Songs of Enchantment (31 page)

‘Then what happened?’

‘The next day he led her into town and married her in the most lavish style . . .’

‘Unlike me,’ mum said.

‘Anyway, after they were married they had six children. The woman brought him incredible good luck. He stopped hunting, and became a successful trader. Everything he touched turned to money. He was blessed with good health, lovely children, and the respect of the world. He became wealthy and famous. They made him a chief in seven towns. Rich men gave him their daughters to marry. He had five wives, but his first wife remained special. He built a mighty mansion for her which she had all to herself. But as he got famous, he got proud. As he got wealthier, he got arrogant. And even his great happiness helped him forget the secret origins of his success. He boasted a lot and drank too much.

‘Then, one day, the king made an announcement that a black antelope with a special jewel in its forehead had been seen in the forest and that the person who killed the antelope and brought it to the palace would marry his beautiful young daughter and inherit the kingdom. The man, who used to be a great hunter, let it be known that he was going out into the forest to kill the animal. That night he had a terrible quarrel with his first wife. He was drunk and as they quarrelled he said, in a loud voice: “Is it because you are an antelope yourself that you don’t want me to go, eh?” The wife became silent. The man went to his room. In the morning he woke up to hear his other wives singing about his first wife, mocking her for being an antelope. Then he realised what he had done. He rushed to his first wife’s house and found that she had gone. He also found that she had taken their six children with her. Quickly he changed into his hunter’s clothes and went back to the forest to lie against the same tree. He pretended to be asleep, he listened to the forest talking about him, but he didn’t understand the riddle of their speech. Deep in the night the strange light flashed past for the last time. It was his wife. He began to sing in
his most sorrowful voice, begging her forgiveness. But she stopped him, and said: “The black antelope you want to kill is my mother. The jewel in her head is God’s gift to her, and her crown. She is a queen, I am a princess, and what you think is an anthill is really my hidden kingdom. You betrayed my secret. What do you think I should do?” “Forgive me,” the man said. His wife laughed. Her laughter started a mighty sound in the sky. The hunter, terrified, looked up. When he looked down again he saw that his wife had changed, not into an antelope, but into a leopard.’

Dad paused again.

‘All things are linked,’ said mum.

‘Then, with a great roar of anger, the leopard pounced on the man, tore him to pieces, and ate him up. And till this day . . .’

I followed dad’s gaze, which had become more intense, as his words trailed off into silence. Up till that point of the story the emerald form of the leopard had been still, unmoving, as if it too were held captive by dad’s fable. But when I followed dad’s gaze I saw nothing there except a faint green light, like a mist, with butterflies tingling the air, and I smelt nothing but the haunting essence of the dying forest.

‘It’s gone!’ I cried.

‘What?’ mum asked.

‘It’s still there,’ dad announced, in a voice that suggested he had finally understood the meaning of the sign.

Then he rose from his chair. He rose like one who was lifting himself into a higher destiny. Such was the certainty and power of his rising that we were riveted and confused, unable to react. We watched him as if his new knowledge had cast a jewelled spell on us. Then, with the swiftness of one accustomed to sleep-running, dad bounded out of the room, and out into the dark street, following the sign of the emerald leopard.

It didn’t take that long for us to rouse ourselves from our astonishment, but when we got outside we couldn’t find dad
anywhere. The moon was low in the sky. The night was warm. The unbearable stench of the dead carpenter encompassed our world. And butterflies vibrated in the secret heart of all things. It was a night of intense dreams. Everywhere I turned I encountered the bad dreams of our community. The dreams merged into one another and took on frightening and concentrated forms. The forms filled me with terror.

‘Let’s go back home,’ I said to mum.

‘But your father is blind. What if he falls into a well?’

I was silent. But the twisted forms of our bad dreams, bristling in the night air, also made mum scared. With great caution, and without daring to go near Madame Koto’s place, we searched for dad up and down the street. The negative potencies in the air almost made me ill. After we had failed to find dad, we hurried back to our room, and waited for him to return. We waited a long time. We waited through all the dreaming phases of the new moon.

A
DREAM CAN
be the highest point of a life; action can be its purest manifestation.

That night, as I waited for dad in the anguish of my spirit, I rediscovered the secret of flight. With the effortlessness of my hidden inheritance, I flew in and out of the dreams of the living and the dead. While mum sat on dad’s chair, praying in a voice weakened by hunger and the accumulated weight of her days, I took off into the air, leaving my body behind, and I followed dad as he railed against his own blindness, stumbling with new feet, naming the world with new words. I was in the air with him as he trailed the apparition, his spirit bursting the bounds of his agony, his voice raging out against the invisible censoring forces of our earthly sphere, calling on the winds to drive him on into greater powers, calling on the hidden God to liberate him from the fears that kept him poor, kept him in a corner, kept him from discovering his true resplendent identity. Dad was a tempest of energies that night and we felt his passion in our squalid room where all our stories are stored.

Dad went on following the sign of the leopard. He stumbled over the debris in the street, but he walked on boldly as if his feet had an instinctive sight of their own. He dared the road to trip him, to keep him down; he dared trees to fall across his path; he dared the night to keep him from seeing; he dared the forces of the air to blow him away or
dissolve his being altogether – and through all this he persistently followed the emerald hallucination of the leopard.

While he raged, voices of our area joined him, one by one. Dad unblocked the spirit of the community with his daring. He challenged the sorcerers of the air and mind, the negative spirits of the lower spheres. Dad didn’t know it, but his incandescent daring concentrated the spirits of the dead and the unborn around him. They followed him, marvelling at a man so blind – and so fragile, as forces in the universe go – who could muster so much rage when it was easier to lie down and die.

His voice rang out over the rooftops, penetrating the ears of dreamers who lay on beds bristling with the invisible broken glass of poverty; his voice was clear and harsh, resonating through the bald patch of trees, magnified by moonlight. And as he cried out for justice and more vision and transformation, cried out that the gods unveil to him his destiny, he unknowingly broke the seven chains that tied our dreams down, that kept our vision of more light disconnected from our reality. One by one we began to wake from a layer of sleep so deep that our lives had seemed to exist only in a somnolent unfolding of time – and that is why we had to resort to legends and myths to explain why time seemed to pass so slowly while momentous events exploded so rapidly and with such simultaneity in our dreams.

As dad’s voice lifted the sky higher above our heads, I realised that the whole community was dreaming him on towards our universal deliverance, urging him on towards our restoration, each within the indignities, humiliations, privations, fears, meanness and the great hidden goodness of their secret lives. We willed him on within our dreams, praying for him to succeed in countering the negative gravity of our spaces, the bad smells of our days, the dreadful weight of our cowardice and powerlessness, to neutralise the spells and enchantments of powerful witches who had been done injustices all their lives and who took out their vengeance by sealing us within the poisoned cage of limitations and
hunger. We dreamt him on, calling on the road to guide his feet, and when he tripped over the extinguished lamp and fell on the bloated body of the dead man in an unholy embrace, when the body – stewing with bile and nauseous gases and suppurating gore – exploded its resentments, its foul purple liquids, its rotting flesh on dad, surrounding him with its noxious odour of death, we could not help him, he was alone, and we retreated swiftly from the void which was his incomprehension, and left him to disentangle himself from the wilful embrace of the neglected corpse.

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.