by Ben Okri
Again I stared at him stupefied. My mind had a hundred objections, but my mouth was stuck. He continued evenly:
‘This workshop is a graveyard of life. Life has a thousand colours, meanings, layers, aspects known and unknown. Print has only one face. That face, in a thousand years, is taken to be the only truth. This is a house of the falsifications of time. I will have nothing more to do with it.’
‘But we leave a record,’ I cried. ‘This is history!’
‘The father of lies!’ returned Don Ki-Otah, with unnatural tranquillity.
The years pass and a great ambiguity falls over those words. The years pass and I become aware that we never really see what is there before us. It is as if the event veils its own truth.
It seems he could indeed read the future in a grain of text. The truth is that after he left that day we scoured all the printed matter we had in the shop. We found that nothing we had printed that day or any other day bore any resemblance to that which he claimed he had read.
It began to dimly occur to us that maybe we did not know how to read the secret scripts of life concealed in the ordinary stuff we printed every day. It occurred to us that we did not know how to read at all. This was perhaps the greatest shock. Don Ki-Otah had read our walls, the dust at our feet, and had discerned that which we would not notice in a hundred years. In that way he taught us that there is a secret reality around us all the time. This secret reality reveals all things.
There still remains some doubt as to whether his reading of this secret reality is a consequence of his madness, or whether our inability to read it is a consequence of our dimness. It may just be that we are blind to the prophecies written on the plain features of our times.
*
That day, after he returned the printed pages to me, he cast one last look at the workshop. Did ever a glance reveal the poverty and richness of a place? For a moment, seeing it through his eyes, I wanted to tear down every brick from that squalid workshop. But then, seeing it through his eyes the next moment, I glimpsed an unsuspected magnificence. With his unique seeing he could transform a hovel into a palace, and a palace into a hovel.
After that ambiguous gaze, he turned to me. I expected from him a long speech, such as antique knights are inclined to give. I braced myself for meandering locutions. Instead he favoured me with a smile, in which was mixed compassion and amusement. To this day I have not been able to fathom the full meaning of that smile. It bothers me often on the margins of sleep.
With a gesture to Sancho, he left the room. I should write that line twice. No one has ever left a room the way he did. He left it altered forever. He left the room, but the room retained the stamp and magic and chaos of his spirit. Afterwards when I went to the workshop a little of Don Ki-Otahism invaded my quiet life.
Why else do I write with elegiac cadences of a moment that happened more than forty years ago? I too would have liked to have set out on a steed and taken on the challenges of our times.
Later we heard how he would attack garage boys thinking they were stragglers from Boko Haram, or would defend a prostitute in Ajegunle thinking her a celebrated Yoruba princess, or how he set upon a convoy of soldiers, accusing them of electoral fraud. In the last instance he was beaten within a half inch of his life for his absurd bravery.
These actions have changed in the telling into deeds of heroism that shame our famous activists. His deeds, re-imagined by our storytellers, made my days into something a little glorious. The years have been good to him.
When he died, in a hovel on the edge of the ghetto, surrounded by his beloved books, he had only Sancho with him, and a scheming niece. His last words were not remembered. Sancho was too broken by grief to ever speak of them. But over the months word went round of his passing. All the market women he had irritated, all the politicians he had insulted, all the prostitutes he had tried to reform, all the truck pushers he had taunted, all the bus drivers who flinched when they saw him, all formed processions along his street and held long vigils outside his house.
I speak of these things with too much compression. They ought to be a thousand pages in the telling. But these are hurried and heated times. It is a wonder one can tell any story straight.
What happened with the rest of his life has been retold by many people. They are fleas on the back of a free-roaming bull. I only wanted to tell of one moment and its long aftermath. It is by the aftermaths that we most truly judge greatness.
*
He stepped out of the printing workshop that day and was struck by the muggy light of the Ajegunle sun. Outside stood the scrawniest donkey I had ever seen. It was flea-ridden and refractory. Don Ki-Otah leapt on the donkey’s back, and was immediately thrown. He picked himself up and dusted himself down. He turned to us and said:
‘It seems Sidama does not want to be ridden today.’
That donkey was a rangy stubborn thing. It looked as if it didn’t think much of its master. Don Ki-Otah kept coaxing it. He spoke to the brute as if it were an intelligent human being. A crowd gathered to watch the strange sight of a man trying to reason with a donkey.
Then something unexpected happened. While Don Ki-Otah was whispering into the donkey’s twitching ear, Sancho gave the beast a short solid kick in the rump. After that the donkey became agreeable. Don Ki-Otah looked at us as if to confirm the efficacy of his technique.
