by Ben Okri
He mourned in the street. He wept by the well. He shouted at night. And he wailed with his yellow spectacles on his face, so that we wouldn’t see his eyes.
NINE
The rewritten riot
ON THE FOURTH day after Madame Koto’s death, we were banished from the night. The hypocritical wailing of the blind old man mystified us. But nothing astounded us as much as the rewriting of our lives by the new powers of the era.
Far away from the places where our realities are manufactured, it took four days for the most extraordinary rumours to reach us through the dense air of Madame Koto’s death. We read the newspapers and missed the rewriting of the upheavals. The bad grammar of our speech probably made it worse. The rewriting had worked so well that we didn’t notice what was being rewritten.
It took rumours to awaken us. And our awakening made us doubt our collective memory. It made us doubt our individual memories too. After a while Mum began to doubt how she got the bruises on her face, but Dad’s deafness saved him the humiliation of having to question his wounds.
After the rally, which became a riot, I heard it said – and it was written in all the newspapers, with photographs to prove it – that the rally had been an unqualified success. We heard that the rally had ended peacefully, the only sign of trouble being the spontaneous ovation, the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd, demonstrating their overwhelming support for the Party of the Rich. We heard how the crowds had taken up the chants and victory songs. How they had dispersed peacefully to their homes, singing the party on to triumph.
We heard these rumours with disbelief. We began to wonder if the papers had been referring to another rally that had taken place in the same arena as ours – a phantom rally, a shadow rally, or a rally of ghosts. Then we began to think that the rally we had attended had been the phantom rally. One that we had all dreamed up together. We even suspected that the riot which followed was a collective fantasy, a mass hallucination.
We began to think of ourselves as hypocrites. We began to imagine that we had indeed been peaceful at the rally, that we had colluded in our cowardice by inventing the alternative ending, the disruptions, the burnings, the rage, the ten people dead. The papers said nothing about the deaths.
We saw an interview with the future Head of State. He praised us for our tremendous show of support. We saw photographs to prove it. Our faces beaming, our expressions intent and hopeful. But we couldn’t recognize a single one of our individual faces amongst the crowds. We saw photographs in the papers of politicians making their speeches with dramatic gestures. We read many things, but nothing remotely resembled the riot.
And for the first time I began to think of history as a dream rewritten by those who know how to change the particulars of memory. I began to think of history as fantasy, as shadow reality. Then I thought of it as the reality we never lived. Who lives our lives for us?
The papers said the rally was so successful that, to ensure the peace continued, and to prevent jealous reprisals from the other party, the interim government was imposing a dusk to dawn curfew. Soldiers paraded the city on the backs of armoured trucks. Waves of them poured down our street, with guns under their arms, eyeing us as if we were the most visible threat to the forthcoming elections. The soldiers swept through our street, disappeared, and then kept returning. They paraded our boundaries.
None of the papers wondered about our rage, or about the devastated houses, the burnt petrol station, the incinerated cars, the torn streets, and the ten dead bodies which still lay under the insurgent sun, hectored by flies.
And because the riot had never happened, because our rage had been a collective hallucination, no one asked questions about the reasons for the riot. No one asked questions about anything. The unasked questions accumulated in the new air of the curfew. Without any answer, they grew bigger. The questions took the form of the unexplained dead. Birds of prey, whose wings grew heavier, fed on that perfect food of night.
The birds of curfew beat sinister rhythms into our sleep. And the unasked questions, joining with the fetor of Madame Koto’s disintegrating myth, produced a combined stink in the air of the nation’s birth which made us seem stupid and sleepwalking, slow and slightly deaf.
We began to wonder if our rage so much as affected a single shadow in that hard world they rewrite as history.
TEN
Living in a paradox
WE BEGAN TO distrust things. When the blind old man wept about the untimely death of Madame Koto we merely took him for a dream that we could not agree upon. We watched his demonic mourning with solitary eyes. The solitary eyes of those who cannot trust others with their perceptions. We watched him in groups, but saw him each in our unique isolation. If he was a fact, we did not discuss it. If he was a dream, we did not share him.
But when the blind old man’s public mourning reached its climax on the sixth day, scaring the dogs and cats with his hyena-like noises, kicking like an upturned beetle on the ground, in his striped hat and yellow sunglasses, we started to wonder if we hadn’t misjudged him. And we became a little terrified at the strength of his bereavement.
As his mourning reached its climax, Madame Koto’s body began to shrivel. Her flesh shrank beneath her gold-braided robes. Her eyes were at their most swollen. We had no idea that the final chapter of her mythic life was being brought to an end. Then we heard that her swollen eyes had burst and yellow liquids drooled down her shrivelled face, staining her pillow-case with her agonized weeping for the dreams beyond death.
On that seventh day of her death, when we couldn’t sleep for the steel rings of curfew round our lives, Madame Koto’s corpse appeared in our street.
