Ben Okri - The Famished Road

‘Don’t trouble me, woman! Don’t bother me!’

‘I don’t want to..’

‘Leave me alone! Can’t a man do what he wants without a woman troubling him? I have a right to do what I want! So what if I stayed out last night! You think I have been doing nothing? I’ve been thinking, you hear, thinking! So don’t trouble me as if I’ve been with another woman..’

‘I didn’t say you have been with…’

At that exact moment Dad leapt up into a tidal rage and scattered the plates of food and tossed away the centre table and grabbed the bedclothes and hurled them across theroom.They landedonme,coveringmyface.Istayedlikethatwiththebedclothes over my head while Dad raged. Mum cried out and then stifled the cry. I heard Dad hittingher. I looked and Dad was slappingher on thehead,kickingthetable,shaking Mum, pushing her, muscling her around, and her arms flailed, and then she submitted herself to his anger, and I got up and rushed at him, and he shoved me aside and I fell on his boots and hurt my bottom and I stayed there without moving. And then, quite suddenly, Dad stopped hitting her. He stopped in the middle of a slapping motion, which changed into an embrace. He held her tight while she sobbed, shaking. Dad also shook, and he led her to the bed and held her, and they stayed like that, unmoving, embracing awkwardly, for a long time. Outside I could hear the cocks crowing. The compound people were preparing for work. Children cried. The female prophet of the new churches chanted for the world to repent. The muezzin pierced the dawn with calls to prayer. Dad kept saying:

‘Forgive me, my wife, forgive me.’

And Mum, sobbing, shaking, also kept saying, as if it were a litany:

‘My husband, I was only worried, forgive me…’

I got up and crept out of the room and went to the housefront. I slept on the cement platform till Mum came to wake me. When I went back into the room Dad was asleep on the bed, his mouth open, his nose flaring and softening, an agonised expression on his wrinkled forehead.

I lay on the mat and didn’t go to school that day. Mum lay with Dad on the bed till the afternoon and then she went off to the market. When I awoke, Dad was still asleep. Heslept with his sufferingstillon his face.

That evening the van of bad politics returned. The women, children, and jobless men oftheareawent up anddowntheplaceasifsomethingterribleweregoingtohappen. The street became crowded. I went across to the photographer’s studio and saw the van of the politicians who had poisoned us. They blared passionate speeches through their loudhailer. We listened in silence to the politicians of bad milk. We listened as they blamed the other party for the milk. We listened as they maintained, with ferocious conviction, that it was their rivals, the Party of the Poor, who had been impersonatingthem, pretendingto bethem.

‘THEY WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MILK, NOT US. THEY WANT TO DISCREDIT US,’ the loudhailers cried.

We found their statement very strange because at the back of the van were the very same people who had come round the first time. We recognised them all. Now they came with bags of garri, but with twice the number of thugs. They had whips and clubs among the garri bags and they seemed prepared for charity and war at the same time.

‘WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. WE WILL BRING YOU ELECTRICITY AND BAD ROADS, NOT GOOD MILK, I MEAN GOOD ROADS, NOT BAD MILK,’ the politicians maintained, with great vigour.

People massed round the vehicle. The photographer darted around with his camera. He wasn’t taking pictures, but he seemed to have awoken completely from his hunger and his fever. The thugs handed out pans of garri but no one came forward to receive any. The people massed silently round the van. It was as if a message was being passed along. There was something ominous in their silence.

‘TRUST US! TRUST OUR LEADER! TRUST OUR GARRI! OUR PARTY BELIEVES IN SHARING THE NATIONAL GARRI AND…’

‘LIES!’ someone cried from the crowd.

‘THIEVES!’ said another.

‘POISONERS!’

‘MURDERERS!’

