Tiger Work by Ben Okri

Author:Ben Okri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804545416
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

AFTER THE END

1

It was a long night after the end. Many of us lived in the night and did not emerge. We knew nothing of what had happened except that one day everything went off. Everything shut down. The electricity was out and the internet no longer worked and none of the communication lines that ran the world existed anymore.

We learned to live in the dark, in houses under the ground, and in caves on the edges of the city. We had books and some of us read, for short periods of the day, with the light of improvised candles. No one went out into the air.

We were a community that lived now beneath the ground. We had forgotten what sunlight was. The air we breathed came through the tunnels in the earth, filtered by the earth itself. For many years we lived like this, pale and quiet, like human moles, unaware of what had been happening in the world above.

Over that time, beneath the ground, many of our families died. People can’t endure being away from sunlight for long. Many perished of sun deprivation. Many simply wilted and surrendered themselves to the earth. Some of us tried to die but couldn’t. I tried several times. I couldn’t seem to find a way to die. After a while I came to accept the curse of life. Every day was an entombment. Every day the dream of light faded from our spirits. I would sleep at night but was unable to distinguish the night from the day. My dreams would be of nothing but sunlight. Sometimes I dreamt of fields of green. The green in my dreams was unnaturally alive. It made me weep to think of such a green. Sometimes I dreamt of rivers and streams, of running water. There was nothing as magical as the sun on my face in those dreams or the feeling of water splashed on my body.

It was down there that we began to reconstruct the world for ourselves. Having lost it, we tried to reconstruct it anew, from our nostalgia and our memories and our incomplete knowledge of the world. It was down there that I realised how little we knew of the world we had lived in before the night came down upon us. I regretted not having asked questions about the world, about how things worked, about the different peoples and their histories. We all realised down there that we had taken too much for granted about the world we had loved. Did we really love it, then, if we didn’t know it? Can you love something you are quite ignorant about?

When we tried to recreate the world, we found that we could only recreate what we had known. We realised quickly that we were reconstructing our narrowness and our limitations. It was less than what we knew before. Therefore, we could not really begin again. And so we had to begin from nothing.

This was the hardest part. The more vocal among us wanted to rebuild what we had known.

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