Ben Okri: A Man of Many Arts

“I would like to master the art of living,” says Lao in The Art of Magic (45). Although this remark is met by demonic laughter, for Ben Okri, living is as much of an art as writing, painting, or composing. As Okri has remarked in an interview, “The way we interpret art is a preparation for the way we interpret life” (Interview 215). Okri’s novels, short stories, poems, and essays from Flowers and Shadows (1980) through The Art of Magic (2014) have all explored aspects of the art of living as experimented by the old and the young, the artist and the beggar, the war victim and the dreamer, the slave and the free woman. In his collection of essays A Way of Being Free (1997), he notes: “Living is a continual metamorphosis. Everything is change; everything is relative” (54). This mutability, which affects all aspects of existence both in the real world and in Okri’s fictional worlds, explains why the art of living constantly needs to be learnt anew in accordance with the shifting circumstances of one’s surroundings and one’s condition. Who better than Ben Okri—an artist with roots in two continents, who has been experimenting with a vast array of genres and modes over some thirty-five years—to be attentive to this necessary flexibility and adaptability to change?

This special issue of Callaloo examines Ben Okri’s multiple metamorphoses as a storyteller who borrows from West African traditions but maintains his attachment to European models, a stylist who shot to fame in 1991 with a sprawling and compulsive novel (The Famished Road) but who is also at ease with aphorisms and short poems, a visionary who observes the misguided ways of contemporary societies but is intent on redreaming the world and conceiving alternative sets of realities. One key to Okri’s multiple faces and manifold art can be found in his transcultural childhood in Nigeria and London. Okri was born in Minna, a railway town in the northwestern area of central Nigeria (close to the present capital, Abuja) in 1959, nineteen months before Nigeria’s independence. In 1961, his father won a scholarship to study law in England and the whole family relocated to London where they remained until 1965. At the age of six, Ben Okri came back to Lagos and had to learn to live differently. He remembers his existence in a run-down area of the Nigerian metropolis as sparking his imagination. In his own words, Lagos was

both a shock and a delight. I saw it was possible to be a human being in a totally different way. It was like going into a multidimensional world. That gave me my aesthetic matrix, where a sense of alternatives became natural. There was no one world-view, but as many worlds as there are ways of seeing.

(qtd. in Jaggi 12)

This awareness of a multiplicity of worlds and ways of living and seeing is reflected in the writer’s work, which draws not only from the tradition of social realism inherited from European masters and perceptible in his first two novels, Flowers and Shadows and The Landscapes Within (1981), but also from West African folktales steeped in the supernatural and the fantastic that he heard in the ghetto and which have left their mark on his later work. The imaginative vibrancy he experienced in the slums of Lagos helped him endure the shabbiness of his surroundings and develop “a humble and magical relationship with reality” (qtd. in Holt). He was there when the Biafran War erupted in 1967, pitting the main ethnic groups against one another, “a war in which over a million people died into normality with no intervening act of healing the wounded national psyche” (Okri, “The Missing Girls”). Igbo people were the target of massacres in western and northern Nigeria, and Okri’s family was forced to move often to hide their mother who was half-Igbo. The young boy witnessed people being killed and saw corpses lying in the street. These traumatic experiences would find their way into two short stories written...