by Ben Okri
She was so disturbed that morning by the new gaps opening up in the trees, by the great irokos crashing down from their ancient heights, that she went in circles round her hut, holding back the rage that swelled in her heart. And while she went round in circles, fuming at the sacred groves exposed to the sky, hobbling and limping with a walking stick, shouting instructions at the one-legged girl, Mum left our room and set out for the forest to find out who had cut down the tree that had fallen on me.
Dad didn’t go to work that morning. He stayed in and his smile became sinister, and his eyes took on a dangerous aspect.
That same morning, the old woman, hobbling round her hut, felt an unnatural explosion shaking the earth on the margin of the nation. The tremor made her kick a stone with her good foot, and she let out a great cry. At that same moment the explosion, quaking the earth and the seas, disturbed the forest and woke a giant spirit from its long slumber. The spirit woke up, and found that it had been made homeless. Confused, it began to wander through the forest looking for its familiar abode, its great baobab tree with its moss and serene lianas. And the agitation of the wandering spirit started a wind which blasted Mum back as she entered the forest, following the noise of the tree-cutters. But Mum fought her way through the wind and rested in the shadow of the black rock.
She followed the trail of broken silver eggs. Ambiguous birds hovered above her unseen. Thin wisps of smoke and wood-sprites floated beside her, listening to her being. As she went deeper into the forest, pursuing the disembodied noise of trees being felled, the noise kept moving, kept eluding her. The forest itself was echoing the sound, carrying it from place to place. It was as if the noises of trees being destroyed had themselves become forest dwellers.
In the room, my head splitting with agony, I saw the mischievous spirits imitating the tree-cutting noises. Deceiving my mother. Luring her in. Drawing her deeper into the labyrinth. And then a yellow smoke obscured her, and I didn’t see her again for a long time.
SIX
A curious interchange
THAT MORNING DAD cleaned out the room, swept the floor, scrubbed the walls, and went to prepare food for the family. It was amazing to witness Dad’s sudden domestication. The compound people stared at him in astonishment as he fetched water from the well and washed our clothes. They were particularly astounded at the concentration with which he washed Mum’s undergarments. They stared with disbelief as he split firewood, and ground the pepper and tomatoes and melon seeds on our rough grinding stone. And they watched open-mouthed as he pounded the yams, his mighty chest heaving, and as he fried the meats, his eyes watering in the smoke-filled kitchen.
When he finished with the cooking he came into the room with the steaming pots of fragrant stews, deposited them in the cupboard, and then set out with Mum’s basket for the market-place. Two hours later, his face caked with dust, veins throbbing on his forehead, he returned weighed down with excess shopping. He unloaded the yam tubers, the vegetables, the snails, the bundles of dried fish, chuckling to himself as he arranged them in pots and basins. He sat down, had a cigarette, and then took Mum’s tray of goods and went out to hawk her provisions.
I was confused that day. There was yellow smoke in my eyes. There were silver eggs in my dreams. Mum was in the labyrinth, raging with a passion that belonged to Dad. And Dad was sweating in the homestead, performing the tasks that Mum did every day. It was strange how Dad’s brief domestication spread outrageous rumours through our streets. But it was wonderful to note how his serenity finally conquered them.
SEVEN
The battle of rewritten histories
I DIDN’T MOVE from bed the rest of that day, but the whole world was in the room. All the events of our history were alive in the little space. Like ghost dramas. Is history the livid hallucinations of time? I slept through the seepages of many events wracking and tossing me on the bed. The ghosts of historical consequences wandered through our room, looking for their destinations. The rumours of violence and the faintest echoes of gunshots reverberated through the floor. Continental liberation wars were being fought in nine places on the ceiling. And the Governor-General, an Englishman with a polyp on the end of his nose, had just completed the destruction of all the incriminating documents relating to the soon-to-be-created nation. When he had finished he proceeded, in his sloping calligraphic hand, to rewrite our history.
