My sentence has been passed. I am to be thrown from a high cliff to the unyielding rocks below. This is the last story I am going to tell. Like all stories, it will end in death. But out of this death will come the only life there is.

I remember a time when I lived in my village and was hot-headed and got into fights over the meaning of a word. I was vain and certain about destiny. All that changed when the Hoplites overran our home.

They came suddenly when I was arguing with a friend about the meaning of the word “vanity.” He tried to tell me some tale about a cock and a wolf he had heard from old folks who told stories when they were drunk in the evening, when the stars elongated in the Mediterranean night. But he couldn’t tell the story properly, and was about to strike me out of frustration when the Hoplites emerged from the shadows and pounced on us. I fought them off instinctively, knocked down two, but felt a whack on my head and saw the stars elongating a long time in my fall.

We were borne away in cages not big enough to hold a lion. Seven of us crouched there, brave young men of our land. I watched the houses of our village fade into the green forest. I hung onto the last curve of the path and the last cry of the women weeping as we were carried off into captivity.

We travelled many nights. I don’t remember the days. Only the nights when the memory was most alive, burning with the pain of loss. The days were wounds in which the mind fell into a fire and devoured itself.

They fed us very little, water from stagnant ponds, scraps from the tables of ordinary soldiers. The further away we travelled, the dimmer our voices became.

At first we roared with grief, like wolves. We cursed. We howled. We beseeched the gods, but the gods were mute and their muteness infected us. One by one we lost the will to cry out. A few of us died from the shame of our broken voices.

One of us, a young lanky lad, kept up his spirits for three weeks by singing all the songs of our land that he could remember. He began with funereal songs and ended with lullabies our ancestors made up to keep spirits away from children so they could sleep. We had no way of knowing that when he got to the songs of the children was when he would expire. When he died our melodies were extinguished, and we succumbed to oblivion. We shrank. By the end of that terrible journey I had swallowed my voice. I had forgotten how to speak.

It’s strange how one tells tales of many things but rarely about the moment that split one’s navel from the earth. We tell stories to forget our awful truths. I tell all this now because it was a long time ago, and I have never allowed myself to think about it. But these days, with the evening lengthening and the days shortening, it feels right to go back to where it all began. It began with the loss of my voice.

When we arrived, in Samos, one of the Hoplites asked me a question.

“Do you remember where you have come from?”

I nodded and shook my head at the same time. I opened my mouth and only sand came out. I felt like I had died in my own life.

It turned out that new bondsmen were sought after in those times. I ran errands, cleaned lavatories, washed clothes. Later I became so favored in some households that I performed some of the duties of the master on the wife. This surprised me most: the strange preferences the masters sometimes had and the secret desires of their wives. It was the worst way of being a slave.

I learned that if one earned enough money one could buy one’s freedom. I accumulated money in small doses, a coin here, a dinar there. Often I watched ants with their grains and saw how with the constancy of their labor they amassed quite a store for themselves for the winter months.

I did many jobs, not only in a merchant’s house where I was a slave, but in other households. The children grew fond of me. They found my face funny. In the daytime I lost myself slaving for others, but at night I regained what I had lost. The night always took me back home to the stories of the elders, stories of foxes and birds, and the strange deeds of men. In the quiet of those nights I recalled more stories than I remember being told. But they didn’t come to me for a long time. I had lived in captivity half a lifetime, and had bought my freedom, and was looking down the long slope to the next life before they came to me, the gift of my early old age.

One evening the children of the merchant gathered round me and asked me to tell them a story. Making impossible requests seemed their birthright, but this was the oddest request they had ever made. They knew I was mute, yet they asked me to tell them a story.

They sat with eager faces in their little aristocratic robes with fine sandals on their feet. I sat on the floor barefoot before them. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but nothing came out. So I told them stories with my facial expressions and my hands. I made large gestures. When I told them the story about a wolf, I became the wolf. Everything I needed to say could be said through my eyes. They watched me, spellbound. For the first time I realized that a story could abolish history, dissolve time, and make of several people one listener.

That was when I became aware that storytelling was my inheritance. It was all I had left from whatever circumstances had given birth to me, all the past that was lost—my origins, my home, my ancestry. And all that remained were these mute stories I told the children. I never knew that my identity could be compressed into an instinct to invent that which isn’t there.

The reputation of my stories travelled far. The children of all manner of rich people wanted me to tell them frightening tales. Sometimes they would give me a coin or a tiny gold piece or food. While running errands I would think up new tales, new gestures. I became known as the one who told stories without words.

