Omeros (15 page)

Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom?

ACHILLE

I do not know what the name means. It means something,

maybe. What’s the difference? In the world I come from

we accept the sounds we were given. Men, trees, water.

AFOLABE

And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There

is the name of that man, that tree, and this father,

would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear,

without the shape of a man or a tree? What would it be?

(And just as branches sway in the dusk from their fear

of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve.)

ACHILLE

What would it be? I can only tell you what I believe,

or had to believe. It was prediction, and memory,

to bear myself back, to be carried here by a swift,

or the shadow of a swift making its cross on water,

with the same sign I was blessed with, with the gift

of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know.

AFOLABE

No man loses his shadow except it is in the night,

and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow

of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light.

When he walks down to the river with the other fishermen

his shadow stretches in the morning, and yawns, but you,

if you’re content with not knowing what our names mean,

then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through

my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here

or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost

of a name. Why did I never miss you until you returned?

Why haven’t I missed you, my son, until you were lost?

Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?

There was no answer to this, as in life. Achille nodded,

the tears glazing his eyes, where the past was reflected

as well as the future. The white foam lowered its head.

Chapter XXVI

I

In a language as brown and leisurely as the river,

they muttered about a future Achille already knew

but which he could not reveal even to his breath-giver

or in the council of elders. But he learned to chew

in the ritual of the kola nut, drain gourds of palm-wine,

to listen to the moan of the tribe’s triumphal sorrow

in a white-eyed storyteller to a balaphon’s whine,

who perished in what battle, who was swift with the arrow,

who mated with a crocodile, who entered a river-horse

and lived in its belly, who was the thunder’s favourite,

who the serpent-god conducted miles off his course

for some blasphemous offence and how he would pay for it

by forgetting his parents, his tribe, and his own spirit

for an albino god, and how that warrior was scarred

for innumerable moons so badly that he would disinherit

himself. And every night the seed-eyed, tree-wrinkled bard,

the crooked tree who carried the genealogical leaves

of the tribe in his cave-throated moaning,

traced the interlacing branches of their river-rooted lives

as intricately as the mangrove roots. Until morning

he sang, till the river was the only one to hear it.

Achille did not go down to the fishing stakes one dawn,

but left the hut door open, the hut he had been given

for himself and any woman he chose as his companion,

and he climbed a track of huge yams, to find that heaven

of soaring trees, that sacred circle of clear ground

where the gods assembled. He stood in the clearing

and recited the gods’ names. The trees within hearing

ignored his incantation. He heard only the cool sound

of the river. He saw a tree-hole, raw in the uprooted ground.

II

Achille, among those voluble leaves, his people,

estranged from their chattering, withdrew in discontent.

He brooded on the river. The canoe at its pole,

doubled by its stillness, looked no different

from its reflection, nor the pier stakes, nor the thick

trees inverted at their riverline, but the shadow face

swayed by the ochre ripples seemed homesick

for the history ahead, as if its proper place

lay in unsettlement. So, to Achille, it appeared

they were not one reflection but separate men—

one crouching at the edge of the spindly pierhead,

one drowned under it, featureless in mien.

Even night was not the same. Some surrounding sorrow

with other stars that had no noise of waves

thickened in silence. At dawn, he heard a cock crow

in his head, and woke, not knowing where he was.

The sadness sank into him slowly that he was home—

that dawn-sadness which ghosts have for their graves,

because the future reversed itself in him.

He was his own memory, the shadow under the pier.

His nausea increased, he walked down to the cold river

with the other shadows, saying, “Make me happier,

make me forget the future.” He laughed whenever

the men laughed in their language which was his

also. They entered the river, waist-deep. They spread

in a half-circle, with the looped net. There was peace

on the waveless river, but the surf roared in his head.

So loaded with his thoughts, like a net with the clear

and tasteless to him river-fish, was Achille—so dark

that the fishermen avoided him. They brewed a beer

which they fermented from a familiar bark

and got drunk on it, but the moment Achille wet

his memory with it, tears stung his eyes. The taste

of the bitter drink showed him Philoctete

standing in green seawater up to his waist,

hauling the canoe in, slowly, fist over fist.

III

He walked the ribbed sand under the flat keels of whales,

under the translucent belly of the snaking current,

the tiny shadows of tankers passed over him like snails

as he breathed water, a walking fish in its element.

He floated in stride, his own shadow over his eyes

like a grazing shark, through vast meadows of coral,

over barnacled cannons whose hulks sprouted anemones

like Philoctete’s shin; he walked for three hundred years

in the silken wake like a ribbon of the galleons,

their bubbles fading like the transparent men-o’-wars

with their lilac dangling tendrils, bursting like aeons,

like phosphorous galaxies; he saw the huge cemeteries

of bone and the huge crossbows of the rusted anchors,

and groves of coral with hands as massive as trees

like calcified ferns and the greening gold ingots of bars

whose value had outlasted that of the privateers.

Then, one afternoon, the ocean lowered and clarified

its ceiling, its emerald net, and after three centuries

of walking, he thought he could hear the distant quarrel

of breaker with shore; then his head broke clear, and

his neck; then he could see his own shadow in the coral

grove, ribbed and rippling with light on the clear sand,

as his fins spread their toes, and he saw the leaf

of his own canoe far out, the life he had left behind

and the white line of surf around low Barrel of Beef

with its dead lantern. The salt glare left him blind

for a minute, then the shoreline returned in relief.