He rewrote the space in which I slept. He rewrote the long silences of the country which were really passionate dreams. He rewrote the seas and the wind, the atmospheric conditions and the humidity. He rewrote the seasons, and made them limited and unlyrical. He reinvented the geography of the nation and the whole continent. He redrew the continent’s size on the world map, made it smaller, made it odder. He changed the names of places which were older than the places themselves. He redesigned the phonality of African names, softened the consonants, flattened the vowels. In altering the sound of the names he altered their meaning and affected the destiny of the named. He rewrote the names of fishes and bees, of trees and flowers, of mountains and herbs, of rocks and plants. He rewrote the names of our food, our clothes, our abodes, our rivers. The renamed things lost their ancient weight in our memory. The renamed things lost their old reality. They became lighter, and stranger. They became divorced from their old selves. They lost their significance and sometimes their shape. And they suddenly seemed new to us – new to us who had given them the names by which they responded to our touch.
Caught in his passionate objectivity, the Governor-General made our history begin with the arrival of his people on our shores. Sweating into his loose cotton shirt, he turned himself into a fairy-tale figure awakening stone-age man from an immemorial slumber, a slumber that began shortly after the creation of the human race. The Governor-General, in his rewriting of our history, deprived us of language, of poetry, of stories, of architecture, of civic laws, of social organization, of art, science, mathematics, sculpture, abstract conception, and philosophy. He deprived us of history, of civilization and, unintentionally, deprived us of humanity too. Unwittingly, he effaced us. from creation. And then, somewhat startled at where his rigorous logic had led him, he performed the dexterous feat of investing us with life the moment his ancestors set eyes on us as we slept through the great roll of historical time. With a stroke of his splendid calligraphic style, he invested us with life. History came to us with his Promethean touch, as his pen touched our Adamic souls. And we awoke into history, stunned and ungrateful, as he renamed our meadows and valleys, and forgot the slave trade.
He rewrote our nightspaces, made them weirder, peopled them with monsters and stupid fetishes; he rewrote our daylight, made it cruder, made things manifest in the light of dawn seem unfinished and even unbegun. In the process he laid before our eyes the written evidence of our recent awakening into civilization – we who bear within us ancient dreams and future revelations. We who began the naming of the world and all its gods. We who fertilized the banks of the Nile with the sacred word which sprouted the earliest and most mysterious civilization, the forgotten foundation of civilizations. We whose secret ways have entered into the bloodstream of world-wonders silently.
And as the Governor-General rewrote time (made his longer, made ours shorter), as he rendered invisible our accomplishments, wiped out traces of our ancient civilizations, rewrote the meaning and beauty of our customs, as he abolished the world of spirits, diminished our feats of memory, turned our philosophies into crude superstitions, our rituals into childish dances, our religions into animal worship and animistic trances, our art into crude relics and primitive forms, our drums into instruments of jest, our music into simplistic babbling – as he rewrote our past, he altered our present. And the alteration created new spirits which fed the bottomless appetite of the great god of chaos.
As he sat there, in his large office, with the picture of the Queen just above his head, as he rewrote destiny (made his brighter, made ours dimmer), the old woman in the forest pressed
on with the weaving of our true secret history, a history that was frightening and wondrous, bloody and comic, labyrinthine, circular, always turning, always surprising, with events becoming signs, and signs becoming reality. The old woman in the forest coded the secrets of plants and their infinite curative properties; she coded the language of spirits, the epic speech of trees, the convergent lines of vital earth-forces, the healing uses of thunder, the magic properties of lightning, the interpenetrations of the human and spirit world, the delicate balances of unseen powers, and the ancient formula for glimpsing the unalterable movement of fate. She even coded fragments of the great jigsaw that the creator spread all over the diverse peoples of the earth, hinting that no one race or people can have the complete picture or monopoly of the ultimate possibilities of the human genius alone. With her magic she suggested that it’s only when all peoples meet and know and love one another that we begin to get an inkling of this awesome picture, or jigsaw, or majestic power. These fragments of the grand picture of humanity were the most haunting and beautiful parts of her weaving that day.
