by Ben Okri
IT WAS THE worst night, but it wasn’t the only one. The days afterwards saw us discovering the phenomenal extent of the devastation of our area. It was as if an unrecorded hurricane had swept through our lives, disorienting our reality. The devastation shocked us. When we went out in the morning, it was as if the world had been hurled against a primal rock. Everything was scrambled up and fragmented. The air was darker. The sky was lower, and it seemed to bear down on us with an oppressive menace. Houses had crumbled altogether. Rooftops had been torn off and twisted under the pressure of a malign force. The broken-down political vehicle, which the inhabitants of the street had destroyed in the early days, had been crushed and its parts scattered as if the wind had taken steel fists to it and flung its components all over the area. Some people woke up to find bits of the steering wheel on the beams of their shattered roofs. Others found the vehicle’s doors jutting through their windows. Tyres had been hurled into rooms. The vehicle’s engine, broken to pieces, was found in buckets, smashed against walls. Some people found pellets lodged in their doors, in their pots of food. It was as if revenge for the vehicle’s initial destruction had now been visited on all of us.
We woke up that morning to find the innards of a dog stamped on our door. We wandered down our street and heard that the heads of black cats had been found in living rooms, in communal kitchens. Parts of animal bodies hung from the branches of trees. Houses had been broken into, properties smashed. We saw the corpses of lizards floating on the debris of the streets. There was rubbish everywhere, flung against the clothes we had left out to dry, in our kitchens and toilets and housefronts. The mounds of rubbish were of such volume that only a wind of vicious intent could have blown them at us from other parts of the city. Clothes and shoes, offal and rotting vegetables, slimy feathers and warped tin cans, broken chairs and stinking plantain and mushroom-infested mattresses had been scattered everywhere. Overnight our street had become a fetid rubbish dump. Dead frogs were all over the place. When we stepped on them accidentally, we were horrified by their popping sounds. We wandered the street and saw live fishes wriggling on the rubbish. Toads had been squashed into the ground by metal hooves. The overwhelming smell of fermented palm-wine rose from the earth as if the rain had drenched us in an infernal libation.
Flowers had been crushed everywhere. The bushes had been torn up. Shrubs and low vegetation, clumps of earth, stumps of trees were found in our backyards, on our rooftops, and along the street. Cracks had appeared in houses. Trees had suffered weird deformations. Stalls had been broken up. Water tanks had been turned upside down, with mud and gore inside them. And throughout our area – as if the force that had raged its visitation on us had given birth to multiples of itself in terrifying irregularity – we discovered broken masks, abandoned jujus, twisted masquerades, eyeless heads of wooden carvings, disintegrated statues of minor gods. They were at street corners, nailed against trees, hurled into our rooms. The masks and statues were truly ugly and quite frightening, with big indifferent eyes that stared at our incomprehension in broken silence.
The destruction wreaked on our area stunned us into speechlessness. The mangled dogs, the bloated eyes of goats, the twisted metal and the crumbling houses played havoc with our senses and made us feel that we had stepped out from the reality of dreams and into a bizarre universe. We kept looking at one another with dazed eyes, seeking confirmation that we were not inventing the monstrosities that we saw. The chaos made us brain-shocked: everywhere we looked our stunned brains conjured further devastations. The chaos made us hallucinate. The air had changed. Some people screamed that they saw spirits melting in the air. Some said they saw rainbows turning red. Others that they saw spirits walking about, their mighty heads higher than the tallest trees. A girl cried out in wonder and her mouth hung open as she followed, with her eyes, the flight of seven angels dressed in rainbows, blue lights flashing round their feet. People amazed us by seeing crocodiles swimming in the density of the darkened air. People saw antelopes with aquamarine eyes running through them, as if they were ghosts. Others saw bulls and goat-headed masquerades dancing on rooftops.
