A Booker prizewinner, he claims to stand at the crossroads where African and European cultures meet. But his magical mysticism means some people can’t tell whether he’s bridging a gap or meandering alone up a one-way street. Roy Hattersley spoke to Ben Okri
By his own admission, Ben Okri finds “concrete prose the most hard to write” – a shortcoming which he acknowledges with something approaching pride. But, although he discusses his work in the same sort of abstraction in which it is written, Okri describes his eventful life in plain, straightforward English.
His “strongest memory of childhood” is “experimenting with fire. I came home from school and set fire to the curtains.” Then he relapses into intriguing abstractions. “Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work … Fire is a chemical presence. In Infinite Riches [his recent novel] it becomes a deity of chaos and rage.”
There is no point in trying to translate the mystical generalities into normal language. Okri’s reputation is built on sentences not susceptible to detailed analysis. The Famished Road – the novel for which he won the Booker Prize in 1991 – starts with a paragraph about which the Okri enthusiasts raved: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out into the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”
Putting aside the literal interpretation of drought and famine, which is not Okri’s style, the meaning is at least ambiguous. But if you are tempted to ask why a road which was once a river was always hungry, you ought to read a different sort of novel.
It is the diffuse mysticism of Okri’s writing which makes him such a controversial writer. The magical quality also provides protection against critics who dislike his work but moderate their condemnations because of embarrassment about their failure to understand it.
A recent Booker nominee who insisted on remaining anonymous said, “I never got past the first page of anything he wrote.”
A celebrated poet thinks: “He gives poetry a bad name. But I wouldn’t say so publicly.”
The 1991 Booker judges illustrate how he divides literary opinion. Ann Schlee (author of The Proprietor) was captivated by “the way in which he slips in and out of reality”. Nicholas Mosley believed The Famished Road “wasn’t a novel at all but a prose poem … It goes on and on with all this mystical stuff.” Jeremy Treglown (chair of the judges) recalls enjoying it so much that he called his daughter to share his pleasure.
But Okri was not his first choice for the prize, and he says the judges were equally divided between The Famished Road and William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev. “I suggested,” said Treglown “that we gave it to the one to whom it would make the most difference.” The one was Ben Okri.
Okri insists he is, at least in part, the literary legatee of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens. But he also thinks of himself as the product of another culture. In him “Africa and Europe meet. I am a crossroads person, a child of intersection.”
He studied English “as a kid in London” – though not very extensively, since he returned to Nigeria when he was seven. Back home, the studies continued “as part of the colonial legacy”, though not for long, since he left school at 14. He “absorbed the understanding of African thought along the way”, a culture inherited from his father without Okri realising that he was “following the route of the older, deeper and more profound philosophies of the tribes”.
At the same time he was reading every book he could lay his hands on. As a result, his education was a “constant harmonisation and synchronisation. The fate of being a child at intersection is that your life is a continual synthesis.”
Okri was born in Minna, central Nigeria, the child of a Yoruba railwayman and “the descendant of Ibo princes”. He was brought to England when he was 18 months old, so his memories of that first emigration cannot be altogether reliable. But he insists he can recall “walking in a strange town in north Nigeria … walking lost … wandering away from home. I was in a strange town among complete strangers. But I was completely at ease and I mysteriously found my way to my uncle’s place. I was not disturbed at all as I wandered through the town.”
The central character of The Famished Road is Azaro, the spirit child who wanders, vulnerable but poised, between the living and the dead. Azaro – the name is a corruption of Lazarus – reappears in Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. One way and another, lost boys play a big part in Okri’s creative thinking.
There was a common pattern in Commonwealth emigration to the United Kingdom in the early 60s. The man, very firmly the head of the family, came to Britain to find work and lodgings and his family followed when a place had been prepared for them. Okri’s father won a scholarship to study law, and came to qualify for the English Bar at the Temple. His wife, their three sons and one daughter joined him halfway through the course. After five years, “Dad”, the name given, not by coincidence, to the carpenter hero of Infinite Riches, decided to return to Nigeria.
In London Okri had belonged to infant gangs which let down car tyres under the inspiration of Dennis the Menace, his favourite character in his huge collection of comics which he believes “must have been one of the biggest in London”. At the same time, at least as he recalls those early years, he “began to feel the enchantment of Shakespeare, the Greek and Arthurian legends”.
