THE AFRICAN PERL BEN OKRI

THE AFRICAN PERL BEN OKRI

Short Stories, Poetry, Non-Fiction, Fiction,Drama

He grew up in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed at first hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England.

He was poetry editor for West Africa magazine between 1983 and 1986 and broadcast regularly for the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985. He was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge in 1991, a post he held until 1993. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1987, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Westminster (1997) and Essex (2002).

His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within(1981), are both set in Nigeria and feature as central characters two young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening in both their family and country. The two collections of stories that followed, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), are set in Lagos and London.

In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road (1991). Set in a Nigerian village, this is the first in a trilogy of novels which tell the story of Azaro, a spirit child. Azaro's narrative is continued in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Other recent fiction includesAstonishing the Gods (1995) and Dangerous Love (1996), which was awarded the Premio Palmi (Italy) in 2000. His latest novels are In Arcadia (2002) and Starbook(2007).

A collection of poems, An African Elegy, was published in 1992, and an epic poem,Mental Flight, in 1999. A collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, was published in 1997. Ben Okri is also the author of a play, In Exilus.

His most recent books are A Time for New Dreams (2011), a collection of linked essays, and a new collection of poetry, Wild (2012).

Ben Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. He lives in London.

In his recent book, A Time for New Dreams (2011), Ben Okri describes poetry as ‘the great river of soul-murmurings that runs within humanity’, and ‘true literature’ as ‘the encounter of possibilities’ that ‘tears up the script of what we think humanity to be’.

Such poetic metaphors and humane concerns indeed characterise the peculiar beauty of Okri’s writing. This can be read as blending the African oral storytelling tradition with Magic Realism.

A long-time resident in London, Okri takes as his grand subject the post-colonial history of his ancestral Nigeria, conjuring up panoramas of souls, visions, dreams, and suffering humanity’s struggle against exploitation and corruption. The latter especially resonates throughout the fabulous trilogy of novels that began with The Famished Road (1991), his several collections of short stories, essays, and poetry volumes including the just-published Wild (2012). Other important subjects for Okri are the demands of art and politics, symbolised in rich flights of fancy, allied to Jonathan Swift-like satirical allegories.

The Famished Road won the Booker Prize For Fiction in 1991. Its narrator is Azaro, a stubborn spirit-child who calls himself ‘an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead’; he is a witness for his parents and the compound they live in, a go-between for humans and spirits. This is necessary, because ‘the world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer’. It is also full of ‘the rotten milk of politics’, violence, traditional native rituals, human-animal hybrids, apparitions, sudden transformations of fortune and ‘a delerium of stories’. Azaro’s father is boxer ‘Black Tyger’, who fights fearsome spirit opponents, but also champions the community, as vote-seeking politicians and their thugs turn up with bribes and favours. The atmosphere is feverish but also hopeful, with pre-Independence rallies taking place.

The trilogy continues with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). By the opening of the third novel, ‘the future rulers of the nation slept in peace …. They dreamt of bottomless coffers to steal from’. Looming ever larger is bar-owner and power-broker Madame Koto, styled as ‘the priestess of a new and terrible way’, about to give birth to three monstrous children. She is the most exotic character – vain, corrupt but generous – who stages her wedding feast just as extravagantly as she supports the Party of the Rich. Despite her sycophantic celebrants, Azaro forsees her death and a future of scandals and coups, ‘the war that was being dreamt into being by the nation in advance’. In a spectacular ironic finale, elections are held and Madame Koto is duly stabbed – only to re-emerge after the funeral in a new car with a ghostly chauffeur.

The poems in An African Elegy (1992) are lyrical yet often angry, sharing some of the same imagery as the novels. ‘Political Abiku’, for instance, (abiku are spirit children impatient to be born): ‘She screamed again: / The birth-pains had returned / And another bloody / Parturition wracked our / Demented nation’. But there are also love poems: ‘The dreams I could never touch / felt like your body. / Your gentleness made the / Night soft’ (‘I Held You in the Square’). Or romantic regret: ‘And if you should leave me / I would say that the ghost / Of Cassandra / Has passed through / My eyes’. Okri’s eye falls upon the squalor of ‘Demolition Street: London, 83’, in describing tower blocks with ‘joyless murals’ and lorry drivers ‘nodding in dreams of resentment and finance’. By contrast, Lagos, is a ‘City of tainted mirrors! / City of chaotic desires!’, where ‘we rush through heated garbage days / With fear in morbid blood-raw eyes’ (‘Darkening City: Lagos, 83’). The title poem is an optimistic meditation, opening: ‘We are the miracles that God made / To taste the bitter fruit of Time. / We are precious. / And one day our suffering / Will turn into the wonders of the earth’.

