“I was a stubborn child, and my mother had this unique way of getting my attention,“ says award-winning author Ben Okri.
The unique way he is referring to is his mother’s style of reprimanding him as a child using metaphors and oblique references that the novelist and poet credits for helping him hone his craft.
His mother’s reprimands must have surely helped.
At 32, Ben went on to become the youngest author to win the Booker Prize in 1991 for his book, The Famished Road, that he describes as a culmination of a writing journey defined by upheaval and literary experimentation.
The Nigerian-British author still remembers the moment he won the prize: “When they announced my name as the winner of the Booker prize, I just sat back, because at that moment I remembered Mom,” he says. “She always said, whatever happens to you – big or small - pause, wait, be inside of it. So, I sat and lived that moment for me; before that accomplishment become a public thing. That was thanks to Mom,” says the author, his voice cracking with emotion. “I miss her so much, I don’t let myself realize it.”
Author of over 30 books, the ‘magical realist’ has been weaving a beautiful world from African myths, legends, history and folklore into more than a decade’s worth of poetry, essays, plays and novels. The acclaimed poet, novelist and climate activist was recently in Dubai to launch his new book, Tiger Works, at Expo City. Dressed casually in a printed cotton shirt paired with black trousers and his trademark half-tilted beret that he claims ‘cools his brain and cooks his ideas’, the eloquent writer gives a courteous handshake as we sit down for an exclusive interview for Friday.
Born in Nigeria, Ben spent the earliest years of his life in London where his father studied law. Young Ben returned to Nigeria with his parents and discovered Lagos, a place teeming with energy and optimism - a world of vitality that was rich in myth, folklore and legends.
His dad, a lawyer, was a big influence in his formative years. He saw him provide free or discounted services to the poor people who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Watching him represent these people and being witness to the injustice they suffered ‘was the most transforming aspect of my personal education’.
Another influence was Plato.
One of young Ben’s main tasks was to dust his father’s library. The first book that caught his attention was Plato’s Symposium. Having had a great thirst for philosophy, he devoured the book. “I found that philosophy helped me understand the change I was going through. That is when I really began to think.”
There was something about Nigerian life that [was waiting to spill out], it was uncontainable in many ways. There was myth, belief, anger, poverty, richness and generosity
He read the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare; the short stories of Maupassant, Chekov, Maugham and then lost himself in 19th century novels. “Like everyone else, I read American and English thrillers. They were a bad influence in every way except one: they made writing seem deceptively easy.”
Financial difficulties forced Ben’s family to move from the elite part of Lagos. “The affluent area was nice, but when we moved to the outskirts of Lagos, everyone you met was a character,” he says. He remembers people with tough faces and pungent proverbs. He got to live among them and share the bad roads that turned into rivers when it rained. It was living among them that made him look closely at the relationship between personality and living conditions. “It took me a long time to express it like this, but the poor folk were simply more real.”
MOM’S INFLUENCE
If his mum had an influence on him through her philosophy and her stories, his dad was his hero. The dignified way in which he bore adversity had a big impact on Ben’s outlook. Ben remembers him as ‘a solid man, with a tremendous aura and a great gift for people.’
One day his father picked up the newspaper turning to the essays on contemporary conditions and was surprised to encounter a familiar name in the byline. He saw his own name first – Okri- and then ‘Ben’ before it and was taken aback. “Goodness, you want to write. You want to be a journalist?”, his father had exclaimed as he had hoped that his son would take up law and inherit his chambers. The piece was on ghetto landlords who threw families and their possessions out into the streets. ‘Dad was impressed with my work,’ he says, with pride.
WHAT MAKES A WRITER
According to Ben, three things that can make a writer are childhood illness, a fall in your parent’s lifestyle, and an encounter with death early in life.
He had experienced them all.
“Solitude is terrible for an adolescent but invaluable for learning to think for yourself,” he says. He began with poetry writing a hundred love poems before burning all but five.
For Ben, the university- Essex University in United Kingdom- was a great playground, a laboratory of self-discovery. Pursuing a degree in comparative literature there, thanks to a scholarship from the Nigeria government, he stood for election to the student’s union (he was narrowly defeated), had two plays staged and published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows. “I was too young and didn’t know how to write. But I learnt how to tell a story,” he says.
