by Ben Okri
One of the somersaulters began with a cartwheel, did two extravagant turns in the air and, with his concentration broken by the odd laughter, landed on his back, lay still for an amazed moment, jumped up suddenly, and began to turn and twist in every direction, as if he were trying to straighten out the queasy disjointedness of his being. Soon he was seen chattering up and down the stage, pulling the queerest faces. Everyone thought he had gone mad. He was quickly whisked from the platform, while the laughter grew worse.
At first I thought that the dreaded spirit of laughter had come amongst us. But as the announcer came on to apologize, and the accompanying laughter turned into something quite fierce, I noticed that all those who were laughing were impeccably well dressed. They wore white hats, white suits, black ties, unimpeachable blouses, proper headties, with gold chains and cowries round their necks. They all had one thing in common: they didn’t sweat. Also, they looked too healthy, too rudely healthy, too radiant and well turned-out. Their features were without pain. They were too perfect to be alive, too perfect to be at the rally. They were like people who had no doubts, people who were absolutely certain of their futures. They seemed too well fed and too clear-headed to find anything funny. I thought I recognized the dead carpenter amongst them.
I was trying to get a better look at him when the agile drummers and the masquerades on stilts came on stage. They danced to rousing tunes neutralized by the laughter from the homogeneous group. The drummers found themselves playing out of harmony, out of tune, and the masquerades on stilts danced awkwardly, with fear in their movements and bewilderment in their steps. They were hurriedly ushered off. Religious leaders, in full regalia, came on and prayed for peace and harmony, while the laughter continued uninterrupted, infectiously sowing insurrection.
The blind old man, waving his fan of eagle feathers in frenzied movements, was in a feverish rage at the edge of the stage. It was only when he turned his blind face towards the crowd, making authoritative motions with his hands, as if banishing waves of madness from his vision, that I began to understand. We had been listening to the terrible laughter of the dead.
I saw them now through the eyes of the blind old man. They were in the front row and on the walls. Some of them stood alone, but most were in groups. And they were scattered everywhere in the crowd. They kept laughing. The dead found everything funny. They laughed at the politicians in their stiffened dignity and forced affability. They laughed at the politicians and their promises, their claims about the glories of the past, the glories to come, and the blessings of their paternal rule. The dead laughed hysterically, raising dark winds around us. They laughed at everything that happened on stage. They laughed at the religious leaders, the rituals perverted to political ends, and at the soldiers who came on stage to appeal for calm. They laughed at the Governor-General who said something in a strangled voice about the future greatness of the country and the hope of continued co-operation in business and culture.
The dead laughed very hard indeed, and the dead carpenter was chief amongst them. I saw children who had died in our street. I saw the adults who had been felled by malnutrition and diseases, by political thugs, and hopelessness. I saw those who had perished in the war in Burma, perished in prisons and road accidents. I saw those who had died of malaria and fear, poverty and milk poisoning, typhoid and rumours, yellow fever and superstition, gut-worms, tape-worms, illnesses of the spirit, madness, famine, drought, weariness, too much acceptance and too much hope. I saw those who had withered away under bad harvests, who had been crushed by cruel laws and enshrined injustices. I also saw those who had died of too much love and too little love, and those who had died under the stars, without a home anywhere on this wide earth. And the more they laughed the more the dead increased amongst us.
The head priest of a renegade church stepped forth to the microphone, and said:
‘POLITICS IS NOT A LAUGHING MATTER!’
And the dead drowned him out with their unconquerable hilarious response. It must be said that the rest of us, the living, did not find the events funny. We did not find anything funny at all. The wind turned cold and lashed us with the embers of an undying fire. The heat turned unnatural. A nameless rash broke out within us at the laughter of the dead. It was troubling, but the dead found our solemnity and our impassivity unbearably funny. It was very odd that the dead should find the living funny. But everywhere I looked I saw the dead amongst us, staring at us with wondering eyes, as if they found the fact of our passivity and mental laziness unbelievable and strange. The serious cast of our faces, our acceptance of the intolerable conditions of the world, the shabbiness of our clothes, the hunger in our eyes made them collapse into tears of laughter.
