Prayer for the Living

by Ben Okri

  Afterwards all one heard of him were legends. He had waged battles with corrupt government officials, and embarked on campaigns in the forests of the North where Boko Haram terrorised the nation. It was even rumoured that he had been selected to join a resettlement programme on Mars. These are stories his madness generated. It is hard to say whether his deeds exceeded our imagination, or whether we are poor reporters of the marvellous.

  Let it be said, while I have breath, that he made us more imaginative, just by being himself. I had never felt myself more locked in the little box of my possibilities than in the presence of that man. He was a call to greatness. We failed to take up that challenge, cowards that most of us are. That failure is the lingering regret of my life. For a life passes, a life is lived. It is lived under fear and caution. One thinks of one’s family. One thinks of one’s self. But the life passes. And it is only the fires that your life lights in other people’s souls that count. This I know now in the long uneventful autumn of my life. There are some people one should never have met, because they introduce into your heart an eternal regret for the greater life you did not live.

  The paper dried, and when I was sure Don Ki-Otah would not have ink smudged on his face, I let him have what we had been printing. I did not know it would have the strange effect that it did.

  He read the text very slowly. In all my life I have not met anyone who read more slowly. This puzzled me. It was because of reading too many books that he lost his mind. He couldn’t have read so many books if he read so slowly.

  ‘You are taking too much time with the reading,’ I said to him.

  The tension in the room changed. Sancho, leaning his fat frame against the door, gasped. I did not understand the gasp and turned towards him. Then I felt the machete whizzing past my face, a cool breeze at the end of my nose. How calmly we regard extreme things after they have happened. I turned to Don Ki-Otah.

  ‘Do you think,’ he said, manipulating his face into a most peculiar shape, ‘that I read sixty-seven thousand, three hundred and twenty-two books by taking instructions from you – in how to read?’

  The manner in which he spoke confused me. He made words sound more than they are. Other people say words and they mean less. He made words feel like more. He made your hairs stand on end when he spoke. I felt a furry growth at the side of my face when he addressed me. I stared at him, mesmerised.

  ‘So you presume to tell Don Ki-Otah how to read?’

  My mouth was dry.

  ‘Pull up your ears! Clear them of wax! Get rid of that dim expression on your face! Stand up straight, young man, and listen!’

  I drew breath. I felt faint. With a few syllables he could induce madness. His speech rocked the back of my skull. I don’t know what came over me. One after the other, I pulled my ears. I tweaked them up straight like a rabbit’s. All the while he stared at me with terrifying concentration. If he had carried on staring at me much longer I might have gone up in flames. I made an effort to stand up straight, till my head grazed the ceiling of his contempt.

  ‘What did I say?’ he bellowed. ‘Listen!’

  I swallowed. It was a bruising adventure to be in his presence.

  ‘In the course of a fifty-year reading career,’ he said, directing at me an unblinking focus, ‘I have experimented with three hundred and twenty-two modes of reading. I have read speedily like a bright young fool, crabbily like a teacher, querulously like a scholar, wistfully like a traveller, and punctiliously like a lawyer. I have read selectively like a politician, comparatively like a critic, contemptuously like a tyrant, glancingly like a journalist, competitively like an author, laboriously like an aristocrat. I have read critically like an archaeologist, microscopically like a scientist, reverentially like the blind, indirectly like a poet. Like a peasant I have read carefully, like a composer attentively, like a schoolboy hurriedly, like a shaman magically. I have read in every single possible way there is of reading. You can’t read the number and variety of books I have read without a compendium of ways of reading.’

  He stared at me. I felt he could see the inside of my head.

  ‘I have read books backwards and inside out. I began reading Ovid in the middle and then to the end and then from the beginning. I once read every other sentence of a book I knew well and then went back and read the sentences I missed out. We are all children in the art of reading. We assume there is only one way to read a book. But a book read in a new way becomes a new book.’

  I felt he was reading me as he spoke.

  ‘And you have the nerve to tell me I am reading too slowly. Part of the trouble with our world, my snooty young friend, is that the art of reading is almost dead. Reading is the secret of life. We read the world poorly, because we read poorly. Everything is reading. The world is the way you read it. As we read, so we are. You are trying to read me now.’

  His focus on me made me nearly jump out of my skin. I could not read him. I would not even dare to begin. He was like a Chinese pictograph or a hieroglyph.

  ‘Don’t deny it. I can see your eyes wandering about my face as if it were an incomprehensible text.’

  He paused.

  ‘You are even trying to read this moment in time. But you read it dimly. The words are not clear on the pages of your life. Youth clouds your seeing. Emotions pass in front of the text before you have grasped it. Can you read yourself in the chapter of time?’

  He was staring at me again and all I had was muteness.

  ‘You are a living paragraph of history. Around you are all the horrors of time and all the wonders of life, but all you see is an old man reading with all his soul. Do you know what I am reading?’

  I shook my head, as if in a trance.

  ‘I am reading a text by a Spaniard about my adventures in La Mancha.’

  He guessed at the vacuity of my grasp.

  ‘You have no idea what I am talking about, and you dare to criticise how I read?’

  Another short laugh burst out of him.