Then one day something happened which changed all that. I was in the house of a rich cloth merchant. It was after dinner and the sun was moving toward the horizon. I had made up a story for the children. They clustered round me, eating grapes and olives. Then the merchant, who never attended these performances, and who was rarely at home, alarmed me by joining us. He brought over a chair and sat in our midst, taking center stage.

“I‘ve heard about these stories without words,” he scoffed. “Well, let’s see. Begin!”

And for the first time I froze. The story I‘d rehearsed in my mind deserted me. Confused, not knowing what to do, I opened my mouth.

I had seen the danger in telling stories about human beings. You never know what people would take personally. I remembered my ancestral tradition where animals bore the burden of the greatest wisdom. It occurred to me that I could say everything I wanted to say about human beings through animals. When you tell stories about animals people never see themselves as those animals. For me this was a new way of criticizing the world. And there was much to criticize. I had seen the folly of a dependence on fate. I had seen how blind people can be when they are rich. No one seems to think death will come to them, but the slave always lives with death.

“One day,” I said, “there was a wolf …”

If I could have bent my eyes round, I would have looked in astonishment at my own mouth. I had not heard my voice in decades. One of the children howled and a few of them scattered. The merchant was so disgusted that I was using words that he sent me packing, taking me for some sort of con man.

But something had changed. I could tell stories in my own voice. I was sold to new owners. I combined errands with travelling the countryside collecting fables from people—from farmers, winemakers, and cobblers. I collected mythologies from the marketplace. I wrote them down.

I told tales that turned the world upside down. I made the small powerful and the powerful small. I saw that you could stick your finger into people‘s eyes with your story, and they’d love it. I put a moral at the end of my stories, not because I wanted to teach morals, but as a way of disguising what I was really saying. When you give people a moral, they don’t think about the way in which the story undermines their world. It seems stories are a secret form of philosophy, even of religion. Stories are like air in which everything breathes. They are like water in which everything dreams.

I became famous and rich from something you couldn’t touch that passes from mind to mind. Something that works within sleep and works within life. This thing I speak of is a wonder. My stories bought my freedom and made me something more than just a man. This was a new kind of power. People came to me to think about their problems, their fears, and even to remember who they are. But I must have told stories well to have them used against me. I might be the first storyteller in history to be damned by their own tales.

One day, out of the blue, some philosopher, some priest brought upon me the same charge they brought against Socrates. They accused me of blasphemy, of poisoning the minds of the young. They used my stories to convict me, stories that say everything and nothing. Stories that look at the gods in a human way and humans in an animal way. Stories that said opposing things at the same time. How can anyone use stories as evidence of one’s belief? Stories are the enemies of belief, though they require you to believe them.

I have been a slave, a teacher, a cook, a cleaner, and I have tasted the immortal air of freedom. I have told stories to paupers, to the deaf, and to kings. And I know what all Greeks, all Africans know, that the fire out of which we are born is the fire out of which we will rise.

I can already hear them coming for me, the voices of those who fear the eternal power of stories. The cliff edge and unyielding rocks await me. I see myself falling. One must die before one’s story ends.

Afterword

This is a man who has lived, endured, and quietly overcome. This is the image of the storyteller. He has much to tell us because life has played fully the music of his existence. Here is a storyteller one can trust, because he has lived and suffered and thought.

I chose Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (ca. 1638) for its stark power, its restraint, its authenticity. Velázquez is an artist of undemonstrative truth. This is a touchstone painting. The humble truth of Aesop’s existence is stated as it is.

This painting is a pungent statement of the stoic attitude. Its colors are autumnal, the background plain, and the figure of Aesop stands out in poverty-transfigured relief. The face of Aesop is a canvas of suffering but his whole personality is suffused with a warm and affecting humanity. And then there is the large book partially visible in his right hand, symbolic of the transmutation of experience into literature.

For centuries Aesop was perceived as one who wrote folklore for children. But the truths he articulates in his stories are deadliest for adults. The facts of his life cast a new light on his stories, making his work deeper and more deceptive. That double quality is there in Velázquez’s painting: the fabular and the real, the humility of the man and the endurance of the work.

But what is most amazing about the painting is that Velázquez chooses a moment that is both sunk in the mud of time, as it were, and suspended above it. This is not a storytelling moment, but a moment of being, and therefore timeless.    

(Copyrights: Ben Okri. January, 2026. All Rights Reserved.)