transgression, truth, freedom

I'm sad today that I can't be at the Kenya PEN memorial reading in Nairobi, for GPO Oulu, Kenyan activist colleague murdered by the state four weeks ago.

It's at the Kenya National Theatre's Wasanii Restaurant, 2pm - 5pm.

I'm currently reading a collection of essays by Ben Okri, A Way Of Being Free.

One passage in Okri's book, on transgression, speaks profoundly to GPO's life and death. I just read it aloud to myself, to the soundtrack of I Ka Barra (Your Work) by Habib Koite and Bamada. It whirled my body across the room, opened my arms and pelvis out from my torso.

My friend Arnoldo Garcia, also a worker for human rights and justice, puts it with brilliant simplicity:

Say it.
Put music to it.
Dance it.

I've taken the liberty of inserting line breaks, rendering Okri's passage here as a found poem. Click on I Ka Barra, read the words below out loud, follow your body. Share it with me as a tribute to GPO Oulu, a young man killed for the transgression of working for truth and freedom.

In storytelling
there is always transgression,
and in all art.

There is nothing more shocking
or more dangerous
or more upsetting
to individuals and nations
than truth.

The truth -
Truth -
SHRIEKS: it wakes up
all the hidden bullies,
the hidden policemen,
and the incipient dictators
and tyrants of the land.

The truth can be our hidden selves
turned monstrous

or the pullulating bacteria
of our secret desires (agendas),
and all the unrealities and lies
and all the consequences
of our strange unhappy actions
that we spend all our time
hiding from and avoiding.

Praise be unto those
that cry out the truth,
for they are cultural
and spiritual heroes.

Transgression can also
simply reside
in creating a beautiful thing.
Sometimes the creation
of a beautiful thing
in a broken resentful age
can be an affront to the living,
a denial of their suffering.
Sometimes beauty
can be accusatory.
It can place an intolerable question mark
over the most complacent
and thick-skinned lives.
Beauty can become a burden,
an unbearable exposure
of collective cowardice
and sloth and smallness of spirit
in an era of malice,
an era of failure.

The joy of transgressing beautifully,
of taking readers to places
they wouldn't willingly go, this joy
ofj seducing or dragging readers
in spite of themselves to places deep in them
where wonders lurk beside terrors, this delicate
art of planting delayed repeat explosions
and revelations.......
this is one of the most mysterious
joys of all.

at bottom, and never wanting
to admit it, we really want to face
the hidden Minotaur within, we want
the drains unblocked, we want the frozen river
of our blood and compassion to flow again, we want this pain
so that we can be free.

It is just that we want this unpleasant job
of facing the dead and rotting thoughts,
habits, desires, notions and traditions
to be done with our collusion,
with our secret consent.

And we would much prefer to be enchanted
or to laugh
or to be taken out of ourselves
while the horrors are being faced,
while the ghosts are being exorcised.

And we hope afterwards that we will be lighter
for it all, and that the gods of harmony
will again, for a while, reside in us.

Ben Okri, from "The Joys Of Storytelling II", Ä Way Of Being Free