I used to know a
little boy called Light. He liked to write. No. First, he was a
storyteller. His stories were strange. They were about children who
were older than their parents and parents who were younger than their
children. I told him they did not sound real, but he told me they lived
around the right corner of his head and were very real and not absurd
like I claimed. Another time he told the story of an unborn child who
gave its mother a sermon. That day it was very hot, so hot some of the
wild flowers were in danger of dying. If you must know, the little boy
and I lived on a strange street. There were no people on that street,
only flowers, wild flowers with sweet smell and strange colours. If you
asked me how I came to know the little boy, I would most probably say I
do not know. One day, while I was hungry, a wild flower begged to be
eaten by me. Oh yes, the flowers gave us a condition to dwell among
them. We dwelt there to eat them.
That day, while I
was hungry, the flower begged to be eaten by me. Forgive me if I had
said that before, but like light told me once I was a woman who did not
think straight. I was worried about the effect of the heat on the
flowers, afraid that if the flowers died we might die of hunger. Light
continued with his story about the sermon from the womb, but my worried
look must have stopped him. Transforming into my dead mother, he told
me there were incantations of revival and reversal that could help the
flowers. Which did I want? I said revival was more suited to the mood,
but also wanted to know why he needed to become my mother. I also
wanted to know if he was a magician and… this time he interrupted me
with a smile. Light said he was just a mentalist, but that he could
also be anything. She then turned herself into a little girl in a green
dress. As she became a girl, the flowers began to sway for joy. Their
colours began to change. Those that were green changed to orange, the
orange ones became pink, the pink ones white. The transformations went
on and on and the otherwise silent street became a noise of swirling
colours. You would think the now laughing flowers had encountered a
presence of absolute majesty.
Light began
chanting in a language that I had never heard. The language sounded
like the flapping wings of millions of butterflies and then it became
the sound of rushing water, before it became a language that I knew.
So, she said, as bees make honey, as chicken does not refuse corn, as
goat does not refuse grass and the smoking rack does not refuse fish,
so too I command you faithful flowers to not refuse the melody of
souls. They revived and even the climate became cooler. Light turned
back into a little boy to conclude the story. He said the baby warned
the mother who had been dying to bear fruit since she became a borne
fruit herself that desire bred grief. That was it! I cried wild- eyed
and hungry again. That was what this story was all about? Light told me
it was a very powerful and potent sermon, the type that gave one wings
to escape. Escape from where and what? From living and the heart, he
answered. It was then I remembered that on the day I met him, when he
had come to me like a cloud of white smoke, I had been running away
from a desire.
That day, as I
sniffed the white smoke thinking it was sweet death and that I could
dwell in it forever, being that we would make no demands on each other,
it became a boy. I was going to accuse him of hypnotism, but Light had
assured me that he had been a little boy all along. He said I had seen
white smoke because I was thinking of something that it suggested. That
was how I suppose we met and dwelt among the flowers with no sense of
time. We might have lived in eternity for all you know. He wanted to
know what desire I had run from and I said I had to try to remember as
I had not quite thought about anything except eating and hunger. Not
that I blame myself. The flowers were too pretty not to devour. While I
thought about myself, Light began to tell another story. It was the
legend of the star. Once, he said, a star lived in the sky among other
stars. Because of its dazzling beauty, it began to behave like a
peacock, thinking that it was the only star in the sky. It went as far
as betraying other stars and that was when it came tumbling down from
the sky. Down to Earth it fell. Down to a place where the darkness of
oppression and injustice made it impossible to shine.
In the time of
finding that desire which I had run from, which in any case I did not
find, Light began to write. He said he wanted to write stories I could
read so as to forget everything… I made a face of protest, telling
Light that I was down to the zero level of forgetfulness. We argued
loud for he felt that I was trying too hard to remember, which meant I
had not completely let go. He said if I completely became empty I would
fill up slowly again. Now tired and angry, I became quiet while he
wrote, thinking for the first time what living among the flowers was
all about and how come the little boy was all around me like a shadow.
As if reading my mind, he looked up from his writing like a painter who
had found an unexpected source of inspiration and told me my head was
talking again. I knew of living in a space where one day my tongue
failed me. I began to mope around, carrying words inside me that I
could not speak. No, wait, before then, I talked to the walls. It all
started like a romantic alternative to emptiness.
