I had been until then a predictable graduate of the Slade’s short course for students of the Selassie Bursary: capable but not exciting, and without a distinctive voice and vision of my own. The Emperor was pleased to send students abroad to study in all disciplines, and bring them back to teach so that his nation might rise among the peoples of the world. I was full of skills and notions and likely until this moment to inherit some academic post here in Addis Ababa from which I would rise according to my political and social acuity rather than my brush. I was – had been – a practitioner of the craft of painting and yet not a painter.
No more. Now I became something else. Before, I’d struggled to find something to say. Now I had so many things in me that I didn’t know where to begin, and they came out jumbled together for a while, producing a crazy paving of vibrantly coloured lizards and birds fading Escher-style into buildings after Le Corbusier – who had so far extended himself as to draft the new city of Addis Ababa for the Fascists all combining into a woman’s face. I worked on it for a day and then tore it apart in a fury for failing to meet my expectations. My skill, or perhaps my mental discipline, were incapable of rendering the thought that was in my head – and that was how it went for the next weeks, as I sought a new understanding of what I was. Liquid silver bubbled in my mind and before my eyes – strange shapes, futures and pasts and presents colliding with blatant symbols of politics and sex, science and rock and roll, but I could not express what I saw. The idea would burn in me, simple and obvious and filled with a restless and infectious energy, so that I knew anyone who saw it would be struck by it, penetrated and inverted and remade as I had been, and yet I could not hold that certainty in my mind and transmit it to the canvas. It leaked, warped and split, so that with each brushstroke my attempt to make an image became instead a battle with evanescence: frantic repairs to a ship sinking before it was even in the water. I wept, wasted canvas, and began again, and again. I stopped ripping up my failures, but set them aside on the ground like discarded library books, until my studio was crowded with a map of my footsteps around and around the desert of my limitation.
Finally, I broke, ate, and slept for twenty hours, and then awoke in an exhausted, placid clarity that felt as if the silver had woven itself into my bones. I was not ecstatic any longer, I was enlivened, uplifted. Anaximander had solved the problem for me, had as much as told me how to deal with it. I broke my dreams into pieces, confined each fragment to a single canvas which might – must – connect with another and another, so that what was in me was imperfectly rendered by being multifaceted instead of holographic, but at the same time achievable by a man painting in the actual world of three dimensions, without the power to reach through the skein of his work and arrange additional layers to be found by a probing eye. The viewer must learn to see my work in a way different from other art, must allow – indeed must reach for and embrace – radical alterations in perspective. Out of Ethiopia would come an art that demanded a new mode of perception to be understood: the mind of the viewer would not only be changed by the work itself but would undergo willing modification simply in order to appreciate that work on its own terms. To reach the new world I would express, my audience would have to make a commitment, to cross a small but significant Rubicon of the self and meet me halfway.
Each piece was composed of five separate canvases, and to see the whole work one must look at them in whatever order and hold in the mind the impression and image of each. To look at a single one alone, or to look at all of them as if they were a panorama, was to misunderstand. The work did not – could not – exist in paint: it existed in the mind as a conjunction, and all five parts must be apprehended at once. Part of the experience was the stretching of the mind, the tearing and repairing of the remembered images. I was making of each person in my audience a zoetrope, save that it was not the illusion of motion that I created by deceiving the eye, but the truth of things as I now understood them, set from my mind into art and then released by the act of observation into theirs. Each painting was not an image of the world but of my mind as it assembled that world for me, and in that it revealed the truth of all art all the time.
I finished the first fivefold painting and hung it on the wall at the next party. Two days later it was sold – for a not-ridiculous amount, but more than I had ever expected to make – to a music executive chasing Ethio-jazz to its source in the hope of profit. He, in turn, hung it on his wall in New York City and explained that you had to see all of it at once, and this complexity of approach – as much as the content – was admired by a Rockefeller, a Heinz and two Kennedys, and the editor of Time.
Bekele’s Amhara-modernist dreamscapes, the New Yorker wrote in its next issue,
are composed of parts, symbolising a fusion of traditional and contemporary understandings of personhood. Each work embraces and distinguishes body, soul, mind and heart, but also fascinatingly the tools and belongings with which a person surrounds himself, acknowledging that we are not only our physical and spiritual selves as given, but also what we may make of those materials and the world around us, and hence what we may become.
To hear the fearmongers these days, you’d think a human mind was as easily shaped as water, but in my experience the business of changing perception is more like carrying a donkey up a hill. If I did it just a few times, amid all that passion and noise and paint, perhaps I did not do so badly, indeed.
*
What came out of me was a sequence of tableaux somewhere between Bosch and Lichtenstein, branded at the time by a canny Englishwoman with a shop near Fortnum & Mason as ‘the Nuclear Prophecies’. In Ethiopia, as much as anywhere else, we lived in the shadow of the hydrogen bomb, the moreso perhaps as we didn’t have one and didn’t want to be involved in the private theological differences of Washington and Moscow – but would be involved anyway if the war came, bringing first unnatural fire and then endless winter to our wide green land.
