in N’Djamena in Chad. Outside, the lake, rocks and trees stretch away as far as I can see. I crouch down from the strange painful numbness inside, unable to uncoil.

  The truth is, I do not know: how to remember her, or where in the world to look for her, or fo
r the essence of what she left behind.

  I walk up the mountain to escape myself, past the bluebells and daisies, past the carcass of a sheep tied to a rock with blue string, and feel a type of madness setting in.

  27

  The invitation read:

  Tribal Gathering and the British Museum invite you to

  Disappearing Africa:

  Tribal Portraits

  On the back of the postcard, in a black-and-white photograph staged in a pseudo-Vogue-like composition, were five young women with geometrically patterned materials wrapped around their waists, intricately twisted headscarves, large round collars of powder on their shoulders and bare breasts, with ‘Dahomey Girls by Irving Penn’ written in the right-hand corner.

  The supervisor for the grant I received, James Murray, had given it to me. He had helped me look through shelves and shelves of boxes in the British Museum’s cold storerooms in Orsman Road, through the indexes of museums in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, New York, until I had finally found what I was looking for.

  One abusua kuruwa, the brass pan at the foot of the bed into which all the children and grandchildren cut locks of their hair for him to take on his ancestral journey; the akrafokonmu, a flat gold half-moon and star, specially treated, to draw to it any elements that would endanger the balance of the King’s kra, the essence that flowed through him and every other human being; several of the King’s sandals, black ones with gold cowries, leather ones with golden stars, gold ones with the symbol of the leopard on them; thick faded Kidderminster carpets, damask sofas, a large silver chair, an ivory gold-embossed cigarette box, Arabic yataghans and scimitars and brass blunderbusses that belonged to my grandfather; gold rings, twirled, sculpted, incised and with the motifs of animals; a large heavy gold bracelet; delicate gold weights of brass hunters and horn blowers, an upright man with an offering of eggs, another seated on an asipim chair holding a sword, two figures intertwined, curved and flat fish, turtles, crocodiles, antelope and deer; a whole world in miniature; scales, spoons, a sieve, a set of small brushes; and brass vessels and boxes made of brass with Arabic engravings brought from the deserts of North Africa, their lids sculpted with figures, an orchestra, three women, a child; a mud-brown batakari kese, a warrior’s smock; three amanpam pom, spokesman staffs, two gold and one blackened; two mfena, sacred swords; four ahoprafo, their silver-and-gold elephant tail whisks. I had documented each of these, tried to find their provenance, and now, James Murray said, he had something to tell me.

  I took off my pyjamas, showered, got on the number 7 bus to Russell Square, and walked in under the vast criss-crossed glass roof of the Great Court of the British Museum.

  James Murray was at reception, with folds in his large dark bushy eyebrows that cast a shadow over his long pale face and white beard, like the clouds over the Black Mountains of his native Wales. He put his right hand over the side of his mouth as he talked and I wondered how it must feel to grow old and watch your body decay with each passing day.

  ‘Your favourite professor has found someone you know, who will take on the entire cost and logistics of the building of—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His name is Gideon…’

  ‘I know him; he’s been trying to get me to work with him.’

  ‘He has the money, and he’s been looking for someone to help him, someone who knows the ropes—’

  ‘You mean someone he can steal from? He’s a businessman. He knows nothing about art or culture…’

  ‘When will you learn to cut your coat accordingly?’

  ‘He’s not even from Ghana.’

  ‘Stop being such a cultural imperialist, or should I say racist…’ He stopped and looked down at me. ‘You don’t have to be African through and through or be called Olufemi or Abena to be qualified to research an African country. In fact, you’re not. I don’t know how your name fits in with your cultural puritanism. And, as a matter of fact, you sound more like the English establishment than he does.’

  ‘But it’s time for us to tell our own histories, you’ve said so yourself. They’ve been told for us long enough, and not very well.’

  ‘Well, if you feel like that, then bloody well take the opportunity when it’s handed to you. Undeservedly, at that.’

  ‘What has he done to deserve it? You say it makes no difference where you’re from, but you’re wrong. It does. That’s why he’ll be heading the project with no knowledge at all, and I’ll be assisting him, with all of it.’

  ‘Yes, and when you’ve gained some humility and experience, you’ll be heading one all of your own.’

  James Murray went down the steps that led into the Africa Gallery. It was already dark in the staircase, except for the spotlights that lit up the masks, shields and feather headdresses in glass cases on the walls.