We saw her at the front seat of her Volkswagen, with party banners draped round the little car. She wore dark glasses, and seemed as imperious as we had ever known her to be. She was driven up and down our area. She was so impervious to our gaze, so indifferent to the world, and so solid in her being, that we could be forgiven for thinking that we were the dead, and that she was of the living. This also made us suspect that we had never been real, and what we took as the facts of our days were merely the intense dreams of our ghosts. We began to suspect that we had been living in a paradox. Living and suffering in a shadow universe, the terrain of the dead. Living in an underworld of mythic time where all the failures and dreams of our lives were concrete things.
We had been living in death. Waiting to be born. Mistaking the dreams in our deaths for realities. I began to understand our eruptions, and why we had such a poor effect on the solid world of history. I understood that a pre-condition for a good birth is patience. But those who rewrote our lives deprived us of the choice of patience. They had foreshortened our possibilities with their corruption and their lies. Everything got spoiled because of the essential questions no one asked. And I saw how we could live other people’s entire histories in such a short space of time, be blessed with plenty, and yet find ourselves beggars in the wide world.
And all this before a tree bore its first fruit.
ELEVEN
Turning death into power
ON THE SEVENTH day we began to realize the implications of that great myth fallen. But it took Dad, who couldn’t hear anything, to make us realize what was happening. The funeral had finally come upon us. It had been searching for us for seven days through all the realms of reality.
The curfew narrowed our lives. But only Madame Koto, who had become an old woman of a corpse in rumour, with her crushed smile and her yellow teeth, found freedom in the night. The curfew was her liberation. Under its cloak the rituals were organized which would transfer her powers into their control. Under the cloak of curfew dread sacrifices were performed, designed to turn her death into power, her myth into domination, her disintegration into unity, the dust of her flesh into the gold of a living force.
In the dreams of death, riding in her Volkswagen up and down our street, her smile turning fiendish, she became the negative will which paralysed us.
The mysterious funeral (1)
ON THAT SEVENTH day the blind old man sent word round that we were all invited to Madame Koto’s funeral. We were suspicious of the invitation and no one sent word back that they would attend.
The funeral music of drums and trumpets and dirge accompaniments filled the air. We heard that several funerals were taking place for Madame Koto simultaneously in different parts of the country. There were funerals in deep creeks, in remote villages, on hilltops, and in the original home of the great black rock. The biggest funeral took place in her secret palace. No one knew where her body was, and in all the different sites of her diverse funerals, coffins supposed to be containing her body were buried.
That same day, a great Mass was held for Madame Koto in the Cathedral of Saint Mary in the city centre. She was buried to halting renditions of Mozart’s great unfinished Mass in C minor. The service drew a huge congregation composed of nuns from the cloisters, bewigged judges, bespectacled soldiers, bishops with glittering crosiers, garri traders, rich businessmen, famous musicians, local governors, sundry church elders, marketwomen, trade unionists, the Governor-General with his two trusted deputies, and the future Head of State with his tentative cabinet. There were also the beggars who had come into the church to shelter from the drizzle which was slightly flavoured with a rainbow. And all manner of people who had never heard of her, bicyclists and hawkers, poets and thieves and street urchins, had been drawn into the cathedral by the sheer magnitude of the occasion.
All kinds of people were magnetized by the instant legend of the event and by the cathedral, with its whimsical dome, its stained-glass windows and syncretic images of saints, its vaulted ceiling. And all were awestruck by the mighty resonances of the cantatas and fugues which poured out of the cylindrical organ pipes and created circles of curious crowds outside the cathedral doors. The surrounding streets were taken up by bystanders and city-folk, all amazed by the cars parked around, the armed guards, the soldiers with guns, and by the mystery of the personage who was being honoured in so unprecedented a manner. It was as if a great ancient mother were being sent on her way to the land of everlasting legends.
The service was such a great success, with speeches from all sorts of luminaries, that the church enjoyed a multitude of conversions.
THIRTEEN
The mysterious funeral (2)
AND WHILE THE service was taking place, the other funeral began at Madame Koto’s bar. There was much feasting and much music-making, but none of Madame Koto’s followers attended. They had all fled into a world of shadows, condemned to be haunted by all the things Madame Koto’s eyes had seen while she lay in state.
But the funeral was attended by a great many musicians, who warred amongst themselves for the sustenance of her myth. All sorts of people turned up. Midgets with ears stained purple. A white man who had helped her flee from the Gold Coast. Peculiar-looking women with golden bangles who brought sacrificial goats, odd-looking yams, wild birds, and baskets of palm kernels. There were men in white robes, soldiers with guns, policemen with batons, and people who had travelled long distances, who made themselves comfortable on mats in her room. None of the revenants returned. Those who attended the funeral were people we had never seen. We marvelled at the many dimensions of her life.
As the day wore on and the feasting progressed, we saw the emissaries of kings, all in royal attire, bearing sacrificial gifts. We saw diplomats from obscure and great nations. There was a delegation from the future Head of State. There were delegations from all the major and minor political parties. There were journalists and photographers, finance ministers, makers of cages, trainers of parrots, keepers of secret keys. It was as if we had only ever known one small aspect of the many lives of Madame Koto, who seemed to grow more august with her death.
