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Ben OkriBen Okri
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in 1959 in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father. He grew up in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed at first hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England.
He was poetry editor for West Africa magazine between 1983 and 1986 and broadcast regularly for the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985. He was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge in 1991, a post he held until 1993. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1987, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Westminster (1997) and Essex (2002).
His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), are both set in Nigeria and feature as central characters two young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening in both their family and country. The two collections of stories that followed, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), are set in Lagos and London.
In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road (1991). Set in a Nigerian village, this is the first in a trilogy of novels which tell the story of Azaro, a spirit child. Azaro's narrative is continued in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Other recent fiction includes Astonishing the Gods (1995) and Dangerous Love (1996), which was awarded the Premio Palmi (Italy) in 2000. His latest novels are In Arcadia (2002) and Starbook (2007).
A collection of poems, An African Elegy, was published in 1992, and an epic poem, Mental Flight, in 1999. A collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, was published in 1997. Ben Okri is also the author of a play, In Exilus.
In his latest book, Tales of Freedom (2009), Okri brings together poetry and story.
Ben Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. He lives in London.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Short stories
Bibliography
Flowers and Shadows Longman, 1980
The Landscapes Within Longman, 1981
Incidents at the Shrine Heinemann, 1986
Stars of the New Curfew Secker & Warburg, 1988
The Famished Road Cape, 1991
An African Elegy Cape, 1992
Songs of Enchantment Cape, 1993
Astonishing the Gods Phoenix House, 1995
Birds of Heaven Orion, 1995
Dangerous Love Phoenix House, 1996
A Way of Being Free Phoenix House, 1997
Infinite Riches Phoenix House, 1998
Mental Fight Phoenix House, 1999
In Arcadia Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002
Starbook Rider & Co., 2007
Tales of Freedom Rider & Co, 2009
Prizes and awards
1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) Incidents at the Shrine
1987 Paris Review/Aga Khan Prize for Fiction Incidents at the Shrine
1988 Guardian Fiction Prize (shortlist) Stars of the New Curfew
1991 Booker Prize for Fiction The Famished Road
1993 Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize The Famished Road
1994 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) The Famished Road
1995 Crystal Award (World Economic Forum)
2000 Premio Palmi (Italy) Dangerous Love
2001 OBE
Critical Perspective
Azaro, the spirit-child narrator of Okri’s 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, calls himself ‘an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead’. Because of his parents’ love, he has broken a promise to return to the spirit-world and is compelled thereby to restlessly move between the human and spirit realms. He is a witness to his people’s struggle to survive, able to foresee natural and man-made disasters ahead. Azaro thereby becomes a symbol of the writer’s imagination, his duty to depict the chaotic story of an African nation (that is by implication an extended parable of Okri’s native Nigeria). An animating conception within Okri’s writing is that ‘the world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer’: this means constant interchange between humans and spirits, grotesque hybrids and transformations; the dead walk again, often singing or fighting, and frequently take animal forms. His fiction also harks back several decades to the immediate pre-Independence era, in which a traditional society with its herbalists and native medicine, animal sacrifices and magic, was being increasingly intruded upon by the arrival of electricity, cars, and above all the forest’s exploitation by foreign multinationals. The ‘road’ is a metaphor for the nation’s independence, but crucially it is a famished road, beset by hunger and often brutally devouring its own people.
The richly metaphorical and ‘fantastic’ elements in Okri’s fiction may appear to Western readers as a species of international Magic Realism, but his writing can perhaps best be understood in the context of the post-Colonial English novel. He re-works the African oral storytelling tradition in Standard English, using only a handful of words from native languages, and deploys a range of modern literary techniques. Okri’s great achievement, The Famished Road, is one of the most acclaimed post-1945 African novels, and the magisterial opening volume of a cycle that continues with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Taken together, they offer a fabulously rich reading experience though not a diverse one: all the volumes proceed by dream-logic and are told in a trance-like narrative voice of astonishment at the continual transformations and reversals of fortune that Azaro witnesses.
