Songs of Enchantment

by Ben Okri

  ‘They are gifts from my best friend who lives at the other side of the world. The people there are white.’

  ‘How did she give them to you?’

  ‘In my sleep. I was dreaming and then the next thing I knew we were standing on the top of a mountain that shone like a star. She broke off some of the mountain and gave these to me. We talked for many hours. She said I should bury them in the forest.’

  I marvelled at the stones.

  ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t,’ I said, remembering how he kept hitting me.

  ‘I also saw my grandmother. She is forty-one years old and she lives near the sea in another country. She is well. All of our ancestors are well. But they are worried for us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Trouble is coming. My grandmother told me to beware of the seven-headed spirit.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she added. ‘In the end we will all be happy.’

  It was her turn to be silent for a while. Dad twisted and turned on the mat, and mum covered the stones and the room went dark again. When dad resumed snoring in a higher register, mum said she was going to plant the precious stones of her dreams.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘In the forest.’

  ‘What about the women singing there?’

  ‘These are special stones. They protect me.’

  Then a cool mysterious breeze blew across my face. I felt around in the darkness. Mum was no longer there.

  I waited for her a long time. Dad stopped snoring. I lay down and listened to the silence, and breathed in the air of incense and precious stones. Then, after a long while, I felt an intense mood in the room. I smelt trees and herbs and moonlight on a wind that came in through the door. I got up and found, to my amazement, that mum was asleep on the bed.

  5

  RIDDLE OF THE WHITE ANTELOPES

  AFTER SHE HAD planted the precious stones in the forest, mum became different. In the mornings she went to work and helped with the general preparations for the forthcoming political rally. She was listless and sluggish in the daytime; her eyelids drooped as if she never slept at night. We began to worry about her. Her wonderful serenity waned. Her skin turned pale, her face grew bonier, and her clothes hung on her, making her look miserable. She became a sad mystery. At night, however, after she had slept a little in the evening, her spirit irradiated like a star. Her buoyancy returned. Her mystery deepened.

  We did not know what to do with her, or how to reach her. She spoke little, and worked hard. She did not complain about anything. One day dad couldn’t bear her silences any longer.

  ‘How is Madame Koto’s bar?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ mum replied.

  ‘How are the preparations for the rally?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Dad looked at me. I looked away. On another evening, when dad was out, mum said:

  ‘My son, I have forgotten why I am living.’

  The remark made me very unhappy. I refused to eat that evening. When dad returned he was in a good mood and he told long stories which drove me to get out my mat, and which did not help him get into bed with mum.

  ‘What’s going on in my house?’ he grumbled.

  No one said anything.

  ‘Are you two conspiring against me, eh?’

  We remained silent. He paced the room, stamping, and eventually calmed down. We went to bed early. That was the night I became certain mum kept disappearing. It had been going on for some time, but at first I wasn’t sure. So I took to pretending I was asleep and would watch the bed in the dark. For three nights she tiptoed out of the room. She didn’t stay out too long, but it was long enough to make me suspicious. On the night that dad had accused us of conspiring against him, I sneaked after mum on her secret journey into the new enigma of the forest.

  I followed her up our street, towards Madame Koto’s bar. I hung in the shadows, and the shadows whispered at me. I hid behind clumps of bushes, and I heard the leaves talking. Mum hurried past Madame Koto’s bar as if afraid of being seen, and paused near an ensemble of wild flowers at the threshold of the forest. Then she moved on, slowly, looking backwards all the time. The elysian women broke suddenly into song. Their celestial voices made me notice that there was a full moon in the sky. There were no stars out and the sky itself was oceanic, serene in its immanence, and of the deepest blue. I came to the harmonic cluster of wild flowers. They seemed to contain their own light; and their colours – red and blue and white – had the soaring patterned illumination of medieval paintings. I was gazing into their mysterious beauty when a voice in my head said:

  ‘Pluck the flowers.’

