by Ben Okri
‘Africa is laughing at us, Harry.’
And the old woman said:
‘Stop weeping, girl. Go and prepare food, but first help me to fold this cloth.’
The girl with the wooden leg didn’t move. The two mad men, still fleeing, stopped laughing. The old woman, folding the cloth slowly, looked up, and said:
‘Feed the animals. I’m going to the moon tonight. Make sure my special candle stays alight. I want you to sit up and protect it from the wind till I return.’
Then she went into her hut and began to study her fate-sealed carvings of the men and women who had banished her to a forest solitude. She didn’t handle the figures. Her heart was suddenly, unexpectedly, touched with a profound nostalgia for the life from which she had been exiled. The feeling was like a bitter herb giving off a divine fragrance in her spirit. Moved by the depth of the feeling, she started to alter her spells. She rearranged the end she had foreseen, and redesigned the spell she had shaped over the lives of the community. But when she cast her divinatory beads she was horrified at the answers. She cried out, and the birds flew from her rooftop. The bat with green eyes stirred on her wall. She had begun her alterations too late: the figures had set, their future was fixed forever. She staggered out of her hut, looked out over the forest, and wept. When she stopped weeping she uttered a cry which brought the yellow owl circling above her head. And with another cry of command she sent the owl winging beneath the roof of the forest, circling and calling out, while the white man said:
‘Harry, I’m going back to the hotel. There’s another owl with binoculars on that tree. I feel ill, Harry. Can you hear me, Harry?’
‘The whole world can hear you,’ said his exasperated friend.
At that moment the two mad men burst into their midst, jabbering, pulling faces, laughing, screaming, imitating the noises of owls and hyenas, sending confusion through the camp. The woodcutters cried out in terror. Harry backed away, his exasperation changing into incomprehension as he said:
‘Are these devils or men?’
The two mad men rushed towards Harry. He stood his ground, clutching his gun, upper lip quivering. The two men made ugly faces at him. Screeching and scratching their bleeding ears. Dancing round him. Imitating his expression of horror. As if they recognized him neither as beast nor man. Then Harry’s companion in the jeep, drunk on whisky, suffocating from the heat and from the spirit which had now completely occupied his being, jumped to the front of the vehicle, started it, and shouted:
‘Are you coming or not? These creatures have smelt your blood, Harry!’
And Harry, confronted by the mad men, backed away slowly, his finger on the trigger of the gun. The two mad men made faces, crowding him, while his friend said, in a tone of hysterical mockery:
‘Get Africans to deal with Africa, Harry. That’s always been our policy. They know their jungle better than we do.’
When the two mad men pounced at Harry, the owl circling the scene cried out three times. The mad men imitated the cry, and Harry fired twice, startling them. He leapt into the jeep, and fired three more times, grazing two trees and hitting the innocent shell of tortoise in the undergrowth. The vehicle’s wheels spun on the red earth, gained solid ground, and shot off along the dirt track towards the distant road. They fled the site, never to return.
Much later, African supervisors took their places. They recruited powerful sorcerers, neutralized the spirit-dwellers, and drove away the witches from their meeting ground within the trees. Then the levelling of the forest began.
But that day, after Harry and his mate had sped off, the owl circled the trees, and sent its messages back to the old woman. The woodcutters of the camp scattered into the forest. Trapped in its labyrinth, they were prey to the vengeance of spirits. They roamed from path to path, ran round in confusing circles, and saw trees dissolve before them as they hallucinated in a forest fever.
THREE
An incomplete ascension
THE OWL COMPLETED its circling, returned to its flowering tree near the old woman’s hut, and was fed a white mash by the girl with the wooden leg. The old woman, saddened by the day’s discoveries, and late for her meeting, retired into her hut to sleep. Beneath her bedspread of stories the old woman changed into a nightbird and then into a spirit with six eyes. Then she soared past me, up through the treetops, a luminous shroud, ascending to the crescent moon.
