Ben Okri

To attempt to describe Ben Okri’s writing seems almost to miss the point of his writing. Whether in poetry, short or long fiction, or prose philosophy, Okri provides his reader with the experience of creativity itself; he satisfies that craving in all of us to be in touch with the real when we come to live through his texts and find that we know living at its fullest and deepest when we are transported to the most unreal places of the imagination. Like all great weavers of enchantment, Okri never shuns his political responsibility. We should remember that the great storyteller with whom Ben Okri has a deep affinity (and a particular favorite of my own) is Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights. She weaves her tales every morning just before dawn not only to avert her own execution but to save all the young women of the kingdom and their brokenhearted families from the same fate.

Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Minna, northern Nigeria. His early childhood was spent in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. His first-hand witnessing of the violence of the Nigerian Civil War in this period informs his writing. A grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to return to England to read for a Comparative Literature degree at Essex University in England. He now lives and writes in London. He holds an honorary doctorate from Essex (2002) and his gift as a writer as well as his tireless advocacy for the centrality of art to political freedom has been recognized widely. He has been awarded an OBE, is a Fellow of the International Society of Literature, and his works have been translated into over twenty languages and been honored by a cluster of the most prestigious international prizes.

His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), are both set in Nigeria and feature young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening within their family and in their country. The two collections of stories that followed, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), are set in Lagos and London. Okri was clearly influenced by the oral tradition of his people, and particularly his mother’s storytelling: “If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn’t correct me, she’d tell me a story.” It is that rich gift that he draws upon in all his work—and even in his conversations. To be his friend is to have in one’s midst a sage and wordsmith who conjures pictures in the most banal of exchanges.

Ben is also now one of the leading poets in the English language. He has even challenged Twitter skeptics proving that the medium does have its aesthetic dimensions by serializing poetry posted line by line.

For me, Ben Okri has an affinity with another great poetic spirit driven by the passionate advocacy of human freedom; William Blake’s powers of prophetic speech resonate in Okri’s work. In his epic poem Mental Fight, published at the Millennium, Okri calls his reader, as Blake did a century earlier, to those transcendent moments of imaginative illumination that overcome social and spiritual division.

The college at Oxford of which I am Principal, Mansfield College, elected Ben Okri as an Honorary Fellow. Ours is the dissenters’ college which grew out of the non-Conformist tradition. There remains a serious resistance to the flummery of English conventions and a desire by the Fellows to throw off the yoke of the old. However, we invoked Ben’s own words at the ceremony to remind us that ritual and initiations, if noble, free us into those greater and better selves we all have the capacity to become:

Illusions are only useful if we use themTo help us get our true realityInitiations and rituals if they are nobleHave this power(They magnify the secret hour)They enable us to pass fromThe illusion of our lesser selvesTo the reality of our greater selvesOur soaring powersThey free us from our...