  I plucked some of the flowers and put them in my pocket. As I did so I was struck by the absurd notion that the wild flowers were somehow connected to the blood of the wounded beggar. They had grown all along the path. The deeper into the forest I went in search of mum, the more beautiful the flowers were, the brighter their centres. The darkness of the forest seemed to bring out light in things which concealed their light. A special corona, almost silvery, shone around mum. I saw spiders asleep on their cobwebs. A curious imperceptible radiance kept spreading and diminishing about me as if it were a coded message for the initiated. From all around, from the trees, the earth, and the sky hidden by branches, the voices of the women poured forth like a divine choir. Their songs were an irresistible perfume on the wind. Everywhere I looked white flashes kept disappearing from view. When I stopped trying to look, I saw white antelopes out of the corners of my eyes. They were like beings that existed only in glimpses, creatures that were real only in the margins and tangents of vision.

  Mum skirted the pit into which the beggars seemed to have vanished. Beyond the pit was a boulder. The moon, shining on its massive form, made it resemble the head of a forest god carved by unknown masters, guardian of ancient mysteries. It was a mighty head, with wise and indifferent eyes where the moon chipped the great rock. I hid behind the boulder, soothed by its timeless shadow. Then a voice from inside the stone said:

  ‘The less you look, the more you see.’

  I fled from the rock. Mum had disappeared. I made a careful detour round the great stone and came upon a white pot with three eggs and two pieces of kaolin inside it. Another voice said:

  ‘Rub the chalk on your face.’

  I rubbed the kaolin on my face and everything went dark all around me. The sky seemed everywhere. The moon had gone. I pushed on till I heard a rattling sound, and saw a snake coiled round a tree. I wasn’t afraid. Further ahead I tripped on a stone and felt my big toe bleeding. When I got up the light tinkling of bells on the wind was all around me. I heard the dense beating of wings. A bird flew past my face. Holding my breath, I stared deeply into the darkness. Only the wind spoke. I walked into its polyphonic whispers, and soon found myself at a clearing. Then everything went silent. And in the silence I beheld a gathering of white antelopes with jewels around their necks. They were in a white circle.

  In the centre of the circle was a tree that resembled a rhinoceros. The antelopes didn’t move. Their stillness was uncanny. Their heads were craned forward as if they were listening to an oral rendering of wise old legends. The jewels and precious stones glittered round their slender necks with many beauteous colours which the wind kept changing. The moon re-appeared and the sky withdrew from over my head. The antelopes stood white and wondrous in the clearing, with the rhinoceros tree in their middle, and with the bells gently tinkling in the wind. The voices had stopped singing. Incense wafted from the open spaces. Something felt hot on the nape of my neck. I turned, and saw the glassy green eyes of an owl. I drew a breath. The wind circled my head. The owl gave a piercing hoot and then flew up into the sky with a flurry of beating wings. The antelopes all looked up, and froze. The owl circled the air above me, hooting its alarmed cry. Suddenly, there were many eyes on me in the forest. It seemed that the trees and leaves had eyes, that insects we
re watching me, that the darkness was intensely populated with eyes, all concentrated on me. I couldn’t hide. Crouching on the earth, I felt water flowing beneath my feet. I looked down, and saw nothing. I could have been standing over an abyss. The wind rose and I looked up and saw a blue mist obscuring the antelopes. And then I saw women in the mist, with jewels and precious stones twinkling round their necks. The women wore white. They moved towards me.

  Then I heard a growling from a frightening animal with fire in its throat, and I began running. I ran and tripped and got up and went on running. Footsteps multiplied around me. When I got to the boulder, the white pot had gone. Lost among the trees, I heard the beating of wings and the whisperings of the wind and hooves and footsteps everywhere. In the margins of my vision I saw open doorways with lighted interiors. I saw children playing joyfully round fountains of golden water. I saw naked men and women, entwined, flying through the air, flying out of visibility. Dreams swirled around me. I stopped. The hooves and footfalls also stopped. I moved gently and all the noises moved gently. The tender bells started up again. The owl flew past, its eyes glittering with alarm, the eyes of a watchful old woman.