Among the many strangers who attended the funeral preparations, there was one in particular who exerted the strongest pull on my spirit-child imagination. He was the most quiet, and the most mysterious. He seemed vaguely familiar though I had never seen him before. He had a smallish head and serene eyes and only three fingers remained on his right hand. He was dressed like a hunter, and he didn’t speak to anyone. A silent power emanated from his wiry frame. And I, the spirit-child, who knows the wondrous destiny of human beings beyond the earth, I could not penetrate the protective serenity of his aura. I could not enter his thoughts. His realm was beyond me. When he stared at me with deep-set eyes the most mysterious flicker of a smile lit up his face as if he knew who I was and had already perceived my destiny in advance. I did not see him much during the tumultuous events of the funeral. I did not see him for the strangers that had moved into our area and who poured out of their houses to pay their last respects to Madame Koto. They were the only ones amongst us who answered the blind old man’s call.
While the bar resounded with funereal music and bustlings and arguments about the different regions – terrestrial and superterrestrial – of Madame Koto’s domain, many of us hung at the barfront watching the proceedings.
But we did not see the secret preparations around Madame Koto’s body, or one of her many bodies. We did not witness the final shaving of her beard for the funeral rites. We did not witness the plaiting of her hair into fantastic braids. And we did not know anything of the commotion that surrounded the construction of her coffin.
FOURTEEN
The power of the dead
MADAME KOTO, IN spite of having shrivelled in rumour into an old woman, went on growing till her last day. We did not see the fury of the blind old man, who had to keep sending orders to the specially hired carpenters. They rebuilt her coffin three times to accommodate her breasts which had grown preternaturally large. Then they had to extend the coffin in length because, rather late, they had discovered that her legs were growing as well.
In the end, the blind old man, fearful of this inexplicable growth, ordered a coffin made of the hardest steel. And then he sent off dimensions so extraordinary that the workmen, to this day, believe that they constructed a coffin for the burial of a giant bull.
FIFTEEN
‘They have taken her heart!’
THERE WAS GREAT tumult when the coffin arrived. Eight stout men, the veins in their necks bursting from exertion, carried the coffin on their heads. And when they dropped it, the foundations of the house trembled. It was a coffin so mighty that it could easily have served as a small room for a family of four. The musicians, noting this crucial detail for the embellishment of Madame Koto’s myth, were significantly silent. The women released awesome ululations. The blind old man, waving the flywhisk in his hand in a gesture of admonishment, banished their cries.
Silence followed. He ordered the room to be vacated. Then he drew an impenetrable veil of spells around the inner circle as they began the final rituals which would remove the powers from Madame Koto’s body.
I heard Madame Koto’s voice cry out during the last rites. No one else heard her cry. No one registered any dread. I heard the cry again. It was hyena-like, piercing, like the cry of sacrificial victims who have their hearts torn out from their bodies, under their own gaze, and under the power of ancient sorceries.
‘They have taken her heart!’ I shouted, and someone slapped me so hard on the face that I found myself reeling in the thoughts of the funeral attendants.
SIXTEEN
Death is cultural
I WANDERED THROUGH the dimly-lit corridors of the white man’s mind. He was thinking: ‘People’s experience of death is cultural’; and then he inwardly smiled. Along the corridors of his mind, beyond its transparent walls, there were places lined with statues and ritual images, chapters of unfinished books, and details for memoirs about the untamed heart of Africa that would never be written. There were also lighted places filled with iridescent warmth and I found myself liking the gentle edges of his consciousness.
Another knock stunned me into another mind. Dark and heated and full of potent sounds. Grim rivers
. Tidewash of memories. Pictures of Madame Koto as a young girl. She was beautiful and had that peculiar green light in her clear eyes which had been an early indication of her unusual birth and destiny. She floated in an air of sandalwood incense. The bones of rare animals on a chain round her neck. I saw her naked. Saw the wild red flower of her vagina. Her heaving breasts. Saw her open mouth and her eyes rolling around. And heard her orgasmic cry deep in the river-wash of that dark mind. I saw two fingers in an enamel bowl. Saw Madame Koto and the man fleeing through the bushes. Living in the forest. I dimly witnessed her initiation into the ancient cults. Then the darkness of that mind closed on me.
I opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by women. Faces hard as bitterwood. Eyes deep with emotion and therefore emotionless. Faces like benevolent masks of fertility rites. Mum was amongst them, and she was cradling me silently. When I got down from her arms, I found everything weaving. My head was unsteady. Silently we watched as the strangers gathered at the barfront in that air of disintegrating myths.
SEVENTEEN
Old trees are impossible to replace
THE MUSICIANS PLAYED, and the blind old man supervised the building of the three temporary huts for the funeral event. They dug holes for the sticks and soon constructed huts with raffia and bamboo. The roofs were made of fresh palm fronds.
