by Ben Okri
‘But only after the rally,’ he said. ‘Or I will lose my job.’
The women showed no interest in him. Mum went to the bathroom to get changed. When she came back she seemed like one prepared for battle. Without a word, like a soldier who is grateful to repay in action an outstanding debt, and with the seven women still arguing about the best method of carrying out their campaign, Mum set out with them into the street quivering with events. The Photographer hurriedly finished his drink and rushed out after the eight women.
‘They won’t get far,’ was all Dad said, grumpily.
I watched him in the silence. I watched him twist and contort in the chair. I watched him as he suddenly began to groan. He stayed in an inexplicable agony, for an hour. I lay down and fell asleep to the noises of the rally, the echoing voices, the harsh war-songs, the clanging of metal against metal, the rude banging on doors, the thundering feet, and the frenzied drum-rolls beating out the syntax of a violent language. Suddenly I heard Dad cry out. I jumped up and saw him sweating. Muttering something about the leopard, he came over to me, and growled into my face.
‘If you leave this room today I will flog you with my iron belt, you hear?’
I didn’t know he had one. I nodded. He strode out of the room, locked the door, and took the key. I didn’t wait long before I crawled out through the window.
The road was calling me into its fevered dream.
The road sang all around me, waking from its sleep, with eruptions everywhere. The road called to all of us. I heard its call with a special lust.
I set off down the street. Houses and stalls seemed smaller. My eyes were misty with odd things that kept breaking on my vision. Answering the call of the rally, I followed the crowds to the place where our nightmares were becoming concrete in the hard world of objects.
THREE
The dead carpenter
WITHOUT ANY IDEA where the rally was being held, and confused by the numerous routes the crowds took, I followed a group of women who seemed to be going for the spectacle and the prospect of sales. They had trays of provisions on their heads and children tied to their backs. The main road was packed with people, all pouring in one direction. There was chaos all around, as if an alien army were in occupation, or as if a civil war had broken out.
Light glinted on metal. Dense smoke pervaded the air. The crowds were in such an intense state of expectation that I heard the sizzling of their hopes and desires, the churning of their hunger.
Further up the road, in the midst of a dense crowd, I saw the dead carpenter. He was taller than almost everyone else, glowing in his white suit, waving his fists in the air. I saw him shouting. The crowd jostled him. I struggled to get to him, but the crowd pushed me across a gutter that ran alongside the road. By the time I got back to the main stream of the crowd, the dead carpenter had disappeared from view.
At an intersection, I saw Madame Koto. She was resplendent in her gold-bordered dress, and surrounded by fierce women and noisy men. After a night of fitful sleep, with a pulled tendon in her neck, she couldn’t move her head very much. She shouldn’t have gone out that day, but the call of the rally, and the central role she had manipulated for herself in the festivities afterwards, made it necessary for her to go out into the changing world. She had a white towel round her neck. Her forehead was creased with agony. Her eyes had deepened, and her head was held high in the stiff dignity of pain.
FOUR
The great rally
THE EVENING MADE the faces of the crowd into masks. There was a light wind and the universal commotion of traffic. Madame Koto got into a van with her protectors; the van drove through the crowd, cutting a path through the density of bodies.
People were talking about how their lives could be improved, their dreams steaming within their spirits’ agony. I felt dizzy at the sheer number of people and terrified by the heated smells of their intolerable lives.
Madame Koto’s van disappeared among the bodies. Further up I saw Helen, the beggar girl, and her troupe of beggars. They were huddling in front of an unfinished bungalow. She showed no sign of recognizing me. She had a vengeful glimmer in her eyes. Her appearance had changed; she was dressed entirely in red and looked more like an incarnate goddess of war. She looked sad and wasted, ill and lean, and more beautiful than a woman can be, among so much suffering. When she saw me, as if I were a sign, she made a motion to her band of beggars, her much multiplied companions. They set off down a side road and I followed them through the maze of bodies, through the labyrinths of streets in the ever-expanding ghetto. I followed them till I had the feeling that I was lost. Darkness was falling over everything, and wide-eyed I wandered into another terrain. I wandered into a space crowded with thousands of people. I had wandered into the rally.