Something in my
head tells me it was not emptiness but solitude, for I was perfectly
serenaded by the songs of birds and the songs of the forest, which
would have been enough to reassure me that all the worlds I have known
sounded alike. So, the romance with the wall might have started as a
prayer: “Bless my pain with fruit, inside this dark wall, I eat words
and long for nothing, for nothing longs for me.” The wall was angry for
she did not feel she was dark. That first time with the wall, I did not
mind that a stone talked back at me. It did not even occur to me to be
angry, for I was too lonely to care. I told the wall that I might have
become a flying witch. I was sleeping and waking up in my country, in
this country, in my village, in all the places I have lived and it was
hard for my mind to stay in one place.
At about the space
my mind slipped back, there I go again, has time become an alien? Was
time space? At about that wavering moment, Light was writing a story
about an island where people had the same dreams and actually lived by
dreaming and even when they died they could dream themselves back to
life. On that Island, dreaming was living, therefore everyone lived
inside a rainbow… The wall asked if I would like to go back to the
place my mind liked the most. I told her that it would have been better
if I did not venture to any place except where I was born. She argued
that venturing was good, for it broadened the mind. I said No with a
scream that startled the wall. I said wandering had caused me pain for
I had been cured of my blindness. She played cool and asked if I was
venturing or wandering and I shouted that in my case, it was the same.
I began to shout, cursing the people who spoilt the land of my birth.
She asked if there are no roads. I said the roads are as wide as narrow
paths. What about food? It is fresh and far. School? The school of
crime. Hospital? Born to die. Survival? Jungle smart-ass. Body and soul
together? Laughter.
The wall wanted to
know if people just lived by laughing. I started laughing and singing
that we stand by laughter. We live on laughter. Over laughter we abide.
The wall too began to laugh and said: “So you must love it here.”
Plenty food? Weight watching. Wide roads? Drunk drivers. Hospital?
Beyond Tylenol, cut-throat. School? Beyond primary, out of reach.
Sophisticated living? Afraid of neighbours. Perfect law and order?
Living robots. By now we were rolling in laughter until I ended up at a
nearby station. I was warned to be mindful of others. I would later
fall out with my speechless companion. Venturing into another
wall-induced prayer I had begun, bless my fruit with fruit. I am inside
a dark wall where beyond the ruins of time are layers of memory waiting
to be exhumed… The wall got mad that I had once again referred to her
as dark. I was now livid that even a mere stone could talk back at me.
The wall shouted that mere stones build cathedrals and domes and
sphinxes… I shouted back, saying she was not a cathedral or dome or
sphinx, just a disillusioned wall. Now it laughed, wandering who it was
that was breaking.
Again, Light had
begun another story, actually two stories in one or as one. It was a
tale of two countries. In one country, Hunger had become a roaming
angel and even those with the holy spirit had succumbed to him. Because
the roaming angel had become a mass disease, the people’s consciousness
became altered and everyone saw the other as human vegetable. They ate
one another, then they began to eat themselves, until that country
became a nightmare of half-formed humans. The other country had reached
the height of great perfection and civilisation and so had no need to
do anything except eat and sleep and plot against any perceived higher
intelligence. There were no humans on the streets of that place. For
robots did everything. Humans had no need to go out. Then the robots
developed their own trickery and would sometimes refuse to bathe these
humans, so that the air was filled with a foul smell and the humans
began to die slowly by getting too big. The robots were feeding them
junk – joy mixed with deadly rays from outer space… The altercation
with the wall got me more than a warning and made Oga-best mad. I was
assessed. The team of experts said it must have been the loss, so I was
borderline this and pipi that, pipi being post-something depression.
Oga-best, who had
once told me that I was his heart because I could make a career out of
dreaming, which meant we might yet become rich and visit the moon
someday, became raving mad. Certainly this had gone beyond
heart-matters. First, he raved about how he was supposed to report the
matter to people back home. Then he got mad about not having the
dialect equivalent of the English word and then he raved that it would
have been better if I had any kind of cancer other than that which the
experts said I had. I looked to the wall. I saw dead silence and I lost
my tongue and began to hear too many voices in my head all at once,
like the whole world was my Verizon network. The experts advised I
write everything down, so I wrote a letter to Pastlyn, a friend in my
head. I wrote: I was crying every night, feeding on my tears and
because I was feeding on my tears I was able to save twenty naira. Then
one day, I noticed that my eyes had gone dry. Eyes gone dry? Dat na
die. I would die of hunger without the tears that had been feeding me.
