These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  While the narrator does not know all the details about this city’s happiness, she is quite certain that it is made possible by the utter misery of a small child placed in a grimy, unsanitary windowless basement:

  In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten.2

  To tell you this story properly, my dear, I have quoted the author extensively, because she writes so evocatively about this one in Omelas. This child knows no daylight, no love, no sunrise or wind in face. It “is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.” It is not pretending to be wretched; it is wretched, and the narrator takes pains to disabuse the mind of the reader that this child is proto-human or some kind of machine devoid of feelings and yearning:

  It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer.3

  Do the people of Omelas not know that the child is there? “They all know it is there; all the people of Omelas.” The narrator explains that they sometimes come to visit, not to console or offer a kind word or bring blankets, but to watch it for a time and then turn away. They know it has to be there. “They all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” Parents explain this to their children—but no matter how well they do, everyone that visits her is shocked. Some understand, but others want to do something about it—except that the moment they offer even so much as a smile, “in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one.” These are the absolute terms. The very poignancy and potency and vitality of Omelas’ culture—their gallant walls, their genuine knowledge of many arts, their enthusiastic benevolence toward one another and hospitality to all—derives from knowing the child is there. The people of Omelas know “they are not free”; it is because the child is there that they can show compassion and be kind to others.

  Eventually, many learn to let go of their guilt after harboring a “rage” about the precarity of the child.

  They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more … their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.4

  The narrator then finds most incredible the fact that some who go to observe the child never return home in their tears; they go past the farmlands, past the noble courts and good roads of Omelas, and leave the city for good. The narrator cannot tell whether they do know where they are going, but they leave—wandering away.

  In retrospect, Le Guin’s story would have been an excellent exemplification of the themes I explored in my previous letter to you—you know, the one about the part of psychic life that is irredeemably dark and our need to come to some way to hold that. That darkness cannot be solved. But back to this: if you feel a certain anger just contemplating the child’s misfortunes, and vow you’ll be one of those that rise up in arms to do something about it, I will sympathize with you, dear. I felt the same way reading the story.

  Le Guin’s masterful stroke, however, is in holding back from imposing moral judgments about the situation. She doesn’t conclude that the people are evil; she doesn’t paint them in unflattering light. A creeping soundtrack of something sinister lurking behind the apparent joy of the city dwellers does not play in your ear while reading it. And so it is—that one of the motifs made clear in Omelas is that nothing shows up “completely” … that, like the oblivious Walmart customer’s purse, things appear diffractively—enabling and disabling, upholding and eliding, simultaneously. It is not possible to find a position or stance that is without these tension of worlds and possibilities forgone. Our very real material economic-political-ethical realities are forged as an ongoing Faustian pact; even the concepts of good and bad are haunted by a child in a windowless room, locked away from view.

  In relation to the question of how to respond to crisis, Le Guin’s story teaches a subtler lesson—one that speaks about entanglements and diffractions and intra-actions: she teaches that this particular question of “how to respond to crisis” has its own agency that often occludes us from seeing that we are already in response. Another way to put that might be to say we are asking the wrong question when we ask what to do, how to get home, how to leave a beautiful world for our kids—but that would be too heavy a brush to paint with. What’s calling for attention here is that ethics is not a thing that comes “afterward.” We don’t observe the facts and then decide to do something about it. Ethics is not external to the material doings and undoings of the world, but emerges with it—so that our bodies themselves are ethical responses of the world to its own complexity.5 To ask “how do we respond to crisis?” can give the idea that doings are human affairs, and that there is a place to stand outside the world to contemplate the best, most appropriate ways to respond to it. But there isn’t. We can’t respond to the world if we are the world.

  Chinua Achebe therefore looks askance at Archimedes’ declaration: “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” To that he replies by saying, “The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”6 There is no place to stand. There is no lever. There is no outside. If you are flowing downstream in a rapidly rushing stream of mud, there is no time to be clean. Just thinking about the world or understanding it in specific ways is performatively infectious; it is action … a performance that does not even originate in us as it diffracts through/with us.7 To think is to think-with. Trying to understand the world without changing it in the selfsame moment is just as feasible as trying to startle your own mirrored reflection.

  As I think of the world’s problems and what to do about them, I am learning to offer different questions—more generative questions … bubbly, hospitable, and humbling questions: how are we already collectively responding or in response to our specific crises? How are we mattering … or how are we showing up vis-à-vis the specific challenges we are encountering? How do we account for
these emergent realities in terms of what is missing, what we find unintelligible, or what is being excluded?

