Transcending Historical Violence: Uses of Myth and Fable in Ben Okri’s Starbook

Violence is a leitmotif of contemporary African literature. In addition to reconstructing their past of colonization and slavery, African writers have increasingly denounced the brutality of postcolonial history, as shown by the multiple images of conflict (class, gender, generational, religious, ethnic) with which their narratives are interspersed. What differs, however, are the modes of representation of past and present traumas. While some writers have opted for realistic and historiographic approaches, others have developed alternative strategies by using the resources of indigenous beliefs to project communal traumas onto the ahistoricized dimension of myth. The narratives resulting from such experimentation point to different ways of conceptualizing, and being reconciled with, the cruelty inherent in old and recent African history, which acquires new meanings and appears more redeemable if viewed from a not purely deterministic perspective. As Ato Quayson suggests, in describing the problem of “confront[ing] a traumatic history of disability,” the difficult relation between past and present, history and progress, should be approached dynamically by Africans: “A crucial step, perhaps, would be to recognize this for a fact and to account for it as a process of becoming, one that needs to be grasped in its full complexity before it can be overcome, requiring patience, fortitude, hope and, above all, dialogue. A ceaseless dialogue” (“Looking Awry” 66).

The necessity for new forms of dialogue is not only felt by writers based in Africa, who combine history with fiction to reimagine traumas in the present and thus free possibilities that were not visible in the past. It also confronts the heterogeneous community of the African diaspora. Diverse though they are in their heritage and individual histories, the members of this community are challenged to rememorize the “founding violence”¹ of those acts from which their median condition originated (Ricoeur, Memory 82). Slavery, in particular, is perceived as a tragedy that blighted the life of millions of Africans and continues to haunt the lives of their descendants. Unlike colonialism and neo-colonialism, however, the large-scale deportation of slaves across the Atlantic sometimes gets forgotten in literary and cultural reconstructions of the past. The very project of Afrocentricity pursued by many black people tends to marginalize the slave experience and to replace it with positive images of African civilizations anterior to modernity (Gilroy 188-90).

This article explores the ways in which the history of African slavery is recollected and given narrative shape in Ben Okri’s Starbook (2007). By creatively emplotting the traumas of the Middle Passage, Okri not only performs an important task of historical narration: that of remembering and making “memorable” “the story of the powerless and the dispossessed” whose “crying out for justice demands to be told” (Ricoeur, “Creativity” 464). He also develops a highly syncretic form of the novel to pursue this objective—one in which myth merges with historical realism, romance mutates into tragedy, and folktales of heterogeneous origins are fruitfully incorporated into the narrative structure. As will be shown, this syncretic novel fulfils multiple functions: it revitalizes a tradition of Middle Passage reconstructions that includes many reticent texts; it invites a reflection on the challenges of rememory and the fictionalizing nature of historiography; it validates the Heideggerian idea that retelling history projects people towards new possibilities; and it shows how this “disclosure of unprecedented worlds” is strengthened by the novel’s fertile blend of “poetry and myth.”²

The tradition with which Okri converses, in reimagining the Middle Passage, is century-long and heterogeneous. Its origins can be traced in the reports and narratives written by European slavers, which “try to nullify the voices of enslaved Africans” (Rice 48), as well as in the early counter-narratives produced by slaves to record their sufferings. Omissions and distortions characterize both groups of texts which, nonetheless, offer significant clues to the reality of slavery. Many slavers’ narratives, for example, indirectly reveal the very humanity of the traded people they strive to deny. For their part, slaves’ stories tend to silence controversial aspects that, instead, emerge in European documents, such as the responsibility of Africans for Atlantic chattel slavery. As...