By Subraj Singh
Once upon a time, the world was bigger. And brighter. And better. Guyana was bigger too. A little brighter. A little better. It sat on the shoulder of what was then South America, which stretched out into what was then the Caribbean Sea.
The country was a desperate woman, spurning her land-locked lovers and yearning to be in the cool arms of the ocean.
Eventually, her wish came through and she came to regret it.
The ice in the northern and southern parts of the globe melted and the water levels rose and began to encroach on the land. Little by little. Bit by bit. The Land of Many Waters suddenly had too much water. The blue of the earth stretched like a plague over the planet. The invading sea began drowning abandoned cities as people fled the coasts, moving further inland to the hills and mountains, destroying and building as they went.
In Guyana, the old kings died and new kings swam out of the misery brought on by the great floods. They were greedy and corrupt. They enslaved. They killed. The artists rose up and rebelled. They sang and painted and spoke and wrote about the kings and the terrible things they did. They tried to pass on bravery through art; they tried to incite a revolution.
The monarchies saw themselves shaking, threatening to collapse under the weight of pens and paper and inks and paints and words. They grew scared. They outlawed art. They tried to get rid of it. They tried to kill it. And so, the Art Wars began.
Emissaries of the kings spewed out bullets and bombs at the artists. And what did the poor artists do? They fired arrows made of poems and wielded their paintbrushes like knives, and their bullets were bits of prose and their bombs were the booming of drums that singers rang to and dancers pranced to. The artists were defeated and they fled from the mountains, into the forests nearer to the New Coast. Mother Nature, who inspired them, would protect them. They hid, cloaked in greenery, and concealed themselves from the evil kings. Generations of artists remained hidden in the forests, quietly practicing their crafts and passing their knowledge on to their children.
Meanwhile, the lands of the kings grew cold and dull. There were no paintings to decorate the walls of the palaces, no songs to cause a lover’s heart to flutter, no stories to enchant the princes and princesses, no poems to marvel at, no music to soothe. The land wilted with the loss of imagination. One king, who thought himself wiser than the rest, proclaimed that art is only a harmful thing if it is not controlled, if it is allowed to roam free like some wild animal, to develop and bloom as the artist desires it to. Art, with restrictions, art that is caged, on the other hand, posed no threats.
Hunters were sent into the jungle to find artists, whom they milked for their skills. The artists were made slaves and were exploited for their work. That is how the second wave of the Art Wars began.
*
Every child of the forest knew that story. Every fledgling poet, painter, singer – regardless of what craft your family practiced – that was the first story that was told to you as a child. It was both creation myth and history. It was a legend that surged through the hearts of every forest dweller, every artist, from the moment it was whispered into their ears at birth, to the moment it left their lips as they died.
Like all good stories, there were several variations. Each wandering clan of artists – from those who steeped their toes in the coastal waters each morning, to those brave people who hid at the foot of the mountains – told the story with their own particular nuances, their own changes and inflections. But each version was always more similar to the others, rather than differing from them. Parents poured that story from their mouths into their children’s mouths, and they then passed it on to their own children. It went on forever, like a circular pattern in a cloth-weaving or a poem that looped and went right back to the beginning. That story was the tale the lone storyteller of Holding Cell No.15 whispered to himself and the other prisoners, as they waited to receive their fate. He told the story day and night, like a prayer. He felt that the story was food that sustained them, that kept them alive, that kept them hoping.
“…and the hunters would catch the artists and force them to do terrible things. They would be made slaves and compelled to work for the king. Their art would be forced out of them and would no longer be their own… No matter what happened to them, though, the artists never gave up. They fought to stay alive because they knew their roles were important. Artists are creators. They are keepers of secrets of the soul. Without them, this world is nothing,” Jerome, the storyteller said, ending his tale for the night.
He turned around and sat, pressing his back against the cold bars of the cell. He looked at the other prisoners and they looked at him. He saw them as they were: destitute, hungry, scarred, afraid. They saw him as a fellow prisoner, but they knew that he was also the Teller of the Tale.
