by Ben Okri
And when the voices stopped, leaving a single song sustaining the peal of an old bell (resonant with the warning that every domination is an illusion which we accept) – a thunderous crash, the shrieking of metal on metal, and the silver lash of a whip cracked in the air and cleaved the song in half, one side still resonating in the silence afterwards, the other side entering a void, never to re-emerge. And it was when I heard the neighing of horses, the cantankerous snorting of hallucinated bulls, that I first had the inkling that a vehemence vaster than the fury of torrential rains had been unloosened over our lives.
16
MADAME KOTO’S DREAM-LUST
THAT NIGHT SAW the great convulsions of incendiary powers. Spirits roasted in the inferno of the air, while the sun raged its anger on the moon. Our area became a vast beast in torment; it writhed and twisted. The houses shook with the vibrations of mortars exploding on our collective flesh. The roads arched their backs like mighty snakes in their last agonised heaving for life. Huge drums thundered in the air. Elephants crashed on trees, trees crashed on houses. Every noise was a picture, and every picture was mined with dread. And as I listened, the noises stopped, and a cold wind swept over the rooftops. And in the glacial silence of the yellowing moon an iron ritual rode through the air on red horses.
That night the Jackal-headed Masquerade, surrounded by its multiples and companions of hyenas and panthers, chanting with the voices of possessed men, wreaked an incredible violence on the forces of wind and forest, slaughtering the spirits and the insurgent women, murdering the trees and our silent protectors, the dormant gods sleeping in our dreams. And while all this happened the future burst on me and I saw tanks rolling over the wounded roads; I saw armoured trucks and jeeps and great military lorries, and I saw swarms of soldiers in dark places of the country, while the rest of us dreamt of a new domination.
A twisted African way invaded us that night as the Masquerades and the political sorcerers rode all the seasons of our future in advance, spreading terror and curfew, disease and the stench of charred earth, destroying the paths, ripping up the roads, lifting rooftops and breathing oil fumes on the sleeping inhabitants, wrenching electric poles from the ground, entangling cables, creating pestilential accidents on highways. The Masquerades woke up the terrible ghosts of our deep past and the air howled with freed deranged spirits of hunger and injustice. The Masquerades rode red horses and bulls, slaughtering the spirits, destroying the potent shrines, killing the guardians of the jewelled forests and their secrets of complete rainbows.
It was the worst night of the political Masquerades, as spirits died in the air with strange moanings, as the clash of machetes sent electric sparks through the darkness, as farmyards and good harvests caught fire, as metal cut through bones, and as angels – scorched by the fury of the new powers – flew away from us, higher into the sky, beyond the burning moon.
I found myself circling the cataclysm and I saw the blind old man turn into a green vulture with blazing eyes. The vast span of his bony wings created mighty gusts of boiling air as he flew over our rooftops, slobbering, reviewing the nakedness of our lives. His laughter was harsh and infectious, for the hyenas and the terrible ghosts of our past laughed as well. And when the Jackal-headed Masquerade laughed three hundred children died in the country in secret ways, and many fathers went berserk, and for the first time in many years some of our women committed suicide. And the oracles and luminous stones of secret shrines burst into twisted laughter, breaking out in livid prophecies of butterflies dying in the air, birds turning into stone in mid-flight, prophecies of monstrous births, of wars that make mothers go insane, catastrophes and freak earthquakes, prophecies of madness-making wealth, of oil bursts alongside famine. The oracles laughed while the winds raged and the glass tombs split open and wooden cages caught fire, roasting their trapped birds, and churches collapsed, and fountains of blood burst out from white concrete floors in empty army barracks, with animals delivering eggs of metal, birds giving birth to snakes, donkeys giving birth to frogs, as if the cycles of life and death had gone mad. And it wasn’t till I saw the Jackal-headed Masquerade with an erection of obscene size, riding the red wind, with the moon burning, and with the butterflies that escaped the incandescent air turning into stars which flickered every fifteen seconds, that I began to understand the illusion of the new conquering force.
