An African Elegy, page 1
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also By Ben Okri
Title Page
Lament of the Images
An Undeserved Sweetness
The Cross is Gone
We Sing Absurdities
Stammerings on Bedrock
Little Girl
On a Picture of a South African Street
They Say
To One Dying of Leukaemia
The Incandescence of the Wind
Darkening City: Lagos, 83
An African Elegy
Memories Break
Living is a Fire
On Edge of Time Future
Ile-Ife, 86
I See Your Face
I Shall Tell You
And If You Should Leave Me
You Walked Gently Towards Me
I Held You in the Square
Demolition Street: London, 83
A Gentle Requiem
Political Abiku
We Have No Other Way
The Poet Declares
Restore the Balance
And Anyone Who Doesn’t
To an English Friend in Africa
Copyright
About the Book
‘Dreams are the currency of Okri’s writing, particularly in this first book of poems, An African Elegy, but also in his books of short stories and prize-winning novel The Famished Road. Okri’s dreams are made on the stuff of Africa’s colossal economic and political problems, and reading the poems is to experience a constant succession of metaphors of resolution in both senses of the word. Virtually every poem contains an exhortation to climb out of the African miasma, and virtually every poem harvests the dream of itself with an upbeat restorative ending’ – Giles Foden, Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Ben Okri’s books include The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize, Songs of Enchantment, Astonishing the Gods, Dangerous Love and A Way of Being Free, a volume of essays. He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Ben Okri’s books have won several awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize. The World Economic Forum presented Ben Okri with the Crystal Award for his outstanding contribution to the arts and to cross-cultural understanding. Ben Okri was born in Nigeria and now lives in London.
Also by Ben Okri
Fiction
Flowers and Shadows
The Landscape Within
Incidents at the Shrine
The Famished Road
Songs of Enchantment
Astonishing the Gods
Dangerous Love
Infinite Riches
Non-Fiction
Birds of Heaven
A Way of Being Free
Poetry
Mental Fight
Ben Okri
AN AFRICAN ELEGY
Lament of the Images
They took the masks
The sacrificial faces
The crafted wood which stretches
To the fires of natural gods
The shrines where the axe
Of lightning
Releases invisible forces
Of silver.
They took the painted bones
The stools of molten kings
The sacred bronze leopards
The images charged with blood
And they burned what
They could not
Understand.
They burned
All that frightened them
In the ferocious power
Of ancient dreams
And all that held
The secrets
Of terror
And all that battled
With dread
In the land
And all that helped
The crops
Sprout
All that spoke
To the gods
In their close
And terrifying
Distance
They burned them all
They burned them in heaps
They burned them in alien piety.
They took some images
And brought them across
The whitening seas
And stored them in
Basements
For the later study
Of the African’s
Dark and impenetrable
Mind.
They called them
‘Primitive objects’
And subjected them
To the milk
Of scientific
Scrutiny.
2
The Images died in spirit
And contorted
Their faces
In the Western
Darkness.
In their native lands
Other Images were made
For new seasons
A new god
For a new
Age.
And when the Images began
To speak
In forgotten tongues
Of death
The artists of the alien
Land
Twisted the pain
Of their speech
And created a new
Chemistry
Which, purified of ritual
Dread,
They called
Art.
3
The secret places
Of the African’s
Dark and impenetrable
Mind
Touch the spirits
Of the deepest night.
The masks still live
Still speak
And only a few
Can hear them
Hear the terror of their
Chants
Which breed powers
Of ritual darkness
And light
In the centre
Of the mind’s
Regeneration.
The makers of Images
Kept their secrets well
For since the departure
Of the masks
The land
Has almost
Forgotten
To chant its ancient songs
Ceased to reconnect
The land of spirits.
4
And the spirits
Hunger
For our touch
Our contact.
The spirits
In their
Loneliness
Have begun
To go insane
They possess
Our minds
They grip our dreams
They weigh down
The flights
Of our inventions.
And every now and again
We break out
In strange tongues.
Rashes
Of violence
Streak across
Our continent
And hang over our
Skies.
The makers of Images
Dwell with us still
We must listen
To their speech
Re-learn their
Songs
Recharge the psychic
Interspaces
Of our dying
Age
Or live dumb
And blind
Devoid of old
Song
Divorced from
The great dreams
Of the magic and fearful
Universe.
An Undeserved Sweetness
After the wind lifts the beggar
From his bed of trash
And blows him to the empty pubs
At the road’s end
There exists only the silence
Of the world before dawn
And the solitude of trees.
Handel on the set mysteriously
Recalls to me the long
Hot nights of childhood spent
In malarial slums
In the midst of potent shrines
At the edge of great seas.
Dreams of the past sing
With voices of the future.
And now the world is assaulted
With a sweetness it doesn’t deserve
Flowers sing with the voices of absent bees
The air swells with the vibrant
Solitude of trees who nightly
Whisper of re-invading the world.
But the night bends the trees
Into my dreams
And the stars fall with their fruits
Into my lonely world-burnt hands.
The Cross is Gone
For R.C.
It was a day of fairs
Yellow music on the wind, feathers
Of dead birds whirling beyond
The green trees.
We walked up into the Heath
Passed a man riding a baby’s bicycle
And the paths confused us.
It had rained; the earth was soggy
Beneath the deceptive grass.
We strayed past trees that bore
The features of dying men.
All around us the trees were heaving.
Their comrades had fallen
The great spirits trapped in their monstrous
Trunks sang in the cold air
Songs of white mermaids
>
Corrupted beyond their time.
Their comrades had fallen:
They who had witnessed the sordidness
And the miracles of three hundred years
Felled in an instant of nightspace
By the karmic hurricanes
Of an unconfronted history.