Green, incidentally, was what it was, and what it is. Ethiopia is not inevitably the cracked mud that is burned into the psyche of Britain and Europe by the bad times of famine that rocked the world. It is a vibrant country, mountainous and misty as much as sandy and endless. That first quintet boiled with nature because nature was what I knew. Years later, I took a trip to Moscow and was amazed, as we landed, to see that the city I had always imagined as a grey industrial grid was clutched in the arm of a great forest, and struck through with a wide river. It must be the same for other people flying into Addis Ababa and expecting some desert fort like Gordon’s Khartoum in the film with Charlton Heston: white walls and yellow sand, and, of course, the demented black men of the desert lurking all around.
All these years later in London, I found myself once more beset by ghosts from other realms. The perfume of stars was the same rich and mouth-watering anise, though now I worried that it might be evidence of a ministroke rather than of dimensions distant and unreal. As before, I painted what I saw: my hands were not imagining but following a map that only I could see, and I saw it perfectly clearly. I knew by old habit how to break the picture into parts and so produce something that made sense to someone without my fractured consciousness, and so I did, no longer wrestling with what was in my mind to force it on to the canvas, but inviting it and making space for it. Without the urgency and arrogance of youth, I found I was content to accept its strictures, and without the fear of failure I did not seek to moderate what came, so that the business of art was to some extent a placid and exploratory one – as one might explore a tornado in a glider, if one did not fear for the structure of the plane. In that earlier encounter, I had traced the outline of a grim leviathan in a forest of numbers – to the stark disapproval of the viewing public, who wanted more in the vein of frozen worlds and bikini astronauts – and now I revisited that unloved image, setting the scene in a vast underground commuter tunnel. It hung ugly in the air, more threatening, I think, than it would have been in the water. The object of its scrutiny – a fleshy fel
low on his drive home – looked suitably appalled. Annie wasn’t sure what the game engine would make of such a thing, but that was the point, she said, to inject the unexpected into the tone, the nightmarish into the visual. Thus encouraged, I threw in more mystical shapes as they came to me: a fishwhite assassin in a Warhol suit; a banker in the robes of an ancient priest; Annie herself, much older, captured and interrogated in the ugly society she had imagined for us; and her grandmother, slim and beautiful and ailing, cast as a Roman scholar and made just different enough that I did not think Michael would see it.
All good stuff, and I smiled as the gates of my subconscious opened – or the gates of the great Jungian quantum collective did, so far removed from our first encounter and yet, no doubt, hardly changed at all from that divine perspective – and connected me with the great artistic beyond. Angst and strangeness bubbled out of me, and we put it all into the game: Clotho at her work, lifting a boy from a stark, Italian Futurist coffin that might have been the headquarters of an international bank; a great crowd of identical women laying siege to a white stone castle; a dead man lying murdered in the street of a city whose new architecture sprouts cancerous and optical from homely London redbricks; a nest of wires becoming roots becoming roads, penetrating the sleeping skull of a goddess; a lonely detective pursuing or fleeing a killer along a film noir alleyway whose shadows were cast not by dressed neo-Gothic stone but by the steel and glass of tomorrow’s skid row. Annie’s software recognised the human shapes and weeded them out, replicating them as statues and logos, and designed apartment buildings and council estates, mansion flats and skyscrapers after my fashion. Little by little, over the map of London, our new territory grew, dipping in and out of what was there and becoming something that was no longer grafted on but supporting and penetrating, so that our illusion became the substrate upon which the old city sustained itself and without which it would wither and die. The infection became the host.
I worked, and felt younger. I tried to weave everything in that Annie and Colson asked for, to pick out the pictures that seemed full of meaning and implication, and then they’d come back to me for this thing they called ‘top-loading’. They wanted me to take what was beautiful and moody and make it ‘information-rich’ or ‘information-supersaturated’, to encode specific narrative significances into every design, to the point where there were whole other stories happening that no one would know about except us, and perhaps a very few who might stumble upon them and pay attention. There was a subclass of gamers, Annie said, who existed as ludic spelunkers, interested only in going where no digital foot had gone before, and they would abandon the main history and work their way through every subsidiary tunnel and hidden door and find whatever we left. Let two disparate characters be reading the same book, she said, or let their homes have the same plan, and no sooner was the game released than there would sprout a jungle of secondary interpretations to make villains of heroes and saints of monsters. Woven about the spine of events, there must be truths and implications, revealed in asides and recurrent symbols. They would make meaning out of everything.
I painted until my fingers cramped, until my chest and back ached as they had not for years. It seemed that I must put down an entire life for each character in a single frame. I tried to capture them, to paint them perfectly so that their identities would flare into life as their portraits were viewed from different angles.
And then one day we were done. My part was over. For a few weeks we kept in touch – they came to me with little ideas and problems, pieces of gameplay, even, and I suggested things that were by turns terribly naive and terribly clever, because I had no idea what I was talking about. I liked that part too. But in the end they faded away, months more work to do on their end, and I went back to being Mr Bekele of the Bekele Home Security company. I kept painting, but we had seventeen workshops in five cities in the UK and no concerns about the economy because people always need keys cut and locks fitted, and now CCTV and personal alarm monitoring. It doesn’t matter what else is happening, the client still wants a door they can shut. I had plenty to do.
