by Ben Okri
‘So what if two thousand years ago when you thought the world was the size of your village and your rumours, so what if my crocodiles cried for your flesh and I answered with the children of those who opposed our religion? So what if when I plucked a flower from the farm three men died? And what about the toad I cooked and gave you all to eat? You ate it and grew strong; you hailed my powers, you followed my politics. I do not drink blood from leaking calabashes. All over the country children call my name at night; the people I have saved outnumber my enemies by five to one; people I have sent to school, mothers to whom I have brought justice, marketwomen whom I have protected from thugs and gangs, unions that I have helped. It is not my fault if a carpenter died because he wanted someone to kill him. You all stare at me as if I am giving birth to a horse, but which one of you can give birth to a country and not die of exhaustion, eh? Which one of you can live in three continents at the same moment? Which one of you can enter the dreams of one hundred thousand people? Which one of you can talk to white people in their sleep and listen to their plans of making us smaller while they get bigger, eh? Which one of you can bear the responsibility of power, can fight off all the demons of the poor, tame the devils of the rich, ride the colonized air of the country? Which one of you, I want to know, can do battle with the six hundred and fifty-two spirits chaining up our future with a single diamond key, a key thrown into the deepest parts of the Atlantic where the bones of a sunken continent dream our history backwards as if it cannot be improved?’
Madame Koto paused a moment and we glimpsed a terrifying intelligence in the madness of her eyes, an intelligence so fascinating that we lost all consciousness of being in our bodies, under the fiery sun. And then, gently at first, as if seducing us with a forgotten tenderness, but rising again to fury and to shouting, Madame Koto continued:
‘So, the secret of our failure is buried in the brain of a dead tortoise: why don’t we eat the tortoise? Why come and dump a bucket of nonsense at my bar, why put the coffin of a man who wanted to die on my new car that hasn’t even tasted the sweetness of our new roads? I did not cut off the fingers of my husband, and even if I did do you see him complain? I did not poison your dreams, and even if I did can you swear that you did not want it? Which one of you can ride a horse in your sleep and still hold on when the horse turns into a giant bird that takes you to the great white egg of the moon? You people believe in scattered gods; you don’t even worship at your shrines. Your gods have too many names; and because you have forgotten why the gods were born there are holes in your souls through which your lives leak out. I plug the holes with rocks. The trees grow on my body, leaving all these rashes. I cut down the trees. They grow again, and I burn them, and lightning flashes while you sleep. Some flowers have roots of millipedes. When they die the air begins to boil. The sun bakes the barks of the trees, and they die – all the young trees that are not good for carving and the plants that are good for eating. They die and the great trees that were here before we knew the name of our continent, they give shade to two thousand caravans of spirits. I cannot cut down old trees. Take away your dead. Plant him in your sleep. I will carry the noise and the cries of those whose blood makes my body swell. I will carry the responsibility for those who say I killed them, poisoned them, planted bad dreams in their kidneys – but take your dead, put him on the great river and let him swell up in the sky. I have no words for the blind, nothing to show the deaf, so when you look at me it is your mothers’ fevers that you mock, and when you judge me with your hungry ears it is the words of your fathers that you judge. I am the tree that you planted, a tree that you can’t find a use for; don’t complain if I give you strange shade.’
ELEVEN
Seeds of mutiny
MADAME KOTO STOPPED. No one moved. The birds had vanished from the sky. The only thing that fluttered in our midst was terror at Madame Koto’s ravings. Like statues, we stood entranced by the flame of her words. The earth sizzled beneath our feet while she broke again into her confessions. We stood there, rooted at the crossroads of many eras which met simultaneously in our brains. And Madame Koto proceeded to confess to crimes committed in other continents, as an inquisitor who burned innocent women on oakwood fires, and made love to their cries. She confessed to murders committed hundreds of years ago in an Empire which flourished on the edge of a desert. She confessed to the deaths of children, to the destruction of villages, to driving men mad, like the husband who cut off three of his fingers under her hallucinative spells.
On and on she went, accusing us of eternal cowardice, of refusing to use our powers and envying those who do. On and on she shouted, mingling her agony with rage at the coffin. She attacked the air with her thick fingers. She flung her beads about. She jumped and fell, and tore her clothes, till she was nearly naked. She repeatedly screamed at us to get rid of the coffin, as she had already got rid of the disgusting bucket and drenched her barfront with basins of disinfectant. When none of us moved, none of us spoke, she charged at us, and we fled howling.
We didn’t stop till we heard her commanding the men to remove the coffin from her car and dump it in the middle of the street for all to see. She said the corpse was our collective responsibility. But her men were silent, and they did not move. And from their silence we knew that they were more afraid of the corpse than of her. We should have known then that the seeds of mutiny had been planted in that silence. But, as always, we looked at the shapes of our ordinary reality – the chickens strutting about, the sun bleaching our walls and our clothes – and we didn’t see the things perceived, but only the myths we brought to them.
Each moment offered us clarity and liberation but we settled for the comforting shapes of legends, no matter how monstrous or useless.
