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Conversations with Ben Okri

Colors conducted an exclusive interview with the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian novelist Ben Okri, author of ‘The Famished Road’, whose visit to Dhaka during the Lit Fest 2017, inspired new hopes for literature and spirituality.

By Mustahsin Labib

Ben Okri, a voice with the unique capacity to penetrate minds, had many things to say on what is inspirational and on inspiration itself. “Inspiration,” he said, “is free. It is one of the very few things you don’t have to pay for. To my mind, it is everywhere: it is in books, it is in conversation, it is in art, it is in films, it is in history, it is in our lives. The world is abundant with inspiration but you have to be open. Openness is the key.”

On the question of Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe’s stature in world literature Okri had a nonhierarchical view: “They will both be widely studied, and not only those two giants but all other writers who write books that are of constant value, relevance and beauty to the human spirit. There is no competition in literature finally; those are just pleasant games that it is nice to play from time to time. But what endures, endures.”

Discussing about the role of African literature to present the continent to the world, Okri suggested, “To write truthfully, beautifully and to raise high the possibilities of literature. Literature is not advertising; it is all the truths that we cannot take and sometimes all the beauty that we cannot bear. It is about our enrichment and about compelling us, through its dreams, to face ourselves. The best contribution that literature can make is to be the best literature that it can be.”

Okri’s own masterpiece came into being through his experience of the others. He said, “The Famished Road is fed by the dreams of literature. I devoured the world, through art, politics, literature, films and music, in order to find the elixir of its tone. Then it became a perpetual story into which flowed the great seas of African dreams, myths and fables of the world, known and unknown. I made up stories in the matrix of the ancestral mode.” He added that many people read these stories and assume they belong to the oral tradition about which Okri is equaly enthusiastic. He has his role figured out from the outset. The writer clarified, “I had always believed that it is an artist’s function to enrich the oral tradition with stories of our own, inventions of our own, inspired by the tales we heard in the moonlight, sitting in a circle. But even in that the tone is the thing.”

Time is something that fascinated this African-born English writer who now lives in London. In travel show made for the BBC he once decided to slow down the process of travelled by taking trains, ferries and other slow-running vehicles. Time slows down in his much talked about novel too, which was also gestated at his life’s pace. “It was as a child that I began the book, with innocence and simplicity of heart. With the rich history of literature turning in my mind, I would disappear into the writing of the novel as into a dream. It was as if I sensed there was a book there, in the archetypal margins of the numinous world that existed already in the spirit realm; my task was to bring it here, as one lowering intact a perfect vision.”

He left school at 14 in Nigeria, yet here he is, being treated as a guru of sorts mouthing words of wisdom to the literary elites. They queue up to hear him speak. They knock on his study door, hoping for help with their lives. They have bought 200,000 copies of the paperback of his Booker-winning book, The Famished Road. Not an easy read.

When he won the Booker, in 1991, and sat for a good minute, as in a trance, before reading out one of his poems, he himself thought, who is this? Pretentious or what?

Being nostalgic Okri memorizes, “The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. “I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure,” he remembered.

“Then I was set upon in the street. I’m not saying it was racial, but there was blood on my typewriter. I asked for help, but no one would stop. I can either die the romantic death — and death does seem beautiful when you are on the edge — or I can use the energy in my rage, burn it another way, take the chaos out of my soul. I had a choice, and I chose to rebuild myself.” He continued.

With his 20,000 pounds Booker money, he paid his debts, bought 10 black notebooks in which he does his writing, and gave some to charity. His Cambridge appointment, as a Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts, came about before the Booker, clever old Trinity.

“So being here is enough?” He asked himself again.

“I might be wrong, but I believe that something going in from an unusual angle is better than the direct approach. I once walked 100 miles to Lagos to learn something. Those who want a word with me are coming forward. Presence is more important than talking.” Okri concluded.

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