  What these questions bring us to contemplate is the ways we are already complicit in the production of certain realities at the cost of complimentary others. They open up the possibility of redescribing our many activisms not in terms of solutions or final arrangements, but in terms of an ongoing accounting for the ways we are part of a universe touching itself … already in response and being responded with. Indeed, what happens when we say we have solved a problem, say, climate change or poverty, is that particular political-economic-ethical-technological forces have enacted a “cut” or drawn a convenient line in the sand … we are caught up in practices of looking away from the world’s ongoing-ness. But we—the thick “we” comprising a porous posthuman string of many bodies in flow—are not to be resolved.

  They say that when one is about to die, your life flashes before you. You see those you love, those moments you cherish, in spontaneous psychic edits of final longing. Perhaps that is only true in specific situations where one is distant from your loved ones. For me, right here, I need no private cinematic bursts of my life and my loved ones; it is all here. They are all here. In the flesh. In this bathroom. I can see them already. And they are about to be murdered by the gun of a Zairean child soldier—who, with gun in hand, stands at the doorway, watching us.

  Everything is fading into a psychedelic, muffled alchemy of sound and image. I think I’m clinging on to Tito and everyone else, but I can’t be sure. Now I sink to the floor, crouching at the feet of my family. I can hear Mummy’s voice—even through this mist I’m enveloped in, her voice is still distinct and even stentorian in her assertion of our survival. I cannot hear my father’s voice.

  And then silence. The mist clouds out all sound and voice.

  I do not know how long I’ve shut my eyes, or how long this silence took me—but I can hear a conversation. In Lingala. My ears seem to clear open, much in the same way stuffy ears are unclogged after one alights from a plane. I open my eyes. Uncle Bernard is here, and he seems to be translating the soldier’s comments to my mum and dad. Uncle Bernard tells them that the soldier boy pities us. He saw my mother pray, and since he is Christian too, he will not take our lives. But that he doesn’t know what his boss will do to him, and that they will all be going soon—when they have taken all they want from our home.

  So long as I live I will never forget her face—this wave of relief that washes over my mother’s splintered face as she collapses to the ground, saying “Thank you! Thank you! Ah, thank you!” I cannot see my father’s face, just his back. But he is speaking to the soldier in French now. I turn to Tito. And Wendy. We are all here. Still in one piece. There is no greater feeling than coming to the edge, and knowing that is not the absolute end after all.

  But the danger is not yet past.

  Moments after the soldier had spared our lives, he escorted us to my own room, where he hoped we’d be safe. There was a wild orgy of deconstruction happening around us. Our home was being dismantled over our heads, beneath our feet, and before our very eyes. I wondered if this was what it was like to be dead: to see things unraveling, peeling back, dropping their skins, and spraying away into the oblivious as ash into sky. We stayed in one corner of my bedroom, near a large office table pushed close to the wall. Scattered around us were bullet canisters, the traces of their fury marking the walls with angry holes.

  Suddenly, another member of the raiding party came to us, and then dragged the boy soldier outside by his ear. Uncle Bernard said that they might kill him for defying orders.

  I wake up from a dreamless sleep, and survey my surroundings. I am still in a fetal position under the table in my room. There seems to be some calm now. At least that’s what my body desperately wants to believe. Before long, I drift back to sleep.

  “Bayo, wake up! Wake up, jo!” Tito is leaning over me, stirring me awake. I get up. A glistening white streams in through the window on my right. It is a princely morning in Kinshasa, the morning after mutinied soldiers ransacked our home and almost killed us. “They’ve taken everything,” Tito is telling me.

  “And do you know even more soldiers came?” she continues.

  “More soldiers? Where’s Daddy and Mummy?” I ask.

  We go through the bullet-riddled corridor, watching our steps as we try to walk past broken glass and toppled ceramic vases. There are droplets of blood on the floor and blood splatter on the wall opposite the entrance to the living room. In the living room, nothing is recognizable anymore. The wall aquarium wasn’t broken; it was totally pulled out. Where blue water and playful fish should be, there is a large rectangular hole through which one can see the large foyer that goes to the kitchen. Dad’s super loud music system is gone. Some of his CDs are on the floor, shattered. Bob Marley’s smiling visage and dreadlocks are still recognizable from a tiny disc fragment. There’s the 1993 Peter Justesen catalog in the shelf, largely untouched. The TV is still there too, broken on the floor a few inches from its former resting place. Its electric cord, taut, is still plugged into the wall. The settees are gone. The curtains. Even the water closet toilets. I’m left wondering how they were able to uproot so much in one night. And how they were able to bear them away! Did they come with a truck or something?

