Ben Okri, the Aesthetic, and the Problem with Theory

I'm all for enriching the deep roots of our continuing aesthetic experience. We shouldn't despair. Capitalism wins but capitalism also loses. Capitalism will always breed its resistance—its anti-capitalism.

—Ben Okri

Ben Okri's publication of his Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, in 1991 hailed the creation of a new aesthetic that goes beyond the traditional nationalist post-colonial agendas of his Nigerian predecessors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. While interviewing Okri it came as no surprise that he shrugs off not only national labels, but also the theoretical categories of post-colonial, postmodernist, and magic realist.¹ In an interview with Jane Wilkinson, he offers an explicit statement about how he sees the relation between colonialism and the aesthetic which is worth quoting at length:

There's been too much attribution of power to the effect of colonialism on our consciousness. Too much has been given to it. We've looked too much in that direction and have forgotten our own aesthetic frames. Even though that was there and took place and invaded our social structure, it's quite possible that it didn't invade our spiritual and aesthetic and mythical internal structures, the way in which we perceive the world. Because if one were going to be investigative, one would probably say that a true invasion takes place not when a society has been taken over by another society in terms of its infrastructure, but in terms of its mind and its dreams and its myths, and its perception of reality. If the perception of reality has not been fundamentally, internally altered, then the experience itself is just transitional. There are certain areas of the African consciousness which will remain inviolate.²

Okri undermines the tacit idea of much post-colonial criticism, which is that colonialism has an all-pervasive impact on the colonized culture. By challenging the importance of colonialism within "the African consciousness," Okri also questions the most Marxist of Marxist thought as he imagines an uncolonized cultural space within the spirit of the people that can be both reached and confirmed by the aesthetic.³ If Okri were English, we might mistake him for a Leavisite or Arnoldian liberal humanist, but his view of the power of art is far more complicated than that of traditional English literary criticism. As Okri draws on Yoruban culture, aesthetics and spirituality are inextricably linked and colonialism has the power to overwhelm neither.

But as C. D. Balzer has argued, post-colonial criticism and post-colonial literature is often driven by the assumption that a post-colonial culture is inevitably oppressed by the colonial conditions in which it has been produced. Worse still is the utilitarian approach of some post-colonial critics as they measure the value of post-colonial writers in terms of their ability to offer us a decolonizing politics.⁴ A key culprit within this school of post-colonial criticism is Jacqueline Bardolph, whose article on The Famished Road receives an impassioned critique by Balzer. Turned off by Bardolph's prescriptive post-colonial agenda, Balzer draws our attention to the way it "compels her to seek closure and overt political statement, and blinds her to the wedge of possibility for spiritual progress that Okri's novel drives into post- Independence, post-Civil war Nigeria."⁵ As she explores Okri's adoption of a Yoruban aesthetic within his writing, Balzer calls for us to read The Famished Road "in its particularity" rather than in accordance with "an assumption of some vague 'post-colonial situation.'"⁶

Once again, the unfashionable word "spiritual" emerges as Balzer recognizes how in Okri's writing, the aesthetic and the spiritual mutually co-exist. Balzer's article is important because it raises questions about the relation between aesthetics and politics in Okri's work. Her article suggests that if we assess the politics of Okri's writing according to an exclusively post-colonial agenda we miss the impact of his aesthetic vision. By way of developing Balzer's thinking further, the thesis of this essay is that we can begin to distinguish between...