A Fragment
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There is an island in the South Pacific where giant stone images of the human head stand inexplicably on the rocks. Many legends surround these imposing images, but no one really knows how they came there, why they were made, or what they mean. They remain one of the great enigmas of man’s passage on this hieroglyphic territory of the earth.
There is in France a cave where images of bulls leap on the stone walls, vivid as if limned there by modern masters. There are bulls and horses, but it is the bulls that shake the imagination. To see these images you have to go deep into the caves, without light, and traverse the steady dripping of water and navigate the slow forming stalagmites and stalactites. And then in the dark the cave walls writhe. The smallest light on them draws a heave of wonder. These are not natural images. These are not mere reproductions of bulls playing in the field. They compel one to a soul-stirring aesthetic contemplation. Why did those ancient artists choose to paint their bulls on a wall so deep in the caves, so deep in the dark? These are enigmas of man’s passage through the dark riddle of the earth.
There is in Lagos a museum where the most potent images are not inside the museum, but outside it, growing like dark koans from the museum earth. They are oddly shaped stones, with curious markings that conform to the typography of the human face but extending this signification to the whole form of the body without separation among the parts. It is a gnomic image of the human form. These images appear to give birth to themselves. They have their home in Cross-rivers state, but they sprout here in Lagos. No form of sculpture anywhere in the world approach their strangeness. They are the magic form of nightmares. Children love them, love their incomplete forms which the mind completes. No one knows how they came to be created. There is a legend that they are the leftover forms when the great god exhausted his creative matrix. They are the addendum to creation, God’s last thoughts. Wherever we are faced with a puzzle older than tradition, which not even stories can domesticate, we are dealing with the depth-charge enigmas of our obscure passage across the face of the stars.
Before humanity knew what it was, it made art. Making art helped humanity glimpse what humanity was. Our remotest ancestors shaped stone for reasons beyond productive use. They liked the elliptical shape of things. Our farthest ancestors were abstract sculptors, minimalist painters, and compressed riddlers. The oldest objects we know of bear testimony to our unfathomable need to shape, to create, to bend form, to hint at the thousand ways that the world can be mirrored and distorted, with each distortion being more true about that which is distorted.
It seems that the impulse for art runs parallel with the impulse to live. [End Page 1041]
BEN OKRI—novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and essayist—was born in Minna, Nigeria, but spent his early years in London, while his father studied law. Okri later returned to the UK to study at the University of Essex. He is author of more than eighteen books, including Incidents at the Shrine, The Famished Road (winner of the Booker Prize), An African Elegy, In Arcadia, Starbook, Tales of Freedom, and The Age of Magic. He has also received such literary prizes and awards as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Premio Palmi. From 1991 to 1993, he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1987 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2001 he was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire). In addition to being a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, he is also a Vice President of the English Centre of International PEN. He lives in London.
