The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri

Rosemary Alice Gray

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350153011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Literaturkritik

Winner of the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, Ben Okri is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary writers writing today. Featuring a substantial new interview with Ben Okri himself, a full bibliography of his creative work and covering his complete works, this is the first in-depth study of Okri's themes and artistic vision. Rosemary Gray explores Okri's career-long engagement with myth, Nigerian politics and culture, and with the environmental crisis in the age of the Anthropocene.

Part One

The alchemy of life: ‘To find life in myth and myth in life’ (Birds of Heaven 1996)

1

Ben Okri’s aphorisms: ‘Music on the wings of a soaring bird’

Introduction

In a chapter that explores the what and how of a collection of nuggets of wisdom, it is apposite to begin by asking why writers such as Ben Okri, who have accepted the post-enlightenment critique of reason, use reason to convey grand notions conceived to give meaning to individual and collective life. One surmises that the answer might lie in a belief in the changeability of the human condition. Okri subscribes to the philosophy of the transhuman, expressed by Sebastian Seung (2013: 273) as being ‘the destiny of humankind to transcend the human condition’.¹ Okri stresses the centrality of ‘great stories’, for instance, because they provide an overarching explanation of human life or suggest universal moral principles (2015: 1042). A fragment in Birds of Heaven highlights the moral purpose of Okri’s aphorisms: ‘It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a re-awakened sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again’ (1996: 40 no. 84). ‘We are all wounded inside in some way or other,’ Okri insists. ‘We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other’ (ibid.). One deduces, therefore, that Okri’s maxims serve as a (moral) corrective to ameliorate both postmodernity’s material culture and the resultant discontent with contemporary life.

Reviving the Wisdom Corpus from antiquity, this multitalented Nigerian writer provides a guiding paremiological exemplum in A Time for New Dreams to counter postmodernity’s obsession with the pleasure principle, fast living and hyper-connectivity: ‘And out of the wilderness / The songbird sings / Nothing is what it seems. / This is a time for new dreams’ (2011: 147). Based on Italian Renaissance’s Desiderius Erasmus’s ([1540] 1982) view on the luminous benefits of concise thought, the argument is that the quintessence of aphorisms or proverbs is their pithy wisdom. A basic premise is that the ‘Imaginatio Creatrix’ communicating in poetic-prose aphorisms provides fertile ground for new connections, new depths and new transversals as well as epiphanies or what Okri terms the alchemy of ‘serendipity’. The cross-generic outpourings of this conceptual artist reveal an almost boundless quest for improvement to counter the hurt – possibly accruing from egotistic values – through intuitive creativity and heightened consciousness leading to intellectual growth and spiritual upliftment. These aphorisms are thus transformative.

The African worldview, as Wole Soyinka reminds us, turns on belief in ‘the continuing evolution of tribal wisdom through an acceptance of the elastic nature of knowledge as its one reality, as signifying no more than reflections of the original coming-into-being of a manifestly complex reality’ (1995: 53). Integral to Okri’s probing of rationality is the evolutionary process of epistemology and ‘the emergence of human creativity as the stimulus to the development of human culture with its aesthetic, moral, and intellectual senses’ (to borrow from Jadwiga Smith 2011: 17).

In Okri’s vision that informs his aphorisms, one detects classical, Christian and traditional African motifs. In contrast to the biblical book of Proverbs or its Hebraic Deuteronomy, Okri is neither prescriptive nor doctrinaire: he prods us gently towards the light. This is encapsulated in the title to this chapter, derived from Okri’s publication The Magic Lamp (2017), itself an intersectional text featuring a selection of Rosemary Clunie’s art and Ben Okri’s accompanying ontopoietic intuitions on Nature and the nature of being. The metaphor ‘Music on the wings of a soaring bird’ serves to illustrate Okri’s synaesthetic mode.² While the immediate appeal is to the auditory and mental, our visual as well as sensory faculties are simultaneously stimulated. Okri’s view of reality, reflecting that of phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘encompasses three ontological categories: the physical, the vital and the meaningful’ (Smith 2011: 18).³

Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in Okri’s aphorisms

Okri has spared no genre or medium in his creative impulse, erasing artificial disciplinary and generic boundaries. Not only does he argue for the healing power of poetic truth, but he also sees a symbiotic relation between the language of literature and that of philosophy, coining in Birds of Heaven a cultural aphorism that ‘[p]hilosophy is most powerful when it resolves into story. But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy’ (1996: 40). According to Ron Grace (n.d.: 4), etymologically, philosophy is the ‘love of wisdom’. In revivifying the ancient philosophy of the Wisdom Corpus, embracing its ideas, points of view, ways of life, systems of belief and so religious myths in his pithy observations, Okri demonstrates its synthesis with the African folkloric tradition that contains ‘a general truth’, itself the definition of an aphorism in The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: 76).

An early Okrian aphorism asserts unequivocally that ‘[t]he greatest religions convert the world through stories’ (Okri 1996: 20 no. 12); and Okri elucidates on the role of fiction in the perpetuation of religious mythologies: ‘All the great religions, all the great prophets, found it necessary to spread their message through stories, fables, parables’ (ibid.: 19). This echoes the claim of Italian theologian, Desiderius Erasmus ([1540] 1982: 17), who suggested that the overlap between philosophy and theology is such that theology is served as much by proverbs as by philosophy. The book of Proverbs in the Christian Bible, with its principle theme of wisdom, testifies to this view.⁴ ‘The Bible is one of the world’s greatest fountains of fiction and dream,’ Okri (1996: 19) aphorizes. Ronald Grace (n.d.: 4) suggests that faith provides the deepest level of wisdom, akin to what Okri terms ‘serendipity’, in its advocacy of an integrative underlying order. His poem, ‘On Klee’ (1996: 45), provides his poetic objective correlative: ‘Wisdom reigns in hidden symmetry / And colours are but charmed invisibility. / What lingers in the soul / Often bypasses the eye / And the birds of heaven, without wings – / How much more sublimely do they fly’ (Stanza 4).

