by Ben Okri
I wandered lost and frightened, my entrails turning into fire, my feet bleeding on the invisible broken glass paths of the kingdom. I wandered the infernal mazes, with pepper bursts in my being, and I saw eyes opening in the air, following me, spying on me. Separated from my body, trapped in the Masquerade’s kingdom, I began to weep.
I wept for my terrible fate. I saw at once that if I lived I would have to struggle for ever and without much hope against the insidious permeating extensions of the Masquerade’s kingdom. I would have to fight against it, never certain of succeeding, never sure of companionship, possibly always betrayed by love. I would have to fight, to help spread some light which the darkness would devour, and I would run out of candles and lamps and all proverbial forms of illumination, till I found a way to incarnate light, to become a new illumination, shedding light and seeing by it, burning fiercely and gently for all the world that I had come to love, for all that I wanted to see, burning my being away, without rest, and without the certainty of transformation. I saw how my mother and father were doomed in the struggle. And I understood what mum meant when she buried her jewels in the sacred earth of the forest. And my heart grieved for all spirit-children, for all who had once been children, and for those who are children now – for in the Masquerade’s kingdom the world seemed so hard, the struggle so unremitting. My being always aches for joy. And it seemed better to return to the spirit world and play by the fountains with the beautiful fauns than to struggle against the empire of the Masquerade’s dominion, and to do this for ever, hoping every day that a miraculous light would emerge to make the world grow more beautiful for all.
As I wandered in the labyrinths I stopped and burst into the most profound weeping, and laughter echoed back at me from the immensity of the kingdom, from its glacial silence. I realised that my weeping was turned into laughter. And the laughter multiplied everywhere, blowing a volcanic wind through the Masquerade’s mind, regenerating the immeasurable negative powers all over the earth. And then I stopped weeping: I saw how my wailing was feeding the kingdom.
I was listening to the wind when a gentle voice said:
‘Who invited you here?’
I turned, and saw the white horse.
‘I got here by accident,’ I replied.
Another voice, behind me, said:
‘You can’t come here by accident. You must know how to enter.’
I turned, and saw Madame Koto. She was enormous and extremely beautiful. She wore a golden robe. Her eyelashes shone with antimony.
‘I was in front of your bar and I looked up and then I found myself here.’
‘Liar!’ a harsh, more ancient voice cried.
It was the blind old man. He looked handsome and healthy, and was covered in silver bracelets. He was carried on a litter by nubile young women. Around him was a retinue of servants, and the resplendent peacock walked in front of him. The blind old man was a great chief in this kingdom.
‘I want to go back,’ I said.
‘Go back to where?’
‘I want to get out of this place.’
‘Get out then,’ the blind old man said, chuckling, as if he were an old antagonist, older than my memory, which on days when my body’s light dims goes back a thousand years.
I turned to Madame Koto for help: she had vanished. I turned to the white horse: only its black shadow remained. I turned to the blind old man, and the wind blasted volcanic ash into my eyes. The searing agony, eating deep into my spirit, made me scream. Tossing and shouting, I realised in a flash of intuition that, before it turns into wailing, laughter might release me from the spell of the kingdom. And I kicked about and fought and contorted and laughed on the sand, till someone threw water in my face and a woman’s voice said:
‘What is wrong with you? Are you mad?’
Someone else whacked me on the head. I opened my eyes and saw a red ghost peering at me and I screamed again and jumped and ran and found myself in the empty bar. There were flies all about. Dad was sitting in the shadow of a far corner. He had a green hat on his head. His face was lowered. He was mulling over a calabash of palm-wine.
13
THE INVISIBLE CENSORSHIP
‘COME AND SIT near me,’ dad said, ‘and let me tell you how I am going to rule this country.’
Drying my face, I went over. My eyes were sore. He didn’t look at me. He stared into his glass. A fly had died in his palm-wine. He didn’t seem to mind. He drank the palm-wine and after a while he spat out the fly.
‘Bad things can never get to our spirit,’ he said, smiling.
Then he was silent. He was silent for a long time. My eyes cooled. The heat and agony in me slowly dissolved. His presence was immensely protective. His blue soothing light, awakened by his new rage, was large in the bar. For a long time no one came in. After a while he said:
‘Where is your mother?’
Mum came in through the back door. She had a basin on her head.
‘Don’t eat the food,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch the meat.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
She went out again, without answering my question. Before dad could say anything the bar darkened, and the wind blew in a pregnant goat. The goat wandered over to our table and stared at us and went out through the front door.
‘That goat walks just like Madame Koto,’ dad remarked, laughing.
The wind blew the goat back in. It regarded us for a long while. Then it sauntered out again.
‘Something is going to happen,’ I said.
‘Something good,’ dad said.
I looked up at him. The volcanic wind rose in my mind.
