At first dad was not sure what had happened. He had fallen and had found himself swimming in soft inner tissue and strange liquids. The stench invaded his eyes with a deeper darkness that made the sign of the leopard disappear. His raging ceased instantly. Dad got up, and staggered, and felt the liquid alive on him, and he screamed. He screamed as if he were trying to dislodge a rock from his brain. The rock left him, the weight on his head also left him, and he became heavier. He had stumbled into a zone of unearthly gravity. And when he stopped screaming, when he looked up and saw the moon mighty and white just above his head, a new madness possessed him. His voice changed, it took on the timbre and weight of the earth, as if a new being were speaking through the mouth of a void. Then he began the naming of the things of the world as if everything were nothing but a quivering incantation. He named the different trees, the obeches, irokos, baobabs, sacred trees whose great presences exuded the monumental serenity of hidden deities, and who were old with history and unheard stories; he named the night birds who were never what they seemed, the ones with the eyes of wise old men, the owl that was a benign old witch; he named the plants, the secret herbs, the poisonous vegetations which themselves cured other poisons, the wild roses of the forest, the tranquil agapanthus, the flaming lilies, the hidden honeysuckles, which give off their fragrance only in praise of the new moon, the cocoyam plants whose leaves are drumskins on which the rain quickens the heartbeat of the land, the banana plants whose leaves are umbrellas for the poor, the dongoyaro root and its untapped cure for malaria, the matted grass which accelerates its growth over the narratives of the continent; he named the cowardly jackals, forerunners of disaster, the ambiguous antelopes and their twilight enchantments, the lions that roar from the muffled depths of our sleep, the leopards that prowl the untested boundaries of our will, the tygers and their unconquerable enigmatic hearts. He named the spirits from higher realms that restore balances, the wise and royal spirits on their migration to the great meeting-place of human justice, he named them in his private language; he named the houses, the mud huts, the zinc abodes, the thatch buildings; he named the wind of good fortune, the wind of bad health, the wind of equality; he named the stars, each one lambent with its own new light, he named the great luminous crab of the African sky, the transformative fish of the watery heavens, the dragonstar of powerful hopes, the horse-star of swift realisations, the tygerstar of courage, the lion-star of bold dreams. Bewitched by the shining mythologies of the immortal sky, he launched into a fever of incantations, crying out a new logarithm of stars, the star of sacrifice and of vision, the star of war and of joy, the star of suffering and of redemption, the star of creativity and of transformation, and the great invisible star of love. Out of the motherland of the heart, quivering under the mysterious omnipotence of the sky, he named all the planets in a new language, inventing one for the bursting elevation of his spirit; he hailed the comets, he sang of the meteors that fall back into the phoenix ash of earth, and he praised the mirror of disasters and redemptions that is the sky. He glorified the nebulae of the gods and spoke of them as signs and ciphers in the book of fate that is the visible face of the heavens; he spoke of stars and comets as letters of a divine alphabet, letters all scattered and scrambled up in an eternal riddle or enigma – scrambled up so that each man and woman has to re-order the words they perceive and transmute their own chaos, creating light out of the terrible conundrum of their lives. He sang powerfully about the cities of the Heavens, where the Blessed souls sing to us from beyond the hidden realities of our sleep-walking days – WAKE UP, AND BE JOYFUL, they sing – WAKE UP, AND CHANGE YOUR DREAMS. Drunk on the wine of his new unblinded mythology, dad sang of the ecstasy of the cities of the hidden heavens which we never connect because of the innumerable piled-up problems in our eyes.