His recollection is so clear that he can be absolutely precise about the first play which inspired him. It was not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the usual introduction to the canon, but The Merchant of Venice. “It was Portia’s caskets. The three suitors had to choose one of them and had only appearances to guide them. It was lead, not gold or silver, that contained the portrait and the right to Portia’s hand. It made me think about the importance of appearances.” It is hard to believe that the lessons of Portia’s casket convinced him that appearances are unimportant.
These days, his carefully casual dress complements his good looks and perfect manners to make him the darling of the literary circuit. Okri is a smooth man with a soft and melodious voice and a ready smile. One literary event organiser said a fortune could be made by auctioning his bedroom key after each poetry reading.
He thinks he was, though he cannot remember, “one of the two black kids at John Donne Primary”. The failure of exact memory is, in itself, important. For it confirms that, if he was surrounded by racial prejudice at school, he was happily unaware of it. “I was not conscious [of my colour] until, one day, Dad came to pick me up from school. It was snowing and kids started rolling the snow into hard balls and pelting us. That’s when I began to realise we were different. I wasn’t conscious of it until then. I wanted to throw them back. But Dad talked to me about it and explained that there was no purpose in it.”
He cannot recall how much convincing he needed and the lapse in a usually precise memory reveals a conflict in his personality. Sometimes he exhibits all the characteristics of the nervous loner. Rosie Boycott, one-time neighbour and permanent admirer, says she has barely met his long- time partner and rarely visits his house, although he has been a friend since he read bedtime stories to her daughter 10 years ago.
Yet he charms his way around literary festivals with a gregarious enthusiasm which more reticent participants both resent and envy. The multiple personality is part of the mystery which, in Boycott’s words “adds to the enchantment”. He is, as he writes, mystical and mysterious.
Okri accepts without question that he has a split cultural identity. He quotes the “famous motto”, which he has some difficulty in remembering: “My blood is African … but my heart belongs to the world.”
As he struggles to recall the character of his other elements he breaks off to describe a lesson learned at his father’s knee. Because of his initially English and then colonial education he had become “entranced” (one of his favourite words) with Plato and Aristotle. Then he “realised that we [Africans] have philosophers just as profound”. Asked to name the Greeks’ rivals, he replies: “Sages, old teachers, priests of our oracles, our herbalists, our village elders.”And he offers an example of the once-forgotten wisdom which he only recalled in adolescence when “Dad spoke of these things”.
“You go into the forest, and come to a group of trees. In the grove there is a little hut and in the hut there is a mysterious old woman. She asks what you are doing in the grove. It is a long time since anyone has come that far into the forest. You say you are just playing and she tells you to sit down and starts talking. Her talking is teaching.” The suggestion that the old woman – however profound her thoughts – was unlikely to have the global influence of Plato is brushed aside with the insistence that “they are Africa’s philosophers and of equal value”.
Conversations with Okri always include passages to which it is impossible to apply the normal rules of logic. He flutters across hard facts like a butterfly and is careful not to land at any fixed point. His explanation of intellectual method does little or nothing to help earthlings understand how they can fly with him.
“Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things. Folks here don’t understand that.” The example he gives to illustrate the cultural divide certainly confirms how wide it is: “If you were to say that tonight’s poetry reading would be a failure, I would ask you to withdraw it for fear that saying it would make it happen. Words resonate. They are parallel to events. It is magical thinking – not what many critics have called magical reality. That is an exaggeration of reality, a transformation of reality. Magical realism is [the belief] that what is perceived and said are real things too.”
After some discussion, during which minds rarely met, it was agreed that the essence of magical thinking – the “enchantment” which has made Okri’s fiction famous – is the refusal to distinguish between reality and imagination.
Okri describes his “world view” as “my own philosophy, but part of the African aesthetic”, a judgment which has to be treated with caution, lest it be misinterpreted as an admission that the usual laws of logic do not apply to African thought. And there is a second reason to have doubts about the provenance of Okri’s thought process. He speaks only in intangibles when he is discussing literature. Life he treats differently.
When he discusses Africa itself, as distinct from Africa’s effect upon his work, he analyses its history and prospects with Euclidean clarity, which has little to do with “words being things”. The “colonial legacy” which brought him Shakespeare, Milton and Byron was a “hugely negative thing in many ways – particularly its effect on the self-perception of the people … The damage is not irreparable. Even trees will renew their limbs when their branches are broken.