Okri showed his early mastery of the short story with Stars of the New Curfew(1988). The lurid titular tale depicts a salesman and his manic sales patter for quack medicines, claiming to cure ‘anything from headaches to elephantiasis’. On board a crowded bus, he sells some to the driver, resulting in a crash. A political dimension is pointed up: the salesman’s boss then insists he tries out a new drug to rectify the problems caused by the old one. ‘In the City of Red Dust’, concerns unemployed Emokai, who sells blood for money to buy drinks in celebration of the military governor’s birthday, while his girlfriend is raped by five soldiers. Young artist Omovo sees corpses in the river and then the soldiers responsible drinking with his father (‘In the Shadow of War’).    

In Starbook (2007) and Tales of Freedom (2009), Okri continues his allegorical critiques of power. But in the latter his forms have been pared down to what he calls ‘stokus’, amalgamating story and haiku, a ‘serendipity’ of vision or paradox. Freedom is a linking theme, as in the opening tale of an old couple lost in the forest with their enigmatic slave Pinprop. Other urgent causes manifest themselves: a deadly disease is at large in ‘The Golden Inferno’, by implication AIDS, though ‘the long denial was over’. ‘The War Healer’ concerns a man tending the wounded of endless conflicts; his bride joins him in No Man’s Land, her wedding dress ‘darkened with gore’. The speaker of ‘Music for a Ruined City’ finds himself ‘witnessing the faces of mute grief, with Mozart in my heart, like ice over a wound’.

Okri has shown his long-time commitment to freedom by his involvement with International PEN. As he states unequivocally in A Time for New Dreams: ‘Nations that imprison, torture or assassinate, or drive their writers into exile fall into the deadlands of their own darkness’. In an online interview discussing this book of essays, Okri described it as having ‘the melody of childhood’ as the keynote, ‘running against other melodies of politics and censorship’ (Granta magazine, 7 April 2011). Thus, there are meditations on childhood as the ideal place for the imagination: it is ‘the Nile of life, the Eden, the Atlantis’. And, more satirically, ‘our childhoods pass obscure judgements on us’. Africa itself is ‘our dreamland, our spiritual homeland’, which is also ‘a challenge to the humanity and sleeping wisdom of the world’. Furthermore, ‘We have to heal the Africa in us if we are going to be whole again’. Okri’s aphorisms and paradoxes, finely tuned to his subjects, also range over the arts. In ‘Photography and Immortality’, he observes that it is ‘always time travel’, adding that it is ‘the dream, the interval, which we take to be the real’. Ben Okri’s poetic manner, his crowded dream-like imagination, his satirical eye and ethical concerns: all these make him a stimulating figure, amidst the ongoing cultural and political dialogues between Africa and the West.    


Dr Jules Smith, 2012

Bibliography

2012

Wild, Rider Books

2011

A Time for New Dreams, Rider Books

2009

Tales of Freedom, Rider Books

2007

Starbook, Rider Books

2002

In Arcadia, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

1999

Mental Fight, Phoenix House

1998

Infinite Riches, Phoenix House

1997

A Way of Being Free, Phoenix House

1996

Dangerous Love, Phoenix House

1995

Birds of Heaven, Orion

1995

Astonishing the Gods, Phoenix House

1993

Songs of Enchantment, Cape

1992

An African Elegy, Cape

1991

The Famished Road, Cape

1988

Stars of the New Curfew, Secker & Warburg

1986

Incidents at the Shrine, Heinemann

1981

The Landscapes Within, Longman

1980

Flowers and Shadows, Longman

Awards

2001

OBE

2000

Premio Palmi (Italy), Dangerous Love

1995

Crystal Award (World Economic Forum)

1994

Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), The Famished Road

1993

Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, The Famished Road

1991

Booker Prize for Fiction, The Famished Road

1988

Guardian Fiction Prize, Stars of the New Curfew, shortlist

1987

Paris Review/Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, Incidents at the Shrine

1987

Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book), Incidents at the Shrine