It became difficult to separate the actual devastations from the strange effects they had on our minds. People kept disappearing from our midst and reappearing somewhere else. Dad vanished and we found him standing on a rooftop, crying out about the wonders to come. He didn’t remember how he got there. We were standing, staring at a partially overturned water tank in which tadpoles swam in serene contemplation, when a child appeared amongst us, crying. A moment later its mother rushed down the street screaming that her child had been blown from her back by a malign wind. We went from place to place, amazed that neighbours whom we assumed were there had vanished from amongst us, and that strangers had taken their places. We suddenly weren’t sure who anybody was, or if the people whom we treated as if we knew were in fact the same people we had known all along.
A herbalist amongst us said that we were all dreaming together, simultaneously; that a lesser god had scrambled up our minds; and that we were now floating in the dark sea of our collective confusion, our mingled consciousness, flowing into one another’s fears. It became hard to tell if the world was real or if we had collectively invented it. We found, to our terror, that our road had been torn up, gashed, wounded, as if it were a weird snake, or a metal that someone had wrenched with sinister force. The back of the road was humped, the flat grounds had become undulated, the straight places had become twisted, pits had appeared in certain spots and strange waters in which fishes swam had filled them. We came to a particular place where the road had cracked. We looked down into the crack and saw hybrid beings writhing in fiendish torment, fighting to get out. Excruciating noises of tortured creatures rose up on the hallucinogenic smoke.
Strange propensities turned our brains. People were astounded when they lowered their buckets into wells and found that the water had gone. One man, who lived a mile away, said he had woken in the morning to find that a crude well had opened up in his living room. He looked into the hole and saw his centre table floating upside down on the brackish water.
The weird manifestations had stranger consequences. People were reported missing. People hurriedly moved away from the area. The strangers that replaced them had bitter, uncommunicative eyes. I thought I recognised some of them from Madame Koto’s bar when I first used to go there. Spies grew in our midst – tall men with trusting faces, short women who seemed generous and affectionate. Even children with mean eyes and thin lips. Those of us that remained in the street woke up each day to see new proliferations of catastrophes. Corpses of yellowing dogs lay at street corners. Decapitated antelopes stared at us from the bushes, their eyes wide open in amazement. We saw fake jewels on the street, glittering their myriad colours amongst the offal and the gore. We were all suspicious of the jewels and no one touched them except a neighbour who had ten children. His house had been devastated and his wife’s leg broken by a falling beam. We saw him surreptitiously collecting the fake jewels and two days later we heard him raving in the street, his head on fire, screaming about flying saucers and rainbows which set houses alight. Three houses burned down that night and smoke hung over the area, charring our eyes and noses with its harsh bitter pungency. The next morning we heard the man who had collected the jewels confessing to the burning of the houses, confessing that he had turned into a wicked wizard overnight. He was bound securely with hemp ropes and his relatives carted him away to be treated by a fearful sorcerer deep in the country.
That same day four children died of water poisoning. Everyone complained of dizziness and something akin to seasickness. The world was turning too fast for us. Everywhere we saw signs and inexplicable manifestations. But that evening the most wondrous and the most frightening signs of all were the butterflies.
19
MYSTERY OF THE BUTTERFLIES
AFTER THE BURNING of the houses we were sitting at our housefronts, when someone cried out that scales were falling in his eyes, obscu
ring his vision. The scales, he said, were brilliant and yellow. Soon after his cry we all began to see scales in our eyes, scales that fell slowly, with bright yellow wings, delicate and semi-transparent. It was as if his cry had created the condition. It was as if we had all begun to flow into his consciousness. For, suddenly, we began to touch one another. We began to reach out and feel the solid things around us. It wasn’t long before we realised that a strange blindness had come upon us all. We stayed up that night, huddled in the street, afraid to open our eyes because we didn’t want to see the cascading yellow scales which were like little wings. In the morning, when the invasion had passed, we awoke from our communal blindness and we saw an avalanche of dead butterflies everywhere.