  I followed him down. ‘Did they have lighting people come in specially to reconstruct the heart of darkness?’ I asked; then, quieter, ‘Why are there never any black people at these events?’ I looked around: there was a woman with long dreadlocks among the men in suits and ladies in ‘smart casual’. It was Juliet Fagunwe, a Nigerian artist patronised by the British Museum. ‘Oh, sorry. I spotted a token.’

  ‘Pipe down now,’ James Murray said to me, ‘or you’ll be fed to those lions pacing up and down outside your front door.’

  ‘And wouldn’t that make a pretty headline.’

  ‘Wait here, and try not to cause havoc. I’m going to see what I can do on your sorry behalf.’

  I turned to look at the black-and-white photographs on the wall. They were even worse than I had imagined. Mostly they were of naked girls with pert breasts, like you would see in Victorian peep-show pictures, arms lifted behind their heads or crossed coyly in front of them. They either had no titles or ones like Benin Girl or North African Nudes. The girls in the latter were no older than thirteen or fourteen and were wearing large jewels or smelling flowers or had scarves draped loosely over their heads. They were alongside portraits of Egyptian and Moroccan women, wholly veiled, showing only their kohled beguiling eyes, which cried out, with all the semantic subtlety of an African child with flies on its face and a distended belly, Save us, oh brave liberal-minded Westerners, from our savage fates and entrapments.

  I scoured the wall plaques for some context or explanation as to why they were side by side, but found none. I moved on to a picture taken by that harbinger of aesthetic fascism, Leni Riefenstahl, of a young virile oiled woman, ready to dance or pounce, or whatever else the occidental imagination would have her do. The plaque read Nuba Dancers of Kau and Riefenstahl myopically described the physical strain and difficulties she had endured in capturing these trophies. At least, I thought, they did not have the generic ones of older women with drooping breasts. I wanted to leave.

  I looked for James Murray and saw him through the throng of people, sipping a glass of white wine with his left hand and reaching into a bowl of crisps with his right. He was listening with one ear, to a thin wiry gesticulating man in a cream suit with a silk scarf tied around his neck, and to Gideon, who looked grey-haired and handsome in a navy-blue jacket.

  I turned back to the photographs, skipped the rest of the nudes and started looking at images of the men; the gender division was the only concession to curatorial arrangement that I could see. The first image, of a man in a long white robe and a brocade-decorated joho mantle, was described only as African Man with a Fierce Look. I was sure he’d look fiercer still if he knew how he was being portrayed here.

  I remembered what Kojo had told me of the palace drums, which when played in the olden days on the battlefield could awaken all the dead to fight on their kingdom’s side. I wished I had those drums to hand now to animate all the figures frozen in the photographs – the half-naked boy carrying a dead leopard upside down and the giraffe in the typical scene of an ‘African landscape’ – to make them step out of the pictures, stand face to face with the throng of English tribal-art lovers and show themselves as they were,
rather than as the exoticised objects they had been reduced to.

  I looked at the plaque next to a picture of four crouching men with large feather headdresses and skins wrapped around their waists, which quoted the inscription on the back of the picture: The dance symbolises a continuous, unchanging element in the lives of the people – their ancient traditions and tribal lore. The only hint of any evolution was the inclusion of a photograph by the Malian photographer, Seydou Keïta, whom an Italian collector – having recognised contemporary African art as a good business investment and knighted himself Ambassador of African Art, insisting that none of his artists had any formal education – had made into an art star. This picture with the trademark patterned backdrop was of a young couple wearing contrasting patterns leaning into each other. It might have been the exhibition’s small saving grace, if not for the plaque, which read: Despite his basic technical obstacles, Keïta revealed his subjects as they had not been seen before, wearing Western suits and bow ties, sitting on motorbikes and holding radios. Not been seen before by whom? I looked around with disgust at the infinitely civilised West. I wondered if they all thought I was little more than an anomaly, a female Tarzan who had escaped the wilds and taken on their garbs and mannerisms. I had to leave.

  I almost collided with an open-shirted man.

  Sweat mottled his thinning hair and sat on his upper lip like a dewy moustache. ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘What do you think of these?’

  I had no interest in answering him. Whenever I went to performances, exhibitions or theatre pieces where the theme was Africa, people inevitably solicited me as the voice of authenticity, and I had no urge to satisfy the smug man’s desires. China Delville, a gallerist specialising in contemporary African art, who was wearing a deconstructed linen tent and narrow multicoloured glasses, came to stand with us. She nodded intensely at the pictures, though her eyes seemed to be looking at a point beyond them.