TWELVE
Birth of a three-day legend
THAT MORNING A three-day legend was born. I stayed at home, with Madame Koto’s words growing larger in my brain. Then our neighbours brought me the day’s newspapers which all carried pictures of a chaotic group of women who had taken hold of the city’s imagination. The women had fearlessly raided a police station and released all its prisoners. Among the faces of the women was Mum. She looked exhausted, her eyes dull, her gesture defiant.
The newspaper said they weren’t quite able to make out the grievances of the women, but listed complaints of malnutrition, poor social services, hospitals that didn’t treat their children, governors who don’t listen, inequality before the law, and above all the case of the man who was arrested – without being charged – for the public good of burying a dead body festering at a street corner.
There were editorials about the women. The story of the women storming the precincts of a police station went round our area, and became more elaborate as it travelled. By the time it got back to me again the story had multiplied like weeds on fertile patches of earth. I heard of Mum leading an organization of women, gathering them from the streets. The women drew other women, all of them lean with undernourishment, their children ill, their husbands listless under the pressures of the days. I heard that Mum led the women from one police station to another, with newspaper photographers following them everywhere they went. At busstops and market-places Mum called on the women of the unborn nation to stage a mighty strike, and to protest for Independence.
Mum changed in our eyes. Her absence nourished her myth. Women of our street, noticing how their comrades were seizing the national stage in acts of boldness, became quarrelsome, and staged strikes against their husbands. They had meetings in which they discussed the formation of organizations, in which they discussed how they could help Mum’s group. They made sure that I was fed, and bathed, and beautifully clothed. They fussed over me as if I had suddenly become a hero. They talked about politics all day long. The word politics took on a warmer meaning.
I heard amazing stories of Mum addressing crowds of bewildered women. She spoke in six languages. She spoke of freedom, and of justice, which she said was the language of women. She sp
oke of Independence and of an end to tribalism. She spoke of the unity of all women who have to bring children into this world made difficult by selfish men. She spoke of all the things she had always been silent about. She talked of the special way of African women, their way of intervening, their way of balancing, of turning hatred into friendship, their talent for redemption, their long memory for histories and secrets that men too quickly forget, their gift of nourishing, of healing, of making good things grow, their secret ways of undermining, their great love of humankind.
Mum always spoke from a height, on top of battered cars, on hastily rigged platforms.
But when, alone among the shadows, I saw her, she was different. What I saw was starker than the legend. She was always overwhelmed by the noise of the women chattering and arguing in twenty-six languages. Often they did not understand one another. Mum was oppressed by the chaos of toddlers and their smells of malnutrition. And the women’s rage overran her simple desire to locate her husband. Meanwhile Dad slept upside down in an empty space. His feet had been beaten with rough wood, his face softened by batons and knuckles. His eyes burned in the dark as he stared at the bright leopard crouching before him, ready to leap into his consciousness, and range around in the expanding bowl of his philosophy.
THIRTEEN
Hidden view of the Governor-General
ALL THAT TIME, Mum was brave and silent. The women who surrounded her wanted to sweep into Government House and storm the doors of the Governor-General.
The Governor-General had spent seventeen days burning the crucial papers relating to the governance of a country whose people he did not much like, and seldom saw except as shapes with menacing eyes and too many languages, too many gods, too many leaders. A people who took too little interest in the preservation of their culture.
He still had twenty-eight days to burn all the secret documents, all the evidence of important negotiations, the notes about dividing up the country, the new map of the nation, the redrawn boundaries, memos about meetings with religious leaders and political figures. He also burnt diary references to the three African women who consoled him while his wife badgered him about the plums of summer and the seashores of Cornwall. The women bore him seven children, whom he denied, though he was to send each of them fifty pounds a year for life, anonymously.
And when he heard the story of the marauding women, I saw his eyes light up their green and blue of lovely deep sea fishes.
FOURTEEN
Distorting the rage
THE WOMEN WANTED to storm the Governor-General’s door. They wanted to create a new parliament. But suddenly elite women appeared amongst them. These new women, with beautiful dresses and polished manners, had flown on aeroplanes. They had spent the same day in three countries, had seen ice fall from the sky, and had spoken into instruments that could send their words across a hundred miles without roads. The elite women were impressive; they talked in languages which none of the original women had heard.
The new women, with their bright bangles, glimmering eyelashes and wristwatches which actually made time visible, tried to lead the original women in another direction, quieting their urge to rebel, their desire to raid stations, descend on law courts and hospitals. The new women distorted the rage of the originals, confused them with orderly plans, with decent processions. The new women with their new words were largely successful.
Their success left Mum free to continue her search for Dad, taking with her the core of women who first joined in her campaign against injustice. Together, all eight of them – hard-headed women who, in another place, in a freer time, could have been eminent lawyers, doctors, engineers and wrestlers – spent the whole day tramping the labyrinthine streets of the heated city, looking for the police station where Dad might be held.
But at the first precinct they came upon, the policemen were patiently waiting for them.
