you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing,
since I am remembering the hope I had for you as a child.
Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing.
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
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
that seared through his skull; he cried his father’s name
over the river. Then he swam to the opposite trees.
He cut off their circle. He hid and felt the same
mania that, in the arrows of drizzle, he felt for Hector.
He let them pass. One was laggard; with a clenched roar
he swung at the grinning laggard and the bladed oar
cleft through his skull with a sound like a calabash,
splattering his chest with brain; then the archer
thudded in his death-throes like a spear-gaffed fish
as Achille hammered and hammered him with the oar’s head,
as the skull grinned up at him with skinned yellow teeth
like a baboon mating; then Achille wrenched the bow
from the locked hand, and then, sobbing with grief
at the death of a brother, he shot like the brown arrow
of the sea-swift through ferns, not shaking their leaves,
brushing webbed vines from his face, and the leaf-shade
freckled him like an ocelot, like the leopard loping,
as he hurdled the roots, raking the way clear of the net
of vines, till his palm was streaked with blood, unroping
himself from their thorns, his eyes salted with sweat,
and the one thought thudding in him was, I can deliver
all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could
change their whole future, even the course of the river
would flow backwards, past the mangroves. Then a cord
of thorned vine looped his tendon, encircling the heel
with its own piercing chain. He fell hard. He saw
the leaves pinned with stars. Ants crawled over Achille
as his blind eyes stared from the mud, still as the archer
he had brained, the bow beside him and the broken oar.
Chapter XXVIII
I
Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song
of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn
and endless in its winding like the brown river’s tongue:
“We were the colour of shadows when we came down
with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea,
for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon,
and these shadows are reprinted now on the white sand
of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors
from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea.
There were seeds in our stomachs, in the cracking pods
of our skulls on the scorching decks, the tubers
withered in no time. We watched as the river-gods
changed from snakes into currents. When inspected,
our eyes showed dried fronds in their brown irises,
and from our curved spines, the rib-cages radiated
like fronds from a palm-branch. Then, when the dead
palms were heaved overside, the ribbed corpses
floated, riding, to the white sand they remembered,
to the Bight of Benin, to the margin of Guinea.
So, when you see burnt branches riding the swell,
trying to reclaim the surf through crooked fingers,
after a night of rough wind by some stone-white hotel,
past the bright triangular passage of the windsurfers,
remember us to the black waiter bringing the bill.”