Ben Okri (1959-)
Novelist, Story Writer, Poet, Essayist, Critic.
Born 1959. Active 1980- in Nigeria, England, Africa, Britain, Europe
Article contributed by
Robert Fraser, Open University
The novels, poems and essays of the Nigerian-born author Ben Okri offer a challenge to received notions of literary convention and form. His reputation was consolidated in 1991 when The Famished Road – the first novel in a sequence of that title – won the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction, but is yet to be matched by an equivalent critical understanding, or a considered body of commentary that might sustain it. Okri has been dubbed a “Magic Realist”, a term that does not really fit him. Meanwhile, the Ghanaian critic Ato Quayson has expounded his work via a revolutionary concept of “interdiscursivity”, the fusion of literary and oral influences within a nation-based text. More conventionally, the British critic Gerald Moore has construed his fiction with the help of Mikhail Bakhin’s notion of “dialogism” — of competing voices within a given work. In actuality, Okri transcends all such nostrums. The reasons for this state of affairs are complex, and may emerge in what follows.
Okri was born in Minna, a railway town in central Nigeria, in March 1959, nineteen months before his country’s independence from Britain. His father Silver Okri, an Urhobo from near Warri in the delta region, worked as a clerk in the Nigerian Railways Corporation, but wished to become a lawyer. Accordingly in 1961 he moved to London, where his wife Grace, a Mid-Western Igbo, soon joined him with their growing family. They settled in North Peckham, where Ben attended John Donne Primary School on Woods Road whilst his father studied at the Inner Temple. In July 1965, after Silver had qualified, the Okris returned to Nigeria. In January 1966 a military coup d’état made clear to Nigerians, and to the outside world, the intrinsic instability of the country. In July Silver was enrolled as a member of the Nigerian bar. One week later there was a second coup. The following year Nigeria was plunged into a bloody and protracted Civil War.
Okri has spoken only intermittently about this period, but it clearly made an enormous impression on him, and was to have an important effect both on his political and moral understanding and on his work. As fighter planes wheeled in the skies above the Mid-West, he attempted to concentrate on his classes at the Children’s Home School, Sapele. Eventually he was removed from the theatre of war to another school in Ibadan, while his father established a law practice in Lagos. By the time he was attending secondary school in Urhobo College, Warri, the hostilities were at an end, but they had already conditioned the outlook of several generations of his countrymen.
Okri began writing fiction in his late teens when, back in Lagos, he held a day job as a clerk at ICI. Stories were published in local newspapers, and eventually he started work on the novel that was to appear in 1980 as Flowers and Shadows. The protagonist of this book, Jeffra, is a young man of Okri’s own age, ethnic background and class
AFRICAN LITERATURE
African literature
Main
the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. See also African theatre.
The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.
Oral traditions » The nature of storytelling
The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions. The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past.
Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition, because they are by their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the present.
It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images that are unlike are juxtaposed, and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight and instruction of the members of the audience—the linkages between them that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present. Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life.
Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present. Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and beliefs.
The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real, contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts, then reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful.
Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters. As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth, as does the tale. At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.
READING AS A WOMAN…
Reading As A Woman: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart And Feminist Criticism
Does “reading as a woman” change one’s perspective on a text? Can a woman read as a woman after being conditioned, generally, to read as a man? In his On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Jonathan Culler (1982) addresses these issues and forms several interesting conclusions. What does it mean to read as a woman? Culler’s answer is brief and relatively problematic: “to read as a woman is to avoid reading as a man, to identify the specific defenses and distortions of male readings and provide correctives”.1 Though Culler fails to outline these defenses and distortions, he does provide some fundamental guidelines for such a reading. Accordingly, to read as a woman requires that one approach a work from a feminist vantage and therefore, not regard the work from the purview of patriarchy. Consequently, in order to read Chinua Achebe’s 1969 literary masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, as a woman, one must query readings which suggest that Okonkwo is the only major figure in the novel, and alternately analyze the motivations of principal female characters who are thoroughly developed within the work.
Before beginning this feminist analysis, we must review the historical and cultural context in which Things Fall Apart was written. Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, was initially written as a response to colonialist representations of Africa and Africans in literature, specifically Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1989). Cary’s work positions Africans in the typical colonialist frame: as individuals without motives, forethought, or knowledge other than base responses to their environs. As JanMohammed (1986) states, “colonial literature is an exploration of a world at the boundaries of civilization; a world that has not (yet) been domesticated by European signification.” It is a world perceived as “uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil.”
Against this context, Achebe’s novel allowed European readers to perceive Africans through an alternate lens. The Igbo society described by Achebe has definitive and complex social systems, values and traditions. Achebe presents customs such as the abandonment of multiple birth babies, and the sacrifice of human beings as conventions and not barbaric, inhumane rituals. He brilliantly places his characters within an ancient civilization with a labyrinthine system of governance and laws.
Consequently, Achebe’s main character, Okonkwo emerges early in the text as a traditional hero, who has within himself the ability to languish or attain his goals. Achebe’s readers understand that European colonialists do not precipitate Okonkwo’s ultimate downfall. Instead, it is Okonkwo’s seeds of self-destruction, which are deeply concealed in his desire to be the antitheses of his “feminine” father.