I met someone who acted as a friend and said I needed a switch, like
from tears to hope. She convinced me that hope would fill me up in a
way that would make it impossible for me to be hungry again. Off I went
with her to Futurelina Lane to meet the woman who sold hope. I took all
of my twenty naira savings.
I was surprised
that the house of hope was built on termite-infested wood. As we
entered, the house shook as if an imminent collapse was inevitable.
Even the hope-seller looked weird. Her hair reached down her back, yet
looked like strands of straws. Her dark eyes, enhanced by kohl, had
sunk deep into her sockets, yet they darted here and there with the
agility of a thieving eye. Her smile was dazzling, yet her teeth were
like remains from a crime scene. She kept smiling until I fell asleep
and by the time I woke up, I believed I had been shot with a lifetime
of hope. That night my sleep was a dream and there I was in a bank. I
began to shake with excitement and actually fainted when I saw the
vault filled with man-made money. Back to life, so to say, I found
myself in my bug-infested bed feeling empty and dead. Wanting to find
solace, I tried to cry, but my eyes had gone dry. Twenty-four hours
later, that same friend said I could buy a lifetime of tears at
Stream-hollow, only this time I had become so poor even tears were
pointless…
Once again I
quarreled with Light. I complained that his stories were becoming too
grave. He did not like the word, so he taunted me about my head-voices
being graver. A song entered my head and I sang that even the place of
paradise and eternity was not an Eden of gardens, for there were s and
so many branches of the true story. Light gave me a long stare before
saying with much pity that I was in the presence of great sorrow which
led to great wisdom without knowing. What was this shadow saying, I
thought wildly, as I remembered that my head story about the dry eyes
caused so much stir among the experts. I became a long list of possible
cases and this further infuriated Oga-best. He vented his anger on the
little we had, for as he saw it I was no longer anything; therefore if
he vented on me, it would seem like punching an unseen fate. I cowered
in a corner, helplessly leaning on the stone wall and at that point
wishing to be situated within the sweet nights where nothing happened.
You know, those familiar nights in my homeland where we drink and
babble… drink and babble our energies away on the theories of survival,
of progress, of the way forward. We conveniently lose our tongues on
the jargons of different agendas, the one-point agenda for corruption!
The seven-point agenda for rebranding the soul of a nation! The
zero-point agenda of hopelessness! No one talks about the needless
point agenda for total love, such as: why love is not an ideology? For
example, lovism instead of communism! We just roll with the night, the
same way as we live by laughter. I cowered while Oga-best pointed ten
ominous fingers at me saying I should rein myself in. What does he
mean? A cage? I was already there, couldn’t he see that? So we drank
and babbled while the monks in the high places looked at us like sad
tales of mortality.
In the days that
followed, I still cowered by the wall like a frightened animal. I was
turning into a cupboard of skeletons, but I was not all that hungry for
I was hearing music in my head – the music of silence, of sorrow, of
sweetness. It was as if I had become a stream of floating song, had
totally become the song… I let myself go. I hear the voice of Celestine
Ukwu singing in my head, saying the world belongs to no one. Saying
that death comes for everyone – saints and sinners alike. Saying people
had come to love life more than death… There was no gospel according to
CU. His voice becomes two angels who asked me to ride on their wings,
which I felt obliged to, under the circumstances. I climbed onto the
balcony rails ready to fly but instead fell on a stretcher with straps
holding me down – me, Kabo, from the lineage of kings and queens, from
a place where “good morning” was an insolent manner of greeting. Being
that I was born in the royal clan, I am hailed in greeting: “Heavens.”
I thought to myself that Light was a blessing that I must thank.
But, alas, Light had become a pillar of tears. One flower taking pity
on my new-found confusion told me that Light heard the call of return,
for his job was done. I asked what job was done and was told the job of
telling stories and I cried that stories were endless because our souls
dwelt in eternity. I was really tired and alone and in that instant all
the flowers began to die. I saw the past and the future and there was
little or no difference and in that instant I knew why Virginia Woolf
took to the sea and the other one took to the oven. They were tired of
dying daily. It was not nothingness they saw, it was eternal stillness,
soul sacrifice… I loved Light so much… The flowers were dying. For once
I understood why they had let me eat them, for they knew this day would
come, this day when I had to pay the ultimate price of love to be eaten
by the flowers so they can live to be eaten. As they closed in on me, I
was smiling for it was not death I saw. It even went beyond sacrifice.
It was eternal stillness.