But the air was dense, and a green mist hovered above the forest. The old woman found her spirit heavy that night. She who had borne exile in her own land. Suffered half a century of solitude. Mastered spirits of air and tree and earth. Listened to the whisperings of gods in her dreams. She was heavy that night. All the cries and sufferings of the earth tugged at her heart for the first time in many years. The agony of innocent human beings. The genocide of the trees. The insomnia of the beasts of the forest. The homeless spirits and the dislodged diseases. The rising seas and shrinking forests. The unstable earth and the misery to come. All tugged at her and made her heart a mass affected by their force of gravity. Her sorrows made her heavy. The unalterable destiny of her people which she had willed and changed too late filled her with nostalgia. And her longing for an earlier time, a golden time of childhood among mysteries, started a powerful wind, which blew round her hut. The wind knocked the door open, startled the birds which slept on branches, and swept a somnolence on the air which made the girl protecting the flame fall asleep. When the wind blew out the candle I heard a great cry from above and saw a bird with a hooked, aged beak fall down. When the bird hit the ground, it turned into an antelope, and then into the old woman. Then to my horror she looked up at me, and said:
‘I can’t stand up. Help me.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Just help me.’
‘Why?’
‘I know your father and mother. They are good people. If you help me I will do something for you.’
‘What?’
‘I will help you too.’
‘How?’
‘I will free you from under that tree, I will help you out of this forest, and I will tell you a secret.’
‘Is it the same secret my father has?’
‘No.’
It was very dark and all around me I could hear birds stirring. A strange wind was turning my body to wood. I could hear noises from the silver egg. As I hovered in two places, I began to hear words all around me on the silver wind. The wind spoke with the voice of the old woman. A voice light like the feathers of birds that fly without ever perching. All night the voice spoke to me of the nitrogen shadows and the air of moss and bark which protects the dreams of forest dwellers from being blasted away by the heat. The voice spoke of the special mysteries invaded by the new chemical secretions in the soil, of marshes and rivers reclaimed by limestone and sand. The voice told of the many beings left homeless and unprotected with the death of trees. It hinted at the rage of the spirits at the disturbance of their centuries of dreaming. It whispered about the trees which had grown magnificent in particular places in the forest. Places where the earth’s lines of vital forces met. Acupuncture points of the land. The voice talked of trees that were like the essence of a civilization, masterpieces of sculpture and survival, with future destinies coded on their trunks. The voice spoke of the tree of mysteries which grew up into the three realms – the earth, the ancestral plane, and the sphere of higher spirits.
The voice dwelt on the indecipherable powers resident on earth in ordinary or invisible forms, seen only by antelopes and cats, dogs and the dying, the inspired and the enlightened, strange children who are half human, one quarter spirit, and one quarter dream. The voice said the function of labyrinths was to confront the trapped one with the light of an inescapable truth. Once the confrontation is effected the spell of the labyrinth is broken, and the fata Morgana, the lure, disappears. Then the bird unique to the entrapped one leads him out to the new realm that was the old familiar place where the labyrinth began.
&nbs
p; The voice spoke all night, soothingly. A voice without language in which many things were heard simultaneously. The voice became more urgent as night neared dawn.
‘You must help me or I will die!’ the old woman cried.
So I lowered my floating form over her and she clung to the back of my spirit. Uttering a wail that was almost a laugh she turned swiftly round, knocking the nightspace from my mind. I felt feathers beating rapidly on my face and heard a steady noise of axes on wood, moving towards my head. The smell of wood smoke was rich on the air. Voices in the distance were calling my name. I opened my eyes and saw a tiny bird of blue and yellow plumage standing on my forehead. Its feathers quivered above my eyes. I awoke beneath a cascade of leafy branches.
