Lament for the Fallen (41 page)

Shakiso Adaro, reflections on the journey, Achenia, recorded during ‘Sowing the Seeds 1,042’

55

‘Daddy, tell me a story?’

Samara smiles, cuddling the child to him in the small bed.

‘And what story would you like to hear, youngster?’ he asks.

The little girl giggles, her eyes the green-cobalt of her mother’s. ‘I want to hear “The Tail of One”,’ she says.

‘Not again,’ says Samara, his voice an exaggerated sigh. ‘You’ve heard that hundreds of times. Can’t we try another one? Your great-grandmother told us a lovely new one just yesterday.’

‘No. I want to hear “The Tail of One”. It is my favourite favourite favourite.’

‘Very well,’ he sighs, teasing. And begins the story he has told thousands of times. As he finishes, her squirming stops and she is still.

He waits, holding her small warm body in his arms.

And waits.

‘I’m awake,’ she giggles. ‘I’m soooooo awake.’

‘I know, my darling,’ he smiles. Shakiso comes into the child’s room from outside. She joins them, the bed growing to accommodate them all.

‘Are you too excited to sleep?’ she asks.

‘Yes, I can’t wait,’ she says. ‘Will they be there?’ she asks. ‘The children of Joshua?’

‘I don’t know, my love, but I hope so with all my heart,’ says Samara.

She squirms a bit between them, tousles Samara’s sandy-brown hair, presses her nose to his face and grins into his hazel-brown eyes. Then decides. ‘Tell me again?’

‘What, my precious?’ asks Samara.

‘Tell me again about Joshua and Daniel and David and Sarah and Abishai and Jason and Isaiah. And Esther,’ she says in a single breathless burst.

Shakiso grins and Samara bends his head, kissing his daughter on the forehead.

‘Esther, my most darling. For you,’ he says, and begins the story again, of days long ago.

56

A man in a delicately embroidered ochre-brown boubou and matching kufi skullcap is walking through the jungle. His feet are in handmade leather sandals. His every step is a drumbeat. He is singing, and the forest sings with him. Birds fly in the trees above him, monkeys scramble through the branches.

He follows a wide stone road through the trees to the edge of a cliff.

Looking out, he sees a great white city.

The city fills the valley beneath him. It gleams in the sunshine, hundreds of thousands of people in the markets and cobbled roads leading to its centre. Ships are sailing up a wide, clear river, its waters sparkle and shimmer in the glory of the day.

More ships are docked at its vast harbour. Children are playing on the beach upstream, swimming and diving in elaborate postures from a small jetty.

The city rises towards a ridge and, at its crown, on a cliff before the river, is a gathering place. A massive open area, gently sloping and filling with a waiting choir. There is a stage and, behind that, an enormous open-sided building, bronze pillars and an immense wooden slit-drum suspended between them.

Around the gathering space are statues of the heroes of the city. One of them is of a tall, straight-backed man. His hands, their scars telling the story of his life, are open before him. His smile is broad and content.

The man on the cliff is now playing a harmonica, his hands cupped around it, even as his voice continues. He releases the harmonica and the notes drift out over the city. He taps his foot, a gentle rhythm spreading through the earth.

In the city, a woman answers. She stands at the drum and strikes it. The beat continues as she walks out on to the stage.

Her arms are wide. Her voice that of a lover welcoming him home.

He replies, and they sing together. Their voices an embrace. A rejoicing reunion.

Now the massed choir is singing too. Their voices gather and swell, filling the air above the city. Welcoming the sky.

The land sings, the song of return, of renewed friendships, of a journey.

In the sky, a glisten, as of dew, and the horizon is filled with starships. One breaks away, races towards the city.

It lands before the great west gate. Its canopy shimmers, and a man is there, carrying a small child. A woman stands at his side. He holds her hand.

A group of people is running to meet them from the gates.

And the man, the woman and the child step out of the craft, on to the earth, and run towards them.