The laughter of the dead created chaos amongst us, stirred our emotions, intensified the rash in our brains, confused the politicians, sent the blind old man into paroxysms of fantastic rage, reduced the mountainous Madame Koto to tears of despair, and made the Governor-General come out in a beetroot-coloured flush. The bizarre laughter of the dead made the sides of our faces nearest our eyes come out in a furry heat. The heat wandered around in our brains. It crawled on the nape of our necks. It made our eyes twitch. It wriggled between our ears, and sizzled at the top of our heads. The cooling winds made us even hotter.
An irritable dark energy bristled amongst us. Then there was a moment’s unaccountable silence. Out of the silence came a host of insects, flying beetles and midges, chattering cockroaches with dark wings. They flew over our heads in the darkness. The dark energy faintly illuminated the heads of the crowd. Then suddenly, it seemed as if the whole world was there at the rally, listening to the dark wind over our heads, waiting for something to happen. Thunderclouds drifted across the faintly yellow sky. I heard the queer syllables of the dead, rousing the silence, and stirring the air with unborn turbulences. Something cracked in the distance and I found the silence of the crowd immensely terrifying. I had started to climb down from the tree when one of the politicians came to the microphone. The loudspeakers blared, and the weird antiphonies of his translated speech started an insurrective murmur.
‘THUNDER IS COMING!’ someone cried from the crowd.
I looked back and saw a host of white birds sailing through the air. The loudspeakers screeched again, and the politicians looked distressed. The white birds had risen from the brains of the dead. They flew amongst us, flapping their wings in our faces without disturbing the air. The birds became dark thoughts of thunder forefelt. And then, as if their thoughts were as one, the birds rose, turned luminous in the night air, circled the crowd three times, and vanished into the sky. When they vanished, the world became diminished.
SEVEN
The silence of Tigers
THE LOUDSPEAKER CLEARED, and we listened to a politician’s long-winded speech. The dead listened intently without laughing. The politician spoke for so long that we forgot what he was saying and we ceased to hear him altogether. He went on at such length, turning empty phrases round the microphone, fingering his beads, sweating intensely, that his speech drew the heat to the surface of our skins. He spoke for so long, forgetting what he began with, wandering down circuitous routes of improvisation, stopping off at a hundred speeches we had suffered before, that the sheer length of his utterance nearly made us break out into spontaneous revolt. He made no sense at all. He seemed to be speaking an alien language whose words denied our reality, whose proverbs intensified our hunger, whose grammatical deconstructions filled our heads with empty spaces in which an old rage began to simmer.
It is impossible to tell what might have happened if the politician had been allowed to continue any longer. For by the time a party functionary had been sent to drag him from the microphone our silence had grown immeasurably deep. The heat that his speech had created threatened the rally itself. As they led the politician away he was still talking, still making his speech. Our silence had destroyed him. It is possible that he is still making that speech to this day.
To fill our minds, where restlessness was turning dangerous, the announcer rushed on stage and made the briefest possible introduction to the most famous musicians in the land. The crowd was silent. The musicians shuffled on stage and encountered the cold blast of our silence. The leader of the band made a joke which got no response. Our silence blew over him in chilling gusts of wind. Hurriedly, they fumbled with their instruments. The loudspeaker distorted their fumblings. Abandoning further jokes or preambles, the musicians struck up their most popular tune, with the hope of warming our mood.
EIGHT
The dance of the dead
IT WAS A night of deep amber. Birds circled our heads unobserved. The smells of the forest blew amongst us. Indigo lights rose from our silence.
When the most famous musicians in the land struck up their most popular tune, the hidden dead rose from the earth. The spirits living in the space in which we were now crowded woke up from their trance and saw us. They must have been amazed to see us occupying their space without intruding on their shadow world. The dead populated our midst. And we, the living crowd, also had the crowding of the spirits, the angry dead, the unjustly dead, the serene dead amongst us. They woke up, gyrating to the most catchy tunes of the land.