Jerome and Abigail were the first to be captured and dragged up the mountain and thrown into the cell. Jerome looked at his sister’s face, forlorn and hallowed out from starvation, and his heart bled for the smiling, ebony-skinned, brown-eyed girl who spent every waking moment of her life painting and drawing on the barks of trees, on flat rocks, on clothes, on whatever she could find. Imprisonment had destroyed Abigail. She lost the roundness of her face and her body grew gaunt and brittle. Her collar bones poked unnaturally out of her chest and she had developed a nervous, constant shaking in her hands. Abigail, who had always lived a life of colour, was tucked forever in a corner of a cell on a high mountain, charged for the crime of painting. The walls of the cell were grey, the bars were black, everyone’s clothes had once been white but were now stained a dirty brown. The one thing Abigail dreamed about, with her head pressed to the cold ground, was colour: the pink and orange splashes in the late-afternoon sky, when the sun became a plump red cherry; the bright, cool green of grass; the luminous yellow of buttercups and ripe bananas; the blue sky, tender and innocent, that stretched infinitely above her head. The cell had no windows and was perpetually in a state of darkness.
The other inmates, Jerome noticed, were in similar states of psychological disintegration and physical collapse. Jen, the flute player, had arrived after Jerome and Abigail. She was from the coast and in her lucid moments she often liked to reminisce about
swimming in the ocean with her children. She came into the prison with long, curly hair that fell to her hips. When she was taken away for interrogation, like they all were, she was returned with her head shaved clean. The guards, armoured, wielding batons and rifles, threw her into the cell and scattered the locks of hair all around her. Jen had pressed her knees to her chest and sobbed against a wall of the cell.
Treated even worse was Anand. He was no more than twelve years old and he was a singer. He was small for his age, with large eyes and shaggy hair. His voice was beautiful. One night, a few weeks after he came, he started to sing. It was a song about birds – their beauty, the way they flew in the sky, the way they chirped, the way they could spread their wings and fly and be free. Anand’s voice was itself like a bird that night, soaring around the cage that was the prison cell. His voice was sweet and soft and it swelled in the confined space he was in, so its beauty became magnified and seemed to lighten the hearts of the other prisoners who were awakened from their empty sleep by the music that seeped from the boy’s lips. His song lit up the cell that night, cutting through everyone’s despair and thrumming through everyone’s hearts, willing them to beat harder, stronger. Anand’s song rose higher and higher, and by the end of it everyone’s spirits had been raised with it.
That was the last song the child ever sang. The guards heard him singing and they burst into the cell, tackling him to the ground. Three guards kept watch over Jerome, Abigail and Jen. Two guards held Anand down and forced his mouth open. One guard forced his fingers between the boy’s jaws, snatched his tongue and quickly sliced through it with a knife. Shrieks of pain and terror bubbled from Anand’s mouth and blood dribbled from his lips. The other artists had to cover their ears at the dreadful sounds he made even as they tried to comfort him, as they tried to stem the flow of blood.
The guards left the tongue behind. Week after week, it remained on the floor of the cell, a pink stub of flesh that ran with fluid, rotting slowly, turning purple then black, calling flies and then maggots. It was a slow process, with the tongue that once created such lovely music turning into a shrunken, torn bit of meat, utterly useless – nothing more than a husk of its former self. For a long while, Anand didn’t take his eyes off the spot where his tongue had fallen. Even after the tongue had vanished, even when all that was left was a dark stain on the floor, the boy would sometimes be found staring vacantly at that part of the ground.
Eventually, time hurried past the bars of the cell.
A man came to visit the inmates of No. 15 one day. He was tall with hair so neatly slicked back that not a single strand was out of place. He walked without swinging his arms, a display that was both robotic and menacing. His eyes moved rapidly around, flitting quickly from one thing to the next and Jerome was reminded of the ticking of clocks. Flick. Abigail. Flick. Anand. Flick. Dirty walls. Flick. Food basin. Flick. Jen.
For the first time since they had been gathered in the cell, the torches in the room were lit. The brightness of the flames shocked and momentarily blinded them. They covered their eyes and shrank back from the wild, beautiful element that had once meant food and family gatherings and warmth on cold nights.
A high-backed chair was placed in the room by two hooded guards and the man sat on it and observed the artists. It was obvious that he was a person of some standing, the way the guards bustled around him nervously. “Yes, Commander,” they whispered, genuflecting, each time they were addressed by the man.
The Commander, Jerome observed, was immaculately dressed. His clothes were carefully woven, with neatly-ordered black and white patterns emblazoned on his long coat and the front of his shirt. It was clearly the work of an artist – a weaver – and Jerome wondered how the man came by it. The man was no weaver.
