Ben Okri (1959-)

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist, considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions. Okri is a
member of the Urhobo people. His father Silver Okri was Urhobo, and his mother was half-igbo. He was born in Minna, in west central Nigeria. His
father moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old, so that he could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London,
and attended primary school there. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted
services for those who could not afford it. Okri’s exposure to the Nigerian civil was and a culture in people saw visions of spirits[ at this time later
provided inspiration for his fiction. At the age of 14, Okri was rejected for admission to a university program in physics because of his youth. He then
claimed to have had a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a
publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in journals and papers. Okri claimed that his criticism of the
government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country.In 1978, he
moved back to England and went to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. But when funding
for his scholarship fell through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends.

(EXILE FIGURE SIMILAR TO CONRAD)

Okri's success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows, at the age of 21. He then served as poetry editor for
magazines and was a regular contributor to the BBC World Services, continuing to publish throughout this period. His reputation as an author was
secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the youngest ever winner of the prize. Since he
published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's leading
writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, along with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows the life of
Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.
Okri's work is particularly difficult to categorise. Although it has been widely categorised as post-modern, some scholars have noted that the
seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this categorisation. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is claimed,
then his allegiances are not postmodern because he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on
some, and not other, truth-claims. Alternative characterisations of Okri's work suggest an allegiance to Yoruba folklore, New Ageism, magical
realism, existentialism, etc. Okri has always rejected the categorisation of his work as magical realism, claiming that this categorisation is the result
of laziness on the part of critics.

He claimed:

"I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death ... Which brings
the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that
the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric
of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history.
Nobody has an absolute reality”.

Homo fabula: we are storytelling beings

(“The Joys of Storytelling III”).

It may seem that because we live in a fractured world the art of storytelling is dead. It may seem that because we live in a
world without coherent belief, a world that has lost its centre, in which a multitude of contending versions of reality clamour in the mind, that
storytelling and enchantment are no longer relevant. This is a sad view. Worse than that, it is a view which implies that we no longer have a basis
from which to speak to one another. When we do attempt speech or song we do it solipsistically, in fractured tones. This negative view of
storytelling also implies that there are no continuities in the human experience, and no magical places resident in us that we can call up in one
another

(“The Joys of Storytelling I”).

The mystery of storytelling is the miracle of a single living seed which can populate whole acres of human minds.

(“The Joys of Storytelling I”)

And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing about us, and with no beliefs by
which to steer our ways through the dark descending nights ahead – I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers,
those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured broken age that we
need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them in order to begin to be whole again. We need to be reminded of the primeval terror
again.
(“The Joys of Storytelling I”)

The writer, functioning in a magical medium, an abstract medium, does one half of the work, but the reader does the other.

[…] Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader.