As a young man, he lived the rough life, mostly living by his wits. His family moved from war-torn Nigeria to England — the land of Dickens and Shakespeare for him — when he was 2. As a homeless student enrolled for literature at Essex University, he lived on the streets and slept in parks and friends’ floors.
“I was happy, I was miserable,” goes the confession from British-Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri.
It is this play of paradoxes that resonates in the works of the 1991 Booker prizewinner, considered one of the most authentic and significant contemporary African authors.
The struggle for survival in London and his early initiation into the horrors of mass violence — returning to Nigeria and growing up during the civil war — only intensified Okri’s resolve to turn to storytelling.
“At a very early age — maybe 7 or 8 — I saw a lot of deaths and bodies lying on the streets. A lot of people I knew died or just disappeared,” Okri tells Weekend Review in an interview. “These things haunted me and made me ask fundamental questions about life itself,” he says.
Many years later, in 1980, the result of those questions would be his first published book — “Flowers and Shadows”.
While he is most commonly associated with his Booker-winning “The Famished Road”, Okri says it is his first book that enabled him to cross over to the realm of an inspired author.
“I began ‘Flowers and Shadows’ when I was 18 and staying in Nigeria. I brought it with me to England in a suitcase, a fairly empty suitcase,” says Okri, who was in Dubai recently to participate at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.
While his magical prose has mesmerised readers around the world and defied categorisation, Okri stresses that the novels germinated from short stories.
“‘Flowers and Shadows’ began as a short story — I was writing a lot of short stories at that time. I was learning from the masters — from writers such as Flaubert and Maupassant — and I felt that the short story was the best training ground for a writer,” he says.
But among the dozens of stories he was writing at the time, “this particular story for some reason just kept growing and growing”. Eventually, it would be published as “Flowers and Shadows”.
How was it like writing a first novel that began in one continent and was completed in another?
“I want to remember always the importance of form,” he says. “A lot of people set out to write their first novel without having actually strengthened their muscles — without having actually learnt how to write a good sentence or a paragraph. It was like learning to run a marathon — you just don’t start by running a marathon, you train and develop the strength and stamina for it.”
Crafting it was still a difficult journey for him.
“It took me three years of many rewrites from a very bad story to a very bad short novel. By rewriting it got better and better — it was like a flower unfolding. And one day I just grew up to understand what this story was trying to say,” he says. “By then I had come to England and I wrote it in England — that’s where it came together in 1979.”
Then began the hunt for a publisher — a test of hope and conviction for the writer of a first novel. “It took me another two years to find a publisher … One day to my astonishment I got a letter after many rejections, saying they wanted to publish me. It was definitely one of the most significant days of my life, it was like a dream,” Okri says.
But then, like in Okri’s novels and stories, the strangest thing happened.
“In the time it took them to publish the novel the next year, I had completely changed it,” he says. “By the time the novel came out, it was a different product. And the book also changed me as a person — I was no longer this young man writing short stories.”
It was his third novel, “The Famished Road”, that made Okri a more familiar name in the literary world thanks to the Booker. Along with “Songs of Enchantment” and “Infinite Riches”, the so-called “Azaro” trilogy fortified Okri as an authoritative voice of post-modern Africa.
But beyond that, it was hard to classify Okri’s prose. Consider this, for instance: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”
That is how “The Famished Road” begins, drawing the reader into the incredible journey of the child spirit Azaro in an unnamed city seemingly in post-colonial Nigeria.
It is not Gabriel Garcia Marquez, although there are liberal overlays of magic realism in Okri’s works; his lyrical and dark allegories often remind of William Blake, while the undertone of political turmoil, suffering and impending doom could be out of a page of Camus or Kafka. Part of the fantasies of “Songs of Enchantment” or “An African Elegy” could confuse the most ardent of Italo Calvino’s fans.
But Okri dismisses such readings of his works as literary bias at best or laziness at worst.
“I think the people who define my literary style with a particular genre are all responding to their various literary inclinations and lazinesses. If you look deeply, any of my stories, any of my novels, any of my poems — you couldn’t really make any such categorisation,” he says.
“I am not a magic realist, but my stories do have elements of magic realism, just like they have existential elements. And I’m certainly not a new-age writer. I wouldn’t give my style a name or a category — I will say to my readers, just read me with an open mind, read me slowly. I am like a rope-maker — I take great pains to ensure that the reader is solidly held up before they go on to the next sentence or the next page.”
But still, if we were to persist, how would Okri be classified as a writer?
“If there’s anything I’d like to categorise my writing as, I would say I am a very careful writer,” he says.
More importantly, he says, a literary voice representing Africa must have to deal with the baggage of history.
“Unfortunately, there has been a lot of stereotyping about Africa.” Okri says. “That’s partly because people think along historical lines and never along the lines of humanity or reality. Because of the dominance of written history, such stereotypes still exist.”
Sometimes, people who are trying to be helpful end up adding to the stereotypical narrative of Africa. “Some have actually never travelled to Africa or travel there with a certain notion in mind,” Okri says.
“This is why literature is one of the few areas which enables people to make journeys across cultures and encounter other people as humanly as possible. But not all literature does that — the literature of [Joseph] Conrad does not transport you to a human Africa, it transports you to an ideological Africa,” he says.
While the literature of post-colonial Africa written by Africans is beginning to change such perceptions, Okri emphasises that his true remit as an artist transcends historic propaganda. “I am not trying to dismantle any stereotypes — that would be to me too reactive a mould to impose on my writing. I start from the point of view of wanting to illuminate the human condition out of the great stories and lessons and wisdom of Africa,” he says. “The greatness of literature is that it reveals the soul of people, their happiness and unhappiness, their ability to overcome difficulties — it reveals the essence of their existence. Our most important task as writers is to illuminate the depth of the human soul. If I touch the depth of a soul, the problems of race, religion, culture and history all disappear — because I have made a connection with another soul.”
As a combination of a careful craftsman and a prophetic narrator, Okri manages to touch that very essence of existence with his dreamlike prose that moves back and forth in time and space, reflecting a reality that is in front of us yet seems far beyond the normal perception.
“Anyone who manages to describe reality is doing us a great favour. People say that by looking around their life, by making a list of things and situations around them, they are describing their reality. But that’s not their reality — that’s just what they are seeing,” he says.
“Our reality is a very complex thing, it’s not just what we see, it’s also what’s underneath. It’s not just also what’s underneath, but what’s inevitable, going to happen; it’s not just what’s going to happen in the next year, but also what’s going to happen in the next generation — unlike the journalistic perception, reality is not a time slice. Riots on a street in one part of the world is not reality, it’s an incident,” says an impassioned and animated Okri.
It soon becomes clear that as with the written word, Okri is equally the master of magic when he speaks: “What is literature? It captures that which is obvious, that which is concealed, that which is growing in the seeds of time; that which is locked away in the psychology of the people; that which is hidden in their dreams; that which seems to be non-existent but a particular event or time will come and reveal it at once.”
