Ben Okri: An IntroductionBy Daria Tunca

Ben Okri was born on 15 March 1959 in Minna, Nigeria, to an Igbo mother, Grace, and an Urhobo father, Silver. Okri's father, then a railway station clerk, soon left for England to study law. The rest of the family joined him shortly afterwards. Despite young Ben's protestations, the Okris returned to Lagos in 1965, where Silver Okri set up a law practice.

While Ben Okri seldom reveals details about his childhood (unless perhaps his early memories of the Civil War), saying he'd "rather reserve that for the complex manipulations of memory that only fiction can provide" (Wilkinson 1992:77), he has extensively commented on his literary influences. They range from the African tales and legends his parents used to tell him to the European authors whose works he found in his father's library: Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Ibsen, Chekhov and Maupassant, among others. This double heritage, the intermingling of African myths and European sources, and the later influence of contemporary African writers, were to become major inspirations for Ben Okri's work.

Okri began writing articles and fiction in 1976, after failing to get a place at a university in Nigeria. He wrote a play and a novel while working in a paint company, and then moved to England, first to study comparative literature at the University of Essex, then to continue writing in London. His first novel, Flowers and Shadows, was published by Longman in 1980, and features a teenager's disillusionment with Nigeria's corrupt society, which, as he discovers, his own father is a part of. The story is, Okri insists, "not autobiographical at all" (Wilkinson 1992:79); unlike, perhaps, The Landscapes Within (1981), whose main character, Omovo, is a young painter living in Lagos. This novel, which Okri was later to re-write under the title Dangerous Love (1996), may be considered an early artistic manifesto, for Omovo's approach to art seems in many ways to reflect the author's views on language and creation, as expressed later in the collection of essays A Way of Being Free (1997).

The Landscapes Within, as well as some of the short stories contained in Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), read as tales of a country, Nigeria, struggling with poverty, corruption, and sometimes war. These thematic interests were further developed in The Famished Road (1991), for which Okri won the Booker Prize. Based on the Yoruba myth of the abiku (the spirit-child who is born, dies and is reincarnated endlessly), the novel is told from the perspective of Azaro, a spirit-child who has decided to stay on earth. Throughout the book, the constant interaction between "reality" and the spirit world reminds one of African folktales as well as twentieth-century narratives inspired by the oral tradition, such as Amos Tutuola's. Ultimately, the myth of the abiku, who is infinitely dying and reborn, is intended as a symbol for the Nigerian nation. In 1993, The Famished Road was followed by a sequel (a "continuation of the dream", as Okri puts it [Mitchell 1994]), Songs of Enchantment; the abiku trilogy was later completed by Infinite Riches (1998).

In his 2002 novel In Arcadia, Okri turns to a European myth and describes a film crew's journey from England to Arcadia. Once again, art, if only through the multiple references to Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie, figures as a central motif that allows the novelist to explore profound themes such as man's everlasting quest for happiness. The key role played by art and the imagination in the understanding and reshaping of the world is also explored in Starbook (2007), a fairytale-like allegory set in Africa during the early days of the transatlantic slave trade, and in Tales of Freedom (2009), a book that includes hybrid tales - which Okri calls "stokus" - combining features of the short story and the haiku.

 

Sources

'Ben Okri', Interview by Edward Blishen, ICA Guardian Conversations, 1988. Video file.

Fraser, Robert, 'Ben Okri (1959 -    )', Literary Encyclopedia, 30 March 2011. Mathys, Kathy, 'Ben Okri: "Shakespeare is voor mij een Afrikaans

schrijver"', Standaard: Letteren, 25 September 2003, pp. 8-9. Mitchell, Elizabeth, 'And the Road Goes on Forever', 1994. [no longer online] Moh, Felicia Oka, Ben Okri: An Introduction to his Early Fiction (Enugu: Fourth

Dimension Publishers, 2001). Wilkinson, Jane, 'Ben Okri', Talking with African Writers (London & Porthsmouth:

James Currey & Heinemann, 1992), pp. 76-89.

An African Elegy

We are the miracles that God madeTo taste the bitter fruit of Time.We are precious.And one day our sufferingWill turn into the wonders of the earth.

There are things that burn me nowWhich turn golden when I am happy.Do you see the mystery of our pain?That we bear the povertyAnd are able to sing and dream sweet things.

And that we never curse the air when it is warmOr the fruit when it tastes so goodOr the lights that bounce gently on the waters?We bless the things even in our pain.We bless them in silence.

That is why our music is so sweet.It makes the air remember.There are secret miracles at workThat only Time will bring forth.I too have heard the dead singing.

And they tell me thatThis life is goodThey tell me to live it gentlyWith fire, and always with hope.There is wonder here

And there is surpriseIn everything the unseen moves.The ocean is full of songs.The sky is not an enemy.Destiny is our friend.

On Edge of Time Future

I remember the history well:

The soldiers and politicians emerged

With briefcases and guns

And celebrations on city nights.

They scoured the mess

Reviewed our history

Saw the executions at dawn

Then signed with secret policemen

And decided something

Had to be done.

They scoured the mess

Resurrected old blue-prints

Of vicious times

Tracked the shapes of sinking cities

And learned at last

That nothing can be avoided

And so avoided everything.

I remember the history well.

We emerged from our rubbish mounds

Discovered a view of the sky

As the air danced in heat.

Through the view of the city

In flames, we rewound times

Of executions at beaches.

Salt streamed down our brows.

Everywhere stagger victims of rigged elections

Monolithic accidents on hungry roads

The infinite web of ethnic politics

Power-dreams of fevered winds.

The nation was a map stitched

From the grabbing of future flesh

And became a rush through

Historical slime

We emerged on edge

Of time future

With bright fumes

From burning towers.

The fumes lit political rallies.

We started a war

Ended it

And dreamed about our chance.

Fat fish eat little fish

Big ones arrange executions

And armed robberies.

Our rubbish shapes us all.

I remember the history well.

The tiger’s snarl is bought

In currencies of silence.

Eggs grow large:

A monstrous face is hatched.

On the edge of time future

I am a boy

With running sores

Of remember history

Watching the stitches widen

Waiting for the volcano’s laughter

In the fevered winds

Hearing the gnash

Of those who will join us

At the mighty gateways

With new blue-prints

With dew as seal

And fire as constant

And a trail through time past

To us

Who remember the history well.

We weave words on red

And sing on the edge of blue.

And with our nerves primed

We shall spin silk from rubbish

And frame time with our resolve.

We sing absurditiesOn the face Of anguishAnd enact cameosWithin the eye'sVision.

We sing of absurdities--Arabesques of bodiesEntangled In the dissolutionsAnd vapoursOf power:Victims of seepagesAnd batterings from above.

We sing absurditiesWhen all else sinks in shallows.Word-acids dissolveOrdinary chaos:Within the eye

A potent chemistry

Unmasks the faces Beneath the terrorsAnd fills the silencesOf anguished journeys.Dreams live serenelyIn our singing And our eyes.

We sing absurditiesWhen all else sinks in shallows.