The wind cooled suddenly. The silence was broken by the cry of the wind on the taut cables. I looked around our room in the darkness and found myself somewhere else, in a long hallway. The rooftop was gone and the sky was empty. A door opened, blowing me through the walls into another room where I saw Madame Koto asleep, completely naked, her mighty breasts heaving like gargantuan bellows, her great legs quivering. A sound cracked my head from behind, spinning me round into a new space where I saw Madame Koto, dressed in a golden nightgown, naked underneath, riding a yellow horse, burning on the saddle, in pursuit of the Masquerades. I followed her heaving form in the air, overwhelmed by her heated lust smells, by the deep essences of her enormous body stewing beneath the constraints of her convulsive flesh. Her craven volcanic desire made the air demonic. Around her lashed the fury of a lust that had been rising all her life, hurtling her deeper into the powers of her spirit, making her flesh blubbery with the over-ripeness of days without lust and release. It made her eyes sharper in their penetrating insight into the weaknesses of men. It made her centre riper, richer, voluptuous and soft. It made her face mask-like in the solidity of self-control and manipulation. It deepened her command of the psychic centres of men and women and invisible forms of power, drawing to her great body the magnetism of the earth’s hunger for fertilisation. And it turned her from a woman into a Queen of nights, protector of the strong, creator of new rituals, guardian of women’s forces, controller of witches and sorcerers. She became a mediator between the women of secret cabals and the spirits of shrines drenched with potent menstrual blood, an encounter which fertilises stones and gives birth to new monoliths with faces and features of alien beings.
Her awesome desire, which had survived the penetrations of dream-sorcerers who clambered up her spirit-body and got locked inside, and who were released only when they surrendered all their powers; her robust desire of years without rich release drove her on obsessively, drove the yellow horse to distraction, as if it too were in pursuit of the great white mare, maddened by an unearthly lust. I watched her go, her face contorted, her golden nightgown flapping and creating agonised noises in the air. And I had no idea of her destination, or who it was that could so arouse her mountainous desire, or who could satisfy it without getting lost, or drowned, or being swallowed altogether, or being crushed by the weight of her myth, or destroyed, burned to ashes by her volcanic consummation.
On and on through the air of her dream she went, her skin smooth, freshened with milk baths, her hair silken, her body fleshy, rude in health and prosperity. On and on she went, seeking the giant love story hidden in the flesh of all our agonies, the love between her powerful beating heart and a being or a god worthy of impregnating her with offspring that could command and concentrate the minds of men and women and nations, and possess their dreams and affect their realities. Offspring that could be myths and deities who would extend her powers, offspring worthy of her ancient blood, a blood as old as oral history. I saw her wild and raw, saw her massive heaving buttocks above the saddle, her tumescent palpitating breasts, her lust-steamed breath; and then for a while, as she flew, creating mists from desire, she became obscured from me. And I found myself back in our room, with sinister explosions crashing around us.
* * *
Dad was silent in his chair. And mum, sitting crouched on the floor, began to utter gnomic words. Her feverish voice somehow frightened us more than the upheavals all around, the dogs barking, the cats screaming. And all through the chants of the Party’s night-runners, mum spoke about hidden ancestors, priestesses of unnamed religions, bearers of eternal signs. Then she spoke about t
he sons and daughters of howling shrines, whose objects of worship lead to hallucinations, sexual fevers, possessions by demons. The contortions of these sons and daughters, she said, would invade many realms, brightening the dark antipodes with the dual potencies of their inheritance. And then she spoke of the puzzling children of the new-born country, of the new age, of all difficult crossroad ages: children with pale, long faces; victims of the epilepsies of the epoch, vulnerable to possession by spirits and sleep-runners; children of war, with faces dyed the colour of an unmentionable sensibility; children whose early years would be blighted by undernourishment, and who would suffer in their flesh and souls the future burning cross of the squandered nation.
