‘Look, Francisco! Look into the womb of my Virgin Camera.’ Mr Mageye could not help laughing, despite the gravity of humour in his expression.
‘Look, Francisco,’ he cried. ‘Deacon approaches within or upon or beneath the back-bone of the Whale. He now embodies the elemental furies of many an adventurer and explorer. He’s the solid ghost who hangs under the Cave of the Moon. He’s a submarine commander about to launch a hidden torpedo. He bundles his constituency into himself. He arrives at Jonah’s house … It took me ages to film that bit … His face is black as thunder. He thunders at the door and sweeps into the dining-room where Jonah sits. Look and listen, Francisco.’
‘What in God’s name is the matter, Deacon?’
‘News from home. Have you read last week’s papers which arrived today? Bloody November is upon us I tell you! How can you stomach the end of the world, Jonah? This Whale has no back door into the Bank of America.’
Jonah crossed to the window and looked out upon the river.
‘There they are,’ he said. ‘Floating high and dry. I knew there was something in the air. My house gave a slight tremor a moment or two ago. Earthquakes do shake the region once in a while. Water is floating ash.’
Jonah was clearly disturbed. He felt the turbulence of dying fish in himself within the vista of futures. He felt the rape of species. He felt as if he were being choked by stocks and bonds.
Deacon was mad, Deacon was angry. ‘The papers say you have broken the law and defrauded the Bank, Jonah. The Inspector is on his way.’
Jonah moved — turbulent stomach and all — to the dining-table in the middle of the room and polished the shining table-top that the sawyers in the Mission had prepared.
‘It’s as bright as a coffin,’ he said. ‘We shall dine on table-top coffins, Deacon. Bring your constituency.’ As he spoke Spider Anansi crept delicately out of the coffin. He danced upon coal.
Human Spiders, Anansi tricksters, were once the saviours of slaves transported through the Middle Passage from Africa. They secreted runaways in graveyards, in coffins.
But an irony came into being within the play of populations, the irony of sweet-tasting power that the political firebrand began to enjoy in himself as he roasted his followers.
Picture him dining now on the fish in Jonah’s stomach: fish reserved for dignitaries in the banqueting hall.
‘What more intimate picture may I paint,’ said the Jester Mr Mageye, ‘than to give Anansi access to his master’s delicacies, stomach, temple? They are apparently equal now in the sight of the state. It’s a figure of speech, mind you. Nothing sexual. I’m talking, remember, about populations that these archetypal tricksters represent, the epic embodiment of populations in crisis. Not individual indulgences. We know little of the collective, hidden ambivalences within mixed or heterogeneous societies, the inner trophies that one group may secure from another, the haunting sense of loss or retention of privilege or power, the greed, the longings, the ruses, the strategies, behind the façade of establishments.
‘When Anansi becomes as much a ruling appetite — in the banqueting hall of history — as the former missionary or ruler or master with whom he contended — then the establishment and the trickster are equals. Listen, Francisco, to what Jonah is now saying to Deacon.’
‘There is some consolation,’ Jonah said slowly, ‘in the thought that — as the end of my mission approaches — blacks and whites are equals. I have converted Anansi, have I not, to cast aside Doubt. He can trust me. His growing appetite for the good things of the world may kill not only revolutionary originality but bitterness at the injustices of the past. We are equals now, black and white.’
He knew he was lying in Deacon’s teeth. Deacon wanted to say: ‘You are a bloody liar, Jonah,’ but he kept silent.
Suddenly I was confronted by the ramifications of the Trickster in Mr Mageye’s all-inclusive film. I was down here in the hall looking at Deacon, looking at myself acting up there. Was it Deacon’s ghost up there, or was it me feeding upon his lips as he stifled his words?
Was it politic to sustain a traffic in lies?
I touched my flesh-and-blood Mask in order to sift the power of lies within the art of the Camera, lies that bear on Conscience, the trickster-Capacity of Conscience to question itself openly (yet hide itself all the more effectively), to spy itself in the speaking yet self-gagging roles that it plays in Aboriginal, archetypal theatre.
How integral is the lie in every evolution of collective theatre to know the truth yet kill it?
Jonah was lying to Deacon. Deacon accepted — or appeared to accept — the lie out of political necessity or fear. I was masked in Deacon in watching myself on the screen. Not myself! I had no desire to lie. Did the screen lie then? Or did I lie? Who am I? Where am I in a mass-media reductive age that Mr Mageye seeks to illumine and transform through the cellular chemistry of interwoven spectralities in others built into unique dialogue and response in oneself?
My head was spinning but I kept the Mask firmly in place as Mr Mageye’s portrayals continued to unroll down here in the banqueting hall and up there on the screen.
‘It’s a question of pride,’ said Jonah. ‘Pride in God’s will. I must win, Deacon, don’t you see? At all costs. Nothing counts but winning. Even if I have to drag Jonestown into the grave. I must teach Anansi to forget. Anansi populations must fuse into eternity. Eternity is a realm of forgetfulness. I shall persuade my people here in Jonestown to eat or drink whatever I dish out. Poison is palatable when it is braced with projected dominion over all species in a coming paradise or eternity when we shall be millionaires in devouring the planet. Not only doomed fish but doomed species of all sorts. It’s not just cyanide in Coca-Cola or milk or champagne or whatever. It’s the conquest of the lower orders. Don’t you see, Deacon?’
Deacon wanted to shout NO but he lied to himself and nodded. He pretended all was well but he knew he would have to break the pact and shoot Jones on the Day of the Dead. Perhaps not before but certainly then. He would strengthen his fingers on the trigger by slicing mine off to assist his. Thus he would generate in me the sensation that when he fell under the Cave of the Moon I would shoulder his ambivalent, angelic, ruthless Mask and begin to play him up there in the sky or screen and down here in the soil of the banqueting hall.
The troubling dimensions of the lie were as pertinent as celestial mathematics. Mr Mageye knew that the self-confessional, self-judgemental arts of the Trickster were essential in laying bare a fallen, perpetually falling humanity. He prodded Deacon — as he swung in the sky between heaven and earth and under the Cave of the Moon — to make visible the Virgin Goddess Kali from whom sprang a multitude of arms that were reminiscent of the cosmic Spider.