The old woman kept the deciphering of the code to herself; for she had entirely forgotten that during fifty years in the forest she had invented a private language. And with this language of signs and symbols, of angles and colours and forms, she recorded legends and moments of history lost to her people. She recorded bawdy ancient jokes, drinking songs, riddles that had never been solved, mathematical discoveries extrapolated from magic squares, geometric forms in music and art, harmonic alignments between architecture and the greater stars. She recorded wonderful forms of divination by numbers and cowries and signs, numerological systems for summoning the gods, and humorous permutations of children’s games beloved of kings. The old woman in the forest recorded advancements in music, a delightful contrapuntal bar and tone system, music derived from the harmonics of streams and wind and the earth’s heartbeat and the flight of birds. She recorded secret ways of extending life, the meaning of bird-cries, the language of animals, ways of seeing a unicorn in broad daylight, ways of speaking to the spirits of ancestors or parents or children or friends who have passed beyond the enchanted mirror of death. She recorded the mystic significance of the fragrance of flowers, the songs of the wind, the songs of history, the music of the dead, the melodies of the interspaces, and ways of making love to produce twins or triplets or a particular gender. She recorded snatches of conversations heard on the wind, conversations that had floated across from other continents. She recorded oral poems of famous bards whose words had entered communal memory, whose names had been forgotten because of their great fame, but whose true names lay coded in their songs. She recorded impromptu poems with measured stresses composed by women on their journey between two kings. She recorded stories and myths and philosophical disquisitions on the relativities of African Time and Space, how Time is both finite and infinite, how Time curves, how Time also dances, how Space is negative, how Space is always populated, how Space is the home of invisible beings, and the true destination of death. She recorded theories of Art and Sculpture, the secret methods of bronze casting, the elaborate geometry and symbolism of the elongation of human features, discovered by an ancient sculptor who was lost in the forest for seven days and who was overwhelmed with visions in which he saw the elongated spirit of his father, sitting in a golden sphere. She recorded forgotten items of meteorological discoveries, calculation of distances to stars as yet unnoticed, and astronomical incidents: the date of a stellar explosion, a supernova bursting over the intense dream of the continent, heralding, according to a king’s soothsayer, a brief nightmare of colonization, and an eventual, surprising, renaissance.
EIGHT
Exposing the earth
THE OLD WOMAN in the forest recorded these things in code within her epic narrative of our lives. As she was beginning another cycle of our secret narrative, exhausted from her consistent application and the dissolving bitterness in her heart, a yellow bird flew over her.
She heard the distant noises of men. They were drawing nearer, destroying the trees as they advanced. A wave of anger poured through her being. She got up and hobbled round the hut, dreading the possibility that all her spells and incantations couldn’t save her solitude. But then she paused. She heard female footsteps running through the forest, footsteps that communicated despair. And while the old woman smiled at the entrapment of another person in the labyrinth of the forest, it suddenly struck her what her fate would be. Everything dissolved round her. The trees disappeared. The birds, her invisible fence, and her protected outcasts vanished. She saw that in cutting the forest down the community had come to her, had surrounded her; and that after all those years in the middle of the forest alone, she would soon be in the middle of a ghetto, unable to escape. And it was with a strange voice, a voice two hundred and seventy years old, that she uttered a cry – a cry which stirred Dad in his three-legged chair – saying:
‘WHAT IS THE USE OF POWER IF I CAN’T FORGIVE!’
Dad, who had returned from the market, and was snoring in his chair, woke up suddenly. He looked around, and spoke his first complete sentence in a long time.
‘There are people who are so powerful that no one knows who they are,’ he said, and became silent again.
‘Like who?’ I asked.