‘Your eyes are red. I will treat them later,’ he said.
He had barely finished when the curtains were swished aside and customers crowded in: converts in disguise, spies, informers, thugs who were off duty. They called out for service. They eyed us surreptitiously. The lamp in the bar, creating jagged and elongated shadows of their presence, made them look almost ghoulish.
‘This is where I will get the most voters for my Party,’ dad said.
‘Here?’
‘Yes, here,’ he said. ‘Here in the very home of the enemy.’
Then he got up, glass in hand, and went over to the largest group, and launched into a long speech about politics, about his Party, and about his plans to build a university for beggars. He talked for fifteen minutes, denouncing the major political parties, chastising the Party of the Rich for terrorising people, attacking the Party of the Poor for cowardice and vengefulness. While he talked the bar listened to him in total silence. The lizards and wall-geckos froze, astonished at his blasphemies. I felt invisible feathers growing on my neck. My face crawled with bristles and itches. I was afraid. Dad was stirring a new wind.
As he talked, mum came into the bar, momentarily breaking the spell of motionlessness. She heard dad’s insurrectional speech and went out, untouched, unafraid, as if she had foreseen it all. I noticed for the first time how sad she had become. Her luminosity had diminished. Only a terrible dignity, an anguished grace, and a curious fearlessness remained.
When she went out dad felt her after-presence, and he stuttered. A wall-gecko fell from the ceiling into his palm-wine glass. It struggled there, and dad didn’t notice. He was looking at the backyard door, anguished at mum’s absence, and when he re-entered his speech, talking louder, more daringly, making incoherent statements about the need to regulate the childhood of the nation, I understood the reason why dad had come into the bar, why he had decided to dare the powers eating up our dreams and draining our body’s will to rebel.
Unable to find a way back into mum’s bed by telling stories, he was trying a bolder method to impress her. So he talked himself into the heart of a bizarre mythology. While he talked the bar filled out with menacing presences. There were moments when I didn’t hear dad’s voice. The people who came in – tall men with rock-like heads and severe eyes – had the curious effect of making me not hear anything at all.
The flies thickened round dad’s face. The smell of corrupted flesh blew in through the front door. Then, out of the negation, I heard dad speaking.
‘Why don’t we use our powers wisely?’ he asked the room at large.
No one answered him. Some of the people who had materialised in the bar silently gathered round his table. He seemed unafraid, but I could feel his muscles tightening.
‘We can use our dark and our magical powers to create good life for our people instead of oppressing them, starving them, or killing them, don’t you think?’
There was a deep silence. Dad began to say something new when he cried out suddenly, leaping from the bench and looking all about him. No one had moved. The wall-gecko in his glass of palm-wine went on thrashing and one of the men seized the glass and threw it outside. Dad sat down, glared at everyone suspiciously, and took off his green hat. Making sure that no one was behind him, fixing his gaze on a milky-eyed man in front of him, dad said:
‘We must use our deep powers to get rid of poverty, not to create it. Poverty makes people strange, it makes their eyes bitter, it turns good people into witches and wizards.’
He paused. The flies were silent. I heard the women singing outside in the backyard. I heard them moving basins, chopping firewood, pouring water and praising the beauty of the meat they were about to roast. Dad went on with his speech, his voice rising in waves of intensity, as if he were addressing an invisible plenum of adversaries.
‘In the country I rule the machetes of the people will be blunt, the guns unloaded.’
Someone laughed at the door. It was Madame Koto’s driver. Short and reckless, his skin patchy, his face like a lizard’s, he wore his new uniform of power, swaying at the door, disturbing the light, a bottle of beer in his hand. He staggered in and collapsed on the chair in front of me. Then he lifted his reptilian head and glared at me with his big drunken eyes of one who is certain of protection.
‘If you cross my path, I will run you over,’ he said maliciously.
Then he sank his head into his arms, and fell instantly asleep.
Dad went on, in a rough voice, talking about the laws he would create in his country. He would stop drivers running over dogs as a sacrifice to their hard deity. He would outlaw the killing of antelopes, lions, leopards and elephants. Everybody would be a farmer. Everybody would be a herbalist. Everyone would have free education and would study the numerous philosophies of the land. There would be a special tax on illiterates. We would produce what we eat. We would create things we need from our own natural resources. We would find ways of using mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches and frogs to be of benefit to us. He talked of training mosquitoes as international spies. He talked of using flies as messengers. He spoke of our people as the ones who carried the weight of the world on their heads. He said Africa has so much of everything, gold, diamonds, diseases, hope, hunger, food, cocoa. He maintained that even our diseases can help to transform our destiny. I wanted to ask him how. Dad spoke of making the nation learn the art of concentration. People who would be in his government would regularly have to pass the severest tests of special sorcerers to make sure that they were not corrupt. He said the whole continent should be one great country. He had just completed that statement when the Jackal-headed Masquerade howled, bringing incoherence into the bar. The darkness, conquering the evening, swept inside on the waves of the air. Dad denounced the Masquerade and said power should be about freedom and food, not about frightening people into voting for one side or another.