‘All you have to do is reason with them,’ he said.
Then he took up the halter, clambered on the beast, and rode towards the red cloud gathering in the North.
* He was known originally as Don Quixote, but under the imaginative force of African nicknaming he became Don Ki-Otah.
Boko Haram (3)
He stood there in the room with the saw in his hand and a grin on his face. He asked his men to bring the soldier to him. They dragged in the soldier, an officer. He ordered them to hold the prisoner down so his neck was bare.
Then he began sawing through the officer’s neck. The officer screamed and fought but they held him down and the man went on sawing. He sawed through the spurts of blood and through the veins and the solid bone of the neck and he sawed all through the broken garbled cry of the officer.
He sawed away steadily, with a calm expression on his sweaty face. Every now and then he looked up and shouted ‘God is Great’. Then he resumed sawing.
The officer had struggled, had bled, had slumped, but the man went on sawing. He had blood and gore down the front of his kaftan. The officer’s fat dripped from his beard.
His hair was wild under his turban but his eyes shone calmly.
When he had finished sawing, he held up the head of the officer. Twisted roots of veins dripping blood dangled from the head. The eyes were shut and the mouth twisted, the tongue half out, clamped down tight with bared teeth. The man held up the officer’s head, as if it were a lamp.
‘This is what will happen to you if you dare to come and fight us,’ he said, grinning, and then spoke for ninety minutes.
When he finished he was still holding up the decapitated head.
‘Did you record that?’
‘Yes,’ said the cameraman.
‘All of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now they will fear us.’
He threw the head on a bundle in a corner of the room. Then he had a shower at the back of the shed, and joined his men for prayers.
A Street
Streets harbour secret and public stories. A street has its habits and repetitions. If something significant has happened in a street it will happen again, in new ways.
There are streets where people are prone to accidents, streets where people are inclined to fall in love, suicidal streets. There are streets where people go mad, streets of inspiration, of revelation.
A poet was once walking along the canal on Maida Avenue. He had been writing an epic, with great difficulty. Half way up the street a leaf falling from a silver birch made him grasp the true nature of his composition. He hurried home a
nd destroyed the epic he had been labouring over for seven years. In its place he composed a haiku.
Many years later another poet was walking down the same street. He had been writing a haiku for five years. Half way down the canal a bird’s nest on the bare branches of a chestnut tree caused him to grasp the true dimensions of his composition. He rushed home and destroyed the haiku he had been struggling with. In its place, over the next seven years, he composed the epic of a nation coming to being out of fire and returning to the trickle of its magical origins.
These events do not appear in history. The histories of such streets are invisible, like underground rivers.
Acknowledgements
I wish to say thank you to the following people: to my agent Georgina Capel; to the inimitable Anthony Cheetham; and to all the fine people at Head of Zeus.
About the Author
Ben Okri won the Booker prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. He has published eleven novels, four volumes of short stories, four books of essays, and four collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than twenty-six languages. He also writes plays and filmscripts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a vice-president of English PEN and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London.
An Invitation from the Publisher
We hope you enjoyed this book. We are an independent publisher dedicated to discovering brilliant books, new authors and great storytelling. Please join us at www.headofzeus.com and become part of our community of book-lovers.
We will keep you up to date with our latest books, author blogs, special previews, tempting offers, chances to win signed editions and much more.
Get in touch: [email protected]
www.headofzeus.com
@headofzeus
@HoZ_Books
Head of Zeus Books
‘Prayer for the Living’ was originally published as ‘A Prayer from the Living’ in the Guardian Magazine in 1993
‘A Sinister Perfection’ was first published in Callaloo in 2015
‘Ancient Ties of Karma’ was first published in Callaloo in 2015
‘Mysteries’ was first published in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2009
‘Tulips’ was first published in the newspaper catalogue Turkish Tulips in 2017
‘The Lie’ was first delivered at the Italian literary festival La Milanisiana in 2012 and first published by the Sunday Times in 2011
‘Alternate Realities are True’ was originally broadcast as ‘The Multiverse Murders’ with Audible in 2018
‘The Story in the Next Room’ was first published in the booklet The Mystery Feast in 2015
‘The Overtaker’ was first published in the Daily Mail magazine
‘Raft’ first appeared in the booklet The Waters of Humanity, published by CCCB, Barcelona in 2019
‘Don Ki-Otah and the Ambiguity of Reading’ originally appeared as ‘Don Quixote and the Ambiguity of Reading’ in the anthology Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare, published by And Other Stories in 2016
‘A Street’ appeared in a shorter form in the Shortlist digital daily Mr Hyde in 2016