High above the crowd, there was a large wooden platform with microphones and bright lights. Hundreds of cars were parked all over the place. The crowds jostled and fought. The air was turbulent with a million voices, shouts, songs, chants and blarings from loudspeakers and bullhorns. Soldiers with guns paraded the edges of the crowd. They also had batons and canes. Policemen with riot helmets and guns and horsewhips were there too. Everywhere I turned I met a wall of giant bodies. People who were so tall that their beards were like darkened leaves of a tree. There was absolutely no escape from the crush and crowding. I was tiny among giant beings. I found myself struggling for space with people’s feet, raw and bleeding, ridden with road-worms, eaten by the salt rains and acidic contents of marsh roads.
As it got darker, the crowd seemed stranger. They seemed like alien beings, visitants from other spheres, dense retributive spheres – so solid and impassive were their bunched faces, so intense and dull were their bulging eyes. The darkness made them hybridous. Men with twelve arms, women with four heads, adults with six feet, all wearing different shoes. I saw midgets crawling between the legs of the crowd; I saw pickpockets and thieves robbing those too intent on the events unfolding up on the great stand.
A bizarre fiesta was in progress all around. All types were present: carpenters, stock-fish sellers, cloth traders, boisterous hawkers, undiscovered witches and wizards, old men and women, young men and girls, marketwomen, fishermen, butchers, mechanics, builders, truck pushers, indeterminate members of secret fraternities, layabouts, beggars, thugs, thieves, journalists, prostitutes, soldiers, and men so hungry that they brought starch-bread with them and ate with angry motions of their jaws as they watched the proceedings on the great lighted stage of the rally.
The darkness made us anonymous, made us amorphous, dissolved our faces and bodies. I felt my mind melting into the stream of anonymous beings. My feelings were no longer my own. The impulses that flowed swaying through the great animal of the crowd, flowed through me, and dissolved my emotions in a brackish tide of barely restrained fevers. There was darkness everywhere. The darkness made us anonymous. But the lighted stage conferred individuality on the people gathered there, dressed in the splendid attire of the party. The flags of the party flew high, spotlighted. Its banners billowed in the wind, displaying its emblem of power. The standards, too, were proud in the wind.
‘WE WILL CONQUER THIS COUNTRY!’ bellowed one of the men into a microphone.
The loudspeakers crackled. His voice dissolved into the screeching volume, as he continued:
‘VICTORY IS OURS ALREADY. WE HAVE WON. WE BRING POWER TO THE PEOPLE. WE BRING WEALTH AND STABILITY. THOSE WHO VOTE FOR US WILL ENJOY, THOSE WHO DON’T WILL EAT DUSTBINS!’
A loud cheering spread out from the front of the crowd. The crowd amplified the cheering, modified it, hissed against it, dissented, agreed and shouted till the road began to rock gently beneath us. No one noticed.
The loudspeakers behaved oddly. It was as if ghosts had entered the instruments and were playing mischievous games with human voices. Speaker after speaker came to the microphone, made long speeches, sweating under the glaring lights, and we couldn’t understand anything they said. Their words changed b
efore they reached us. We heard things that insulted our hunger, and derided our patience. We heard them call us fools for trying to exercise our right to democratic choice, for trying to be discriminating. We heard ourselves called idiots for expecting the other party to represent an alternative. I was no longer sure what party was holding the rally; I seemed to be at several rallies at once, an underworld of negative rallies.