When mum had finished uttering her prophecies, her voice quivering, a dense silence reigned in the room. And the silence closed my eyes and sent me spinning and I saw Madame Koto being fecundated by the Jackal-headed Masquerade, while the blind old man, transformed into a vulture with the feet and feathers of a peacock, played a dreadful harmonic accompaniment from his infernal accordion. And the consummation was effected and apotheosised by new crescendos of violence, of screeching birds, choked cries of sacrificed goats and sheep; and then the colours of Madame Koto’s dream became livid, incendiary bright, for she unleashed an ecstatic cry so fearsome that the night was silenced. In the long stillness which followed I saw that she had given birth to three baby Masquerades in her dream, children who spent their lives divided, warring against each other, fighting for their mother’s milk, savaging her breasts, and tearing her apart in a bizarre, incestuous and greedy rage – while Madame Koto, the new Mother of Images, heaved gently, asleep, on her mighty bronze bed.
17
NIGHT OF THE POLITICAL MAGICIANS
THE WORLD ABOUT us heaved in dread and death, but dad completely refused to shut our door. The wind blew in the smells of blood, the noxious odours of triumphant Masquerades, the bitter scents of wood-sprites dying, the fumes of our hopes burning in the streets.
Dad sat now on the bed, watching the door, watching the leaves and dust blow in. And mum, her utterances ended, sat in a dim silvery glow. Meanwhile the deep chanting of mask-heads dominated the air, speaking of new armies, eternal converts, the victory of fear over silence. Every now and then we heard cats howling, unable to escape the hooves of the night-runners and the multiple phantom images unleashed in the dark by the blind old man, master-sorcerer. He had crowded the air with apparitions of our fears, materialising our terrors, converting our cowardice and anxieties into concrete bestial forms that wreaked havoc without any mercy.
I saw the blind old man that night, in a black suit and black shoes. His head was shorn, he had a yellow tie round his neck, a yellow umbrella in his hand. He went round in his new master guise, supervising the carnage inflicted on our area, on the torn-up streets, the dead animals, and on the men caught wandering about lost or drunk or homeless on that night of the artificial curfew. The blind old man inspected the evidence of his powers. He strolled up our street, proprietorially looking at the damaged houses, the wrecked huts, and at the fallen trees that had ended their domino-like catastrophe on the buildings where the inhabitants sat huddled in corners of their rooms with branches in their living spaces. He inspected the twisted forms of animals, the contorted shapes of women caught in the forest, the quivering maniacal rage of his followers and party supporters in their unholy bacchanalian possession. Their faces were covered with masks from whose tight nostrils they breathed in fumes that fill the brain with rampant visions of power without end. The masks possessed the wearers with the images of menace carved on their dread-manufacturing features. The wearers became their masks, and the masks took on their own true life, enacting the violence of the blind old man’s sorcerous dictates.
He wandered the streets, surveying his new domain, with the tentative gait of a perfect gentleman. He looked into our houses, saw us cowering in our rooms, surrendering ourselves to his kingdom. And over the places he passed, great winds howled, multiplying the furies behind him. I followed him as he consecrated the manifestations of his powers. I followed his spirit’s delight as he blessed his desecrations, believing them to be for our own good, believing that the superior manifestations are the best ones and therefore always victorious. As he went deeper into the city, passing the new houses and the skyscrapers and the grand highways of Independence, I knew the exhaustion of his spirit. I knew the price he felt of containing and unleashing such powers, saturating the air with such demonic insurgencies. I knew the agony of having so much power in such an old body, unnourished by new blood. I also knew his spirit’s despair at not being able to find worthy successors to his secret might, thousands of years old, a lore of might that wrought leadership changes in old empires, a force at the service of dynasties of kings and queens, or against them; a force that brought rain or withheld it, that dimmed the moon, that made the scorch of sun on earth more bitter, that filled old kingdoms with visions of glory, that exhausted the frames of the people, held back their development, that blinded them to the vastness of the world or to what ideas and dreams of conquest would bring the outside world to our lands; a force that made our kings and rulers think the earth not much greater than their own kingdoms. The blind old man’s despair was as deep as the powers he was heir to, a control over the minds of the people that made them unprepared when the invasions came which would change history for ever. His powers wove a pernicious web of rituals and beliefs that froze the minds of kings, deafened their ears to the words of the soothsayers and sages blessed by the jewels of radiant gods, who uttered innumerable prophecies about the invasion by the white peoples. The rituals confused our minds with too many manifestations, too many gods, too many dreams, confusing us in order to rule us, till our history became our own nemesis.