While dad spoke, his voice rising and receding, as if the darkness were cancelling out his words, I kept seeing long-legged spiders out of the tail of my eyes. When I turned and looked, I saw nothing. But they kept moving closer, like crabs or a phalanx of Roman soldiers, changing positions with the movement of my head. The mosquitoes flitted round me. A lizard scuttled across dad’s hat. The mosquitoes flew into my ears and whined in my brain. The driver stopped snoring. The Masquerade’s kingdom began to invade my mind. I felt its gigantic presence in me, alien and dark, like the shadow of a compacted mountain in a small room. I felt the spaces in me crowded out, stretched and bursting with this unholy occupation. A grotesque form, composed, it seemed, of pullulating debris, the essence of the Unborn, the lust of the machete, the darkness of eyes that see without limit and without pity, compressed itself into me. And for the first time I became aware that just as I could unintentionally enter the spirit of things, they too could enter into me. And the Masquerade, howling in my mind, watched dad through my eyes.
My thoughts were all shadows. I saw dad as a luminous tiger, small and snarling with light in the frightening expanse of a dark forest. There were faces on the bark of the trees, spears in the branches. An abyss was at his feet in the illusion of shadows, and boulders hung poised in the clouds above him. Dad turned his face to me and I saw his scowl of an enraged tiger, his tongue red, his eyes yellow, his teeth bloodied. And then I saw him as he was, talking incoherently, whipping his hands in the air, his face twitching, tortured by flies. Dad went on so long and so vigorously that the spiders began to climb up my neck. I couldn’t get them off. I cried out and fireflies darted into my mouth. Mosquitoes and irascible insects made me come out in bumps. I itched furiously all over. My skin felt furry, as if covered in rashes; but when I inspected myself, I found nothing. Dad continued with his visions of an African utopia, in which we would pool all our secret wisdom, distil our philosophies, conquer our bad history, and make our people glorious in the world of continents. The more the flies tortured him the more intense and visionary dad became. A fierce energy concentrated round his mouth; his head was surrounded by fire. Dad burned and didn’t know it. We mistook the smoke for the smell of meat roasting on the spits outside. Dad’s hair caught fire and I tried to move, but the mountain of shadow sat solidly in me. When dad stopped speaking to draw in breath, the fire vanished. He put on his hat and called for palm-wine, and a woman came in with his request, along with a plate of roast meat. She came in a fraction of a second before dad had called her and the meat had a delicious aroma and I tried to speak again but a light flashed in my eyes, blinding me for a moment. The spiders had climbed up on my hair and become entangled and I attempted to pull them out but succeeded only in tearing off clumps of my hair. Dad saw me struggling and he came over and said:
‘What’s wrong with you?’
I couldn’t speak. He knocked me on the head and my brain cleared.
‘There are spiders in my hair,’ I said.
He looked. After a moment’s inspection he pushed my head away lightly, saying:
‘There’s nothing there. Come and have some of this wonderful meat.’
He went back to his bench. The people who had gathered round him in concentrated solemnity went on watching him. Dad was encouraged by their apparent fascination and he began talking again, somewhat vehemently.
He said that as a people we must have more respect for death; that in the country he rules he will make sure people don’t take death too lightly. He lashed out at the political party for filling the people’s minds with too many ambitions, with greed and selfishness, promising them land and cars and government jobs if they voted for them, instead of filling their minds with self-respect and regard for hard work and service and love, and with thoughts of how to make the people strong, healthy and well-fed. Dad went on and on. The wind howled outside. One of the men pushed the plate of meat and the palm-wine gently towards dad. A strange spirit entered his head and I saw him trying to shake it out and he burst into ranting about how in the country of which he would be the ruler people would take exercises every day. He would discipline the old and the young, girls and women. He would toughen the bones of the citizens and make their bodies supple. And rituals would be used for reasons that make us take life more seriously and more joyfully, instead of being corrupted into instruments of terror.
14
DIALOGUE WITH THE WHITE HORSE
IT WAS AT this point I became aware
of the curious invisible censorship that had come to exist in the air and objects of Madame Koto’s bar.
‘Africa is the home of the world, and look at how we live in this world,’ dad said vehemently, knocking over his glass of palm-wine in a sweeping accidental gesture.
The people who had gathered round him stared at dad as if he were both mad and amusing.
‘Poverty everywhere, wickedness, greed, injustice all over the place, goats wanting to lead the country, cows running for elections, rats scheming to become governors. This could be the great garden of the earth, but it is now a backyard,’ cried dad.