On stage the musicians performed with leaden solemnity. Their faces were stiff as they stared out into the unresponsive crowd. As they played, increasing the vigour of the drums, the pierce of the guitars, the colours of the maracas, the mood of the accordions, the strangest thing happened. We, the living crowd, were silent and still and unmoving, but the dead began to dance in mad fervour. They danced their dread dance amongst us. They danced through us. They danced on to the stage and danced over the musicians, marvelling at the instruments, tampering with the sounds, perplexing the spirits of the musicians, distorting the music. And when they began to change the music into a madness-making sort of chaos – the peculiar groups of the dead amongst us began to laugh again.
The new laughter of the dead created chaos everywhere. It confused the politicians, made the musicians falter, causing them to play discordantly. The discordant music began to wreak havoc on the loudspeakers. The discord jangled our nerves. Female dancers were ushered on stage and they danced rigidly to the odd distortions of the music.
I watched the triple realities on the stage with terror. I watched as the musicians strained against the new resistance of their instruments. The depthless thud of the drums. The lifeless screeching of the guitars. The dull wailing of the tambourines. And even the whining of the loudspeakers. The instruments began to produce the sounds of the anguished gyrating imps, the syllables of the dead, the ominous indigo hum of the awoken spirits. Music and spirits collided. The musical instruments became somewhat dead, heavy, unresponsive; the dead became more festive.
While the half-nude female dancers weaved and writhed in a somnolent daze, the dead jumped about on stage, laughing wildly. The spirits and imps, with their bat-like faces and their ill-proportioned bodies, danced with frightening and fantastic mobility, contorting their frames, and swinging round the women, who did not see them.
As the music got worse, the awakened spirits grew weirder. They laughed grotesquely in their celebration, their awakening.
The politicians watched with consternation the half-empty stage. Madame Koto’s face was swollen. The blind old man was transfixed. The Governor-General seemed in a daze, rooted to that ghostly mood.
NINE
The forgotten power of laughter
THE LAUGHTER OF the dead infected our mood and suddenly we couldn’t stop laughing at the broken music and the rigid dancers. The laughter of the dead broke through the protective seal of sorcerers and controllers of phenomena. I learned, one moment before the bizarre fiesta changed, that the manufacturers of reality had no power over laughter.
As the spectacle on stage reached its weirdest moment, I saw a flash from the Photographer’s camera, and heard one of the sorcerers – attired in a black robe, with glittering magic stones round his neck – point a crooked finger at the Photographer, and shout:
‘That man is a demon, he is evil! Catch him!’
The Photographer fled from the edge of the stage into the crowd, spreading waves of frenzy over the great gathering.
Then the mood of dervishes and the spirit of the whirlwind descended upon us.
TEN
The rally turns into a fantastical riot
THERE WAS A crashing noise on the platform. The planks had broken and the musicians, dancers, politicians and manufacturers of reality all disappeared into the quivering hole. Musical instruments splintered our ears with high-pitched noises. Loudspeakers came tumbling down. Policemen and soldiers at the edges of the stage froze for a long moment. And there was a brief silence, during which I clearly saw the dead carpenter. Yellow flowers sprouted from his head. I saw him pulling up the planks and scattering the equipment with wild energy. No one else seemed to see him. And when the brief silence passed, one of the greatest rallies of our times turned into a blistering riot.
Voices screamed everywhere. Police whistles blasted our ears. Soldiers released a round of gunshots into the sky. All those who had fallen through the stage began to scream in the black hole, that underworld of phenomena.
Below me, there was the sheer cacophony of wailing women and the cursing crowd. I heard a man saying how dangerous it was to get too close to the powerful. He was not too close to the powerful himself, but the crowd poured over him, stamping on his body, breaking his legs. Everyone was fleeing in a hundred directions. Soldiers were hitting people with batons. Birds were squawking over us. Lights were flashing in our faces. Children were screaming. Everything was changing. The world was widening and waves of heat kept blasting us.