“But, for a while, the people saw themselves as less than what they were. Africans now need to revalidate their relationship with the universe. The African ways have their flaws. But they also have their wonders and their greatness.
“Africa has gone through its own stage of civilisation 1 000 years ago and gone into a decline. It’s like Greece. Whenever I go to Greece I’m astounded by the relationship between its great living past and strangely denuded present. The same is true of Africa and African culture. We have our past civilisation. Things peak at different times for different peoples. The contemporary peakers always think that other people never had a peak, that all they had was dark ages.”
He breaks off from his analysis to emphasise his enthusiasm for “mutual respect for different cultures and the need for a grander picture of world developments”.
Okri’s romantic piety is one of his attractions, at least to the sort of audiences which flock to his public readings. That is not to say he is not attractive to more exacting intellects. Mary Ann Sieghart, an assistant editor of The Times of London, met Okri when she chaired the ill-fated revival of the Brains Trust and he was one of the “brains”. She regards him as “a magical man with a spiritual and poetic nature”. Her uninhibited encomium provides part of the explanation for the popularity of his work.
Okri most enjoys talking about literature, not, much to his credit, his own work but the influences which have inspired him. His latest work at least owes its title to William Blake. Mental Fight is a “secular poem” which the dust jacket describes as “an anti-spell for the 21st century”. Okri wrote it to mark the millennium, which he regards as “a great shining, hopeful moment, a good time to belt out a joyful story”. Critics will differ about the merits of Mental Fight, for no contemporary writer has raised greater passions than Okri.
But it is unequivocally revealing about its author’s strange relationship with European literature and the pride he takes in his erudition. Every conversation is interrupted with statements of gratitude and admissions of the debts he owes to the writers, particularly the poets, who preceded him. It is as if, despite the literary distinction that brought him the Booker Prize and half a dozen other glittering awards, he still feels he has something to prove about his education. The sixth stanza of the eighth book of Mental Fight (“a poem in itself” according to its author), as well as mentioning the gospels and “one thousand and one nights”, contains nine literary references in 20 lines: “Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, The Tempest, The Trial, The Waste Land, things have fallen apart, remembrance of things past.”
It makes the compassionate reader want to assure Okri that he has no need to establish his antecedents or the extent of his reading to the point where he appears to be playing a literary game. Some regard the literary name-dropping as insufferably pretentious. The speech with which he accepted the Booker Prize, though elegant and gracious, sent a frisson of embarrassment around the room because of its grandiloquence.
Writer and critic Hunter Davies defends Okri against the assaults of more restrained writers with the explanation that he is basically self-taught and that the authors who have filled his life still dominate his thinking. Davies is certain that the homage he so regularly pays is genuine. Indeed he regards Okri as a wholly genuine writer, whose books express his real emotions.
“He is,” says Davies, emphasising that he is speaking about Okri’s life as well as his literature, “with the fairies,” – a judgment that encapsulates the
criticism of those readers who find his fantasies unintelligible. But, Davies adds, “He’s a super chap.” The personal praise will not reconcile Okri to Davies’s opinion of his work. For he does not take criticism well.
More often than not, Okri’s work has enjoyed a warm reception. Yet what he recalls, with a vehemence which approaches bitterness, are the bad notices. “They do not hate my work. They hate what my work does to them. It is not the work they attack. They do not understand the work. They call me magical, dreamy … In fact my work is very hard-edged. If I were a boxer, I would be Rocky Marciano, not Sugar Ray Leonard.”
And so he goes on, defending himself by image and analogy and discussing his poetry and prose in language which confirms the reservations of his detractors. “I find their stupidity painful.” The Times’s review of Infinite Riches he describes as “almost illiterate”.
In his estimation, even “the good reviews were based on a profound misunderstanding”. But, in sharp contrast to the resentment he earlier expressed, he was anxious to make clear that he “does not mind being misunderstood”. Interrupted with the news that a moment ago he sounded as if he minded a great deal, Okri explains the confusion. “An important part of what a book – any work of art – does to one, is that we misunderstand it. The moment a work of art is understood it disappears … It has to be beyond the reach of full comprehension.”