They had fallen on the leaves, on the floor of the forest, had banked up on the rubbish of the street, had piled up on the broken stalls, on the clothes-lines, on the rotting corpses of the animals we had been too scared to touch, and had formed irregular mounds on the rooftops. They were mostly yellow butterflies with vivid striations and batik patterns. Some were yellow with black stains. Others were blue with yellow markings. Some of them were hideously large, almost predatory with their black little claws. A great number of them were deformed, with bodies like little human beings fixed in midway transformation. But many of them were very beautiful and delicate, and the finer ones were joined like twins, with blue radiancies on their partially transparent wings. They had fallen on every visible surface as if they were part of a new weather condition, and they had died as if there had been a secret plague.
They were a frightening mystery to us. We had no way of explaining their presence, nor the sheer abundance of them. More than the destruction of the houses, the rutting of the roads, the unexplained deaths of the inhabitants, the butterflies awoke in us a new colossal helplessness. We wandered the streets concussed by this new demonstration, amazed at the limpid butterflies dead without explanation on our streets and rooftops. The sky was clear that day, but we went around with our faces turned upwards, wondering what the next sign to descend on our lives would be.
Silence came amongst us. The wind was still. The forest was quiet. We wandered in that silvery air of a strange enchantment, as if we had strayed from our true reality into a secret country which exists only in the unpredictable tangents and margins of vision.
We began to doubt our collective sanity. For days afterwards we couldn’t sleep. We dreamt with our eyes wide open. We feared sleep because we couldn’t be sure what the world would change into while we shut our lives away in our rooms or in our dreams. We stayed outside and communicated to one another in an improvised sign language, mostly using our faces, as if we had developed a new fear of speech. We couldn’t be sure that we hadn’t somehow talked the new reality into existence during all the careless days of our lives. We were never so close to one another as we were in that time of fearful manifestations. There were those amongst us who believed there was a reason for it all, and for it all happening to us. There were those who believed that after the plague of dead butterflies it was almost certain that the world was soon going to end.
The wind remained still, and there was no rain. During the exhaustion of the long vigil for new signs, I realised with a shock that we could occasionally read one another’s thoughts. Hunger came amongst us and the children grew leaner. The faces of the women grew longer. The men became listless and pale. Dad stayed at our housefront most of the time, staring at the street, his energy much reduced, his eyes dull. Mum stayed with the women, who comforted one another in silence. The rest of us merely awaited the final sign which would announce that our lives had come to an end for ever.
We didn’t sleep and we didn’t speak and we turned our eyes to the skyline, awaiting the annunciation, the great flood, or the flash of lightning which would crack open the sky and unleash eternity upon us. The three-legged cat did not return to concentrate our minds on its wonder. There were no bird or animal cries from the forest. The irrepressible insects were silent. Maybe we didn’t hear them. But it dawned on us slowly that the animals had vanished. In the afternoons the sun was relentless. It baked the earth and spread a progressive rust on the leaves. It cracked our faces.
20
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORIGINAL WAY
OUR WILLS BECAME weak. We looked out at the world from listless eyes. We became ill for lack of dreams. The world dissolved slowly under our liquid scrutiny. We began to see holes in reality, in objects, in people, and wherever we happened to look. The sleeplessness increased our mass hallucination. People saw blue flying objects in the air. When one person saw them we all did. Red flares appeared in the clouds. Our houses began to move. The road trembled. The trees changed shape. The world started to succumb to strange distortions. People turned into chickens, goats and iguanas under our gaze. People’s features began to alter. Dad took on the soft jaw of the blind old man. Mum’s eyes became infected with a yellowish watering. We saw Sami, the betting shop man who had run off with all dad’s money. We rushed over to him and when we got there he had turned into a goat. The women began to look like variations of Madame Koto. Someone passed the thought to me that I resembled a baby jackal. Even our mirrors played tricks with our sanity and our perception. When we looked into them we saw ourselves reflected as healthy, fresh and buoyant.
The wind stirred one day and brought rumours and prophecies about the children born on the night of the political magicians. It was hinted that they would be children with rapacious jackal faces, vicious eyes, and teeth fully formed in their mouths. Apparently some of them were born with beards and had the ancient faces of forgotten sorcerers. They were children who scratched their mothers, and dreaded their mother’s breasts. It was also said that they would be strong and gifted with longevity and that from birth they had been infected with the darker sides of power. None of it made any sense to me.