The politicians on the stage were all dressed in similar attire, they sweated, and none of them made sense. And they all spoke as if we were not particularly important to the results of the elections. It soon became clear that – for the speakers – we didn’t exist. We, the crowd, were the ghosts of history. We were the empty bodies on whose behalf the politicians and soldiers rule; we were not real. We could not communicate our desires save by the intensity of our cheering or hissing. We were shadows in the world of power; the mere spectators of phenomena, the victims of speeches. We were meant only to listen, never to speak. We were not meant to feel or to think or argue or dissent. Assent was all we were good for. And our faces, which the night made masks of, finally found their true identity in the world of power; we were statues, rows and crowdings of sculpted bodies. We were bodies without urgencies. From the viewpoint of the stage, that is how we seemed.
Crushed among the torsos of men, I found it difficult to see. I had to be carried by a neighbour who recognized me. Then I saw, for the first time, the bizarre theatre of politics, the magic tricks of power, the power of illusion. The stage was arrayed in lights, as if a great magician was about to perform wonders for our hungry consumption.
Oh, the host of dreams in the yellow lights of the air, the illuminated midges, the fireflies, the moths and the shadows of the multitudinous gathering. And on the stage – politicians with sunglasses and animal-headed walking sticks. They were surrounded by sorcerers in white smocks and feathered headgear, amulets round their necks. The sorcerers kept waving flywhisks, uttering incantations.
Party candidates came forward and spoke into the microphones, drenching us in amorphous decibels. The crowd rocked; the neighbour who had been carrying me on his shoulder put me down; and the chaos of the crowd soon separated us. I pushed my way through the nobbled knees of adults and I came to a wiry tree and climbed up its branches and sat there, perched, looking over the crowd of five thousand heads, watching the stage. And then, suddenly, a blast of hot air knocked my head backwards and I saw a host of birds flying madly through the atmosphere. I felt myself falling. When I opened my eyes everything had changed. Everything had become inexplicably hotter and darker, more intense, as if the collective dreams of the hungry were about to combust.
FIVE
Shadow beings in all the empty spaces
I COULD SEE the stage more clearly now and could make out the forms of shadow beings and spirits who saw us but whom we couldn’t see. I could make them out in the spaces between the people on the lighted platform. Then I noticed that there were shadow beings in all the empty spaces, and even in the spaces that we occupied with our bodies. The shadow beings were part of the crowd, tangential to everything, yet living their lives in spaces filled by a thousand pressured bodies. The realization made me cry out, but no one heard me. Lights flashed on the dais, and I saw the Photographer perched on a wall. Then for a while I didn’t see the shadow beings any more. Instead I noticed Madame Koto on the stage, amongst the resplendent politicians.
Then I saw the blind old man with a host of sorcerers, and I became aware of the focus of his role. He had an enchanted flywhisk and charms round his neck. And he was orchestrating certain events backstage. His true role was supreme; he was a political sorcerer and controller of phenomena. While the clouds gathered above us, turning yellow in the darkening sky, while they erupted, exploding not rain but dark air, I realized that the blind old man was holding our spirit in check, holding back the rain, filling the spaces with dread darkness, filling our bodies with the dreams of his party’s domination.
On all spheres the ascending powers were waging their battles for our consent. In the spirit-spaces the blind old man was unleashing a host of fears and shadows and forms that whispered submission into our bodies. Meanwhile the other sorcerers fought off the counterspells of the other political party, fought off their rain-bringing powers, diverted the blasts of thunder they hurled at the dais. They sent out protective shields to repel the lightning that flashed over the platform, aimed at the presidential candidate. And they sealed off the spaces so that no demons could slip into the bodies of the politicians and fill their heads with nonsense, and make them start to say the wrong things on stage.
And while we gathered there, ordinary citizens in the presence of invisible powers, all the higher spaces around us were battlezones of insurgent disembodied fires. In the air, I saw the forms of witches and wizards, sorcerers and herbalists, manufacturers of reality, dreamers of spells and rallying songs. They were all in violent confrontation, hurling blasts and counterblasts at one another. I saw the shadow bullets, the air of fire, winged lightning and spears of spirit-substance. I heard the jagged words and the animal cries.
