by Ben Okri
A special host of spirits followed the Governor-General. They marvelled at the illuminated yellow dust of angels growing in his body. The august group of leaders got into their cars, but the crowd smashed the windscreens, and turned the cars on their sides. The policemen lashed at the crowd. Whipped the possessed women. Clubbed down the enraged men. But the Governor-General and the future Head of State managed to get through the tumultuous crowd to a convoy of soldiers, who immediately formed a protective cordon round them. The leaders were ushered into a police car and, sirens blasting, sped through the crowd. Mowing people down. The car soon gained the main road, and was free of the insurgent crowd. The car had six outriders on motorcycles, with sirens wailing. Closest to the speeding vehicle were two-headed outriders with silver boots.
ELEVEN
Adventures into chaos
THE RED CROWD poured past me towards the city centre, their fury unabated. They went on an insane feast of destruction, wrecking everything they touched. They rampaged for every child of theirs that had died of malnutrition, for every humiliation they had suffered, for hunger too long endured, for every prayer unanswered, every dream betrayed, every mosquito bite borne, for every night of insomnia, for their relentless poverty, for their roofless huts, for the rewriting of our lives, the rain leaking into their dreams, the long years of unemployment and bad pay, all their despair, all the insults of being powerless, all the frustrations of being unheard.
Floating in the air, I raged with them. They were angry at everything, at the walls around their lives, the many rigorous laws that pressed down the poor and lifted up the rich, the tight narrow spaces crowded with too much history. They were also raging at all the suffering, all the waste, all the betrayals, and all the failures to come.
Not one person escaped without bleeding. The barbers, signwriters, marketwomen, truck pushers, sellers of trinkets and oranges, they all bled, they all suffered blows, lashings, cuts, and falls. The fury of the crowd was so intense that I feared everything would spontaneously combust. Cars were set alight, houses burned, and people ran around with fires in their hands. The intensity of the people’s anger, the raging of spirits, the shrieking of the dead filled the world with harsh lights.
Looking at everywhere with strange eyes, I witnessed the ritual passage of an old god reborn. The god of chaos, with uncountable hands and five thousand heads. Where did all those hands come from, those hands beating the air like withered wings, those hands hitting, burning, tearing down roadsigns, setting petrol stations on fire, looting the jewellers and the banks, smashing the windows of government houses, invading Independence Square? The god of chaos rode through us all, whipped our minds. At Independence Square we laid out a burning altar to the god, and made it one of his homes.
Where did all those feet come from, the calloused worm-eaten feet, beating relentlessly on all the doors of the earth, rousing the nightmares of the road, trembling the land, shaking open the abyss, widening the pits, starting cracks in the fortunes of others across the seas?
Where did all those faces come from, masks of the new god, hardened faces, beautiful faces, undefeated faces, raw and bony faces, crafty faces? Where did all those eyes come from, flaming eyes, trancelike eyes, clear eyes of young girls, wild eyes of thugs, the defeated eyes of the fallen?
I saw them all, saw them possessed by the moon-madness of the new god, their bodies inhabited, their hearts occupied by spirits goading their rage. I saw women with handwriting on their necks, men with fierce scarifications. The fury of the crowd became so incandescent that I feared witnessing a metamorphosis, a mass transformation. I saw the bodies begin to give off yellow lights. The yellow glow filled everything, but it was more intense where the stampede was fiercest.
TWELVE
The procession of higher beings
MURDEROUS CRIES WERE rending the air. Petrol tanks burst into flames. The road heaved. I blinked. All the redness vanished, the rioting human beings disappeared. For a long moment, all I saw in the darkness was the awe-inspiring procession of higher beings. I saw majestic spirit-kings and their courtiers. Famed warriors with their attendants. Ancient and illustrious philosophers with their disciples. Mighty figures in golden robes, riding liveried spirit-horses. Mythical beings. Representatives of the gods. The great mothers. The masters of the great African underworld. The dazzling plenum of the unborn who would lead special lives. The shimmering stream of noble personages, each with a blue and serene radiance. They moved with dignity, and with grace, distilling gold lights about them, followed by silvery birds.
I saw the higher spirits as they moved over the scenes of rioting. Their priests waved censers that gave off the aroma of their wondrous philosophies. I saw them riding, walking, sailing past in the air. They were silent. They moved with solemnity and lightness, as to an important convocation. They went over us, seemingly unaware of our existence. I beheld these splendid beings. The ancient and future mystics. The political philosophers of the ancient worlds. The strategists of Timbuktu and the thinkers of Songhai. The Kings of Great Zimbabwe. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The lawmakers and the intense dreamers. All those invisible beings whose achievements spread enlightenment from Egypt to ancient Greece. I beheld them all. They filled the air with lights of topaz, emeralds, diamonds, aquamarine. Mists of gold and yellow swirled about them. They poured over us in colours that human eyes have never seen. Colours seen in dreams but never remembered.