  I would later learn that no room in the house was spared. In the kitchen, two deep refrigerators and their contents of frozen chicken are all gone too. Apparently, a major fight had ensued between smaller factions within the troops that stormed our house. Some of their wives had struggled for the same items; their husbands had brought out their guns and shot at each other. This is what Uncle Bernard says. The bloody drag marks on the tiles show where bodies had been, Mummy in one of the rooms is praising God and saying it is a miracle that we survived—and not just that, but the soldiers started to kill one another! I am beginning to get a sense of how improbable our survival was, and indeed how much a miracle it is that we are all here—in one piece.

  Well, all of us except Sumbu. During the pillaging, he had locked himself in one of the wardrobes in the house, hoping to escape notice. I do not know all the details, but he was shot at, and barely escaped a gruesome death: the bullet whizzed past the right side of his face, burning its livid trail into his skin. He is pressing an icepack on the wound, his right eye unable to stop tearing up.

  Sitting on a tiny stool in the middle of this pandemonium is my dad. I go straight to hug him. “Good morning, Daddy,” I say, wrapping my small frame around his warm body. Were it not for the softness and innocence implied in the greeting, the irony of those words would have been too great for any of us to bear without laughing. Or perhaps crying. Or both at the same time. He holds me tight, with one arm, and tells me to find a pair of slippers. It’s too dangerous walking around without one, he says, against a backdrop of men picking up bullets into bags and making notes of damaged items for the report I trust my father would soon begin to prepare for the Nigerian Embassy.

  Mummy comes out into the hall, and I hug her too. She is more in a hurry, but no less strong-willed and grateful that we survived the ordeal. She is carrying a bag with what is left of Wendy’s things. I look into it to see if I can make her bottled hot milk for her. There’s hardly anything in the bag, except a few feeding bottles. “Where’s the Nan, mummy?” I ask, referring to the baby formula milk. My mum then tells me that she had the last one packed up inside the bag, and had set the bag in the middle of the hall and gone back into the room to retrieve any salvageable items for the trip we are about to make. When she returned to the hall, a strange kid, scantily clad, was already in the house, surveying the contents of the bag. Alarmed, Mum started to shoo the boy away and was going to chase him off—when the boy pulled out a gun and just pointed it to her with a dead stare that was maybe more chilling than the prospects of an unusual death. Raising her hands and backing away gently, she asked him to take anything he wanted and just please go. The boy took the Nan and
scuttled out of the ruins of our home, leaving my mother calling frantically for my dad.

  We have no food, no water, and no clothes. Embassy files, Dad’s off-white Peugeot 505 with the musical horn he installed to make us laugh anytime he came home, shoes, clothes, suits, slippers … all gone. I remember our dogs, Sasha and Maiden, with a crushing feeling of vertigo: I had not considered them during our ordeal. I wonder if they are anywhere to be found. A man in a red cap comes through the black gate, and my father goes out to meet him, and then comes back after a while to find Mummy. “It’s time to go,” he says. He is still in his pajamas—the only item he can claim as property. My mother nods her okay and takes us all into the room to change into some clothes that had escaped the soldiers’ gaze.

  In a moment, we are out under the foreboding sun, gathered in the compound by our black gate. Mummy, Tito, Wendy, Uncle Bernard, Sumbu, and some men—including the man with the red cap, who is now telling my dad that we are lucky, because the French ambassador was killed in his home.

  I turn around to look at the house that had held us all this time. The first home we had moved into when, three years ago, back in Nigeria, my father received an official letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that he had been posted to China. We were excited. China was Bruce Lee and cool martial arts. But then our excitement was short-lived because he came back with a new letter: the Ministry had changed its mind and posted us to some country in Central Africa I hadn’t heard of: Zaire. We made the journey to Kinshasa via Air Zaire. I remember the no-smoking lights were permanently lit, to no effect, as cigarette smoke swirled in the space above our heads. It was the most turbulent flight ever—but we made it. First to the beautiful and extravagant Nigerian Embassy at 141, Boulevard du 30 Juin, next to the more conservative Israeli Embassy, where my dad played table tennis with other members of the diplomatic corps every Wednesday night. And then to this house—this place where I got my first robot toy—the blue one with eyes that glowed red as it screamed inaudible sounds and crashed into the wall; where I learned to climb the palm kernel tree in the backyard; where Ms. Ruth Montacute, our headmistress at the Zaire British Association School, had told my dad about my naughty note to Bhavna, an Indian girl in my class I had a crush on, while I trembled in the room; where I learned to toss food from my plate under the dining table when mummy wasn’t watching; and, where Bimbo, Tito, Wendy, and I would wash daddy’s hair in his bathroom … to preserve his youth.