Songs of Enchantment (32 page)

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 same 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.

H
IS 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.

D
AD 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.’

‘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.

S
HIVERING IN HIS
three-legged chair, after his cold bath, dad began talking semi-exultantly about the astonishing lives beyond the mirror. He talked about the continents of our hidden possibilities, about the parts of us facing inwards in the direction of infinity, and about how we should bring those realms into our visible world and so create a kingdom of serenity and beauty on earth. He spoke for a long time about the intimations that had come to him when he was blind and when he was unconscious on the floor of the forest. I partly understood him to be conjecturing about the dreams of the dead and the unborn; but he declared over and over again that the most astonishing lives we lead are the lives beyond the mirror. We listened to him in silence as he spoke of the relationship between the infinite and the abyss. He swore that there are corpses in the consciousness of all peoples, all histories and all individuals, dead things that need to be acknowledged and buried, dead habits, dead ways of seeing, dead ways of living, things that weigh us down and drag us towards death and prevent us from growing, choking out the sunlight. How many of us carry neglected and unseen corpses in our minds and in our histories, he asked. Without answering the question, he said:

‘I earned my blindness because I refused to see.’

Then, without noticing the hunger in our silence, and in
the radiant animation of those who have stumbled into a realm of blind prophecy, he spoke about forgotten heroes, those who win our liberation and light for us before we do; and that because of them we should live our lives with fire and love and wise hope. Dad was definitely drunk on something that night – for, without seeing our diminished presence, he sang about the luminous jugglers of dreams and those who manage to be escape-artists from the hell of our accumulated negative perceptions. He sang about the wisdom of those who always remain dancers in their spirit, and about the joy of those who break out from their own darkness and soar into the exclamation of their own secret light. He sang about those who, in breaking from the chains of fear and centuries, help us break our chains in advance; and those who, in bursting out from the dark sea caves and from time’s terrible enchantments, help us burst from ours. But they do it in advance, he said, with thorns on their head in the darkness which later for us becomes a crown of illumination.

Then, quite suddenly, his voice changed and became a little ghostly as he told us about some of the things he had seen when he collapsed on the floor of the forest. He saw clearly, for the first time, signs of our hidden realities. He saw worlds behind our world, a mere sleep, or a mere thought away; he saw parallel worlds, simultaneous realities, inverted universes, where the roots of trees were branches, and where plants released the essence of their flowers into the spaces in the earth. He saw the hidden realities of our thoughts and actions, and their immediate consequences which lurked beside us, waiting for the confluences of time when they would become real and irrevocable. He saw how we created our lives with our thoughts, how our thoughts created our realities, and how we carry around with us the great invisible weight of all our thoughts and actions and secrets. He saw a world co-existent with ours where all our secret selves were real and visible.