He stared at me with dull eyes in which a distant emotion flickered. He seemed to be waiting for a cue, his ears cocked. After a while I realized he was asleep again.
The flies stirred in the room; birds flew in wild patterns round the old woman in the forest. She didn’t speak again either, but her great cry had startled the wandering spirit. And the spirit crashed through the forest spaces. Dead leaves and twigs spiralled in its whirlwind. A heat-mist gathered in the wake of its passion. Trees dropped their pods and fruits prematurely. Birds flapped their laden wings, gasping for air.
While the heat gathered, blown on by the wind, Mum – completely unaware of the labyrinth – eventually located the tree-fellers. Possessed by an unfamiliar passion, she strode up to the foreman and said:
‘Who asked you to cut down the trees?’
‘The government,’ replied the foreman, imperturbably.
‘Which government?’
‘Any one you like.’
‘Who cut down the tree that nearly killed my son?’
‘Which tree?’
‘The one that nearly killed my son?’
‘We haven’t killed anybody – yet,’ said the foreman.
The other tree-cutters laughed. One of them said:
‘Madame, leave now. We are busy. This is dangerous work.’
Mum was launching into a tirade when the whirlwind appeared in their midst, blowing the riven earth everywhere, cracking the branches, scattering the men, blasting away their tents. Then the whirlwind found Mum, and obscured her from me, while trees crashed and thundered to the ground, exposing the earth to desolation.
NINE
Birth of the heat
IT WAS NIGHTFALL when I woke. Dad wasn’t around. Mum hadn’t returned. My forest fever had retreated. I couldn’t see into the darkness. Intimations of Mum lost in the forest, and Dad dissolved in his silence, haunted me along with the mosquitoes.
The heat of the world was different, and the air was dense. The heat was inexplicable. It had intent, a naked heat, as if some sort of iron veil before a furnace had been rent asunder. It was hot in my blood and when I moved the air made me melt. I was covered in sweat that felt like molten metal. I couldn’t move for the heat.
Dad wandered in with a candle whose odd illumination made his head look disembodied. He sat down on the bed, his face like melting bronze. His eyes were large, his nostrils were like bellows, and he breathed the hot air deeply. Touching me on the head, sweat running into his eyes, he uttered his second complete sentence. His words expanded the universe for me and opened all sorts of doors through which many undreamt of beings emerged, rampaging through the world with unintentional fury.
‘Our spirits are going mad,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We no longer communicate with them,’ he replied.
We sat in silence for a long time. The heat softened the candle, made it bend, till it was like an unfinished question mark. Dad blew it out.
Around midnight, Mum returned. The smell of antelopes soaked by rain clung to her. She brought three strangers who had been lost in the forest as well. When Mum gave them water to drink they fell into a mechanical chorus:
‘That forest is terrible!’ they kept saying, as if their minds were stuck in a hole.
We listened to them as they repeated the words over and over. As if the words would somehow free them from their mental fever. After a while they left. They stumbled out. They couldn’t seem to trust their eyes or feet any more.
Mum was silent throughout. She had sand and leaves in her hair, mud up to her knees, her dress was soiled. I was struck by her puzzled, horrified expression. The angles of her face were more defined. Her eyes were dazed. When I followed the direction of the emotion in her eyes I noticed that she had her precious stones of sleep in her hands. She seemed both confused and afraid. Dad was no longer smiling.
There was a betrayed look on Mum’s face. When she came over to me, her back to Dad so he wouldn’t see, she uncupped her hands and showed me the wonderful pearls and rainbow-coloured stones of light that she had brought back from her fabulous kingdom of sleep a long time ago. She had planted them in the earth of the forest. She had planted them deep. But now as I looked at them I was shocked to discover that their magical lights had diminished. They were now like ordinary stones. Transparent stones. I didn’t understand. Mum was silent, and she didn’t say a word the whole night. She too had suffered the lure of the forest. She too had a forest fever. We could not sleep for the curious heat.