Today, the author who is the recipient of two honorary degrees from University of Essex as well as the University of Westminster, recalls how he was disheartened when he was forced to quit his studies two years into university after his scholarship was defaulted.
With nowhere to go, he returned to London, an author of two novels, only to “slide into my homeless phase” bit by bit ending up quite literally on the streets. He slept on park benches and in the doorways of banks “because they had that draught of warm air above the door.” His eyes have a faraway look as he recalls, “I don’t know how I got by. I think I was saved by the romantic attitude to life I had back then. If I’d been a realist, I might have had a nervous breakdown.”
He had books and he did some of the best readings on those nights making notes in notebooks and writing poems about starvation, cold nights and empty streets. “I wrote my way out. It was another level of my education into being human.”
He was rescued from the streets by his friends who lent him 300 pounds to make a new start. “I rented a room and wrote like a madman,” he says.
Book reviews earned him some money but it was his short stories that caught the attention of British novelist and critic Peter Ackroyd, who included one of them in an anthology of a new fiction. Suddenly publishers started to take an interest.
What caught Booker Jury’s attention with Famished Road that his previous four publications didn’t? I ask the noted author.
“There was something about Nigerian life that [was waiting to spill out], it was uncontainable in many ways. There was myth, belief, anger, poverty, richness and generosity,” he says.
He realized that a structured and rational form of writing was not going to convey that experience. He needed a new form of telling stories that would capture this richness.
His father’s belief in the enduring presence of ancestors, things he saw that could not be rationally explained, his mother’s enigmatic way of telling stories, and the flamboyant manner in which the people of Nigeria narrated their experiences made it clear that he had to reconfigure his language and storytelling. “You could call it an aesthetic crisis or culture crisis. The best crisis I ever had. I had to invent a tone that could accommodate the ordinary and the mythical, the poetic and the uncanny.” It made him go back to the beginning and catch this African way that was not there in any literature. He gave himself time and went at it with all his passion and that is what the judges found interesting, he believes. “I had done something new, something different.”
There was the financial crisis too. “With nothing to fall back on, I was a young man writing to save my life,” says Ben.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he explains that suffering gives a particular energy and, when it is done right, has a particular beauty. “Those who suffer really know how beautiful it is to be human and to be alive.” For him, suffering gave him the strength to crack through the limitations and tell his story.
“Famished Road is my biggest risk and the biggest literary experiment I undertook. If it didn’t work, I might have just died in my early 30s because I had put everything in that boat.”
Even before the Booker, Famished Road received rave reviews. Author and Journalist, Linda Grant said “Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down this side of prose. When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them.”
Ben admits that there is an incredible magnification that the Booker is able to bring to a book and a career.
When Ben was writing his first novel, he was working in a paint company. He had to report to work by 8am, and with the traffic, it took three hours to get there. The only way he could get some writing done was to wake up at 3:30am. If he didn’t do that, he would not have written his first novel.
He adds that over the years he has come to understand that humans are creatures of paradigm – we tend to look at the world in terms of patterns of what we see. “For me it is a matter of great celebration to see people who crack a perception. Over the last 2000-3000 years, only certain kind of people have been able to take centre stage to tell their stories; how we crack that is what matters.”
His editor once told him that “he didn’t stand a chance” after pointing out the demographics – all his readers were going to be white; why would they be interested in a story from Nigeria. “I told him that people don’t read your colour, people read good stories, well-written stories. When you open a book, your colour is not in the words, it is in the quality of the words.”
A member of the board of the Royal National Theatre who was awarded an honour of OBE in 2001, Ben points out that the world is so much in need of literature. “Literature connects us with everything, it helps us pull back from our everyday machine life so that we see life both from a distance and very intimately at the same time, which is another way of saying that we need good, great writers now.” It is not only about writers who can showcase their skill, but writers who can use language to show us these big and small things that we can appreciate and understand very quickly and yet take us deep.
He believes language can be both a vehicle as well as an obstruction. “Language can be lazy and clumsy in relation to reality, but it is all we have for now, so we need to find a way to refine it and make it malleable and able to catch the nuances of reality.”
As a concluding tip Ben says, “The best writing is not about the writer, but the reader. Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds a castle of possibilities. When you imagine that you begin to create, you realize that you really can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you are suffering in.''