Then he returns to a more bellicose defence of his writing. “My life and what I represent get on some people’s nerves because I challenge their lifestyles.” Does that suggest that racism lies barely submerged beneath the literary criticism? “No. Just ignorance.” But does he fear that prejudice is to blame for the failure of his work to be adapted for cinema or television? “They couldn’t stand the thought of all those black people running about on screen.”
The complaint came as a surprise. For Okri is notable for the way in which he fits snugly into Western society. He has become part of the literary establishment, a suggestion which he rejects with the angry assertion that he still has to persuade publishers to accept his work. That was surely not true of Mental Fight? The idea that the millennium poem must have been accepted with enthusiasm by Orion was denied with such passion that it seemed necessary to consult the company about the reasons for its reservations.
Maggie McKernan, Okri’s editor, was astounded by the notion. “The only problem was getting something suitable for publication. At first it was a lecture. When it became a poem, we were delighted to publish it.”
It all contributes to the suspicion that Okri – completely at home in polite society – likes to think of himself as an outsider.
Okri is so absorbed with his writing that he is rarely associated with the campaigns and good causes which attract so many other writers. But his novels paint moving pictures of poverty’s consequences and his social conscience is alive and well, if sometimes sleeping beneath the psychedelic patterns of his prose.
As a boy in Nigeria he wrote “thousands of poems and many of them bad”. Then he began to write for newspapers. “My journalism came out of outrage, the poverty all around me and the government’s indifference to the suffering. It was a time of great corruption … To be in power was to get money for yourself and for your tribe.”
It was also a time of great frustration for the young Okri. He had briefly become infatuated by science but no Nigerian university would offer him a place to study the subject. He changed tack and won a government scholarship to read liberal arts in England. He registered as an undergraduate at the University of Essex.
Unfortunately, the Essex episode ended prematurely when the Nigerian government, experiencing an economic crisis, cancelled his grant. For a while he lived with his uncle. Then the house they shared in south London was knocked down and, for reasons he no longer remembers – or chooses to recall – he took to the streets and lived rough. He slept on railway stations and missed so many meals that “his ribs stuck out”. His consolation was “talking to other writers”.
Now he speaks of his vagrant months with something approaching gratitude. “I needed to experience suffering if I was to write … truthfully … To me suffering is an aspect of the great Promethean will, the thing in us which most makes the spirit wake up. Modern literature is the product of too much false suffering, too much false pain. Real suffering is like the dirt that miners dig up and carry away. It is necessary if we are to find the true gold that writers seek.”
In Hunter Davies’s view, Okri’s own story is more interesting than the stories he writes, though Davies has expressed some mild scepticism about the claims to precocious literary interest. Davies spent a day with him in Cambridge during Okri’s year as fellow commoner in creative arts at Trinity, the most aristocratic (as well as most intellectually self-regarding) of all the Oxbridge colleges, and delights to recall the dons’ reaction during the interview which secured the appointment. “He told them stories about Nigeria folklore and they loved it.”
It is the secret of a unique success. In a uniform world, Okri is different – not because he is black but because he writes in a way which is new to Western culture and describes events which are outside Western experience.
Trinity, by recognising that special quality, struck lucky. Two weeks after he took up residence he won the Booker Prize and they had a celebrity in their senior common room.
He is idolised by readers who are, to use his favourite word, entranced by the colourful mysticism which is his stock-in- trade. He represents a world untroubled by hard reality, in which it is possible to pass from human form into spirit and back again. It is a dream which thousands of people, in their flight from cold winter mornings, crowded buses and grocery bills, want to share.
Life at a glance
Born: March 15 1959, Minna, central Nigeria.
Education: University of Essex.
Career: Broadcaster and presenter BBC 1983 to 1985; poetry editor West Africa 1983 to 1986; fellow commoner in creative arts Trinity College, Cambridge, 1991 to 1993.
Some publications: Flowers and Shadows 1980; The Landscape Within 1982; Incidents at the Shrine 1986; Stars of the New Curfew 1988; The Famished Road 1991; An African Elegy 1992; Songs of Enchantment 1993; Astonishing the Gods 1995; Birds of Heaven 1995; Dangerous Love 1996; A Way of Being Free 1997; Infinite Riches 1998; Mind Fight 1999.
Awards: Commonwealth Prize for Africa 1987 (Incidents at the Shrine); Booker Prize 1991 (The Famished Road); honorary DLitt Westminster University 1997.
Ben Okri’s Mental Fight will be published in South Africa by Orion next month