FIFTEEN
The re-emergence of an old deity
THE EIGHT WOMEN had just entered the police station to ask whether Dad was imprisoned there, when the door was slammed shut behind them. When three Alsatian dogs leapt at them from behind the counter, they realized they had walked into a trap. I dread to think of those dogs slavering for a bite of human flesh, pouncing on the women, barking, while cameras flashed. The women screamed. The policemen blew their whistles. Prisoners in numerous hidden cells clanged on their bars, cursing the organs of justice. While the dogs tore off the women’s wrappers, the policemen were ready with their batons for an invasion, seeing more women than were actually there.
The police station, for a moment, in that chaotic violent air, changed into an underworld crypt that flowed into all the other crypts in the years to come. The flies sizzled in the heat and the stench of the prison latrine buckets circulated in the closed spaces. When the dogs jumped on the women, spreading fear and panic, the most extraordinary thing happened. One of the women who had stayed silent the whole time, released a cultic cry which created a counter-panic. She was short and heavy-faced, had bold cicatrices on her forehead, and peculiar handwriting on her bare arms. After her mesmeric cry, the lights flashed. And when the women looked from behind the vain protection of their cowering hands they saw that the dogs were perfectly still, sitting on their haunches, their tongues drooping from their mouths. In the moment of wonder that lasted for a few seconds, the police station was completely silent, and then a voice from one of the cells hidden below said:
‘Your husband isn’t here. Black Tyger is not in this station. Why trouble yourselves, eh?’
Then the woman who had stilled the dogs with her dark enchanted scream went to the door, and unbolted it. The policemen in their khaki shorts watched in utter astonishment. The women and the photographers started to leave. They were outside on the steps when the police officer, released from the spell, recovered his sense of authority, and barked out an instruction.
The Alsatian dogs, trained in two international cities, did not bite the women. But the policemen, galvanized by the instruction, leapt on them, fell on their defenceless backs, and clubbed them down the steps. The policemen pursued them into the streets, upsetting a gigantic cage of monkeys which a Brazilian revenant was bringing as presents for his relatives and in-laws. Five of the monkeys escaped, screeching along the road, causing cars to run into one another. Ignoring the extraordinary traffic chaos, the policemen went on pursuing the women, hitting passers-by who got in the way. The monkeys fled over cars, and made faces from the backs of lorries.
The Brazilian was surrounded by the shrieking of car tyres, the wailing of women and the general howl of the city. He ran across the road to the police station, began screaming his complaints about the cruel behaviour of the police, and was promptly bundled into a cell as a political agitator.
Meanwhile, the policemen went mad in the streets, stepping into a future time when public madness would be their norm. The entire road filled with the cacophony of dented fenders, exploding tyres, combusting engines and the cries of monkeys being run over by lorries. The road was jubilant at the taste of such novel blood. And the monkeys, ground into the road as sacrifice to the god who also likes the taste of dogs, probably saved the lives of the women. For the road, convulsing in its hunger, possessed the drivers, who saw forms rising from the tarmac, spirits with calabash heads and six eyes and thin legs and long fragile arms. The lorry drivers, fearful of committing an unknown sacrilege, crying out the names of all the gods they worshipped, entirely lost control of their vehicles. The lorries ran into parked cars, and crashed into buildings, their tyres spinning in the air, their engines groaning.
Having been faced with what they thought was a mutiny of women, the policemen now had a larger problem to occupy them: the re-emergence of an old deity, the great god of chaos, who would revel in decades of unprecedented rule, a new reign beginning with the birth of a nation.
The women regrouped, limping along with their torn wrappers, battered faces, wrenched shoulders, dislocated ankles. Blood flowe
d down from their hair-lines, fertilizing the nightmares of the road. They gathered together, collapsing into a heap, groaning, cursing, expressing gratitude for their lives in fifteen languages. The cameras went on flashing at them. After a while, they got up, limping, ankles swelling, bones aching, welts forming on their necks. As they began to leave, as Mum pushed on with unconquerable determination to the next precinct, a man came towards her. He lowered his camera, jolting me as I watched them all in my dark circling space in the room, and said:
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘No,’ Mum replied, wearily.
‘I’m the Photographer, the International Photographer. I killed all your rats. You protected me when the Party of the Rich were trying to get me. How is Azaro?’
Mum recognized him instantly. In spite of her agony and exhaustion, she cried out in joy at seeing a familiar face.
‘I’ve been following your campaign,’ the Photographer said, with an important air. ‘And I want you to meet someone who might be able to help.’
A short man, briefcase in one hand, a parting in his hair, stepped forward and shook Mum’s hand.
‘He is a lawyer. He has just returned from England. He believes in social justice and he wants to offer his services free of charge. This will be his first case.’
At the next police station, they got an entirely different reception.
SIXTEEN
Dad dissolves into seven selves
AS THE WOMEN were getting closer, Dad sat in a boiling cell, his chest constricted from all the beating. His ears were so wounded that he heard the language of his blood in the beating heart of the prison walls. His eyes hurt so much that he saw shapes hovering between the metal bars. Angel or demon, spirit or ancestor, he couldn’t be sure. The form was bright one moment like a passionate annunciation, and dark the next like a death sentence. It was as if all prisons have a special god of their own, whose menacing face keeps changing, and whose features are never remembered.
