Between Magic and Everyday Life

Ben Okri is an individualist and a rhapsodist who hardly resembles any other in Africa. He may be compared to Mia Couto of Mozambique, Kojo Laing of Ghana, Breyten Breytenbach of South Africa—a poet of diversity, a genre-breaker, insecure, non-ideological but engaged. The real-life aspects and the sense of disclosure are important to them, but what is decisive is the desire to dedicate themselves to a newly-conquered language. One also thinks of Tarkovsky and his films about the fate of the country, the unpredictable fall of society, his hallucinatory clarity of vision.

Okri was born in 1959 in Nigeria and came to England as a child. His father, a clerk at the railway, received a scholarship to get a law degree. The family returned to Nigeria some time before the Biafran War. His father was Yoruba, his mother Ibo; they were caught in the line of fire and fled. But before that, his father allowed Ben to meet the murderers, the swindlers, and the innocent who found their way to his lawyer’s office. Thus, the son was to be lured into law, but that experience led him into fiction.

Ben read Plato and Dickens and wrote his first novel at the age of seventeen, which was rejected by ten African publishers. He then went to London and met with new refusals, until Longman took the book and published it two years later. During that time, he slept in the underground at Charing Cross, became malnourished and was assaulted, his head filled with Ezra Pound. The police, who saw a young black man reading Joyce’s Ulysses, did not intervene. Okri became immersed in guilt and despair, and to avoid death he wrote his first collection of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine (1986). That one and a subsequent collection, Stars of the New Curfew (1988), contain some of the most memorable stories from Africa—about unmarked graves, about ministers who confer honorary doctorates and million-dollar houses on themselves, about uninhibited businessmen and power-hungry politicians.

Okri often depicts people at the margins of a society without a center, where loyalties have been loosened. He creates crazy acts of revenge, alcohol-fuelled orgies, family vendettas. He is fascinated with slums and decay. His work is essentially about the fears and hopes of the exploited, their escape routes and resistance. With energy and humor, Okri helps his characters avoid drowning in chaos.

In two of his novels, Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Astonishing the Gods (1995), there is hardly any room for familiar reality. They are fairytales. In mysterious scenes a simple message is being preached: endure, seek wisdom and enlightenment, create what may surprise the gods. With Okri, there is little intrigue, but many sensual, striking episodes. He cultivates an untroubled objectivity within the frame of the marvelous. He writes tenderly of the vulnerable, bitingly of those in power. He is a poet and an interpreter of dreams and transcends all boundaries like his predecessor Amos Tutuola (The Palm-Wine Drinkard). In Nigeria, where objective truth is a joke and you kill whomever you are fighting with, it seems adequate to react with a feverish imagination and to turn reality into myth and illusion. Okri’s Lagos is a cannibalistic carnival, a ghetto reminiscent of Hogarth’s scenes from the eighteenth-century gin-soaked London. Quarrels and slander, pickpockets, nightsoil men, flagellants, ritual murderers make his language oscillate between loose rhetoric and great beauty. In Astonishing the Gods, the nameless hero is in search of “visibility.” He finds a city on a beautiful island, where invisible creatures have built a culture of light, justice, and love. After endless hardships and bizarre adventures he realizes that this is where he belongs. He conquers temptations—love among them—and is taken into the company of the invisible. He leaves the material and rediscovers the childish innocence that belongs to heaven. It is sometimes unbearably didactic. These two novels irritate because Okri seeks to express what cannot be expressed and is therefore forced to use abstractions and clichés. They are...