  I ran in a straight line and after a while I saw the lights of Madame Koto’s bar through the trees. The feeling that I was almost safe brought a rush of blood to my head, and I fell. As I got up the growling was so hot on my back that I cried out and ran with such desperate fury that it was with a shock I collided into a solid figure carved out of a mass of darkness. I was sent sailing through the air, my head swirling. And when I recovered – astonished to find myself swaying in a world of muggy lights, where worms had wings, where skulls had painted faces like old women at a fair, where jackals were dancing to the antiphonal music of a warped harmonica – it came as a surprise to see that I had knocked over the blind old man. My heart wildly drumming, I rushed and tried to help him. He cursed, and stood up and dusted himself. When he lifted his face at me, I nearly fainted at the yellow lights that glowed in his eyes. With frightening speed he grabbed me and shouted, in the voice of an exhausted bull:

  ‘What on earth are you doing in my dream?’

  6

  THE BLIND OLD MAN’S DREAM: A PROPHECY

  I OPENED MY mouth, and the hot wind blew in. No sound came out. My insides burned. I screamed, and the blind old man hit me on the head. I was about to hit him back when I saw that he had feathers about his neck, and quills and glow-worms on his face. His arms had bony wings, as if he had been trapped midway in transformation from a skeleton into a bird.

  ‘Answer me,’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing in my dreams?’

  He had the eyes of a bull and the feet of a dog. He kept beating his bony wings, with an expression of tormented ecstasy on his bristling face. I was trying to wrench myself from his calcified grip, when something unpleasant happened to my eyes. I found I was no longer in the forest. I started to scream again, but I heard my own sound somewhere else. The old man laughed. He had the tongue of a cat. He waved his wings over my face and an excruciating pain shot through the back of my eyes and when I looked I saw fierce soldiers behind him. Everything had changed. It was a burning day, and the soldiers were clubbing men and women in a crowd. They hit the women till they became a mass of writhing worms. The pain went through me again and the scene transformed and I saw men bound to stakes, the great ocean behind them, soldiers with guns in front of them.

  ‘Fire!’ the blind old man commanded.

  And the soldiers shot the men for what seemed like three generations. Then things began to change horribly. I felt myself flying at terrific speed, the wind almost snapping my neck. The blind old man flapped his monstrous wings in the heated air. And I became absolutely terrified because I realised for the first time that I had accidentally hurled myself into the blind old man’s dreams.

  I flew into a world of violence, of famine, of pullulating hunger, with beggars swarming the city centre, with maggots devouring the inhabitants, with flies eating the eyeballs of the children who were half-dead with starvation, with traffic jams everywhere, and people dying of hypertension at their steering wheels; with gases burning in the air, multiplying the ferocious heat of the sun; with housing projects built by corrupt businessmen collapsing and crushing to death their inhabitants all over the country; with soldiers going mad and shooting at people, emptying their guns at students, butchering their mothers, while riots quivered all over the landscapes; with the prisons overcrowded and exuding an unbearable stench of excrement and blood; with children poisoned by their mother’s milk, the mothers having been poisoned by just about everything; with the rich and powerful gorging themselves at their bacchanalias, their feasts of twenty-one slaughtered cows, their sweat reeking of vintage champagne, seven bands playing for their perfumed guests and weaving their patron’s names in fulsome songs, while the food spilled on the polished floors and the guests trod on them, while the choice delicacies changed into the writhing savoury intestines of the dying children and women, which were gobbled up in celebrations without end.

  I saw soldiers in armoured trucks rolling into the city, I saw coup after coup, till our history became an endless rosary necklace of them, each new bead an assassinated head of state, or the secret numbers of failed coup-plotters, executed at dawn.

  I saw history as a madman with a machine gun, a madman eating up the twisting flesh of the innocent and the silent.