Moreover, though Achebe’s text is written in English, the language of the colonizer, it remains authentically African: “Achebe is most successful in expressing his African experience in English and still preserving its African authenticity.”5 The actions, ethos, and characterizations in the text depict a culture in transition, with indigenous practices which may be perceived as untenable to foreigners, but which are ordinary accepted within. Even when certain members of the community seek refuge in the Christian church, it is most often because they find themselves casualties of specific cultural norms: women who have multiple births, albinos, etc…rather than those who are secure in the traditional world.
In addition, as Iyasere (1969) states, reading Achebe’s conventional world as a woman, one cannot merely ascribe to the view that “one of Achebe’s great achievements is his ability to keep alive our sympathy for Okonkwo despite the moral revulsion from some of his violent, inhuman acts.”6 Instead, query whether this sympathy may remain intact for those reading through a feminist lens. Although many critics explicate upon the horrors and injustices Okonkwo inflicts upon the men in his life, (mainly his son Nwoye, his other ’son’ Ikemefuna), most omit any discussion of the abuse suffered by Okonkwo’s wives. However, this critique reevaluates the significance of not only the pain of these women, but also their importance as individuals within their community. Therefore, “by providing a different point of departure (this feminist reading) brings into focus the identification of male critics with one character and permits the analysis of male misreadings.”7 Hence, this work challenges these misreadings and positions the female characters at the center of the text. Instead of focusing on Okonkwo, as most critics have, this reading is focused on two major female characters, Ekwefi and Ezinma, and one minor figure, Ojiugo. They are mentioned only briefly, if at all, by other critics of the text, and when referred to, are examined only in relation to Okonkwo’s actions or motivations. Reading this text as a woman, this author analyzes these characters according to their self-perceptions, as well as societal awareness of them as women, wives, mothers and daughters. Exploring the relationships between these women reveals not only alliances between mothers and their offspring, but also alliances between comrades in arms.
SURVIVAL OF THE BEAUTIFUL
Survival of the Beautiful
is the Book of the Year in Nigeria and it is the latest adventure novel from the prize winning Nigerian author Bisi Ojediran.
Abel falls in love with Kiki, the shabbily dressed lady who turns out a different sort of prostitute, and in return for his kindness, Kiki hands him a ‘mystery’note, which reads: “In the throes of death, a snake bite, bearer’s origin, survival of the beautiful, an unknown culture, yet in this same country”. The note fires Abel’s journalistic curiousity, and his decision to investigate it, brings him in a head-long clash with Price in the ‘villagé of beauty’and in Lagos. It is an assignment fraught with danger and near-death situations to expose Professor Price and liberate the people.
:: Editorial Reviews
Reviewied by ThisDay Newspaper, Lagos Monday, August 29, 2005
BOOKSPLUS Nigeria Ltd, has repackaged Bisi Ojediran’s classic novel, “Survival of the Beautiful.”
The novel, described by the author as his most original creative project, was first published in 1999.
Peter Abel, journalist and protagonist in many of Ojediran’s literary works made his first explosive appearance in Nigerian and global literary space in this composition. Following its strong impact and its great potentials, the original 30,000-word novel has been rewritten completely and expanded for the international market with a beautiful cover that has Grace Amah of Nollywood fame as its model. Currently under a publishing deal with agents in the United States, the author said he has agreed with the agents for the release of a limited number in Nigeria, because in his words, “Maintaining relevance in Nigeria where I live, work, and write, is very important.” He also promises to be active on the local literary scene on retirement. He is sure the novel, which has been listed on the agent’s website, will be published in the United States very soon.
In the classic novel, a Biology Professor is driven by beauty into a morbid experiment of breeding beautiful women in a remote, uncivilized village. The Professor, lost his beautiful wife in an automobile accident, but had exhumed her head to kiss every morning in a bizarre show of love and a tonic for his experiment. In the city of Lagos, Peter Abel, an ace investigative reporter who has the uncanny gift for writing delightful scoops, and celebrates each with a drinking binge, runs into an escapee from Price’s village of beauty, Kiki, in a brothel. Abel falls in love with Kiki, the shabbily dressed lady who turns out a different sort of prostitute, and in return for his kindness, Kiki hands him a ‘mystery’ note, which reads: “In the throes of death, a snake bite, bearer’s origin, survival of the beautiful, an unknown culture, yet in this same country”. The note fires Abel’s journalistic curiosity, and his decision to investigate it, brings him in a head-long clash with Price in the ‘village of beauty’ and in Lagos. The difficult trip and his sojourn in the remote village enables Abel to crack the mystery of Professor Price’s experiment, but it is fraught with danger and near-death situations. Abel escapes to the city on a helicopter that takes Price to the village to transport some more beautiful girls to the city. Back in the city, the newspaper story of a heavily bruised Abel draws the attention of the government and Non-Governmental Organisations to begin a massive rehabilitation programme for the people. But he discovers after a long search that Kiki, who had waited endlessly for him, has returned to the village to look for him, triggering another search, this time for a dear one. The desperate search ends with the finding of a Kiki who has been charmed by the villagers into a vegetable, but Abel needed exactly the woman who made it possible for him to love women – nothing less.