“Artists,” the Commander spat, sitting on his throne and glaring at them. He looked around at the guards who sneered along with him. He waited and eyed the prisoners as if waiting for them to respond.
No one said anything. They had all retreated as far back as they could go. Jen was holding Anand close to her side and Jerome crouched on the floor with Abigail, her head pressed into his shoulder, her eyes barely open. The silence held tight and, then, was broken by the Commander.
“Now,” the Commander said, “You are all prisoners. You have all been placed here because each of you has engaged in high treason by practicing some form of art without approval or guidance from the authorities. Does anyone deny this? No, I didn’t think you would.” The Commander waited again and still no one said anything, so he continued.
“You there,” he said, pointing at Jen, “What do you do? What’s your area of expertise?”
“I…I am a flute player.”
“Flute? Interesting, interesting. We don’t have any flute players back home.”
“And you, boy? What skill do you specialise in?”
Anand shuffled uncomfortably.
“Well?”
Anand looked at Jen, at Jerome, at Abigail.
“Answer me!”
“He used to be a singer,” one of the guards offered.
“Used to?”
The guard bent down and whispered apologetically into the Commander’s ear.
“What? I keep telling you people not to injure them like that! Do not harm them in such a way that the skill is lost! That is the only thing we want from them, you fool! It is the only reason we keep them alive! How many times must this keep happening? What am I to do with them once they cannot sing or play or sculpt? Tell me.”
The Commander took a deep, angry breath and then pointed at Jerome. “You.”
Jerome looked him full in the face. “Storyteller.”
“Storyteller?”
“Storyteller.”
The Commander stroked his chin and kept his eyes locked with Jerome’s.
“Storytellers are usually the most dangerous of them all,” the Commander murmured to the guards, smiling. “They were the ones who incited the first rebellion. Long after the Great Floods, when the City on the Mountain was built, the storytellers were the ones who tried to turn the people against the King. They persuaded all the other artists to join them. They’re more dangerous than the rest, but they can also be the most valuable, the most entertaining…if they are trained and managed.”
“I will not be trained and managed. I am not a parrot or an ape. I tell my own stories…and the stories of my people, of artists.”
Jerome saw the man’s eyes harden and become chips of dirty brown metal. Abigail stirred slightly beside him like a seedling, moving at the touch of the shard of light that was her brother’s voice.
The Commander’s lips curved into a perfectly symmetrical smile and his metallic eyes twinkled at Jerome. “Who is the girl?” he asked.
“The storyteller’s sister. She paints,” replied one of the guards.
“Bring her closer,” the Commander said.
Before Jerome could move, one of the guards aimed his rifle at the middle of his forehead and the other guard dragged Abigail to the foot of the Commander’s throne. Out of the corner of his eye, Jerome could see Jen and Anand, tucked into a corner of the cell, pushing deeper and deeper into the blackness, terrified at the sight of the gun. The further they crushed themselves into the corner, the harder it was to see them without turning his head, the easier it was for them to blend into the grey wall – like disappearing ghosts, as if they were slowly seeping out of the cell.
The Commander prodded Abigail in the ribs with the tip of his shoe. Jerome was frozen in place by the sight of the gun trained on him. It was as if he had become one of those wooden sculptures the artists in the forests made in homage to the artists of the past – the artistic ancestors. He became a wooden figure like that of the ancient poet, who wrote the prayer about all being involved and all being consumed. The only difference was that he was not wood. He was flesh and blood and tears and sweat. He breathed air and he lived. With his sister offered to the Commander, with the guard aiming a weapon at him, with the only two friends he had left in the world cowering on the ground, Jerome felt that the life he prolonged every time he breathed was punishment for daring to defy, for daring to create, for daring to do it for himself and those he cared for.
Abigail’s eyes fluttered open and her lashes grazed the dirty floor of the cell. She blinked twice at him and then feebly started to move her head around.
“I hear you are a painter,” the Commander said grandly to her, smiling his perfectly symmetrical smile.
Abigail shielded one side of her face with her hair to keep the bright light of the torch held by a guard out of her eyes and she nodded ever so slightly at the Commander. She struggled to push herself to her knees and she teetered weakly before him, like a drunken worshipper praying before a smiling deity on his mighty throne; like a peasant before a king.