In November the game came out. I was rather surprised by how true it was to what I had painted. I saw posters on the sides of buses with my architecture looming over the driver’s seat. There was even a brief spot at the end of the six o’clock news, the bit where they try to cheer you up about the end of the world by showing you a swimming bunny.
I didn’t really notice it at first, because even with my new grasp on all things digital I wasn’t connected very strongly with the world of games. I had an Instagram account I used to show details of my new work to the hundred or so people who were interested, mostly friends. I was not on Facebook because I loathed the interface – I’d become a digital snob in tandem with becoming digitally aware. Good grief but Facebook riled me, laid out like the want ads of a local paper and glaringly white, the algorithm stifling news from outside one’s bubble and pressing inappropriate sponsored content like a man on a street corner with a collection of flyers for his new-minted religion. I was exploring Twitter and finding it by turns enlightening and infuriating: a close encounter with wit and scholarship and the joy of living that could drop away beneath one’s feet into a sea of sheer pointless nastiness – though it had never happened to me, beyond a few low-level encounters with bored children sniping at an old man.
Even sculling peaceably through the backwaters of the Internet, though, I began to realise that Witnessed was breaking out, that people were talking about it. Then when I turned around it was a huge success, and then a phenomenon, and then this year’s breakout thing. Paper magazines began to talk about it, schools and parents objected to it, and then an MP denounced it in the House of Commons, which in turn required that another MP come to the game’s defence. In the United States it was denounced as un-American, which was nothing more than the truth because none of us was remotely American, but for some reason the assertion stirred up a controversy and we got more and more coverage. Was the game sensationalist or simply sensational? Something about it spoke to people, certainly, and it gave them pause. You could explore Witnessed, fight in it, sneak in it, survive in it, or turn the tables on the game and become the oppressor. The protagonist and her nemesis duelled against the Orwellian backdrop of a nation not merely under surveillance but composed of it, a democracy where everything the citizenry did was totally transparent. The ostensible enemy was a mysterious group called – inevitably and humorously – the Fire Judges. One fought them, the other unknowingly served them, and it was hard to tell which of them was good and which evil, or whether such distinctions still made sense in the maze of missions and quests, right up until the Minotaur was revealed. It resonated with a population increasingly aware that ‘liberty’ does not in fact mean ‘micro-policing’ and that they had bartered away their historical legal rights in the name of keeping out a fifth columnist jihadi Muslim army that did not exist in the way they had been told. Then, too, here was a fantasy world which discreetly inverted the established conventions of such creations. White people looked subtly wrong in the game, sickly and slick. It was an elegant political prank, especially in a medium not widely known for progressive nuance, and it advanced the notion of games as art, and that in turn created comment, and comment – well, you already know what comment is.
The commercial truth, by the same token, is that paranoia sells – especially sophisticated and atmospheric paranoia with an attractive lead character – and sell it we did. We sold not only games and subscriptions but merchandise. We put my sketches and my paintings on T-shirts and mugs and key rings. We sold a board game, movie rights, a novelisation, and we made … well. More money than I knew what to do with, to be honest. Real money, of the kind that erases debts and creates dynasties in their place. And of course, all my old work was suddenly very sought-after and expensive. A few paintings I had shut away in the cool attic of our warehouse in Royston were abruptly worth millions, more than all the business we would
do for five years. Inevitably, at that point, someone asked me to paint a new collection. Greek billionaires bought a dozen canvases at a time, with who knew what mad money. I went on Radio 4 with Colson, Newsnight Review with Annie, and we talked a lot of nonsense about the zeitgeist and our unique creative pathway. It was heady and enjoyable not least because I had no need for any of it, no driving urge. I was a happy passenger on my own success, and my greatest pleasure lay in seeing the success of those I loved. Michael was pleased with me: proud and amused as much as bemused – though Lord knows, his daughter becoming a multimillionaire in her twenties must have been a little startling.
The game was a phenomenon. You could choose not to play it – but by the end of the year, you couldn’t claim not to have heard of it.
Then one afternoon Annie was asked, in an interview with a small YouTube channel run by a friend, whether she thought women and particularly women of colour were still under-represented in games. She laughed, and said that, given that they were people of colour, and particularly female people of colour, she didn’t see how in a global society still obedient to a tiny minority of rich white men they could be anything but under-represented. Then she discussed as a point of interest the business of photographic emulsions and the skin of black persons. She went into some detail – fascinating, I thought – about the process and the design decisions in the making of Witnessed, and where the team had had to rework the game palette, even the colour of the notional sun, to deal with the shortcomings of some digital displays in the representation of non-white bodies. The game was a game, Annie said, but it was also real, and the art in it – mine and hers – had found its basis in a real world that had not yet overcome its various entrenched and accidental racisms.