“Redreaming the World”: The Poetry of Ben Okri

“Dad was redreaming the world as he slept.”

—Ben Okri, The Famished Road

This essay reassesses Ben Okri’s poetry—particularly the collections An African Elegy and Wild—in the light of his other work, arguing that Okri’s poetic project involves a high-risk strategy that marks his poetic voice as different from much other contemporary verse in its modes of rhetorical address as well as in its commitment to a traditional and elevated concept of literature. There is also a declared allegiance to aesthetic and ethical categories that the postcolonial ethos has tended to regard with suspicion: the word “beauty” occurs nine times in Wild, “truth” four times, and the closing lines of his poem “On the Oblique in Horace” declare that the greatest poetry finds a place within us, “Where all the greatest things are known./ Hidden, eternal, true” (Wild 69). Scarcely since the heyday of the English Romantics have eternity and truth been located so resoundingly. That, in the context of Okri’s subject-matter, is one of the risks he takes—seeking to anchor these abstractions within (and in the face of) the politics of the modern world. The other risks he runs (and from which he does not always emerge triumphantly) are in his preference for “we” as a hortatory or confiding mode of address, and in his use in certain poems of a Blakean simplicity and vulnerability. I hope to show that these features help to make Okri’s poems powerful and daring, as he redreams human history, migration, and the very nature of the postcolonial moment. But I want to begin by referencing one of Okri’s recent polemical essays, which concerns aesthetics.

Shortly after Christmas 2014, Ben Okri used the pages of The Guardian newspaper to argue that “A Mental Tyranny Is Keeping Black Writers from Greatness.” Drawing on examples mainly from European literature, including Flaubert, Joyce, Woolf, Cervantes, Homer, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, he suggests that the greatest literature has often worked through an “indirect mirror,” gaining universality through its treatment of surprising and sometimes apparently “slight” topics (such as the party in Joyce’s “The Dead” or the gambling in Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”), rather than engaging deliberately and obligatorily with “overwhelming” and self-evidently important subjects such as “slavery, colonialism, poverty, civil wars, imprisonment, female circumcision” (Okri, “Mental Tyranny”). The problem for African writers, he states bluntly, is the weight of expectation (often, by implication, derived from Western readers) that they address and directly represent such subjects. They are placed under an obligation to be spokespersons, and engagement with such topics shackles their “freedom” as writers, since “The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things” (Okri, “Mental Tyranny”).

A response followed quickly. Sofia Samatar, the Somali American poet writing in the Guardian Books Blog for December 30, 2014, under the heading “Black and African Writers Don’t Need Instructions from Ben Okri,” began by saying that Okri had given “instructions for achieving greatness. Black and African writers … must attain ‘mental freedom’: we must stop writing about ‘overwhelming subjects’ such as slavery, colonialism, poverty, and war.” I am not convinced that either of these accusations holds true. Engaging in a polemic and “giving instructions” are two different things; Okri did not demand that writers stop addressing those subjects—rather that the way they were expected to address them (in order to be regarded as successful and significant) flew in the face of his sense of how literature works. After all, he includes War and Peace in his pantheon. The point, for Okri, is that “Great literature is rarely about one thing. It transcends subject”—and his appeal to both “greatness” and to the category of “literature” is part of the article’s challenge to its readers.

For Samatar, however, the article was counter-productive. “[Okri’s] charge that black and African writing is too political dismisses, with one blow, both the world we live in and the possibilities of political literature,” she wrote, pointing with justification to the lack of specific reference to African writing in Okri’s essay (apart...