by Ben Okri
We stayed in the shadows and watched the mourners dancing and weeping. We watched the bacchanalia which followed. Visitors and participants got sated and drunk and lay sprawled in the intoxication of a ritual celebration of death. We watched the hundreds of cartons of beer, the endless bottles of whisky and the innumerable gourds of palm-wine consumed by the celebrants as they mourned and told stories of Madame Koto’s incredible feats, of her extravagant generosity.
The blind old man sent huge portions of fried goat, stewed rice and beancakes round to us, but none of us ate the meat of her myth. None of us partook of the rice and palm-wine of her legend.
As we watched, lingering in the shadows, witnesses to the end of an era, we noticed that apart from the ghoulish wailing of the blind old man, only the women truly mourned her.
TWENTY-SIX
Lingering in the shadows
WE BECAME UGLY in the shadows because of the hardness of our faces. Our eyes were dull. We had the listlessness of people whose sleep has been continually sabotaged.
In the shadows we watched the young girls. Many of them were bare-topped. We stared at their hard and shining breasts. We watched the girls who were cultic priestesses in training as they bore white basins with the legend ‘Koto’ on them. The basins were weighed down with food prepared in unknown animistic convents. The girls had kaolin on their faces, their eyes remote. Their young bodies were golden with a deep sensuality, and when they began to dance the men were entranced. The men were electrified, their desires made more intense because they were forbidden intimate contact with the girls. As the musicians conjured ethereal strains from their instruments the girls danced with such vigour and insanity that I feared further transformations. But as they got lost in the ecstasy, they passed from mere dancing into a somnambulistic trance.
Then, utterly possessed, three of the girls ran towards us in the shadows. They pointed their fingers at us, their thighs shaking, breasts quivering. They hissed like snakes. They ululated. They pointed at us accusingly. It occurred to us that we were being blamed for Madame Koto’s death.
One of the girls stepped forward from the rest. She was of extraordinary beauty, and had kind eyes. Her fine pointed breasts were oiled and looked like polished mahogany. She knelt in front of us, as we stood resentful in the shadows. Then she began a puzzling entreaty, begging us without stating the particulars of her plea. She knelt there with a sad expression on her face, rubbing her hands together in profound pleading. She had tears in her eyes. She kept begging us, without ever making it clear what for. Then she quivered. A spirit took her over. She screamed and begged, and then the men, flashing their eyes at us, came and rushed her away. As she was borne away, she was still pleading.
We who had lingered in the shadows, our faces harder than dead wood, retreated from the funeral celebrations. We dispersed to our different rooms. Our faces hurt in fixed severity. We remained slightly deaf and dumb, bewildered by the inexplicable acceleration of time.
TWENTY-SEVEN
When I cried out the pain eased
WE FOUND DAD standing on his head, upside down, against the wooden window.
‘Who is crying for forgiveness?’ he asked as we came in.
We said nothing. We sat in silence on the bed.
‘Someone is crying for forgiveness,’ Dad said again.
We didn’t understand him. All around we could hear Madame Koto’s women ululating, could hear them howling into the dawn, as if they were trying to break down the mysterious doors of the earth, the doors that separated the living from the dead.
The room was dark. There were no candles lit. Dad remained standing on his head, his eyes shining oddly from the ground as if he were a sinister cat, or a mischievous spirit spying on our lives in the soft darkness.
A rebellious wind rattled our rooftop. After a while there was silence. We waited for the sound of Madame Koto’s wailing women to return, ghostly in that strange night. The darkness in the room was that of the earth. I saw the spirits of trees in our living space, their leaves an ethereal green. The spirit-trees flourished in their invisibility. I was seeing them for the first time in a long while. All things continue their dreams, both living and dead. All living things continue even when dead. Their shadow selves, their spirit entities, keep on growing as if nothing had changed. The world is full of superimpositions.
‘I can hear a baby crying,’ Dad said.
We couldn’t hear anything. The silence was deeper than the night. We were in the seabed of silence. Silvery fishes swam across the hardness of our faces. The silence was so deep it obliterated time. Only Dad’s breathing anchored us to the world of darkness.
As we sat in the silence, the stigmata in my palm suddenly came alive in pain. The stigmata burned as if I had just sustained a wound in the middle of my palm. Under the sudden lash of that pain I cried out, cracking the silence asunder. When I cried out, the pain eased. When I stopped, the pain returned.
‘I can hear someone crying,’ Dad said, from the floor.
Mum fetched a candle and lit it and asked what was wrong. I showed her the stigmata. It had now grown so vivid it seemed as if jagged glass had been twisted into my palm. Or as if someone had stuck a red-hot taper in my palm and left it there. Mum fainted at the horrid sight, dropping the candle. Dad scrambled from his upside-down position, relit the candle, and revived Mum. Both of them stood perplexed. They said nothing. They stared at me with suspicious eyes, as if I were transformed.
The wind blew out the candle. Dad stayed kneeling in front of me. Mum was crouched beside me. The silence deepened.
‘It doesn’t hurt any more,’ I said.
They stayed silent. Then we began to hear new tones of weeping. The weeping drifted in from the adjacent rooms, the rooms of our neighbours. All the women in our area, all in their different rooms, began weeping at once. It was quite ghostly. Like a circling chorus, circling the air, swirling and rising in sorrow. Mum’s face was hardened in the darkness. She looked to me like the masks they use to frighten off bad spirits.
TWENTY-EIGHT
As if they had all just lost their mothers
‘THEY ARE ALL crying,’ Dad said, with wonder in his voice.