He woke to the sound of sunlight scratching at the door

of the hut, and he smelt not salt but the sluggish odour

of river. Fingers of light rethatched the roof’s straw.

On the day of his feast they wore the same plantain trash

like Philoctete at Christmas. A bannered mitre

of bamboo was placed on his head, a calabash

mask, and skirts that made him both woman and fighter.

That was how they danced at home, to fifes and tambours,

the same berries round their necks and the small mirrors

flashing from their stuffed breasts. One of the warriors

mounted on stilts walked like lightning over the thatch

of the peaked village. Achille saw the same dances

that the mitred warriors did with their bamboo stick

as they scuttered around him, lifting, dipping their lances

like divining rods turning the earth to music,

the same chac-chac and ra-ra, the drumming the same,

and the chant of the seed-eyed prophet to the same

response from the blurring ankles. The same, the same.

Chapter XXVII

I

He could hear the same echoes made by their stone axes

in the heights over the tied sticks of the settlement,

and the echoes were prediction and memory, the crossing X’s

of the sidewise strokes, but here in their element

the trees and the spirits that they uttered were

rooted, and Achille looked at the map in his hand

rivered as numerously as this, his coast. Then war

came. One day a drizzle of shafts arched and fanned

over the screaming huts, and the archers with blurred stride

ran through the kitchen gardens, trampling the yams,

and the dogs whirled, barking. Achille could not hide

or fight. He stood in their centre, with useless arms.

The raid was swift. It was done before he knew it.

Its accomplishment lay in its strategy of surprise.

It had caught the village in the flung arc of a net

with its mesh of whirling archers whose baboon cries

terrified the dogs, had stumbling mothers shrieking for

their standing children. Noise was as much its weapon.

The fishermen, hearing the cries from the ochre shore

of the river, dropped their vines, woven with grass

and reeds, and ran as if they themselves were a race

of river sprats, entered the mouth of the ambush

where a new brace of archers rose, and another brace

erect from the reeds, suddenly grown from the bush.

The raid was profitable. It yielded fifteen slaves

to the slavers waiting up the coast. The brown river

in the silence rippled under the settlement in waves

of forgetful light. Swifts crossbowed across it, a quiver

of arrowheads. Achille walked in the dusty street

of the barren village. The doors were like open graves.

II

Achille climbed a ridge. He counted the chain of men

linked by their wrists with vines; he watched until

the line was a line of ants. He let out a soft moan

as the last ant disappeared. Then he went downhill.

He paused at the thorn barrier surrounding the village.

Then he entered it. Dust hazed the path. A mongrel

and a child sat in the street, the child with a clay

bowl in its hands, squatting in the dust. The fanged growl

backed away from his shadow. Achille turned away

down another street. Then another, to more and more

silence. There were arrow shafts lying in the dust

around the thatched houses. He creaked open a door.

Achille saw Seven Seas foaming with grief. He must

be deaf as well as blind, Achille thought. The head

never turned but it widened its mouth to the river,

the same list of battles the river had already heard.

Achille shut the thatch door. Where were all the dead?

Where were the women? Then he returned to look for the

child and the ribbed dog. Both had disappeared.

Once, he thought he heard voices behind a thorn barrier,

when a swivel of dust rose. He went down to the pier

and saw the other dugouts nuzzling the crooked poles

and his own canoe, and nothing was strange; it

was sharply familiar. They’d vanished into their souls.

He foresaw their future. He knew nothing could change it.

The tinkle from coins of the river, the tinkle of irons.

The son’s grief was the father’s, the father’s his son’s.

He climbed down to the steps of the pier and undid

the green mossed liana and towed it towards him

gently. The canoe came like a dog. And then Achille died

again. Thinking of the ants arriving at the sea’s rim,

or climbing the pyramids of coal and entering inside

the dark hold, far from this river and the griot’s hymn.

III

He walked slowly back to the peaked hut where the council

was always held, where, until the last embers of starlight,

the men sat with the griot, drinking from the bark bowl.

The griot crouched there. Warm ashes made his skull white

over eyes sore as embers, over a skin charred as coal,

the core of his toothless mouth, groaning to the firelight,

was like a felled cedar’s whose sorrow surrounds its bole.

One hand clawed the pile of ashes, the other fist thudded on

the drum of his chest, the ribs were like a caved-in canoe

that rots for years under the changing leaves of an almond,

while the boys who played war in it become grown men who

work, marry, and die, until their own sons in turn

rock the rotted hulk, or race in it, pretending to row,

as Achille had done in the manchineel grove as a boy.

Seven Seas was like that canoe, with the bilge of his prow

choked with old leaves, old words, by a blue, silent bay.

Achille looked round the hut. But what he looked for

was not certain. A weapon. A lance with its stone leaf,

or a shield stretched from pigskin, the mane of a warrior,

or the earth-dyes whose streakings would mask his grief

in their fury. There was one spear only. An oar.

He ran down to the pier. In the nets were their eyes