Dangerous Love

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Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple – often people want to simplify it, generalise it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.

The Penguin African Writers Series will bring a new energy to the publication of African literature. Penguin Books (South Africa) is committed to publishing both established and new voices from all over the African continent to ensure African stories reach a wider global audience.

This is really what I personally want to see – writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history. One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also to the world beyond its shores.

Storytelling is a creative component of human experience and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognise the importance of our own stories. By starting the series on the solid foundations laid by the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series, I am honoured to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa's people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world.

To Maggie McKernan

And to R.C.

I have always preferred the original title of this novel:
The Landscapes Within
.

The novel was intended as a double mirror – of the ordinary reality that makes history, and the inner reality that makes consciousness. I have always thought it is not enough for the artist to show the world as it is; they also have to show the consciousness that experiences it. Only then can they reveal truth, whatever that is.

In my twenties I too dreamed of a total work of art. I believed that depicting a moment fully and truthfully would reveal the whole. In any case the whole is impossible to convey. A million books cannot convey life as we experience it. But a moment is manageable. A moment is sufficient. I hoped to show the whole by the part, by implication.

I wrote the first draft of
The Landscapes Within
through the cold winter of 1978, in a poorly heated room in Plumstead, South London. It was rewritten in a girlfriend’s flat in Pimlico. The first draft has disappeared. The novel was retouched while I was at university, studying comparative literature, writing plays and poems. It came out in my second year and the
Guardian
called it ‘a strange and brilliant novel’. That was one of its few reviews.

Over the years I came to feel I had not realised the potential of the novel. I originally believed that the work should parallel reality. But just because a reality is rough does not mean the writing about it has to be rough too. Now I believe we experience reality without emphasis. Our pains happen to us in the same uninflected way as our joys. Reality enters us simply. The text should enter us that way, without seeming to, like life does. Perhaps when we are younger the strength of our emotions under­lines every experience. As time passes we see that life happens. People die, and magical things occur, without any special announcement.

I rewrote the novel sporadically and more calmly over the years. I wanted all my themes, preoccupations, and techniques to be invisible, folded into the text, hidden, as in life. There are some people who prefer the first version, because it signifies more overtly.

In 1996 this novel appeared in its new incarnation, fourteen years after the first version. I called it
Dangerous Love
to distin­g­uish it from the earlier publication. But I favour the earlier title. It is truer to my intentions. Initially I wanted to show how a particular reality contributes to creating one work of art, and how that work of art is a receptacle and mirror of the landscapes without and the landscapes within. I hope amongst my novels this one achieves something I had long sought, to portray a living moment and through that to reveal history, culture, society, the depths, the surfaces, and the mystery of being human.

Upon its second publication it was warmly received. My Danish publisher once told me he was hopelessly in love with Ifeyiwa, the central female character; and there is a Finnish lady who rereads the novel every summer. It seems that this novel, worked on over the years, a little like those cathedrals built over successive generations, figuring forth something of the contours of fate and time and survival, owes something to the fortunate conjunction of youth and experience.

Little Venice, London

August 2014

Shouldn't these ancient sufferings of ours finally start to bear fruit?

Rainer Maria Rilke

EXTRACT FROM A NOTEBOOK

I was walking through a dark forest when it happened. The trees turned into mist. And when I looked back I saw the dead girl. She walked steadily towards me. She didn't have a nose or a mouth. Only a bright pair of eyes. She followed me everywhere I went. I saw a light at the end of the forest and I made for it. I didn't get there.

Omovo was emerging from a long dry season. When he looked at his face in the mirror, and saw that his hair needed cutting, he didn't know that he was emerging from a long dry season. The barber's shed was next door and when he went there an apprentice told him that the master had gone home to Abeokuta for a few days. Omovo asked whether he could still have his hair cut and the apprentice replied enthusiastically:

‘What kind of question is dat? I have cut about five heads today. I cut them well.'

Omovo dozed off during the haircut. When he woke up he found himself looking like a newly recruited policeman. He told the apprentice to cut his hair shorter. And as his hair got progressively shorter he thought he looked progressively worse. Exasperated, he told the apprentice to shave off the whole damn thing. When the barber had finished, his head looked bony and angular in the large mirror. At first he was disconcerted. Then gradually the freshness of the experience grew on him. After paying the apprentice he gathered up the dark masses of his hair that were scattered on the floor, tied them in a cellophane wrapping, and went home amid taunts of ‘Afaricorodo, shine-shine head' from the children around.

The next morning he went for one of his walks through the ghetto of Alaba. He had only gone a few hundred yards from home when an unexpected fine shower of rain started to fall. The flesh of his head tingled. He resolved not to run for cover and went on walking. He passed a building that had been burnt down in a fire the night before. Not far from the building some men were cutting down branches of a withered tree to use for firewood. Near the tree poorly dressed children were hitting a goat with sticks. He stopped and stared at the children and at the same time felt a shiver, which started from his head, run through his being. Something froze and then flashed within him. Something shimmered in the sky. He suddenly shouted: ‘Leave the goat alone!'

The children stopped. They stared at his bony angular head. The goat they had been hitting trotted towards the tree. The men looked at one another: one of them threw down a branch with dead leaves and the other one shouted: ‘What's wrong?'

Omovo felt awkward. He couldn't explain. ‘Sorry,' he muttered.

Then he rushed home, brought out his drawing sheets, and began to sketch furiously. He worked and re-worked the lines, curves and shadings a hundred times. And then he hit upon the idea of using charcoal. He felt he was capturing something more strange and real than the actual event, and he was joyful.

When he finished the drawing, he put down the charcoal and went down the corridor into the backyard. As he walked past the twin strips of bungalows that made up the compound, the airless trapped heat, the stuffy smells and the bustling noises crowded his senses. The cement floor was grey, dirty and full of potholes. Above, the sky could be seen through the corrugated eaves.

In the backyard the compound men were having an argument about something in the newspapers. Their nostrils flared angrily, arms were flung about, voices clashed. When Omovo went past, one of the men detached himself from the argument and called to him.

‘Hey, painter boy...'

Omovo replied irritably. ‘I beg, don't call me “painter boy”.'

‘Okay, Omovo...'

‘Yes?'

‘I see you have begun to draw again.'

Omovo's face brightened. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes.'

The man nodded and stared at his shining head. Omovo went into the communal bathroom. The stench was overpowering. While he urinated he gazed at the scum that had collected around the drain. As soon as he had flushed he hurried out.

On his way back he again passed the men who were arguing. The argument had become more intense, as if it had been whipped up by something other than the heat. He knew what they were arguing about. It had been in all the headlines. He didn't want to get directly involved. He had to keep his emotions intact.

A few people had gathered in front of the balcony where he had been working. They stared at the drawing and whispered among themselves. Omovo paused. As he stood there, uncertain, one of the compound men walked past, stopped, came back, and tapped him on the shoulder. It was Tuwo. He was very black, robust, on the squat side, and good-looking in a fortyish way. He spoke with an affected English accent. It was something he had worked on for God knows how long. It gave him distinction and, added to the other things he was infamous for, confirmed his notoriety.