I stayed like that for a while, bewildered. I stared up at the chaotic canopy of leaves. My head hurt. My brain was spinning from a hundred livid dreams. When I moved the bird flew from my face, twittering and circling the branches. Slugs were crawling up my legs, ants were busy on my arms, worms wriggled on my chest, and lianas were tangled about my head. Weaving in and out of different spaces of clarity and pain, I listened to the sound of wood-chopping coming closer and closer, and to the rough voices of men marvelling at the fallen tree. Then I saw several faces above me. The bark faces of hungry men. I panicked. Screaming and wailing, I wrenched myself from beneath the weight of branches. And when I rose frantically the men saw me and shouted, fleeing. They shouted that the tree was turning into a human being, that the place was possessed.
Clumsy and confused, I managed to get myself out from under the branches completely. I stood swaying before the most beautiful ancient god of a dead tree that I had ever seen. Blood was streaming down my head. The blue and yellow bird was circling the air above me. And I gazed in awe at the magnificent tree. It was the length of ten elephants and its flowers were in full bloom. Bird nests were scattered around and silver eggs broken on the red earth.
Following the erratic flight of the blue and yellow bird through the labyrinth of the forest, I came to a place where a group of women in white smocks were performing a ceremony. The women were deep in their ritual. A white goat was tethered to a root and white chickens flapped, terrified in anticipation of their sacrifice. I ignored the women and wandered on. My stomach was empty. My head reeled with forest fevers. I came to the fabulous rhinoceros tree that had grown from Madame Koto’s fetish. It seemed so long ago now that I first rode it in complete innocence. Further on, the voices calling my name were louder. Soon I could see them. Our neighbours and street people. With cutlasses and sticks. Mum wasn’t with them, and neither was Dad. They stopped when they saw me. I felt like a ghost returning to a forgotten home.
Our neighbours were so amazed at my appearance that none of them spoke. I must have seemed to them like a sleepwalker or an apparition. I gazed through them with Dad’s impassivity. They let me wander amongst them. Muttering strange words about our family, they followed me home. At the door to our room, certain now that I had got home safely, they left me alone, and gathered at the backyard, to whisper weird legends about our little family.
Dad sat in his chair, nodding his head. He was staring through everything with a smile on his face, as if he hadn’t moved for seven years. Mum lay on the floor, weeping in her sleep, exhausted from spending all night looking for me along the silent roads of the world.
FOUR
The unaccountable passion of mothers
DAD DIDN’T MOVE or express any emotion at my return. As soon as I went and sat on his lap, Mum woke up and saw me. Yelling for joy, she snatched me under the arms and swung me round. She embraced me. Then, still joyful, Mum threw me up and swung me right into a yellow terrain where the old woman woke up on her bed and, complaining of backaches and a throbbing head, scolded the girl for not protecting the candlelight while she ascended.
When I opened my eyes woodsmoke was thick in the air and Mum was dressing the wounds on my head, saying:
‘What happened to you, my son? We have been looking for you for two days.’
I stared at her. She had changed. Her eyes were fiercer, her face longer.
‘They were cutting down a tree and it fell on me,’ I said.
‘A tree fell on you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘In the forest.’
‘Who cut down the tree?’
‘I don’t know.’
She turned abruptly to Dad, raising her voice, and said:
‘So, while you were sitting in your chair, nodding like a lizard, a tree fell on our only child, eh?’
Dad turned his head towards me. Nodding. Smiling. With the gold ash ghoulish round his eyes, he stared without seeing me.
For a while Mum stayed silent.
When she had finished bandaging my head she prepared food and watched me eat. My head kept swelling, my eyes hurt and the room swayed.
Mum cleared the plates. Then, in an outburst of rage, she hurled the table over, and left the room. She soon came back, straightened the table, and sat next to me. For a long while she stared at me. She stared at Dad. She kissed her teeth, cursing. Then she proceeded to gather what little money she had from her various tin cans. She tied the money at the end of her wrapper, laid me on the bed, and went out.
