by Ben Okri
Out of the wonder and agony of being come these cries and questions and the endless stream of words with which to order human life and quieten the human heart in the midst of our living and our distress.
The ages have been inundated with vast oceans of words. We have been virtually drowned in them. Words pour at us from every angle or corner. They have not brought understanding, or peace, or healing, or a sense of self-mastery, nor has the ocean of words given us the feeling that, at least in terms of tranquillity, the human spirit is getting better.
At best our cry for meaning, for serenity, is answered by a greater silence, the silence that makes us seek higher reconciliation.
I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more silence, more deep listening, more deep giving.
2
When the angels of the Bible spoke to human beings, did they speak in words? I don’t think so. I think the angels said nothing, but they were heard in the purest silence of the human spirit, and were understood beyond words.
On a more human scale there are many things beyond.
A mother watches her child leave home. Her heart is still. Her eyes are full of tears and prayer. That is beyond.
An old man with wrinkled hands is carrying his grandchild. With startled eyes the baby regards his grandfather. The old man, with the knowledge of Time’s sadness in his heart, and with love in his eyes, looks down at the child. The meeting of their eyes. That is beyond.
A famous writer, feeling his life coming to an end, writes these words: ‘My soul looks back and wonders how I got over.’
A young woman, standing on a shore, looks out into an immense azure sea rimmed with the silver line of the horizon. She looks out into the obscure heart of destiny, and is overwhelmed by a feeling both dark and oddly joyful. She may be thinking something like this: ‘My soul looks forward and wonders – just how am I going to get across.’ That is beyond.
3
A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares for the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her in words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or duende. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her for ever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts she begins her dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls us into the awesome risk of her dance.
She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.
She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.
And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no one moves. The fact is that she has destroyed us all.
Why do I dwell on this dancer? I dwell on her because she represents for me the courage to go beyond ourselves. While she danced she became the dream of the freest and most creative people we had always wanted to be, in whatever it is we do. She was the sea we never ran away to, the spirit of wordless self-overcoming we never quite embrace. She destroyed us because we knew in our hearts that rarely do we rise to the higher challenges in our lives, or our work, or our humanity. She destroyed us because rarely do we love our tasks and our lives enough to die and thus be reborn into the divine gift of our hidden genius. We seldom try for that beautiful greatness brooding in the mystery of our blood.
You can say in her own way, and in that moment, that she too was a dancer to God.
That spirit of the leap into the unknown, that joyful giving of the self’s powers, that wisdom of going beyond in order to arrive here – that too is beyond words.
All art is a prayer for spiritual strength. If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom. We would not be afraid of speech, and we would be serene with silence. We would learn to live beyond words, among the highest things. We wouldn’t need words. Our smile, our silences would be sufficient. Our creations and the beauty of our functions would be enough. Our giving would be our perpetual gift.
4
The greatest inspiration, the most sublime ideas of living that have come down to humanity come from a higher realm, a happier realm, a place of pure dreams, a heaven of blessed notions. Ideas and infinite possibilities dwell there in absolute tranquillity.
Before these ideas came to us they were pure, they were silent, and their life-giving possibilities were splendid. But when they come to our earthly realm they acquire weight and words. They become less.
The sweetest notions, ideas of universal love and justice, love for one another, or intuitions of joyful creation, these are all perfect in their heavenly existences. Any artist will tell you that ideas are happier in the heaven of their conception than on the earth of their realisation.
We should return to pure contemplation, to sweet meditation, to the peace of silent loving, the serenity of deep faith, to the stillness of deep waters. We should sit still in our deep selves and dream good new things for humanity. We should try and make those dreams real. We should keep trying to raise higher the conditions and possibilities of this world. Then maybe one day, after much striving, we might well begin to create a world justice and a new light on this earth that could inspire a ten-second silence of wonder – even in heaven.
Amongst the Silent Stones
When I read Herodotus and when I look at some Renaissance paintings, I find myself uncovering some of the lies that have been told us in history books. When I look at the bronze representations of Portuguese soldiers from the Benin Kingdom, it occurs to me that history is essentially silent. It is we, looking back with clear eyes, who can make it speak. This is our privilege.
In Renaissance paintings I sometimes see that the interaction between Europe and Africa is an old one. The relationship wasn’t necessarily coded with notions of degradation. That came later, to an age degraded with notions of conquest. In African sculptings of Europeans I notice that the white visitants were not seen as gods but as men, human in their squat representative forms, their helmets, and guns.