With the liquid of the dead man still writhing on his flesh, mixing his horror with exaltation, he named the rivers, creeks, streams, and even the waves of the great ocean that perfumed the air of that island. He named the gods of the ghetto: the god of poverty, distant relation to the god of rainbows, the god of fear and of transferences, the god of timidity and suspicion, the god of self-imposed limitations and fatalism, the god of quacks and diseases, the god of pullulating superstitions and negativity, the god of blindness and fear of what other people think, the god of illiteracy and refusal to think. Then he named their counter-gods: the god of Consolation and Solidarity, the god of Music and Beauty, the god of Good Visions and Quiet Consistency, the god of Mystery and Wisdom, the god of Work and Health, the god of Art and Courage, the god of Democratic Kindness and Humility, the god of Clarity and Strong Thinking, the god of Time and Creativity, the god of Light and Universal Love.
His voice changing pitch, moving away from his glorious contrapuntal recitation, dad began chanting out the secret names of those that dwelled within the sundry abodes, the baker who lay dreaming of a garden of diamonds, whose name meant REVEAL TO US OUR GLORIES; the sign-writer, who dreamt of a river of magic words, each in brilliant colour, whose name meant OUR DESTINY IS IN OUR HANDS; his wife, the seamstress, who lay in a huge cave where yellow fauns and white antelopes played on flutes and drums while she made clothes for the patient rocks, whose name meant NOTHING CAN KEEP A GOOD SOUL DOWN; the petty trader, enchanted in a blue landscape with happy iridescent snakes, whose name meant TIME IS ALWAYS ON OUR SIDE; the butcher, who was being lectured by a unicorn on the theme of forgiveness, whose name meant SAVE US FROM EVIL; the carrier of monstrous loads, three streets away, who was dreaming of being in flight amongst silent angels, whose name meant WHATEVER HAPPENS TO US WILL MAKE US STRONGER. Yes, dad named them all, he named the owners of stalls, the hawkers, the marketwomen, who battled flies and moths and thugs; the ghetto musicians, who never stopped believing that one day the whole world will fall in love with their melodies plucked from the flaming heart of suffering; he named the children, who never celebrated birthdays, who were born chained to poverty, whose names meant GIVE US LIGHT or KEEP US ON THE GOOD ROAD or GOD IS OUR GUIDE, who would die in wars or in famine or by food poisoning or the accumulated stench of corpses or as world heroes of mysterious origins, who are condemned to having to transform their lives and dream a new beautiful future for the world, from misery and love; dad named the supremely heroic mothers, and praised their subtle and obdurate goddesses, their innumerable angels; and he named the byways, paths, streets and roads, not forgetting to celebrate the father of roads, the great river, grandson of Time, who leads everything to its concealed destiny; and he astonished me that night when, in the midst of his scary exultation, he gave me a new name, a long one for a long life, which meant KEEP RE-DREAMING THE WORLD WITH MORE LIGHT. Dad named everything with a booming quivering voice which made us all afraid that sight was a kind of transcendant madness, an undiscovered chaos, a hallucinatory window into the mysteries lurking behind ordinary reality.
And when he named the flies, the blue ones, the green ones, the big and the small, when he named the mosquitoes, and praised them for helping to prevent the colonialists from entirely taking over our lands, when he named the ants and woodworms and applauded the service they rendered in the dissolution of old gods so new ones can be created, when he named the termites, the cockroaches, and all the rodents, all the busy occupants of the continent’s undergrowth, all the curiously valuable lower forms that destroyed wood, carvings, statues, our paper, our histories, making it necessary for us to invent a science best suited for our continent, making it imperative that we be perpetually creative, constantly inventive, worshippers at shrines of beauty, self-inventors who have to re-dream the world anew because it is always passing away, workers in the vineyard of new life, a people who have to create paper which the termites won’t eat, narratives that the ants somehow recreate in their devouring, histories that don’t become fixed only into written or spoken words, stories that are re-invented in each new generation, myths that always live because they are always allowed to die, melodies that spring from the sa
me unchanging source of the redemptive heart, philosophies hidden in rituals, hidden in stories, hidden in moods, concealed in places where time and change cannot get to them, when dad noticed the flies again and acclaimed their polyphonic existence, when he named the smells, the stenches, the debris, the gutters, and all the forms of our deaths – he had come full circle, he had travelled a sublime arc, made a parabolic journey, starting with his eyes, proceeding to the cosmos, and ending where he really began. And when he found himself naming the dead body, the dead carpenter, he instantly unravelled all his hallucinations, his dreams, his fevers, and all the messages that had been invading him in so many signs and riddles. As he named the dead carpenter, he saw the corpse, and speech and exultation deserted him.