  I saw the blind old man administering potions for warding off evil projections directed at the master politicians.

  I saw the blind old man changing, and I knew his secret identity to be that of a master transformer, who could turn into a bat and spy on his enemies.

  The old man took me through the insurrectional afternoons, the boiling nights, through days and years merged together, with great events and ordinary happenings taking place simultaneously, and with his robotic grip fixed on my wrist.

  My eyes were burning now with so much forbidden sight that I couldn’t see myself. Through the fire of such sight I suddenly found myself on a battleground deep in the country, deep in the dream of the unborn nation, and I saw a bloody war raging, a war without beginning and without end, whose origins formed a self-feeding circle like the ouroboros. I saw soldiers stick their bayonets into the eyes of their countrymen. I saw bombs explode, laughing, while limbs scattered about the place in unholy jubilation. Blood spurted from the trunks of palm trees. Limbs, intestines, eyeballs and pulped torsos grew from the earth and writhed and crawled amongst the rain-washed undergrowth. Flowers sprouted out of slit and rotting throats. Mushrooms bristled out of the suppurating anuses of the dead. The battleground became a liverish carpet of sliced tongues and slug-infested hearts. The blind old man turned into a skull, the skull exploded, and blood washed down on the earth. Detonations growled, and trees – dancing – were splintered. I saw a young man with his face melted by grenade heat. He ran howling through the cinderous village and women fled from him. The war raged and the blind old man turned into a mosquito, spied on the rebel troops, and reported back to the army chief who had hired him, whose emblem was a white lion. I was on fire all over with the horror, and the more violently I tried to get away, the greater was the metallic grip on my wrist.

  Then an incandescent flash lit up everywhere and I saw a glowing yellow carpet on a beach, with the green ocean swelling and dreaming all around. And on the yellow carpet I was surprised to see a fervent mass of men and women tearing the blind old man’s body apart, eating his entrails, gorging themselves on his divinatory head. And when they had finished devouring him, his sorcerer’s blood drove them mad and they jumped into the ocean and drowned in a choir of ecstatic voices. The maddened waves washed the carpet away and deposited on the beach a new thing, a new image, a being, wriggling like a great horrid worm – the blind old man, reborn as a baby, regurgitated from the sea. His muscles were bunched-up, his head was mighty like a Nimba sculpture, his eyes were raw and intelligent. He had two sexual organs, his prick was monstrous and
erect, his vagina was tiny, like a comma.

  The ocean became calm. I saw the baby growing, and it saw me, and stared at me. I was knocked about in the old man’s dream of a dying country that had not yet been born, a nation born and dying from a lack of vision, too much greed and corruption, not enough love, too many divisions.

  And when I looked I saw the baby impregnate itself: it grew into a man-woman, and struggled for many generations trying to give birth to itself, to its own destiny. The sky changed, and the earth heaved, and when the period of parturition was over, I noticed at the feet of the man-woman a bizarre birth, a birth within a birth. Everything was still. The man-woman had delivered several babies who were joined at the hips. They were all different, they had few resemblances, their hues were dissimilar, and they were secretly antagonistic to one another. It was truly frightening, this pullulation of babies with different voices, different eyes, different cries, different dreams, similar ancestry, all jostling, all trapped within the same flesh, pulling in conflicting directions. Unable to escape one another, growing at incompatible rates, some dying as others grew fatter, some dragging the corpses of their siblings through the days and nights, feeding off the dead amongst them – this horrible sight made my head swell in the infernal labyrinths of the blind old man’s dreams.

  Time accelerated. The original man-woman had disappeared into its hybridous offspring. And I saw them, with their unnumbered legs, their multiple arms and heads, seldom thinking together, suspicious of one another, condemned to wander as one, to build as one, to destroy as one, yet always trying to be separate from one another, always failing, for they were all of one body, one ancient and forgotten ancestry, their destinies linked – in union or division – for ever.