The four voices broke the stranglehold of the loudspeaker. The politician who had been launching into his litany of promises lost control and stammered. The loudspeaker gave off a high-pitched screeching noise. The people increased round the van. They were silent again and they followed the van silently as it moved, women with hungry resentful faces, men with thunderous brows. The thugs jumped down from the back of the van. One of them said:

‘WHO CALLED US THIEVES?’

No one answered. The thug’s eyes fell on the photographer. His camera made him conspicuous. As the thug moved towards the photographer the politician cried, through the agency of the loudhailer:

‘WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!’

Then he repeated the words, with other entreaties, in his language, appealingto local sentiments. At that same moment the thug punched the photographer, whose nose started to bleed. No one moved. The thug lifted his great fist again and the photographer ducked intothecrowd,screaming,andthemenwentonofferingpansof garri, and the politician went on with his claims, and suddenly a stone smashed the van’s window and undammed the fury of angry bodies. Several hands clawed at the van; someone cracked the politician on the head and he screamed into the loudspeaker. The driver started the vehicle; it jerked forward and knocked a woman over. The photographer recorded the moment. The woman howled and the men hurled stones, breaking the side windows and shattering the windscreen. The crowd surged to thefront ofthevan,preventingitfrommoving.Thethugsjumpeddownandwhipped people,thephotographerfrenziedly tookpictures,andthepeoplewentonstoningthe side windows till they gave completely and then they threw rocks at the men handing out garri. The men shouted, blood appeared on their faces; the politician appealed for calm; someone in the crowd cried:

‘Stone them!’ Another said:

‘BURN THE VAN!’

The thugs went on whipping till a fierce crowd of men surged over them. When the thugs reappeared they were almost naked. The women, with a special vengeance, cracked firewood and planks on their heads. And a smallish woman, whose three childrenwerestillsufferingtheworst effectsofthepoisoning,wasseenrushingfrom her house, shouting:

‘I’mgoingto pour boilingwater on them! CLEAR THEWAY-O!’

And people cleared a way for her and she emptied the basin of boilingwater on to the thugs who were hiding at the back of the van; they screamed and scattered everywhere, tripping over their garri bags, falling over the furious bodies, and when they hit the ground the crowd lashed at them with whips and sticks and when they ran the crowd pursued and stoned them. The thugs ran, pleading, but no one listened, and they were stoned till they were bloody all over. They fled into the mudflats and the marshes and a contingent of people followed them. The thugs waded thigh-deep in marsh and brackish waters and disappeared into the wild forests; the contingent returned with the news, their anger unabated.

Only the driver was left in the van. The violence had so stimulated the people that we set about punishing the vehicle, kicking and denting its bodywork, hitting its tin and aluminium construct with metal rods and firewood, and the van did not scream, and so chanting and cursing, we gathered and heaved all our energies together and lifted it and tipped it on its side and, with the tentative agility of a cockroach, the driver clambered out and managed the distinction of being the only one to escape without a beating, for as soon as he got out he fled down the street towards Madame Koto’s bar, where he was offered invincible asylum.

The van stayed overturned. Through the night people went on sporadically wreaking their impotent vengeance on the van. They went on even when we heard that a truckload of policemen were on their way, armed with guns and batons. By the time the policemen arrived the impotent rage had turned sulphurous; burning brands had been stuck into the petrol tank and the night exploded into yellow incandescence at the same moment that the policemen, barkingorders, blowingwhistles, jumped down fromtheir trucks. They stoodaroundwatchinghelplessly asthevanburstintoflames and thunder. They questioned a few people but everyone had just arrived, just been awoken from sleep, no one had seen or heard anything, and the police took in five suspects.They couldn’t doanythingabouttheflamingvan,whichcrackedtheairina final spasmic explosion. All night the van smouldered and the fire brigade did not cometoput out theflames.Andit wasonly whenthepolicewerepullingawaythat we saw the faces of those taken in for questioning. The photographer was one of them. He had managed to get rid of the evidence that was his camera. He looked stony-eyed and brave. He waved at us as they dragged him away.