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
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