:: Customer Reviews
Ways of Dying
Ways of Dying
by
Zakes Mda
Ways of Dying covers only a few days, from Christmas through New Year’s Eve, but these mark a considerable change in the life of the central character, Toloki. He meets and winds up moving in with a childhood friend from his hometown, Noria, as both come to terms with much of the past and find in each other a person that perhaps can complete their respective lives.
The world they inhabit, in a South Africa just beginning the post-apartheid transition, is far from idyllic. As Toloki says:
’Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying ?’
With death omnipresent Toloki has chosen to deal with it head-on: he has become a Professional Mourner, the first of his kind. He already has something of a reputation, and people hire him to come to the funerals of their relatives. In his dapper mourning outfit he makes quite an impression. Like another standard feature of funerals — the Nurse, someone who describes the death of the deceased –, Toloki thinks he’s onto something. For now he still accepts whatever people are willing to give, but eventually he hopes to set fixed rates for providing this professional service.
The book opens at the funeral of Noria’s son, and Toloki eventually re-connects with this woman he knew from his village. Much of the book revisits the past, something both of them have left behind but not completely escaped from. Noria was a bewitching child, and it was especially Toloki’s dad, Jwara, who was under her spell: when she sang for him he was inspired, and created fantastic small figures. He would bribe and praise her, but as she grew older she found that she could get more interesting rewards from men closer to her own age. Without her, Jwara was sullen and could not create — and he took much of his frustration out on his ugly son, Toloki.
Toloki eventually ran away from home, finding some success along the way and then in the city. By now, however, he was reduced to being homeless, keeping his belongings in a cart by the beach. It was a lifestyle that suited him: he wasn’t particularly ambitious and he got by well enough.
Noria married badly and had a child who died horribly, as would the next one. Her circumstances by now are also poor — “I have been chewed, Toloki. Chewed, and then spewed”, she explains –, but she had become a generous soul, and made do with her lot.
Death is all around, and it is a big part of the book. Senseless violence touches almost everyone, and some of it is truly shocking. Yet, helped by the fact that Toloki and Noria are almost relentlessly optimistic, the book is also surprisingly upbeat. Life is not easy, heart-breaking tragedy common, but still the two of them are able to look forward and find some joy in small things. Their generosity of spirit, and willingness to allow imagination to trump reality (as when they decorate the walls of Noria’s new shack, and practically move within the images there) is enough to allow them deal with the horrors all around them.
Both Toloki and Noria are broken people, but instead of going entirely to pieces they have found ways to channel their despair. Toloki’s mourning for strangers — praised as adding: “an aura of sorrow and dignity that we last saw in the olden days when people knew how to mourn their dead” — is, of course, also a mourning for all that he has lost and never had, and for a whole society in trouble.
Their circumstances, and that of the whole nation, are extremely difficult, but Mda suggests there is hope for it all. The message may be too simplistic: neither Toloki nor Noria are entirely believable characters, but the stories are well-told and woven together, making for a powerful and appealing novel. Mda’s light touch keeps the death-horrors from overwhelming the book — though occasionally death is also kept almost too much at a distance. The central death — that of Noria’s boy, buried at the funeral where Toloki meets her — is, when finally explained, absolutely devastating, and the reactions not entirely convincing. This is the book’s biggest failing: that it confronts the horrors only obliquely, and that Mda is not willing to allow his characters to react fully to them.
Ways of Dying is a very good book: powerful, entertaining, and well-written. It is full of good stories and scenes, and Mda manages to present his material without sensationalizing it, which is far more difficult than it looks. Well worthwhile.
Review Consensus:
Generally favourable, though find it a bit simple
From the Reviews:
- “Mr Mda adds a touch of magic to the grim realism more common in accounts of black South African life.” – The Economist
- “Mda finally seems to be saying that if violence is in this particular people, then so is the answer and solution to violence, in the form of the people’s gods and ancestors. The spirits will deliver.” – Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books
- “(A) rollicking, at times whimsical tour through the dying days of apartheid as witnessed by the Professional Mourner, Toloki, who wanders from township funeral to township funeral with the hapless wonder of a Chaplinesque loner. Despite its lighthearted touches, though, as the title suggests, Mda’s story is still rooted in the endemic violence that has long stained South Africa” – Anderson Tepper, The Village Voice
- “Ways of Dying is a politically brave work, one which uncompromisingly suggests that the new leadership about to assume power has elements that are elitist and corrupt (…..) Ways of Dying is saved from its whiff of didactic one-dimensionality by the eccentric quirks of its main character. (….) Ways of Dying is not an adult novel and will frustrate the English adult reader. However, very few works address the sophisticated needs of a young adult to be challenged and captivated by issues that are appropriate to a teenager but in a language accessible to a second-language user. Ways of Dying does just this.” – Brenda Cooper, World Literature Today
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