An hour later, she returned with a herbalist. They had both hardly stepped into the room when Dad, setting eyes on the wizened sorcerer, gave out a disdainful cry. The herbalist had come with his charms: crow’s feet, beads, vulture’s liver, and a bag of potions. Dad grabbed the sorcerer by the scruff of the neck, and threw him out into the startled compound. Mum was horrified. The herbalist was reputed to be so powerful that he could drive out demons with a single inscrutable syllable. But he picked himself up, dusted his trousers, and said to Mum:
‘Your husband is a strange character. He’s too strong for my powers. Don’t ever consult me again!’
And, without malice, he stamped off.
Dad went back to his chair. His eyes were red from the effort of rage without words. He had a demonic smile on his face. He turned his fierce eyes on me. Then I told him about what had happened to me in the forest. He smiled all through my narration, rocking in his chair. Why did my father smile at my terrible experiences? I had no idea. And while Dad smiled, Mum got angrier. She turned on him again, and accused him of being a monstrous coward since he’d come out of jail. She taunted him, saying she wished she had never taken the trouble to free him, saying that it was all right for him to be brave when there was no suffering involved but as soon as he feels the true suffering that comes with real courage he turns into a speechless chicken. Dad went on rocking his three-legged chair, staring without focus. Mum couldn’t stand his colossal impassivity. She began crying out that people had nearly killed her son with a tree and he was doing absolutely nothing about it.
‘What did they do to you in prison, eh?’ Mum screamed at him. ‘You are a great fighter. What has happened to you? Did they poison you? Did they cut off your prick? Did they eat your heart, eh? What did they do that has made you so timid – you who used to be afraid of nothing under God’s sun, eh? Now you’re just a big dunce, eating up all the food in the house, and doing nothing!’
But Dad smiled on. The shadows on his cheeks made him look leaner. Mum got exasperated, and stormed out of the room again.
Later we heard stories about what Mum did when she left. She became quite strange. She took to stopping people in the street and telling them that the sacred forest was being destroyed, that her child was nearly killed by a falling tree. She talked to neighbours at great length and with unaccountable passion about roaming spirits and about forgotten diseases stirring from their resting places in the forest. She bewildered everyone, especially when she began to talk of the woman that the community had driven into the forest because they were afraid of her pustules.
Mum didn’t go hawking that day and she didn’t prepare any food for us. She went from house to house, her hair dishevelled, her clothes dirty
. Trying to gain the support of the women in our area. Trying to organize them into expressing revolt at what the woodcutters were doing to the sacred forest. No one paid much attention, and people began to speak of her as mad.
While Mum was going up and down the street shouting, Dad rose from his chair and polished his boots till they shone like new steel. He washed his safari and French suits. He had a shave. Then he came and sat down again in his fabulous chair. The smile had dissolved from his face.
We starved till late in the evening when Mum returned, exhausted from too much talking. We had a small meal. After eating Dad spread out the mat and lay down. Mum went on and on about the tree that nearly killed me. I remained bed-ridden, unable to move, watching the room expand and contract. Dad blew out the candle. By slow degrees Mum fell quiet. Not long afterwards they struggled gently on the floor.
FIVE
The old woman’s circular narrative
THAT NIGHT THE old woman went to the moon as a flying spark of light. She circled the moon three times before attending the meeting of other lights from all over the world. In the morning, when she returned full of the energies and enlightenment her journey had given her – the life extension and the weight of future sight – she resumed the weaving of our narrative.
Simultaneous narratives of past, present, and future were also being woven in other places around the world by other people.
The old woman wove our secret narratives into her bloody and eventful cloth. Our narratives in pictures, in angled images and mysterious signs, were like a labyrinth from which there was no escape.
Our stories were patterned and circular, trapped in history. Unable to rise above a problem older than millennia our circular stories continued, trapped by the things we wouldn’t face.
The old woman seemed older than ever that morning as she wove the terrible and wonderful narratives of our lives. Divining the future had accelerated her ageing. It weighed heavily upon her that she was unable to alter the future in any significant way: the signs must be properly interpreted and acted upon. All she could do was divine and weave. And when she finished her morning’s weavings the past also weighed on her in that deep forest space.