It was odd to see how we became altered during the nights when the stars were like brilliant ice-chips in the sky. We began to dream feverishly about water. The street smouldered in the afternoon blaze. Our hunger became so intense that we took to eating mouldy vegetables. We carved up the animals and roasted their flesh and stared into the night-fires, our faces dry and sweaty, our eyes unmoving. The hunger made the world unbearable. We couldn’t trust the water and slowly we got drunk on our parched condition. Through the days and nights our thoughts were fixed on water. We stared at the sky, waiting for rain. The sky deceived us often with its cloudbanks.
One night I went into the room and couldn’t find dad. I wandered amongst the debris in the street and saw him standing up stiff and straight, his eyes wide open. I was afraid to touch him. That night I left dad where he was and took to wandering around and I was amazed to see the curious state of our neighbours. They were all standing up stiff and straight, eyes wide open, as if turned into stone, transfixed in some mysterious way. Those who were not standing or transfixed were the strangers amongst us. They had bright eyes, nourished skin, were suspicious, and they spied on our every movement. I couldn’t find mum anywhere. Many of the women had vanished. I wandered back to our compound and saw three mallams standing, petrified, in the middle of the road. I touched one of them, and he fell. I touched another, and the same thing happened. They fell and registered no pain, made no sound. They lay motionless on the ground, their eyes open, as if they had been murdered in a moment of open-eyed contemplation. Then it occurred to me that we were dying, that people in our midst had died standing up, eyes open, as if all the distortions and manifestations, the bad smells of rotting butterflies, the stench of maggots on dead meat, had finally become too much for us.
Suddenly a great thing heaved in the numbness of my mind. I couldn’t get it out. I found myself stuck in one place, frozen, my eyes wide open, unable to move because of the mighty thought that was lodged in my brain. For the first time I became aware of the depth of the darkness in our area. I was entirely oblivious to everything. I stood there and a great darkness, peopled with mighty beings,
invaded my mind. I saw the invisible beings and marvelled that giants still existed in our world. The great spirits were innumerable. They had chariots and black beards. They rode on the backs of blue unicorns. They rode through us, through our physical forms, as if they were real and we were ghosts. They rode through us, journeying to a vast meeting place. They were laden with the burden of centuries, the weight of unrecorded illuminations wrought from the history of loving and suffering in the most magical spheres of the universe. I watched them till their momentous procession disappeared into the horizon of blue darkness. After them came the shining representatives of our forgotten gods, our transformative ancestors, robed in dazzling clothes of silver and gold. I noted their lineaments of jewels and cowries, their blazing crowns, their bangles which rattled our forgotten music, their diamond-beaded hair, and their necks borne up with rows of sapphire and cornelian and precious stones whose lights were thoughts given radiant form. I also noted their silver staffs. They passed through our earthly devastation without noticing. The urgency of their journey was suggested in the sage-like and noble gravity of their bearing.
Behind the second procession came the representatives of our spirit world, illustrious ancestors with caravans of wisdom, old souls who had been reborn many times in the magical depths of the continent, and who had lived the undiscovered secrets and mysteries of The African Way – The Way of compassion and fire and serenity: The Way of freedom and power and imaginative life; The Way that keeps the mind open to the existences beyond our earthly sphere, that keeps the spirit pure and primed to all the rich possibilities of living, that makes of their minds gateways through which all the thought-forms of primal creation can wander and take root and flower; The Way through which forgotten experiments in living can re-surface with fuller results even in insulated and innocent communities; The Way that makes it possible for them to understand the language of angels and gods, birds and trees, animals and spirits; The Way that makes them greet phenomena for ever as a brother and a sister in mysterious reality; The Way that develops and keeps its secrets of transformations – hate into love, beast into man, man into illustrious ancestor, ancestor into god; The Way whose centre grows from divine love, whose roads are always open for messages from all the spheres to keep coming through; The Way that preaches attunement with all the higher worlds, that believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always receptive, always listening, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world.