The community within which Azaro and his parents precariously live is visited by ghosts and natural disasters, but also exploited by the landlord and his political thugs. The novels constantly describe food being bought, prepared, and enjoyed; as well as longed-for, withheld, or gnawed by rats. Azaro’s father has another existence as ‘Black Tyger’, the boxer who fights spirits, but his real-life opponents in The Party of the Rich are all-too-human. His mother constantly plays peacemaker, not only in the family but also between Black Tyger and the compound-dwellers with whom they are in constant conflict. In this, she needs the interventions of the local bar-owner, fabulous Madame Koto: vain, corrupt and generous, she literally swells up to dominate the novels. Like Azaro, Madame Koto exists in both realms; as a power broker with a retinue of thugs, prostitutes and praise-singers, and as ‘the priestess of a new and terrible way’. By far the best and most colourful character in the cycle, her new car and ghost chauffeur, her introduction of electricity, her rallies on behalf of the Party of the Rich, all add greatly to the doom-laden gaiety of the action. Her impending delivery of three spirit children, conceived with a jackal-headed creature, leads to a destructive climax to the third novel. And during the riots at a chaotic pre-Independence rally, Azaro sees a vision of the future: coups, executions, scandals, conflicts, uprisings and ‘the war that was being obliquely dreamt into being’. The departing governor-general is busy attempting to rewrite history in his memoirs, while Madame Koto’s final transfiguration accompanies the birth-throes of the new nation.
Whereas the novels present the issues of economic and political corruption, war, and ecological destruction in elaborate metaphors, Okri’s short stories, though they continue to show Africans interacting with spirits, are more ‘realistic’ and urban in setting, capturing contemporary economic desperation and social chaos. In ‘The City of Red Dust’, for instance, Emokai is reduced to selling blood for money to buy drinks for official celebrations of the military governor’s birthday, while his girlfriend Dede, driven to distraction after being raped by soldiers, slashes her throat. A man is robbed then beaten up by police; when his car is attacked, he finds himself in a village of the spirits where he sees his dead wife again (‘Worlds that Flourish’). The outstanding title story of Stars of the New Curfew (1988) depicts a salesman of quack ‘cure-all’ drugs to the poor getting nightmares about their effects. But, ‘sufficiently drilled by starvation’, his manic sales pitch for a cure-all ‘power-drug’ on board a crowded bus results in its crash. This farcically satirical political allegory concludes with his boss insisting that he try out a new, improved drug to deal with the problems caused by the old one.
Dangerous Love (1996) may well be the most satisfying of Okri’s recent novels, a love story with a subtext about politics and artistic freedom, taking place in Lagos during the 1970s. It revives as its artist-hero Omovo, who first appeared as the child in an evocative short story about the civil war; corpses are seen floating in the river by the child, who also witnesses soldiers killing a woman. Fainting, he is then rescued by the soldiers and returned home, coming round to see his father drinking with them. Dangerous Love is also a more mature re-working of the subject of Okri’s early novel The Landscapes Within (1981), an artist whose social protests on canvas rebound disastrously upon him. Omovo still has his painting confiscated by the authorities, and loses his clerk’s job to the chemical factory manager’s nephew, but the ‘dangerous love’ of the book’s title is for the seventeen year old wife of a jealous neighbour. One of Omovo’s friends dreams of escaping to the USA, while another says explicitly: ‘our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs’. Sadder and wiser, Omovo (in a wider sense like Okri himself) dedicates himself to ‘the fortunes and rigours of art’ to set alongside his social critique, insisting upon ‘the intimations of a greater life that flowed somewhere in the landscapes within’.
Ben Okri is also a fine poet, with a lyrical if at times bitter tone. The subjects in his collection An African Elegy (1992) are again dreams, spirits and the legacy of colonialism. He describes a nation which 'ceased to reconnect / The land of the spirits'; 'The soldiers and politicians emerged / With briefcases and guns / And celebrations on city nights' ('On Edge of Time Forever'). But he also celebrates love in the shadow of disaster: 'I see your face / Where beauty is threatened / With violence / Roseate in the evening's / Chimerical murders'. And 'The Poet Declares': 'Let the music irradiate my spirit / And I shall travel farther than allowed / to find the gifts of the new / light'.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
For an in-depth critical review see Ben Okri by Robert Fraser (Northcote House, 2002: Writers and their Work Series).
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