A whole new domain erupted before my gaze. And the battle for reality, blazing over the quiet spaces above our heads, took some time before it became manifest on the level of concrete things.
SIX
The insurrective laughter of the dead
ON THE STAGE, discreetly amongst the new rulers of the new age, stood the Governor-General. I recognized him immediately because of the invisible black insects clinging to his body. He looked so innocent in his grey suit. I saw him scratching himself, unaware of the black insects. Then I understood why sometimes, without willing it or even knowing, I found myself in his dreams or his nightspace. For he too was a manufacturer, a retailer of phenomena. It may be because of his presence on the stage that the impish spirits of our nightspaces came awake.
The Photographer had somehow moved closer to the stand. I saw the flash of his camera. Spirits took form in the flash and gathered round the Governor-General. They climbed on him, investigated him, and studied him. The spirits looked curiously at his striped tie, and fell about laughing when he came to the microphone and made a short speech about something which we missed altogether. The spirits would have continued their exploration of his body-smells and shadow-smells, but for the flourish of drums which startled their impish investigations. The crash of cymbals and the blast of trumpets announced to us all that the extraordinary spectacle meant to seduce us into assent had begun.
Midgets with fiery paint on their faces, in lines of sixes, came dancing on stage. Their machetes burned with antimony. After them came the beautiful women of the land. They were half-naked and they sweated. They had ruffles on their ankles and party armbands on their wrists, and they danced with a splendid sexual vigour under the hungry gaze of the crowd. At first, the crowd went wild. The midgets jumped up and down, the music flourished, the loudspeakers screeched, the women danced and flags of party symbolism were carried past by masked figures. A man rode a white horse on stage and blew fire over the heads of the crowd.
‘Will all this nonsense feed us?’ an angry voice said below me.
The question was unanswered. The moment of grand spectacle had arrived, sowing the whirlwind of wrath. The great rally and the battle for our future had called forth the spirits of the whirlwind, the storm spirits, the spirits of extinct beasts and the shadow beings. They were amongst us. They had come to attend the rally that had shaken the land and unloosened the trapped resentments in the air.
The organizers of the rally then brought on the dancing farmers with their giant yams, pawpaws, massive plastic fruits, symbols of future plenitude under the party’s rule.
The crowd fell silent. Then from places in the crowd came strange, isolated laughter. People turned to look at those who were laughing. The dancing farmers seemed both embarrassed and happy to be on stage with their plastic harvest. Their dance took the form of a fertility ritual, and a woman crowned w
ith fruits was at their centre. Those who laughed did so even harder. The laughter was so chilling that it created silence and empty spaces all around. The laughter made the stage look desolate and bare, made the whole spectacle look garish and cheap.
The dancing farmers left the stage. An announcer came on and introduced the next event. Certain members of the crowd laughed at the introduction. The boneless dancers, who could twist their bodies into knots, as if they were made of rubber, came on and performed to the intoxicated uproar of those who laughed. The boneless dancers, with their curious beetle faces and small eyes, performed their unique act, contorting themselves, forming letters of the alphabet, which became the name of the party. No one found it funny except those isolated groups who laughed with bizarre vigour, laughing as if they had no chests, their laughter coming out in uninterrupted bursts, as if they had unlimited air in their lungs.
Then came the firebreathers and the fire-eaters. They jumped up and down the stage. They swallowed the flames on the ends of brands and torches. They spread fire over their bodies and danced in ecstasy. And the weird members of the crowd fell over themselves with laughter, caterwauling in a hilarity that was both exuberant and joyless.
Then came the somersaulters from the salt-creeks. They wore red skirts of raffia and red shorts. Their faces were painted red and white. They did brilliant turns, tumbling over one another. And as they did these extraordinary feats, the strange members of the crowd, who had silenced the rest of us with the sheer insanity of their humour, laughed so hard that they destroyed the balance of the intrepid performers.