In contradistinction to Roger Fowler’s notion that ‘“Art” … like “good” must be simply a commendatory word covering a multitude of incompatible meanings’ and – more insightfully – that ‘Art, as all know who are in the know, is not Life’ (1973: 12), Okri avers in an aphoristic correlative that ‘All art is a prayer for spiritual strength’ (1996: 12 no. 8). Evocative of the notion of a universal soul, he adds: ‘If we could be pure dancers in spirit, we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom’ (ibid.). Erasmus’s articulation on the efficacy of aphorisms or proverbs, such as these, concurs in greater detail:

To weave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles of Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour. In a word, it will wake interest by its novelty, bring delight by its concision, convince by its decisive power. ([1540] 1982: 17)

The trajectory of Okrian aphorisms

This discussion traces the trajectory and suggests the import of Okri’s blueprints for regaining our true state of being, for loving ‘with strength and wisdom’, conveyed via his aphorisms in Birds of Heaven (1996), A Time for New Dreams (2011) and Callaloo (2015: 1042–3). Broadly speaking, the trajectory comes together in the form of a secular sermon on ontopoietic ‘beingness’, a term used by phenomenologists as a synonym for Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’.

Predicated on the twin aphorisms that ‘Africa breathes stories’ and ‘[w]e are part human, part stories’ (Okri 1996: 24 and 26), Birds of Heaven explores the notion of humankind as ‘Homo fabula’. As a variation of the myth of faith and faith in mythmaking, Okri aphorizes enigmatically: ‘To find life in myth, and myth in life’ (ibid.: 42 no. 95). This prefigures a later aphoristic gem – ‘Great literature is almost always indirect’ (Okri 2015: 1042 no. 6). Predictably, given the thrust, a swirling cosmic dance of Okrian maxims has to do with the imagination and creativity, illustrating the writer’s conceptual artistry and transdisciplinary mode. For instance, he asserts that ‘[t]he imagination is one of the highest gifts we have’ (1996: 42 no. 93), but with the proviso that imagination operates best when unbounded, as implicit in ‘[t]he higher the artist, the fewer the gestures’ and explicit in ‘[t]he fewer the tools, the greater the imagination’ (ibid.: 40 nos 81 and 82). Musing that ‘[c]reativity is a secular infinity’ and that ‘[c]reativity is evidence of the transhuman’, he asserts that ‘[c]reativity is the highest civilizing faculty’ (ibid.: 41 nos 86, 87 and 88), a concept reiterated in my interview with the writer in 2011 (the closing essay in this monograph). Such twinned adages are perspicacious, for, as Anders Sandberg attests, ‘Transhumanism, broadly speaking, is the view that the human condition is not unchanging and that it can and should be questioned’ (2014: 1). This resonates with Soyinka’s claim for the evolutionary and plastic growth of wisdom, mentioned earlier.

Foregrounding the primacy of love and creativity, Okri intertwines art and spiritual love, moral codification, thankfulness and politics in numbers 90, 93, 98, 99 and 101 with:

Love is the greatest creativity of them all, and the most blessed.

Creativity is love, a very high kind of love.

Humility is the watchword at creativity’s gate.

Creativity is a form of prayer, and the expression of a profound gratitude for being alive.

And then, in another transdisciplinary observation, a mode that is core to his aesthetic practice, Okri avers that ‘[p]olitics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible’ (1996: 41–3). The astute anaphoric wordplay implies alchemy at work.

To adopt Joseph Addison’s view, if clarity and perspicacity were all that were needed, ‘the poet would have nothing else to do but to clothe his thoughts in the most plain and natural expressions’ (Jones [1922] 1963: 239). Although pared down to their essentials, the aphorisms in A Time for New Dreams develop mythmaking, inviting us to rethink our human condition.

Here, Okri is perhaps more methodical in his exhortations. In a section entitled ‘Seeing and Being’, he provides ten aphorisms on this chosen theme, nine of which are variations on the indivisibility of seeing and being, as captured in ‘[t]o see, one must first be’ (2011: 23 no. 5); while the tenth, ‘It takes a work of art to see a work of art’ (24), illustrates an aphorism from Birds of Heaven: ‘All great stories are enigmas’ (1996: 43 no. 97).

The next quiver of aphorisms in A Time for New Dreams occurs in a section entitled ‘The Romance of Difficult Times’. In line with this oxymoronic section heading, these maxims turn on paradox, where paradox, as defined by Fowler, is an ‘apparently self-contradictory statement, though one that is essentially true’ (1973: 136). Fowler cites an example from Schopenhauer by way of explication: ‘The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him’; as well as one from Shaw that evokes the pathetic fallacy: ‘The man who listens to reason is lost: reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her’ (ibid.). Both paradoxes are proverbial or aphoristic. Okri’s adage that ‘[s]tory is a paradox’ (1996: 31 no. 48) in Birds of Heaven can perhaps be better understood in aphorisms 19 and 21 that are, when paired, clearly paradoxical: ‘In the beginning there were no stories’ and ‘The universe began as a story’ (ibid.: 22). To a Western believer, the allusion would seem to be to Genesis. But I would argue in line with Emmanuel Obiechina (1995: 123) that these aphorisms perform an organic and structural function. They allude to ‘a return to the ro...