It was his silence that told us he was seeing the world with terrible new eyes. It was his silence that began our liberation, for it went on a very long time as he underwent the agonising process of deciphering what he was seeing, and as he separated what he actually saw from all the feverish narratives he had been living during the period that he had been blind.
2
THE FREEING OF ONE VISION IS THE FREEING OF ALL
HIS VOICE MADE us realise that we were still alive, but his silence made us aware that we had all been dreaming. Some say it was the weight and majesty of the moon which unblinded him, but I think it was death. His silence was his dialogue with the dead man. And he spoke and listened for a long time as his brain, going right back to the moment when the carpenter was murdered, unscrambled itself from the coil of his hallucinations. But when, in silence, dad began to move the dead body, something quite extraordinary woke up in the air. It brought me down from my circlings and I sat up and then I ran outside. Mum came with me. A blue cord had encircled the moon. And when we got to the housefront, the night had begun to speak; voices were rising within darkened rooms; a strange storm was gathering. The voices were indistinct, a dark mystery. As dad carried the body into the forest, with a feverish emerald mist swirling around him, we heard an unbounded voice shouting, over and over again, as if a miracle had been made incarnate:
‘I CAN SEE! I CAN SEE! SIGHT IS WONDERFUL! THE WORLD IS HOLY! EVERYTHING IS GLOWING!’
Then the night became populous with cries, astonished cries, as at a universal revelation. Other voices joined in, lights came on in different rooms, and people poured out of their houses, into the street, throwing their canes up towards the moon, jumping about in drunken jubilation, proclaiming the miracle and restoration of sight. It seemed as if all the people who had been recently blinded, who had been tossing on their beds, willing dad on, had been simultaneously liberated into new vision. They chanted and sang in their passionate rejoicing, as if the freeing of one vision had freed all the others.
And while dad carried the dead man through the forest, treading on the prickly undergrowth, kicking stones and making them crack, the recently unblinded people gathered themselves together into one vast group. I went and joined them, and told them that dad had followed the sign of a leopard, and though no one had ever seen a leopard in our area before, they believed me. They rushed off to their rooms to get axes, machetes, pikes and dane guns – while dad laid the body down on the forest floor and began to dig a temporary grave with whatever he could find. He dug the soft earth with his bare hands till they bled at the fingernails; he dug with sticks and branches; then he found a broken shovel and dug frenziedly as if he were trying to create a hole big enough to bury all our bad dreams, our cowardice and our fears; he dug like a madman, without the help of moonlight, disturbing the spirits of the forest, cleaving the sleeping earthworms, and while he dug the homeless spirits of that realm watched him with sad silver eyes. And as he began burying the body, laying it in the hole that would not be its home for long, tramping about the vegetation plucking wild flowers which he strewed over the body with incantations and prayers to appease the fury of the dead carpenter, the community of the unblinded marched down the street with their pickaxes, sticks, machetes and dane guns, like a night army, and stopped at the front of Madame Koto’s silent bar. But when I shouted that the dead body had vanished again, they all broke into a run, bounding into the forest, calling dad’s name till it rang out through all the mouths of the trees and the wind. We ran deeper into the forest, astonished to find that it had grown smaller, amazed that while we had been living within the closed circle of our lives the forest was being turned into a graveyard of trees. And when we came upon dad, his hair wild and tangled with cobwebs and earth, his hands bleeding, his shirt torn, gore on his chest, the burying accomplished, we found him pushing the great black rock, moving it by inches, and we were astounded into silence. He was shifting by slow degrees the black rock of enigmas whose infernal density was the home of inexplicable voices. We were astounded because none of us could understand how he could move the black rock infested with so many fearful legends, which was heavy and monumental like a compressed planet. But dad moved the rock, grunting, completely ignoring us, until it lay at the head of the grave of the insurgent corpse which had been a plague in our lives.
