An Interview With Ben Okri

This interview was conducted on March 28, 2005, at the British Arts Council in London, England.

Rowell:

This morning, as I opened the newspaper The Daily Telegraph in my hotel, I noticed that there was an article on an exhibition of European-American paintings, a small collection from New England. This exhibition is being mounted at the Dulwich Picture Gallery here in London. I love art in various forms. All of us as human beings love it, and some few of us create it. You are an artist, a maker, a creator. Your literary texts are art; your poetry is art; your fiction is art. What is this thing that you make? Will you talk about the fiction you make as art. Art is the essence of the narratives you create; the essence of your narratives is art. Will you talk about what you make as art? What is it, how it moves in the world, how you want it to exist in the world, and how you want us to respond to it or experience it?

Okri:

It is the most mysterious, and the most future-making, past-transforming, prophetic, death-consciousness-resonating, civilization-shaping, life-molding activity that we do. I see art as a bridge between the secular and spiritual aspects of humanity. In art I’m including everything from song, dance, architecture, painting, music, literature, conversation of a certain kind, even certain silences. Society is held together by laws, but is animated by art. When the art of a people die, not long afterwards, the people die. It’s the art that keeps the brightest and the most important aspects of a people, inwardly, alive. It keeps them alive to conscience, to their failings, to their missed roads, to their wrong turnings, to their great destination which keeps moving forward and taking us with it. Art connects the prophetic; aside from the spiritual, art is the next great realm of humanity. It is practically a continent just off paradise, within the spirit. That’s how important it is. That’s how important I see it. Therefore, it requires from us on the one hand the greatest consciousness in our execution of art, the greatest responsibility, the greatest freedom, the greatest wisdom, the greatest discipline. On the other hand, the greatest, the humblest, capacity of interpretation, because an art that is not originally an interpreter is like a sphinx that doesn’t speak. Right now, we exist in a world where so many things in our art have been speaking to us and telling us all kinds of things we need to know about ourselves, the mistakes we’ve been making, the kind of human beings, the kind of society, the kind of families, the kind of people we can be; all of these works of art are speaking to us, but we’re not hearing them because of poor interpretation. Interpretation is not something that should be left only to the cultural interpreters. It is the responsibility of every human being. The way we interpret art is a preparation for the way we interpret life, and vice versa. They are in a perpetual dialogue with one another. If you can’t read a book, if you can’t read a poem, you’re not going to be able to read a situation that you find yourself in clearly; it’s the same textual interpretation. We need the same moral intelligence, the same spiritual aliveness, the sense that everything is a text we can learn from. Whether it is literature, painting, music, dance, a building, it is always there speaking to us about our open possibilities. Interpretation should be an important part of the educational curriculum. This whole idea of interpretation has been too culturally isolated. Rap artists constantly are interpreting one another’s performance. Interpretation is one of the most wonderful things we do; it’s just that we separate it from critical interpretation. This broadened sense of art spreads that, and becomes a life thing. Life and art complement one another, perpetually in dialogue, with our consciousness as the mediating place.

Rowell:

I am...