I am feeling better. I've recovered from my week of weakness and sleep and many tissues. As always happens, being sick makes me realise that I am not immortal and my body has limits. The helplessness is frustrating as my body forces me just to stop and wait. So I did. I'll fill you in on what happened and what is to come, but for now, seeing there has been nothing to read here for more than a week, here is an exerpt from Ben Okri. It is a great passage. It is longish - to make up for the silence. It is rather African and anti-Empires. Enjoy!
(oh, and happy 21st to Matthew - was great to chat. Happy bday also to Criss, Charles and Elizabeth)
INFINITE RICHES by Ben Okri (excerpt)
The English Governor-General rewrites Nigeria's history...
He rewrote the space in which I slept. He rewrote the long silences of the country which were really passionate dreams. He rewrote the seas and the wind, the atmospheric conditions and the humidity. He rewrote the seasons, and made them limited and unlyrical. He reinvented the geography of the nation and the whole continent. He redrew the continent's size on the world maps, made it smaller, made it odder. He changed the names of the places which were older than the places themselves. He redesigned the phonality of African names, softened the consonants, flattened the vowels. In altering the sound of the names he altered their meaning and affected the destiny of the names. He rewrote the names of fishes and bees, of trees and flowers, of mountains and herbs, of rocks and plants.
He rewrote the names of our food, our clothes, our abodes, our rivers.
The renamed things lost their ancient weight in our memory. The renamed things lost their old reality. They became lighter, and stranger, They became divorced from their old selves. They lost their significance and sometimes their shape. And they suddenly seemed new to us - new to us who had given them the names by which they responded to our touch.
Caught in his passionate objectivity, the Governor General made our history begin with the arrival of his people on our shores.
Sweating into his loose cotton shirt, he turned himself into a fairy-tale figure awakening stone-age man from an immemorial slumber, a slumber that began shortly after the creation of the human race. The Governor General, in his rewriting of our history, deprived us of language, of poetry, of stories, of architecture, of civic laws, of social organisation, of art, science, mathematics, sculpture, abstract conception, and philosophy. He deprived us of history, of civilization, and unintentionally, deprived us of humanity too. Unwittingly, he effaced us from creation.
And then, somewhat startled at where his rigorous logic had led him, he performed the dextrous feat of investing us with life the moment his ancestors set eyes on us as we slept through the great roll of historical time. With a stroke of his splendid calligraphic style, he invested us with life. History came to us with his Promethean touch, as his pen touched our Adamic souls. And we awoke into history, stunned and ungrateful, as he renamed our meadows and valleys, and forgot the slave trade.
He rewrote our nightspaces, made them weirder, peopled them with monsters and stupid fetishes; he rewrote our daylight, made it cruder, made things manifest in the light of dawn seem unfinished and even unbegun. In the process he laid before our eyes the written evidence of our recent awakening into civilization - we who bear within us ancient dreams and future revelations.
We who began the naming of the world and all its gods. We who fertilized the banks of the Nile with the sacred word which sprouted the earliest and most mysterious civilization, the forgotten foundation of civilizations. We whose secret ways have entered into the bloodstream of world-wonders silently.
And as the Governor General rewrote time (made his longer, made ours shorter), as he rendered invisible our accomplishments, wiped out traces of our ancient civilizations, rewrote the meaning and beauty of our customs, as he abolished the world of spirits, diminished our feats of memory, turned our philosophies into crude superstitions, our rituals into childish dances, our religions into animal worship and animistic trances, our art into crude relics and primitive forms, our drums into instruments of jest, our music into simplistic babbling - as he rewrote our past, he altered our present.
And the alteration created new spirits which fed the bottomless appetite of the great god of chaos...
I was reading an essay for class tomorrow, and had a bit of an epiphany! I realised why i haven't been 'liking' Jesus so much lately.
There is alot of talk here about identity theft, but i don't think this will be a problem. I've also been deconstructing the whole new craze around 'blogging' and the desire to have your journal read by the whole world. I haven't come to an answer yet, but i'm sure it has something to do with the need of modern people to: be connected, be known and be on the map. I keep on telling me that this little site is to keep family and friends updated on my movements and not to have to email everyone.