When dad had marked the grave with the fiendish and semi-sacred rock, he turned to us, his bleeding hands in the air, his eyes vibrant with a sulphurous divine madness, his chest heaving, the moon glowing unveiled over the trees, and he greeted us with a great terrifying cry, saying:
‘MY PEOPLE, THE EARTH IS ALIVE!’
And then he collapsed on the ground.
3
ASTONISHING LIVES IN THE MIRROR
DAD LAY ON a bed of leaves and he was out for a long time while the cold wind blew about us. He lay very still, his arms stretched out as if the earth were his cross, and nothing the community of the unblinded could do managed to bring him round. In the silence of our double confusion a woman with a voice of ghostly beauty started to sing. She sang about the ancient heroes of our forgotten dreams who journeyed through the underworlds and carved a new road to our futures. When she finished singing the men lifted dad up and began carrying him home, but mum asked them to put him down again. It was mum who managed the curious feat of reviving him. She bent over his inert form and whispered strange words into his ears. She whispered them for a long time. Then, slowly, he began to stir. When he eventually got up he was subdued. He refused to speak. Then he started to weep. He wept so hard that he drew weeping from the secret wells of our hearts and we all wept with him for the dead man whom we had all refused to see. And then the woman with the ghostly voice changed our weeping into a funereal lament, singing piercingly, her voice ringing all the way to the realms of the dead. The other women joined her and when they finished an old man began impromptu obsequies, a prayer for the dead, for all the unjustly treated dead, a prayer of appeasement, begging God to forgive us for having failed a fellow human being. We stood around the grave till the night deepened around us, with the moon obscured by dense clouds. When the wind blew hard amongst us dad, holding me by the hand, started to leave. The community followed. As we neared our place dad said:
‘I killed him a second time, because when he was dead I refused to see him.’
‘We all killed him twice,’ someone behind him said.
Dad was silent. Maybe he was thinking about the threats of the Party of the Poor.
‘What will happen?’ I asked.
‘Whatever it is will make us stronger,’ dad said.
He paused. And then he told me something quite strange. He said that while he was unconscious the forest had told him a secret which he would reveal only when he had seen the right sign. And then he said:
‘The earth is growing.’
‘Bigger or smaller?’ I asked.
‘Not bigger or smaller. It’s becoming more.’
I didn’t understand.
‘The night is growing,’ he continued. ‘The earth is growing like the night. One day there will be a new earth and a new night.’
‘What about the day?’
‘The night is older than the day, and greater.’
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‘Is that the secret the forest told you?’
‘No.’
He fell silent again. And then, for no reason, he spoke.
‘The light comes out of the darkness,’ he said.
After that he didn’t say another word till we got home. Neither did anyone else. And it was only as we went back silently that I noticed the silence of the unblinded. A new mood had come upon us. One by one, without any parting gestures, the community went back to their different houses. The moonlight, quivering against the houses, made it seem as if the people were stepping into distorted mirrors. With their sticks, their machetes, and dane guns on their backs they looked like soldiers from a lost kingdom. They did not speak about their regained sight. They had become weighed down by the air of the forest, the air of sorcerers, and fears of a reprisal. That night belonged to the dead carpenter; he commanded our silence. And there were no festivities to mark our passage into a second sight, because now that we could see we were all ashamed. We were ashamed of what we had allowed our lives to become. And even the moon, casting its white transfiguration over everything, did not prevent us feeling that there could be more astonishing lives beyond the mirror.