48. Turning Point

I waited for Hama Batu to continue but he said nothing then, as the silence stretched, I tried to think of an appropriate question to ask him. Abruptly he resumed.

“Some nights I sit on the edge of the precipice and I look out over the plain. The sounds of the forest surround me and I can see the lights of the Village in the distance. You would not think that things that look almost like stars could be so dangerous.”

He paused a moment and then continued, “There are places in the jungle where the trees suddenly stop and there is a clear green field before you, covered with the most beautiful flowers. When you have spent the morning cutting your way through the undergrowth and hacking away at creepers, then it seems like the answer to your prayers to find an open path.

You walk out into the field before you realise that there is a good reason for the absence of trees. The grass and flowers float on a muddy quicksand that enfolds you in a fatal embrace. There is nothing to cling to. You are without any solid point of attachment and sometimes the worst thing to do is to struggle. The only way that you can escape is if someone comes to intervene.

Sometimes the most attractive seeming things are the most dangerous.”

I thought a moment, then I asked him, “What is the difference, Hama Batu, between living in a comfortable house and living in a tent in the forest? Surely the house is just a better sort of tent and the tent is just a worse type of house?”

“Yes, Tommu, you are right. They both provide shelter. Nevertheless, there is a difference. If a man has five pairs of shoes, then you have to ask yourself, ‘How many feet does he have?’

Among our people, there have always been times when one man would accumulate property. He would be the best hunter in the tribe or the strongest fighter and others would look to him for leadership. Then over a period of time, he might have several wives and many sons and they would hunt together and be able to build strong shelters that could be occupied all the year round, with pigs and chickens grazing nearby.

That man would be in danger of becoming separated from the tribe, of being excluded from what gave him his strength in the first place. The traditions of Morakeewa therefore prescribed a duty to him and, on a given day, he would bring all of the tribe to his home. He would kill the pigs and chickens. His wives and his sons and his sons’ wives would gather fruit and corn and prepare a feast.

So the danger was dealt with. What was not needed was consumed and the man would rejoin his fellows. That is my answer to your question.”

“I understand. If there is a surplus, you are saying that we should share it. I can see that our Gardeners in the Village would agree with you. They rely on sharing. And in some ways, that must be right, but some of our people do not even have enough, despite the best that we can do to feed everyone.”

“But is that really true? We see that some people in the Village have far more than they need while others have less. Producing more does not solve the problems of those who have nothing if they are not allowed to share it.

I see walls and fences built for the very purpose of preventing those who have nothing from obtaining what they need. They live in separate locations so that they can be watched and controlled. They must be where they are told and any morning they might receive a visit to see that they are in the right place.

The position of their bodies can be checked and controlled but this separation is what frees their thoughts and their minds. When a man has all that he needs then his mind remains tied to the things that he owns. A man who has nothing can think what he likes. It is thin people that change the world.

When you were in the plantations, Tommu, you made the people fat. They ate the food you gave them and the food ate the people who consumed it. You allowed the people to fall asleep and it was necessary to waken them. That is why we must struggle in this life. We must, at all costs, remain awake.

If we fall asleep, then life is just a dream, between the time we are born and the time when we die. A dream that is no more real than a reflection in a lake; you try to touch it and it shatters. If we are asleep when we are alive, then what happens when we die? A moment of awakening, perhaps? Or perhaps just forgetfulness. That is why you should not encourage them to fall asleep. When you took away their cares, they had no reason to struggle and without struggle, they had no reason to be.

That is a sad thing, Tommu, a man who has no reason to be. If you take away his reason to be then he will try to create one, and the danger is that he will think that his creation is real. It would seem that nothing could be more futile than a group of men struggling over which end of a field a coconut is to be found.

And yet, thousands of men watch that struggle. They begin to imagine that they are less than the men who struggle on the field. They imagine that the struggle over the coconut is important and that the carrying of the coconut is reality and the squalor of their lives is not.

How have we come to this, Tommu? How have we come to the position where a pointless game can blind people to what is important? Where the name of Our Granny can be distorted to persuade people with no purpose that they have one? Where the only relief is in sleep and sleep can only be obtained through liquor?

That is the sad truth, Tommu. In the forest, we were the only humans among the animals. Outside the forest we, ourselves, are the animals because the other animals are gone.”

“You are very pessimistic,” I replied, “is it not our ability to dream that separates us from the animals? Are we not human because we can imagine a world that is different from what we see before us?”

“We cannot know whether animals dream. Our duty as humans is to distinguish between wakefulness and sleeping; between what is real and what is not; between what is good and what is not. Do you remember my father?”

“I don’t think that I ever knew him,” I answered.

“Possibly not. You were a little younger than me but I can remember when your father would come to visit us and bring you with him but I was only young myself so you are likely to have forgotten.

My father served with yours. He was one of the first to learn to drive the tractor. I can remember how proud I was to see him, seated high up on this giant machine, clearing the fields and ploughing long, straight furrows in the earth. A child could not avoid being taken with the sight of his father in control of that snorting beast.

I would go with him to the fields and the other Guardians would carry me as we followed the tractor across the plain. The plough would cut through the soil like a knife cutting through the skin of an animal and we would see the furrows, rich and black as they were turned by the blade, revealing a whole, unsuspected world underneath of insects and worms. It was as if we were seeing what no-one had ever seen before.

I think there were only two drivers in those days so, as the child of one of them, I was sure of special treatment and, naturally, I took it at face value. I thought that the whole village was there to treat me well and that the world revolved around me. I was allowed to insert the pin that held the plough onto the tractor. I rode next to my father, leaning against the mudguard as he drove the great machine along. I imagined that the tractor was the greatest gift to the world that there had ever been.

I saw that my father had more power over the earth than a hundred men with hoes. I was a part of something greater than the tractor, greater than the fields, greater than the island. I do not know if my father thought that too. Sometimes I fear that he did. He was not very old and it would be no shame if he was taken in by the power and the honour that people did him.

In any case, I certainly did not see how much he presumed by thinking that he could change the pattern of the ages and that the island would simply accept it. Week after week, field after field, the work proceeded and field after field, week after week, confidence grew.

Oh, foolish confidence.

Then one day my father was breaking new ground, ploughing an uphill stretch away from the village when the plough caught on a root deep under the earth. The tractor was just moving off and my father, in his confidence had given it too much power so that the front of the machine reared up. My father was thrown to the ground, upon which the engine stopped and the machine ran backwards.

For my father that was the end of everything. His head lay behind the wheel and it was crushed like a pumpkin.

I was at the other end of the field. I did not see what happened but I knew at once that something was wrong. The men did not tell me anything and that was the worst thing of all. They took me home to my mother and all that I can remember are her screams of rage and grief. I could not understand what had occurred. It has taken me many years to begin to understand what happened that day.”

“It was your father whose head was crushed by the tractor? I had never made the connection. All the Guardians know that story but no-one ever told me that you were the child.”

“Who would remember the name of a six year old child? And perhaps it is better that they did not make that linkage. My mother was never the same after my father’s death. I was left much to my own devices and I used the time to think deeply. When she died a few years later, I spent time as a Gardener to learn the ways of Our Granny and it was then that I understood how far things had deviated from Her intentions. That was the beginning of the next part of the journey.”