Enchanted by their procession, I began to follow these higher beings. To see where they were going. But a knock on my head stunned me from that realm. Then I found myself in the middle of the road. The rioting was all around. Cars sped past me, stoned by the crowd. I fled from the road. Felt my head bleeding. I began to cry. I called for my mother, but she didn’t hear me. Women with black hoods bore down on me, and I ran away from them, and lost myself amongst a group of urchins who were looting a shop. I saw the policeman who many years ago had locked me in his house as a substitute for his dead son. I fled again: I seemed to keep running into my past.
There was a weird smell in the air. Further on I saw a man whose coat was on fire. The road heaved again. Convulsions rent the air. The road swayed, arched its back, and became a feverish snake. Everything shook as if there were an earthquake. Pits opened as the road seemed to wrench itself up like a maddened animal. Cars drove into houses. The air, the moon, the people, the objects of the world, all began, it seemed, to hallucinate.
Is the world capable of dreaming, as if it were a whale? Are the objects and the particulars of this world – beings? Can a thing be a table or a brick to us, and yet be a living thing in another realm? I don’t know. But the world was in a hallucination that night. The world was dreaming itself. And all of us who were possessed by the new god dreamed the world as a fever, changing it even as we dreamed it. We had broken the spirit-barrier. Higher energies burned in us. We were everywhere that night. We had awoken into an unholy rage and had crossed over the barrier of ordinary awakening. We had entered the fullness of power and spirit. A thousand suns flamed in us. Charged with the intoxication of the new god, we became chaotic gods ourselves. Our bodies, unable to withstand such intensity, began to howl for cooling sleep.
The road became a stream and lashed us with its burning waters on that night of six hot moons. I saw the six moons, all clustered beneath a golden glow. I shouted, pointing upwards. Then I saw them again. The ancient Chaldean astronomers. The soothsayers of ancient Greece. Dream-interpreters of ancient Babylon. Omen-readers of Damascus. Magic-workers of Mesopotamia. Sumerian guardians of mysteries. They were an illustrious and tempered host. Masters of the art of hiding their greatest discoveries in time. They travelled over us, unmindful of the confluence of moons.
We who had burst our spirit-barrier, had we materialized in another realm?
THIRTEEN
Night of wondrous transformations
THEN IT OCCURRED to me that in other realms, new worlds were being dreamt up, were being born. New thin
gs were emerging from the turbulence of people speaking the only language that is understood – the language of violence. On other spheres new realities were coming into being. On which sphere was I? It seemed I dwelt in several of them at once. The different spheres seemed all superimposed, existing concurrently within the same space. All this confused me. I wandered amongst the rioting people. There were six hot moons in my head.
As I wandered, utterly lost, I saw Helen, the beggar girl, coming towards me. She was alone. She seemed too beautiful to be alive. She flashed me a gentle smile. Mysterious. Full of meaning. Then she vanished.
When Helen vanished, the road changed. The stream stopped flowing; mosquitoes enraged my ears. A jackal-headed masquerade, on a white horse, rode past me. Its hoofs thundered the ground. My head swelled. The road changed into a snake again, lashing out with its tail. Its cratered back was like an old sea-monster. Then the snake changed back into a road. A flash of light struck me in the eyes. I saw a host of enraged women, singing old warsongs, hell-bent in their rage on changing the world, and altering reality. They bounded towards me like an avenging army. A conquering battalion. Sweeping everything aside. Worshippers of the new god.
The women were terrifying to behold. I fled round the compounds, till I emerged at the rally again. In the dark men, meek in their ordinary lives, were tearing down remnants of the stand. Women were amongst them, hair in disarray, blouses torn, wrappers in shreds, cuts and bruises on their faces.
Then the heat of the six moons got to everything. The rage and heat of the rioters got so much that their frames cracked. Their bodies changed. Their spirits burst out of them stunned. And as I watched men changed into spirits, and spirits into men. New human beings manifested amongst us. Amidst a crackle of electricity in the air, a pantheon of gods came alive. They descended on our fury. The mercury heat of the spirit intensified. In that fog of night, that forge of incandescence, with acrid smells all around, I witnessed frightening transformations. The skins of the beggars cracked. The granite muscles of political thugs crackled. And with the sound of rushing lava I saw men turning into bulls, into horses, into tigers, their skins bristling, aflame in the night. I witnessed men turning into jackals. I recognized them instantly as worshippers at Madame Koto’s shrine.
It was a night of sorceries. In the wild crowd I saw men with dread hoofs and almond-shaped eyes. They stood upright, their fingers thickening into stumps, as they changed into hippos. I saw the half-men, half-beasts, part time human beings, manufacturers of reality, themselves remanufactured. I saw women burst into new shapes, into antelopes and great feline creatures. Into ravenous anteaters. Into jaguars and lionesses. Into beings with jagged teeth and diamond eyes. I saw women turn into smoke, into spirit-wisps, into gigantic birds with golden talons and aquamarine wings. They swooped over me, raging into new elements. Men became dwarfs. Became hunch-backed. Became long thin monsters with vertical eyes.
The night of sorceries steamed my flesh. The transformations galloped at me. Birds with shredded wrappers round their sharp talons flew over me, knocking me down with their lashing wings. I scrabbled on the ground, and ran towards the houses.