Like old elephants, their trunks inscrutable,
Breathing lamentations on the unforgiving earth
Into which they will not be reborn,
The trees sang to us of a darkening age
With mysteries dying
And yellow spirits in the wind.
We passed their hulks
On the graveyard of the Heath
We said nothing about them
We talked about a single voice
From oppressed spaces
That could bring down thunder on corrupt lands
And about tyranny unleashing wounds on itself
That bleed through us, the innocent journeyers
Into forbidden zones of dying gods.
We passed them quickly
Noting the character and psychology
Of each surviving tree –
Then, from the valley, we looked up high
And saw three kites,
One red, another of blue,
The third of gold, invisibly attached
To a black cross,
Bold against the sky.
We climbed Parliament Hill
Our spirits heaving, our breaths
Quickening, the earth slipping beneath our feet.
The sky quivered with silent birds.
With our ascent we noticed a gathered crowd,
An old woman with a yellow scarf
A black man with a red beret on his bald head
Children playing with strings
A nun with frozen hands
An Irish priest wearing metal-framed glasses
An enormous bible under his arm
A wand in one hand, the string of the red
Kite in the other.
We approached them, holding
Fast to our invisible trail, breathing
Heavily the rarefied air:
And when we gained the hill top
The cross shivered
A strong wind, smelling of incense and radiation,
And disease and French perfume and hidden wars,
Blew over from the distant Thames.
We saw all the world laid out
Before us in the air
A city perceived in a moment’s enchantment
Whose history, weighed down with guilt and machines,
Laughed all around us like ghosts
Who do not believe in the existence
Of men.
We saw the city and marvelled.
We dream the city better
Than it dreams itself.
The air and distance weave such burning
Miracles from the houses and church spires
The towers and glass offices of multinationals.
We dream the housing estates, built on marshes;
The woods, sad and defiant;
The disorder of buildings, the threaded streets,
Where madmen wander alone,
Where men dream of impossible women,
And women of non-existent men,
With each pursuing instant fulfillment
Love without responsibility
Miracles without pain
Transformation without humility
Joy without despair
Power without vulnerability
Fame without chaos
A new life without a new death
Difficult dreams, doomed to abortions
And sick births
Blind births, one-eyed births.
In the phantasm of the city
Glacial vision prevails
While voices from the marshes vainly cry out
That they are the victims and hostages
Of the history their parents accepted
In silence.
The world lay before us
And the wind stayed still.
We wandered round the Irish priest
Not daring to approach
How would we be received?
And then a bitter wind blew the kites
And one got stuck, blue on green, against
The branches of a fallen tree –
We wandered round the crowd
And gazed at the cross
Upon which was written, on that wintry day,
Summery with the blessedness of its naming –
For it was Easter Sunday –
The words, clear as glass:
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again –
And our spirits soared, mixing with the clouds
Of deep colour –
A child’s cry of delight
Sent the golden kite upwards.
The priest’s cassock lifted and was whipped
By the winds of four directions.
Voices became sweet on the air.
In the distance below, the three lakes
Shimmered – the wind carved its many names
On the face of the waters.
We went down and dwelled
In the solitude of swans.
We talked of painting, love, and adventures.
My friend’s face was reddened by her red coat.
We heard the fair and followed the jangling music
Through the wet trails
And came upon cacophony.
We dwelled in the fair, listened to the conflicting
Noises, watched the faces of ticket sellers,
And the machines like windmills sending
The children into the air
Of artificial stimulation
And the gadgets and games and bumper cars
That once filled our adolescence with longing
But which left us hungry and empty now.
We left the fair followed by the smell
Of mass-cooked sausages, by dogs
Dragging hamburgers between their teeth –
We left the day behind us, with the view
From Parliament Hill
Forever bright in our vision.
We went back to our lives of ordinary miracles
With the joy of that day lost in us
Till three days later when she returned
From a long walk –
She didn’t look sad, or disappointed:
But in that tone of voice we reserve
For events that should be underlined
Except we don’t know why
Or how, or with what accentuation
To underline them
Make them speak
Make them significant –
And with a disturbed, imperceptible tossing
Of her head
A movement of her shoulders
A hand launching itself into the air
But holding back
She said, simply, without mystery:
‘The cross – that cross – is gone.’
April 1988
We Sing Absurdities
For Robert Fraser
We sing absurdities
On the face
Of anguish
And enact cameos
Within the eye’s
Vision.
We sing of absurdities –
Arabesques of bodies
Entangled
In the dissolutions
And vapours
Of power:
Victims of seepages
And batterings from above.
We sing absurdities
When all else sinks in shallows.
Word-acids dissolve
Ordinary chaos:
Within the eye
A potent chemistry
Unmasks the faces
Beneath the terrors
And fills the silences
Of anguished journeys.
Dreams live serenely
In our singing
And our eyes.
We sing absurdities
When all else sinks in shallows.
Stammerings on Bedrock
Karma proceeds upwards
Through skies of aquamarine terrors;
The world loops under
Bringing the tyranny of rain
Upon the heads of priests
And upon the rest of us
The mania of a planet ruled
By fear.
Rain wisdom down upon the earth
Wash thunder upon us
And on this landscape smash
Our beginnings:
Smash the endings that they foresaw
Hold us in the palm of incandescent
Understanding
Bare us to those birds of madness
That peck at our false bindings
And reveal the pulp of flesh
Our cross of fire.
Explode to us our history
Save us from our resourceful
Damnation.
2
I have seen lies grow from
Seeds of twisted dreams
They shoot up in ordinary nights
They gorge themselves upon our hunger