  ‘I don’t read slowly. And I have long ago left reading fast to those who will continuously misunderstand everything around them. I read now the way the dead read. I read with the soles of my feet. I read with my beard. I read with the secret ventricles of my heart. I read with all my sufferings, joys, intuitions, all my love, all the beatings I have received, all the injustices I have endured. I read with all the magic that seeps through the cracks in the air. Do you, therefore, dare to judge the way I read?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sa,’ I murmured. ‘I did not mean anything…’

  ‘You would prefer me to gulp words down like a drunk guzzling palm wine in a bukka?’

  ‘No, sa.’

  ‘I suppose you think the faster you read, the more intelligent you are?’

  ‘Not at all, sa.’

  In truth, though, this is what I believed.

  ‘I suppose for you living fast is genius. I bet you fuck fast too. Fuck so fast that the poor woman has hardly had time to notice that you were in her.’

  ‘Not at all, sa!’

  ‘Not at all, what?’

  ‘I don’t know, sa. I am confused, sa.’

  He inflicted on me another long stare. I felt myself shrink to a tiny form, one inch from the floor. At the same time I felt magnified beyond the sky. He had that paradoxical effect.

  As he stared at me it seemed my life rushed before my eyes. I felt myself hurtling through time. I grew older, more arrogant, more successful. A chance event brought me down. Then years of doubt followed. My waistline thickened. I found a wife, became a father, and lost all my dreams. I worked hard in the name of raising a family. And then I was an old man on a porch, wondering where all the magic and promise of life had gone, when only yesterday I was a young apprentice with all the world before me. Then Don Ki-Otah comes into the printer’s shop, and shakes my life with his mad Urhobo gaze.

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ he said, relentlessly, ‘is that nothing is done faster than when it is done well.’
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br />   For the first time, I noticed the unnatural silence in the workshop.

  ‘You read for information, I read to extract the soul of the conception. Reading is like entering the mind of the gods, seeing beyond the page. Can you read an entire history from a single glance? Can you deduce a poet’s health or the station of their time here on earth from a single line of their poetry? You think reading is about reading fast. But reading is about understanding that which cannot be understood, which the words merely hint at.’

  He would have gone on, in this fashion, had Sancho not sneaked a look at the text that Don Ki-Otah had in his hands.

  ‘My dear Don,’ said Sancho, ‘but I see your name on the pages you are reading. How did that come to be?’

  Don Ki-Otah paused in a particularly brilliant crescendo of thought. Then he lashed Sancho with one of those gazes perfected in the creeks of Urhoboland.

  ‘Did you not hear one word I’ve been saying to our young friend here about reading?’

  ‘Don, the things you say are too intelligent for me. They go clean over my head. I watch them sailing past. I don’t find it helpful to pay attention to what you say. But your name on these pages, what is it doing there?’

  Don Ki-Otah brought the machete, flat surface down, hard on the edge of the printing machine. Sparks shot out into our faces. Don Ki-Otah was himself taken aback by the sparks. His eyes protruded. I sensed another long speech coming on. To distract him, I said:

  ‘Aren’t you going to continue with your reading?’

  For a moment he was torn between a scientific and a literary choice. With a sigh, pulling at his beard as if it helped him concentrate, he returned to the text. He read in silence like a man drowning. A wall-gecko ran half way up the wall. The wall-gecko saw Don Ki-Otah reading and was transfixed by the vision. I watched the wall-gecko watching Don Ki-Otah. It must have been a historic sight.

  Now, many years later, I see how much of a historic moment it was. It was a moment in which a golden line between the old and new time was crossed.

  Can someone reading constitute a significant moment in the cultural life of a whole people? Can something so intimate have historical repercussions? I do not want to make extravagant claims for such a subjective activity. But what if the understanding of one mind precipitates the understanding of the many? There is a moment in the life of a people when things are suddenly seen for what they are. It may be injustice, or it may be a great social evil. But what if such a seeing was achieved first by one and then by the rest of us? Maybe the great historical moments, the storming of the barricades, the laws eradicating poverty, the liberation of women from servitude, the proclamation of racial equality, the protection of the earth’s environment, are the outer forms of an inner activity. Maybe a people see first and then the realm of deeds comes after.

  But as Don Ki-Otah read that text we could feel the air in the room change. His way of reading was like a prosecution of all our assumptions. It was like a thousand question marks scattered across our corruption-infested landscape. Even his face kept altering as he read. His beard was twisted into the enigmatic shapes of ancestral sculptures.

  In the silence a thousand questions began to swim up to me. Maybe it was that long in-between time usually given up to chatter. Maybe it was the time used in covering up that which we do not want to see, but which stares at us like a corpse at the side of the street. Maybe it was that silence, so rare in our times, allowed the questions to rise up to the holes in the roof, through which they escaped out into the nation.

  Being an eminently practical man, according to his own curious logic, Don Ki-Otah would disapprove of such fanciful notions. But something happened in that space, in that silence, as he sucked in the air with the concentration of his reading. It may have been the beginning of reading the world, reading the world in which we suffered every day. It was that more than anything.