The Commander clapped his hands gleefully together. “Wonderful!” he proclaimed, “Wonderful! You must paint something for me. I need to see how good you are. My wife is very fond of paintings. Perhaps you should do a piece for me to take to her?” He made a short motion with his fingers and the guard who pulled Abigail to the centre of the cell quickly left and then returned with several items. He placed a length of canvas, several pots of paint, and a slender paintbrush before Abigail.
“My wife likes paintings of flowers,” the Commander informed her, “Please be kind enough to paint me some flowers. Poppies, perhaps? If you’re good, I’ll take you with me and we’ll go on a long journey to the top of the mountain, where there’s a kingdom of light waiting for you. There you will be able to paint all the time. You will be able to paint until your fingers bleed.” His cold eyes twinkled as he grinned at Abigail.
Jerome could only watch helplessly as his little sister delicately touched the items before her, softly, unbelieving, as if the canvas was a stretch of silver and the pots contained liquid gold and the brush was a length of polished glass. She leaned close to the ground, her limbs contorted in strange angles as she tried to shift the pain away from her neck and her back and her arms and fingers. She pulled one of the paint-pots close to her nose and inhaled the pungent fragrance of the paint. Two tears rolled down her uncovered cheek, like runaways speeding over a hill. Everyone in the room watched her.
The Commander clapped his hands together sharply and Jerome’s breath caught in his chest. “Enough crying,” snarled the Commander, “Paint some poppies for me.”
Abigail slowly hauled herself into kneeling position once more and spread the canvas before her. She dipped her fingers into the pot of red paint and held them over the sheet, where red drops peppered the whiteness and glistened in the light of the fire.
“Use the brush,” the Commander muttered dryly.
She ignored him and traced her fingers across the canvas in wild, intricate patterns. The Commander frowned as her fingers became brushes and glided like red-shoed dancers across the sheet. Thin red lines marked their swirling dance, tracing a dense mass of scarlet circles, with a tiny white dot in the centre. Over and over again, she dipped her fingers into the red paint and deepened the shade of the circles before her. Her fingers began to move faster and faster and the circles grew wider and wider. Her movements became more erratic and the red circles covered the canvas and seemed to evolve, in Jerome’s mind, into the inside of a snarling mouth – terrifying and bursting with a blazing and ferocious energy.
“Stop this at once!” The Commander growled. “Stop it! This is my painting and I told you I wanted poppies! It is my painting, damn it!”
Abigail looked up at him, her eyes still wet with tears, and whispered, “No, it is mine.”
Suddenly, she leapt. It was as if she had been saving her energy while imprisoned so she could perform this one final feat of power. She sprang to her feet, quick as a loaded gun and she raked her fingers across his face. He screamed and clasped his hands to his metal-like eyes, trying to shield himself from more blows, trying to stop the oozing of blood that leaked from the scratches of her nails, trying to wipe the red paint from his face as it mixed with his blood and stung the wounds.
The guards snatched Abigail and dragged her to the floor again. She wrenched herself from their grasp and picked up the discarded paintbrush. Wielding it like a weapon, she lunged at the Commander again as he rose from his chair to escape the madwoman with paint-stained fingers. The guards pried the paintbrush from her grasp and it clattered loudly against the stone floor, creating a death rattle that reverberated around the entire room.
Jen was screaming. The Commander was on his feet, cursing and rubbing the paint and blood from his face. The guards were hurling insults at Abigail and kicking her as she lay on the floor, unmoving, all of the energy drained from her tiny body from the effort of trying to scratch out the Commander’s eyes.
Jerome, watching as it all unfolded, had not moved a single muscle. It was only until a guard was dragging Abigail’s limp form from the room did he realise that they were taking his sister away. The tears came then, burning with the fire of memories of the girl who loved to paint with her fingers.
Jerome looked on as they took her away from No. 15. He could feel Jen’s hands in his and he could feel Anand’s sobs as the little boy braced himself close. All Jerome thought about was Abigail, sick and dying for weeks, and then finally using her last bit of strength to fight the cold man with the dangerous eyes.
The Commander pinned those eyes to Jerome and with claw-marks and flecks of paint still on his face he resumed his seat once more. He tried to regain his composure and he gratingly snapped at Jerome, “You, storyteller, tell me a story. Tell me now!”
Jerome looked up at the man, tears flowing, his mind still on his sister, and began his tale.
“Once upon a time,” he said, as his voice cracked with rage and sorrow, as he willed himself to be brave, “The world was bigger. And brighter. And better…”
