Scenes of Enchantment: Visionary Style in Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love

Ben Okri’s novels have been much analyzed as examples of a distinctive postcolonial voice. However, given his widespread recognition, it is time to focus closely on features of his style to understand Okri’s particular narrative skill. I will concentrate on one characteristic feature, his use of three or more brief sentences to evoke a scene, which, for lack of a better term, I call “scenic lists” because it denotes both their scenically evocative power, their brief notational quality, and consequent paratactic-like style—their lack of liaisons between the sentences involved. One example, “The branches of the palm trees swished and swayed. Women chanted their wares. Cars did dangerous turns” (50). In analyzing this feature (which appears elsewhere as well), I will concentrate on Okri’s 1996 novel Dangerous Love, which has received little critical attention, because it centers on artistic vision. Since they constitute a pause in the narrative, creating an epiphanic moment of defamiliarization suggesting the onset of visionary power, and thereby leading toward the protagonist’s inspired painting, scenic lists contribute an incipient narrative enchantment to the text and help to explain Okri’s distinctive visionary style.