See, the colours were like a deep clear stain. I miss it, the intensity. Its like everythings dyed to the bone. Sunsets, say. I used to work in a photographic gallery here, and exhibitors would bring their portfolios round for critique: sunsets were a no-no. Same with pictures of horses, dogs and children. And flowers. Too obvious. Someone could have done meticulous, technically astounding blow-ups of petals of staggering beauty and wed be there in our edgy, arrogant certainties: Too obvious. Its been done, love.
So take sunsets, and a sky the colour of copper sulphate, slowly suffusing with greeny bronze. Suns under the rim already but the little boat-shaped clouds hanging over the edge up there are just catching the edge of the light, turning orangy-pink, like candyfloss. Id never seen candyfloss. Like little pink silverfish. Like flying fish leaping. Like little lithe rats leaving the sinking ship! Like: weve got to stay on this earthy old clod turning under into darkness but theyre going to jump for it
And on the other side of the sky it got bluer, darker, deeper, denser. Clouds heaved themselves up, billowing, and banked into mountains, shadowy-bright, fainter and fainter white, dense grey, deep black and a shimmer coming through if the wind blew. Pink aerofoil things still leaping away into light on the other side of the sky. Light still there, you know, sinking down on the other side, trundling away and then finally towards us without changing direction. Night coming up deep and clear like a stain, its own lights mellow: candles in a tin, hurricane lanterns, smoky, pungent. It was hot.
I used to write really bad sub-Tolkienesque poetry, about cities in the sky, or rather, citadels.
The white and shining city, in whose land
Boats silver-singing leap like beaked birds to the strand
.
But then, you know, what the city was, I wasnt the only one slapping a sticking-plaster imagery on it, an alternate reality. It had been rationalised and controlled and crammed into an alternative ideal and had its quarters and ghettos and histories and references thoroughly marmelised alreadynot that it was an old city. Not that it wasnt unruly, so that the more pliable its acquiescence, the less predictable its conformitysee, thats the secret of creolisation, you have to love the invader, you not only want to be like him, youll do him the great compliment of improving him
But as I was saying, right on the top of the city, like icing (or like the plaster on a boil) there was a neo-classical temple with pillars and pediments, crowning the seething city. Ambition hadnt stretched to making it marble: it was plaster and brick, and not so jarringly different from the mud-brick stucco plaster pastel-coloured houses it crouched above, one-story blocks with courtyards, balconies, wooden shutters and dust, lots of dust; dark cool houses and forever afterwards Ill understand that temple-pediment derivatory monument as vernacular to my city
There it sat. Right at the top. And as low flat hills ring the city, seven of them, just like Rome, theres nowhere round the edges, in the suburbs, that you cant see that temple, which is the Municipal Town Hall. They cut a highway through the crammed old houses of the central city like a knife through butter; like steel through clay (a machete through a pot); like hot black macadam through red crumbly earth; and they imposed upon the city TOWN PLANNING.
(Now Ive been to the top of that hill to get an official form and on our way into the building a raggedy old man with a drum followed me and my father, singing our praisesdrumming our praises, actually, in a desultory kind of way, to see if we would bite, by strutting a little dance, to his advantage. We didnt give him the sixpence.
Imagine that, someone whos been learning their art since infancy. Someone who has more verses memorised than a Fifth Century Celtic bard. Someone whose art makes your soul leave your body and fly about in a nutty fashion ecstatically
Above all the arts, drumming messes up your synapses till you dont know what youre doingmaybe its like maths in that way. Extreme maths. Extreme multivalent physically hypnotic mentally compelling mathematics
He said, struggling with English: Im greeting you. I de Praise you na.
Then he used the drum to say: I have not praised myself yet, the word-monger.
The great manufacturer of words. I can always make the gift of a verse
To stir a mans insides for a very long time.
They hang around the municipal town hall waiting for weddings, hoping to make pennies. We walked past without eye-contact sos not to encourage him.)
Anyway, as I was saying, about the town planning: everywhere through the cracks, rot burgeoned. Thats the tropics for you.
Nobody realises how African I am. Eloquence, for instance, one of the proper adult virtues, much on call at weddings and funerals and thanksgivings. Its not my facility with English thats the point, its whether I can fashion a call, stir you to your stomach, make you want to jump up and join my gang with your arms in the air, or hiss through your teeth and curse me; in an elegant but still amateur manner, cause its my job to be a grown up, not an artist, officially. But the stuff that artists do, that stuff makes you stagger around like a cat in catnip. Yeah, and sometimes wet your pants. I make no such claims.
But my citymy god I could get drunk with it, even though I hate it and I cant go back to it, since its just so awkward and difficult and uncomfortable. Wipe my whiskers through it. Roll in it. You cant tell I belong in such beautiful chaos, I seem like an English person now, moderate and in control. But I can tell you, between two continents, Im a very even blend.