The true possibilities of the interactions between people haven’t yet begun. This is evident in modern art, in the paintings of Picasso and the Cubists who saw only the outward forms of African Art. The Surrealists saw only the insurgent subconscious content, the world of dreams, the perception that our relationship to the cosmos can only be on human terms, and that we represent and harness the great forces through those strange forms that well up from the depths of the human psyche. They did not begin to see the spiritual life, the mythic structures, the incantatory world-view, and the secret histories that shaped the African’s artistic genius.
The beautiful thing about even the most superficial attempt to collide with the secret lives of others is what can only be termed the aesthetic of serendipity: the accidental discoveries, the widened horizons, roads opened by lightning flash into the forests of reality.
The Cubists pursued one aspect of the discoveries made from African art. It led to the breaking up of form. It also led to the belief in four dimensions. The Surrealists delved into the subconscious, and swam on the surface of the oceanic possibilities of what was really the Shaman’s terrain. For Shamans and African image-makers know that we contain the universe
inside us, that the sea is in the fish much as the fish is in the sea; that birds breathe their own flight; that forces in the human frame can interpenetrate matter, extend the bounds of time and space, enter the dreams of lions, and travel through the private histories of rivers and mountains.
It is a bewildering fact that while we launch out to distant planets, while we approach the wonder and dread of a new millennium (one that could see the human race bring about its own extinction, or enter the greatest stage of its development), as human beings we have not yet begun to see one another as people who are forced to be together must. Human history is hundreds of thousands of years old and still we look at one another with superficial eyes – as if we haven’t learnt in all these millennia of interacting that we are all merely human, that beneath our skins there are continents of similar desires and eruptive dreams, swirling universes of thoughts, pre-historic urges, lightning flashes, and an eternal bloom of flowers.
It is bewildering because it seems that beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is holy.
We have not yet discovered what it means to be human. And it seems that this ordinary discovery is the most epiphanic that can be made – for when we have learnt what it is to be human, when we have suffered it, and loved it, we will know our true estate, we will know what gulf separates us from the gods, we will know what it means to be free, and we will know that freedom is really the beginning of our mutual destinies.
The Cubists were excited by the fourth dimension in art. The African sculptors bore testament to a fifth dimension, a world of spirits, the interpenetration of the worlds of the living and the dead. Those who forget death forget how to live. The African world, by opening life into death, by drawing death over the living spaces, gave life more space in which to live, to celebrate, to bear suffering, and to be joyful.
Many discoveries have been interrupted by history, discoveries which could lead to fundamental principles that would annihilate all the superficial distinctions of skin, religion, class and sex, by which we conduct our lives. Europe interrupted some of the mythic dreams and the psychic discoveries of places like Africa and India, and then denied the existence of their unique ways. It wasn’t always like that: for a time these places fascinated Europe with their deep mysteries. The colonisation of Africa, and its subsequent representation, apart from being the triumph of greed over humanity, was the triumph of rationalism over the subconscious, the victory of the head over the spirit. That triumph, as any psycho-analyst would confirm, is short-lived, and ultimately disastrous. The dreams of the world are more insurgent when repressed.
Apart from the wounding of the souls of continents, colonialism also – paradoxically – achieved an accidental serendipity. It brought people together in a way that might not have happened for hundreds of years. For example, as a result of its over-reaching, Britain began by colonising half the world and now finds half the world in its territory, within its history, subtly altering its psyche. Things work both ways. It is interesting to hear some people complain about these presences living in the land, to hear statements about retaining the purity of the race. The fact is that in nature all organic things of single strain have short histories. Obsessions about purity of blood have wiped out empires. We are all of us mixtures, and our roots are fed from diverse and forgotten places. The Yorubas of Nigeria trace their origins to the Middle East; some anthropologists claim that the real aborigines of Africa are the Bushmen of the Kalahari; the English are a combination of Celts, Vikings, Brigantes, and so on; the ancient Egyptians were black as well as dun-coloured. This is the history of bodies. The history of civilisations is even more eclectic.
We are on the threshold of a new era. The greatest responsibilities of our age rest not only with the big nation powers of the modern world, but also with the host of small nations, those whose ancient dreams are on the verge of extinction. The responsibilities of the unvalued, the unheard, the silent, are greater than ever. And the weight of this responsibility rests on one thing: we are essentially struggling for the humanity of the world. We are struggling to liberate the world into a greater destiny. We are struggling for world balance and justice.