The first to emerge from the wreckage of the stage was the blind old man. He was feverish with rage. All about him the great wave of the crowd became a heated beast, tearing everything, attacking soldiers. Then they descended on the platform and wreaked their rage against anything they could lay their hands on. The wreckage of the rally was truly frightening. A storm had broken on the proceedings: the criminals released from prison, the thugs, the beggars and the marketwomen all went entirely wild. Destroying things. Shattering the windscreens of parked cars. Tearing down the banners and flags of the party. Burning vehicles. Ripping down stalls and sheds. Their noises raged through the night. The supporters of one party turned on the other. Soldiers shot into the crowd, killing two women and three men. Thunder growled above. Below there was the din of stones against glass, of clashing metal, the rumble of collapsing walls, the cries of people trampled underfoot, the wailing of those stabbed in the eyes, the swell of angry voices, the lambent caterwauling, the faces broken by fists swung in any direction. The fury of the crowd attacking itself. I saw it all from the tree. I saw the riot scattering a thousand heads in a thousand directions.
The riot broke the tree on which I perched and I fell to the ground and many feet trampled on me. I kept twisting and turning. When I managed to get up, a red night with spirits appeared before me. I saw masquerades on white horses. Masked faces clubbing people. Soldiers whipping the women. Angry men setting on the police. Gunshots creating furious gaps between the crush of bodies.
As I struggled to walk a man snatched me up and I found myself on horseback. When I turned to look at my rescuer, I screamed. He had five heads and ten glowing eyes. I fought him, unable to bear the fact that the five-headed spirit sent by my spirit companions to bring me back to the land of the dead was still intent on me and hadn’t given up. Screaming out Dad’s fighting name, I kept hitting the five-headed spirit. His horse rode through the crowd, trampling on people.
The five-headed spirit rode furiously through the mass of bodies, then we entered an indigo realm. I saw the dead carpenter in front of us. I called out his name, I shouted that I was Ade’s friend. I begged him to help me. The dead carpenter turned his yellow-flowered head to me and laughed happily. Then he jumped on the horse. The collision
sent me flying. I landed on the chest of a wizened old man. When I looked back I saw the dead carpenter battling with the five-headed spirit. They fought themselves into other realms.
Beneath me I heard deep coughing. I got off the old man on whom I had landed. He lay there coughing strenuously, beating his chest. For a while I couldn’t move. The wizened old man turned to me and, after another bout of deep-chested heaving, said:
‘They are destroying Africa!’
He lay there, quite still. Then he sat up straight. When he lit a cigarette I recognized him. He was the herbalist who had ritually washed Madame Koto’s car a long time ago. He was the one who had prophesied that it would be a coffin. He seemed very drunk. His eyes bulged. He didn’t appear to know whether he was alive or dead. His serenity seemed to protect us. The crowd thudded around us without harming us in any way. He smoked his cigarette for a while, staring at everything with tranquil eyes. Then he said:
‘I had this dream. A white man turned into a tortoise and asked me to give him my land. He had a gun. I fought him, and he shot me through the head.’
He stopped speaking. I was transfixed. He began to cough and did it so violently that a bullet popped out of his mouth. He turned the bullet round in his hand. The bullet glittered through his phlegm. Then I noticed that the wizened old man was covered in blood. I noticed that he had three eyes. The third eye, in the middle of his forehead, was bleeding. I fled when I realized that I had been listening to the dreams of a dead man. He ran after me, shouting my name. I fled into the tangle of rioting bodies.
My head ached. An insistent din pierced my ears. Everywhere I looked, the world of spirits was in turbulence. I saw men with the heads of chickens. Goats with the boots of soldiers. Horses with women’s heads. I banged my head against a wall to straighten out my vision. And then I really started to see things. A priest in a red smock, carrying an image of the bleeding Christ, weeping about the world’s distortion of his message. Red creatures with massive bellies. Red human beings, looting shops, drunk on stolen wine, screaming into the flames. Red insects in the night air. I blinked, and found myself in another space, floating above the eruptions. Floating above the Governor-General, the future Head of State, and their entourages. They were fleeing into the night. Crouching beneath crumbling red walls. They were exiles from reality. Afraid. Surrounded by red spirits. Led on by the dead. Stumbling along in the gutters. Their heads low as they made for their vehicles.