Then, like kerosene exploding into flame, Mum broke down too. She crumpled on the bed, contorting and kicking. She wept hysterically, and couldn’t be stopped.
‘Why is she weeping?’ Dad asked in utter amazement.
I was astonished at his question. I was astonished because Dad could hear.
‘You can hear, Dad!’ I said.
‘I know. But why is your mother weeping, eh?’
I couldn’t see Dad’s face in the dark. Had he been on a long journey and just returned? Had he been wandering in a world of echoes and voices that he took to be reality?
‘I think it’s because of Madame Koto.’
‘What has she gone and done now?’
‘She’s dead. They buried her today.’
Dad didn’t say anything. He went on another long journey, wandering amongst memories.
In silence, we listened to the lamentation. Even the ones who hated Madame Koto the most wailed all night. They wailed inconsolably, as if they had all just lost their mothers.
TWENTY-NINE
A little night music
AS I SAT there, a beautiful glow appeared all around me. Out of the enveloping glow came the merest hint of sublime music. I listened to the purity of the music and said, very gently:
‘Ade, it’s you isn’t it?’
The spirit of my dead friend appeared next to me. His brilliant white hat was the only sign and star in that sad darkness.
‘Why do you bring such lovely music when there is such misery here on earth?’ I asked, in a whisper.
‘Be grateful for the music,’ he replied.
I thought about what he said. I could hear a cooling wind blowing over the land. He stayed silent. His silence made me more aware of the music.
‘Why do we lose the highest point
s in our life?’ I asked.
‘To go either higher, or lower.’
‘Why do we lose the best dreams of our lives?’
‘Because we forget.’
‘How can we stop forgetting?’
‘By renewing ourselves.’
‘How?’
‘By becoming a child again every seven years.’
‘Do we always have to lose our best dreams?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘To find them again, anew.’
‘How?’
‘By listening.’
‘To what?’
‘To the agony or the laughter of angels.’
‘Where?’
‘Within yourselves.’
The music was fainter now. The fainter it was, the more beautiful it became. It was almost unbearable. My friend’s presence was fading. The glow was diminishing. He was leaving me behind again, in this dark place, among the hard things of the world.
Then he smiled, and was gone. But he left me the music. Its tenderness lingered in the silence.
THIRTY
Softened faces
MUM FELL ILL. Most of the women in our area came down with mysterious fevers. Dad entered a state of shock that lasted a week. Madame Koto kept appearing to me. She kept begging my forgiveness, which I tried to give, but did not know how.
A new era crept into our lives. When I woke up on the morning after Madame Koto’s burial, I felt as if I had been overcome by a curious illness which had no discernible symptoms. The pain of the stigma had lessened. I alone was aware of the illness. To my parents I was perfectly well and normal. When they sent me on errands I was happy to obey. The illness took the form of a curious spaciousness in my spirit. I felt lighter, as if a part of me had floated away.
Everyone remarked on how well I looked. I felt tranquil. But I knew that soon the other world would begin invading me. I became vigilant. I thought often about the seven-headed spirit who was coming to get me. I kept expecting the voices of my spirit companions, who were still angry with me for betraying my pact to return to them in the spirit world. I awaited further appearances of Ade. I had unexpected longings for the disembodied singing and the wonderful melodies that I alone heard, which haunted my childhood. But nothing happened. The lightness, the spaciousness, remained.
I felt prone to simultaneous visions. I felt like one perpetually on the verge of a fit or a seizure. Still nothing happened. I suffered the lingering expectancy, the sense of something ominous about to happen, but endlessly deferred.
There was one lovely thread woven into the fabric of that period. After the weeping, and after the fevers, a gentle change came over things. It gladdened my heart to see how the faces of the women had lightened, how their eyes shone. It touched me also to see that the men had lost their vaguely stupid expressions. An inexplicable pestilence had been lifted from our collective air.
I noticed also that after Mum had wept all night her face softened, and her beauty returned.
There were no masks among us in the respite that followed Madame Koto’s burial.
THIRTY-ONE
Time quickens
THE RESPITE WAS brief, and time quickened. We woke up one morning to find curfew hours extended. We woke up on another morning to find massive obituary notices for Madame Koto in all the newspapers. The obituaries took up three full pages of every single newspaper in the land. We saw big photographs of her sitting on a wicker chair. The obituaries appeared for an entire week. They all bore condolences and deep regrets at her passing. It was strange how she had become more public and more famous dead than alive.
We had hardly recovered from that shock when, on another morning, on awakening, we found that the much delayed elections were upon us.
The elections would seal the fate of the unborn nation.
THIRTY-TWO
The karmic dust of angels is everywhere.
The secret side of things is open to us.
The time of innocence is gone.
The age of dreaming has come.
Old ways are dying.
We who live through turbulent mysteries
Do not know that a whole way is passing.
We do not know the things to come.
We go on living as if history is a dream.
The miracle is that we go on
Living and loving as best we can,
In this enigma of reality.
1989–1998
London
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Graham Greene who, in 1989, at the Oxford & Cambridge Club, told us the anecdote on which I based the Rain Queen story;
And to Harould Courlander’s collection of oral African tales, The Crest and the Hide, for reminding me of a story from my childhood;
And to Rosemary Clunie.
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Epub ISBN: 9781409087670
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Copyright © Ben Okri 1998
Ben Okri has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Phoenix House
First published in paperback in 1999 by Phoenix
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