I followed the blind old man in spirit, circling round him as he passed the centres of secular power, the Presidential mansions, the army barracks that would be famed for future coups and secret executions. I followed him knowing that he was reaching the zenith of his power’s manifestations. I knew that he knew this. I knew his fear of spontaneously combusting and turning into a malignant force in the air, a potential that can be tapped only by those who reach the unique frequency of his spirit’s vibration. And I saw his sadness in having someday to leave this realm behind, for he was a demonic spirit-child of the worst kind, the kind that had developed all its potential for malignity to the highest degree, that had re-connected the old forces which ran in the veins of ancient secret societies and cabals, fuelled by an abundance of spirit energies. I saw his despair, his invisible tears, and his misery beneath his walk of an impeccable gentleman, a diplomat on an evening’s stroll.
And as he turned suddenly, aware that I had been following him in spirit, circling his disguise, the door of our room creaked and the wind blew in a black smoke that was hot and acrid with the stench of unmentionable burning things. Then I heard mum say, in the voice of a little girl:
‘Azaro, don’t be afraid. Everything is connected.’
‘I’m not afraid any more,’ I replied.
‘Why not?’
For a moment I was silent. Something else was coming in. I listened. Then I heard the low cry of a small animal outside our door. The wind blew harder, straining the foundations of the house, knocking the door insistently against the bed. Something cracked at the housefront. The horses thundered past. I was about to answer mum’s question with an unformulated thought when a strange heat began swirling around in my head. Then something crept into our room, and stopped in front of me, its eyes glowing. It ran further into the room, brushing past the table silently. A moment later I saw two electric green eyes hovering over the centre table.
‘Something has come into the room,’ I said.
‘Shut up,’ said dad.
We didn’t move. The eyes watched us, unblinking, bright, fierce. Suddenly, dad lit a match. The flare dazzled twice, its harsh phosphorescence startling the two gem-like eyes. The match went
out, and the eyes vanished. Dad lit another one and, to our wonderment, we beheld, on our centre table, a three-legged cat.
‘A message!’ cried dad.
‘What does it mean?’ asked mum.
The cat regarded us.
‘Silence!’ hissed dad, his eyes intent, brightened in the lumination of the undeciphered sign.
The cat stared at me, and then at mum. Then it leapt on dad’s chair, and sat on its tail, the stump of its bad foot twitching. Dad lit three candles. In silence we studied the cat, oblivious to the noises outside, all of our attention concentrated on the mysterious presence in our room. The cat became bored with our intense sign-reading scrutiny and after a while it curled up and went to sleep, with its tail coiled half way round its fragile form.
It is hard to explain the somnolence and serenity that came over us as we gazed at the sleeping cat. At some point mum got up and, walking as if under water, blew out the three candles. In the darkness I saw the amazing other form of the cat. A green spectral light was spread around it in the shape of a great lion, filling the room with a mighty animal presence. In the darkness, I became aware of its forest smell of untamed hair, its warmth both damp and comforting. Watching the gigantic leonine aura round the little cat I drifted off into another darkness and into another light and I made several journeys to the shrines favoured by spirit-children all over the world, and when I came back to my body it was daylight.
Mum slept on the floor near me, grinding her teeth. Dad snored on the bed, with his boots on. The warm smell of an affectionate animal was still rich in the room. But the cat itself had disappeared, as if we had all collectively dreamt it into existence during the worst night of the political magicians.
18
THE INVENTION OF CHAOS