  He infected us with a new way of reading. We began to read the cockroaches. We read the spider’s webs. We read the raw roads and the corpses under the bushes. We read the cracks in our faces, through which despair seeped out. We read our extraordinary talent for evasion. We read our breathing and noticed what a pungent text the air made. When we began to read the shacks, the slums, and the palatial houses with armed guards and high electric fences, when we began to read those who grew fatter as we grew thinner, when we began to read the ambiguous text of our recent history, we saw that the world was not what we thought it was.

  Before, we had seen the world as somehow inevitable. We had seen that it was the only way it could be. Now, with the new reading, we saw that the world was only one of a thousand ways it could be. But we had chosen this one, with its bad smells, its injustice.

  All this happened in the space of a printed page. Don Ki-Otah read the page. Then he took up another printed page. He read that. Then he looked up. His head aslant, he regarded us with puzzlement.

  ‘What is it?’ Sancho said, rushing forward. He sensed distress in the eyes of his beloved master and friend.

  ‘What is it? What is it? Have you seen what I am reading?’

  ‘No. What is it?’

  I don’t know how, but he had ink on his face. He looked both comical and ghoulish. He misunderstood our collective stares. He seemed to think that we knew what he had been reading, and that we had somehow colluded in it. His machete rose above his head, and we backed off into the shadows, and pressed ourselves into the walls. The curve of our backs ought to have dented the bricks.

  ‘These are pages about our adventures,’ he cried.

  ‘What adventures?’

  ‘All our adventures.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘All since we left Ughelli and roamed the world as far as La Mancha, fighting demons, defeating giants, rescuing women from abduction, tilting at oil rigs, battling corruption. It’s all here!’

  ‘But how can that be? No one else knows of those adventures except us. I haven’t told anybody. Have you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sancho.’

  ‘But who is writing down those adventures? Is it someone we know?’

  ‘Someone called Ben Okri. He claims to be writing the adventures from oral history.’

  ‘Oral history?’

  ‘Yes, oral history. Don’t look so stupid, Sancho. It is word of mouth history.’

  ‘You mean gossip?’

  ‘Not just gossip.’

  ‘You mean rumour?’

  ‘No. Stories told by people.’

  ‘Can you trust it?’

  ‘Oral history can be more reliable than written history.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People exaggerate. They tell tall tales. Sometimes they engage in propaganda.’

  ‘I know. Oral history gives us the spirit, but written history gives us only the facts. The facts, by themselves, tell us very little.’

  ‘So are we to believe this Ben Okri?’

  ‘He also claims to be writing the adventures from manuscripts originally written by Cervantes, who wrote his from papers he discovered by Cide Hamete Benengeli, who got it from an Arabian manuscript.’

  ‘It sounds very complicated.’

  ‘It is not complicated at all. It is like biblical genealogy.’

  ‘What is genealology? You are always using words bigger than me and I am a big man. Can you not find a simpler word for a plain man like me?’

  ‘And that is not all,’ roared Don Ki-Otah, ignoring Sancho’s request.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Of course there is more. Why else would I be so upset?’

  ‘You are always upset about something. Or you are always upsetting something.’

  ‘Shut up, Sancho.’

  Sancho offered the Don a glum look.

  ‘This fellow has written adventures I haven’t had yet.’

  ‘You mean he has written your future?’

  Don Ki-Otah considered this. His face was almost
meditative.

  ‘He has written one future.’

  ‘How many futures are there?’

  ‘We have a wise saying in our village. A man’s future changes when he changes how he lives.’

  ‘Forgive me for being stupid, but is that not one of the futures too?’

  ‘No!’ bellowed Don Ki-Otah. ‘We believe that a person can confound their future. It was prophesied for me that I would die in my bed, and that I would renounce the life I have lived. But I will do no such thing.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They can write my future. But I am the only one who can write my present.’

  ‘So you are going to become a writer now?’

  ‘Of course not, Sancho. I have chosen to live. I have chosen the noble path of adventure, not the sedentary art of writing.’

  ‘You had me worried for a minute.’

  ‘When I say I will write my present I only mean that I will write it in how I live it. For many people, writing is what they do on a page. For a rare few, writing is what they do with life. Some write their texts on paper. I write my text on the living tissue of time. I write my legends on the living flesh of the present moment.’

  ‘I prefer pounded yam and egusi soup, with goat meat.’

  ‘Of course you do, Sancho.’

  ‘Each to his own.’

  ‘For me, however, all destiny is here. In this moment. This present moment is one the gods have no control over.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they have yielded to us the marvels of consciousness.’

  ‘I had never thought of that before.’

  ‘Of course you hadn’t, Sancho. Most people read books; I read life. Some people write stories; I live them.’

  He looked around the workshop.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said abruptly. ‘We have spent enough time in this house of embalmment.’

  He slid the machete into a rough sheath that he wore at his side. Moved to a defence of my apprenticeship as a printer’s assistant, I cried:

  ‘Embalmment?’

  I did not even know what the word meant.

  ‘Yes, embalmment,’ replied Don Ki-Otah, calmly. ‘What else are you doing here but burying living time in the tomb of print? What are you doing but fixing in the amber of print that which was fluid and multi-dimensional?’