Near a tree I saw Sami, the betting shop owner who had run off with Dad’s money a long time ago. I saw him changing into a giant rat, as if he were merely taking off his coat, tearing off an outer layer of human identity. Even as a rat his face was still familiar. When he caught me staring at him he uttered a monstrous syllable, barely human. I ran again, no longer carried by my feet, but by a hot wind. The bad dreams of politicians were wreaking havoc on the earth. A tree burst into flame and a yellow star pulsed in the remote regions of ash-flavoured space. New realities were being born in the birth-throes of a new nation.
At the main road I saw the wild women again. Their voices were intensely chanting new things into being. Widening the spaces for better realities. Extending the womb of the world. I recognized some of the women. They were the endless toilers of the earth, the strong-willed marketwomen, the women who worked all life long in salt marshes, the seven women who had followed Mum on her campaign to free Dad, the hawkers who trod the endless dream of the roads, their brains sizzling under the undying language of the sun. They were the perpetual mothers, the great virgins, the somnolent widows, mothers of priests and criminals, mothers of the endlessly poor, mothers of beggars and cripples, prostitutes and cloth-dyers, mothers of the strong and the timid, the cunning and the weak, all intoxicated by the incarnation of the new god.
I saw the wild women, but I didn’t see Mum amongst them. The women poured towards me, and I feared the most frightening transformation of all. I waited for the cracking of the skins, the acrid stench, and the sudden conflagration. I held my breath, transfixed, waited for the women to trample me into the fevers of the road.
Then something happened. The spaces widened. The hard reflections of burning cars on half-broken windows flashed in my eyes. I heard a cry. Everything changed in my vision, and I moved sideways into another reality. The women who rioted, wild and barefoot, started changing forms before my stunned gaze. As the women got more violent they began to mutate into giant butterflies. They changed from the head first. Their feet shrivelled and disappeared. Their arms, beating the air, spread out, and became wider. Their faces became smaller. Their clothes fell from them and their wings became the exact pattern of their wrappers.
As the women ran towards me, their faces lit up by the fires, they changed into large butterflies, lifting off into the wind, wings frantically beating the air. Those that changed sowed disarray amongst those that were unchanged. Suddenly, I saw them all transformed, clothes first. They were utterly changed in that air of bark and fires and herbaceous sorceries.
It was astonishing to see it all. To see how the women’s feet at first still touched the earth; and how the next moment they were in the air. It was amazing to see the girls in white dresses, walking serenely towards me, leaping into butterfly forms. They all took off, flew up into that sky of six moons, and circled the chaos below three times, emitting poignant cries.
Then the seven women swooped down on me. They seized me with their soft pincerous claws, and soared up into the sky. I tore at their wings, and they dropped me. I fell slowly. I fell through the procession of higher beings. I hit the ground and rolled over. The lights changed in my eyes, my spirit knocked from its centre. I lay there, on the ground, feeling as if something had moved out of me, or as if something had moved in. I felt all mixed up. It was as if my feet were where my hands should be. As if my head had gone into my body, or as if my body were all scrambled up. I couldn’t make sense of anything. I didn’t know if I was still a human being. Or if I had changed into a butterfly, a bird, a fox, a spirit or a mixed-up song. As I lay there, my mind dissolving in the brown lights of a new terrain, the six moons become one. I saw the seven butterflies flying up into the air. They flew up higher and higher. Then they became seven new stars, fluttering in the night sky. I watched the stars pulsing.
FOURTEEN
A sympathetic invasion
AFTER A WHILE, I noticed that the world was quivering, as if a sympathetic invasion had been unleashed. The whole ghetto was covered in little blue and yellow butterflies. They beat on our faces, and they clung to our bodies. I found myself so completely covered with these butterflies that I felt I had woken into a nightmare. I screamed and kicked. When I opened my eyes, the air around me was thickly populated with little winged creatures. It occurred to me that the butterflies all over me were in fact devouring me. With all the energies embedded in my fear, I cried out, and jumped up from the ground.
Hitting out at the bristling horde of soft-winged creatures, I ran screaming, my brain on fire, my eyes hurting, and blood seeping out from a thousand places on my body.
Flailing, crazed, lashing out, I ran blindly through that dense air of transformations. I ran till I couldn’t see anything. My rage and horror had burned out my sight.
IV
BOOK SEVEN
I flailed my way into a cool terrain
AS I WENT on running I flailed my way into a new terrain where the air was cool. Gentle spirits serenely floated about their business. Girls in white shifts, kaolin on their feet and antimony on their faces, glided about with great ease, as if they were dreams.
I ran through a world of shadows. There were shadow beings everywhere. Everything was alive. The objects in that realm shone with eyes. The lovely cross had an eye at its centre. The earth had eyes, the trees had eyes, and the river had eyes too. There were pretty young girls everywhere. They had three eyes, rings in their noses, hair beautifully plaited. The girls looked happy and more at peace than I had ever known people to be. They didn’t notice me or see me. I ran through them without disturbing their shadows.