The unheard have always seen themselves as strangers in a world of juggernauts. We have accepted the world’s definition of us. The world is neutral: it is we who give things value. We could change the value we place on ourselves. We should always remember that it takes a certain natural genius to survive the depredations of history. We should reconnect that genius, for if we do not place the highest value on ourselves we cannot achieve the highest good in the world.
And, whether we like it or not, what happens in the world is our responsibility as well. The world is a battleground of mythologies and of dreams. Those who allow their houses to fall into chaos and disarray deserve to have the silences of forgotten histories wash over them. As the thunderous roll of world powers gets larger, more silences are created. Those who have lived with nature, those who have suffered the erosion of unexplored paths of history, cannot afford to be silent, to be cowardly, and to think only of themselves.
The new theory of chaos asserts that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings can start, can herald, momentous storms. The same may be true of history. The dying star of a nation, the silent death of a language, the eclipse of a way of seeing, the definite cry of a silenced people, could herald something more momentous than a storm for human history.
It is not the size of the voice that is important: it is the power, the truth, and the beauty of the dream.
Those who think that the homogenising forces of the world will not turn their valued spaces into little deserts without mystery deserve to see the coming of the storm. Those who watch in opportunistic silence the growth of tyranny, the swelling ranks of conformity, the rankling prisons, the cracking down of dissent, and the curious new methods of censorship, deserve to witness the world become smaller, tightening around their throats.
Tyranny takes many forms, but all the forms have something in common: a homogenising advance, a fertile bed of discontent and silence. It seems to me that the age demands that each man and woman become a light, a fire, a responsible heir to all the veins of freedom and courage that have enabled us all to get here, in spite of the forces of darkness all around. It seems our age demands that we all be clearer about ourselves than ever, that we be stronger, more courageous in the defence of a multiplicity of voices.
They tell me that nature is a survival of the fittest. And yet look at how many wondrous gold and yellow fishes prosper amongst the silent stones of the ocean beds, while sharks eternally prowl the waters in their impossible dreams of oceanic domination and while whales become extinct; look how many does and antelopes, ants and fleas, birds of aquamarine plumage, birds that have mastered Chinua Achebe’s art of flying without perching, how many butterflies and iguanas thrive, while elephants turn into endangered species, and while even lions growl in their dwindling solitude.
There is no such thing as a powerless people. There are only those who have not seen and have not used their power and will. It would seem a miraculous feat, but it is possible for the unvalued ones to help create a beautiful new era in human history. New vision should come from those who suffer most and who love life the most. The marvellous responsibility of the unheard and the unseen resides in this paradox.
Nature and history are not just about the survival of the fittest, but also about the survival of the wisest, the most adaptive, and the most aware.
Fables are Made of this: For Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–96)
If you want to know what is happening in an age or in a nation, find out what is happening to the writers, the town-criers; for they are the seismographs that calibrate impending earthquakes in the spirit of the times. Are the writers sleeping? Then the age is in a dream. Are the writers celebrating?
Then the first flowers of a modest golden age are sending their fragrances across to the shores of future possibilities. Are the writers strangely silent? Then the era is brooding with undeciphered disturbances. But when you hear that writers have been inexplicably murdered, silenced, that their houses have mysteriously burnt down, that grotesque lies are told against them, that they have fled their countries, that they dwell restlessly in exile, but above all when you hear that writers have been sentenced to death by unjust tribunals, then you can be sure that perils and the demons of war and the angels of fragmentation have already begun their dreaded descent into the blood and the suffering of the millions of people who inhabit that land.
Then you know that the air of that land is already rich with corruption and terror, that the air is unbreathable, that the lives are insufferable, that the soil has already begun to deliver its harvest of dead bodies and the bizarre plants of disaster, that liberty is dead in the fields, and that the government itself is under the grim sentence of death.
The writer is the barometer of the age. Elections can be rigged, their results undemocratically annulled, and the rightful leaders installed in the presidential quarters of prison houses. The people can be frightened into sullen acceptance, into cynicism, for the sake of their children, for the sake of food. And they can go on living, blessed by their incredible ability to wait for the diseased time to consume itself, for better seasons to return, and for the earth to decompose the arrogant certainties of tyrants.
But the writer, bristling with the unacceptable that grows swollen in their sleeplessness, unable to carry on for the sheer smell of dung in the age, the writer cannot help but break cover from the wisdom of waiting, cannot help but break faith temporarily with the wisdom of the people who have seen so many monstrosities come and go, so many famines consume themselves to death, so many wars devour their children and eventually expire in a landscape devastated and deserted.