Acknowledgements

Lament for the Fallen
has been a long time coming.

I wrote its first words thirty years ago, when I was twelve, and – while the detail and texture of the story have changed as I matured – it was always about a man escaping from a prison in space back to a planet on the cusp of social upheaval.

Science fiction is at its most beautiful and challenging when it places us within the transition zone between here and there. The technologies presented in the novel are all as expected from any work of speculative fiction. It is less common to place those tools somewhere real, rather than breaking an existing place, and let people behave as they will.

Geographic necessity placed Samara’s fall close to the equator in Nigeria and serendipity took me there, to walk the streets of Calabar and meet its people, before I returned to the final writing push.

I drew on a host of sources, and you will find much more of the complexity, wonder and terror of Nigerian culture and traditions in these books:

Cross River Natives,
Charles Partridge (1905);

Efik Traders of Old Calabar,
edited by Daryll Forde (1958);

Life in Southern Nigeria – The Magic, Beliefs, and Customs of the Ibibio Tribe,
P. Amaury Talbot (1923).

Amaury Talbot was a colonial administrator who travelled far and wide in the then British colonies of Southern Nigeria in the very early 1900s. He and his wife photographed and described everything he saw without embellishment and with the wonder and reverence of a truly impressive social historian.

Efik Traders of Old Calabar
is something even rarer: the diaries of Antera Duke, an Efik chief and slaver who lived in Calabar, and covering the period of 1785 to 1787.

If you wish to experience the food described, try Arit Ana’s
A Taste of Calabar
(2000).

While I certainly drank deep from these sources, I have moved things around and restructured the landscape and people to meet the needs of the story. My intention was not to produce a work of Nigerian literature, merely to capture a sense of people and place. The usual storytellers’ prerogative of saying that no names or places should be inferred as being about real people or events prevails here.

I am thankful for where this story has taken me and the people I have met, particularly the kindness and patience of people in Benin City, Calabar and Lagos who, inadvertently or not, helped inform my research. Far too many of the anecdotes featured here are real, and I leave it to you to separate them from the imagined.

If you would like to immerse yourself further, here is the music playlist along with the relevant scenes where they belong:

‘Talibe’
, The Balladeer
– Ismaël Lô [Song for the Fallen]

‘Mabemba’
, Rising Tide
– Mokoomba [The Balladeer’s song of thanks in the market]

‘No Ballads Ballad’
, Spirit
– Geoffrey Oryema [Samara and Joshua talk along the river]

‘Dionysus’
, Untold Things
– Jocelyn Pook [Mama’s tale]

‘Makambo’
, Exile
– Geoffrey Oryema [Setting out on the river to Calabar]

‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’
, Broadside
– Bellowhead [Samara in the bar in Anacostia]

‘Njoka’
, Rising Tide
– Mokoomba [The Song of the City in Calabar]

‘Ndayaan’
, Ndayaan
– Omar Pene [Man singing in the road on the tour of Calabar]

‘Dem Bobo’
, Africa For Africa
– Femi Kuti [Farinata Uberti’s party]

‘Rero’
, The Balladeer
– Ismaël Lô [After the massacre]

‘Happiness Is’
, Coming Home
– Yungchen Lhamo [Song for the Leaving medley]

‘Lubara Wanwa’
, Laru Beya
– Aurelio [Song for the Leaving medley]

‘Hard Times’
, Stone Cold Ohio
– Little Axe [Song for the Leaving medley]

‘The Rhythm of the Heat’
, Peter Gabriel
– Peter Gabriel [Song for the Leaving medley]

‘Dragonfly’
, Music Food and Love
– Guo Yue [Song for the Leaving medley]

‘Nabou’
, The Balladeer
– Ismaël Lô [Song for the Return]

There was no ‘her’ when I began this tale, but she was always there and she always knew. I am grateful.

@GavinChait

started 1986 in South Africa, completed, by way of Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, 2015 in England.