OKRI, Ben

Nationality: Nigerian. Born: Minna, Nigeria, 15 March 1959. Education: Urhobo College, Warri, Nigeria; University of Essex, Colchester, B.A. in comparative literature, 1978. Career: Broad-caster, "Network Africa," BBC World Service, 1984-85; poetry editor, West Africa, 1981-87; visiting Fellow at the Trinity College, Cambridge; has worked as a journalist; full-time writer and reviewer for the Guardian, the Observer, and The New Statesman, all London. Awards: Commonwealth Writers' prize for Africa, 1987; Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction, 1987; Booker prize for fiction, for The Famished Road, 1991.

Publications

Short Stories

Incidents at the Shrine. 1986.

Stars of the New Curfew. 1989.

Uncollected Short Stories

"The Dream-Vendor's August" (in Paris Review). 1987.

"Disparities" (in Literary Review). 1990.

Novels

Flowers and Shadows. 1980.

The Landscapes Within. 1981.

The Famished Road. 1991.

Songs of Enchantment. 1994.

Poetry

An African Elegy. 1992.

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Critical Studies:

"Ben Okri's The Landscapes Within: A Metaphor for Personal and National Development" by Abioseh Michael Porter, in World Literature Written in English, Autumn 1988, pp. 203-10; "Portrait of a Young Artist in Ben Okri's The Landscape Within " by Ayo Mamudu, in Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, 1991, pp. 85-91; "Ben Okri's Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity" by John Hawley, in Research in African Literatures, Spring 1995, pp.30-39; Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Reverend Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri by Ato Quayson, 1997.

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Nigerian-born writer Ben Okri has experimented in a number of forms—the novel, poetry, and essays—and during the 1980s, two volumes of short stories. Okri seems to have begun more or less as a realist writer. "Laughter Beneath the Bridge," for example, is a powerful story, set in Nigeria in the time of civil war. Told by a ten-year-old boy, it describes the flight from the war, the brutality of the soldiers, and above all the narrator's love for a spirited girl named Monica, who is finally taken away by the soldiers. All the grim detail of the war is there. A woman is raped repeatedly by soldiers after a bus is stopped at a checkpoint. The boy himself is almost shot when he forgets his own language in panic. The corpses in the stream are so jammed and swollen that they are unable to float, an image that recurs in Okri's work, and the leading citizens in the town have to come out and free them.

Okri is master of the unobtrusive detail. The old bus on which the boy and his mother flee in "Laughter Beneath the Bridge" has a sign on it: The Young Shall Grow. At the end of the story, when Monica disappears never to be seen again, Okri repeats the words with impassive irony. There are moments of mordant humor. When the boy's mother is asked to recite the paternoster in her husband's language, she realizes that the interpreter does not know the language well: "… so she extended the prayer, went deeper into idiom, abusing their mothers and fathers, cursing the suppurating vaginas that must have shat them out in their wickedness, swearing at the rotten pricks that dug up the maggoty entrails of their mothers…." And yet all this, the boy keeps insisting, he remem bers as "a beautiful time."

"In the Shadow of War," similarly, is a short, Hemingwayesque story that takes us back to the civil war period. The central character is a young boy named Omovo, who watches a strange woman with a black veil over her head go past the house each day. It turns out eventually that she is a rebel. The boy follows her, but so do the soldiers, and they kill her. Then they bring the boy back to his father. She has clearly been working for some kind of resistance, and the boy discovers that she is bald and "disfigured with a deep corrugation. There was a livid gash along the side of her face." It is a conventional but powerfully written story that works with great economy.

Elements of realism recur in all of Okri's short stories and frequently they begin with flat, impassive descriptions of Nigerian landscapes and crowded urban scenes, with their repeated invocations of the smells, the poverty, the heat, the drinking, and the brutality of the police all emphasized. Okri's political consciousness is never far away. Almost invariably, however, the stories move out, in Kafkaesque fashion, from physical detail into flights of surrealism, allegory, fantasy, and sometimes satire.

"Converging City" is an almost comic story about J. J. Agodi—part businessman, part man of religion—who lives an impoverished, frantic life. A series of incidents takes place, described in flat, rapid prose. He accidentally spits on a girl, then chases her up the street, pushes past a man who turns out to be an ex-wrestler, who hurls him into the air and down onto the body of a dead cow. A starving man dressed in underpants visits him and again is chased out of his shed. A traffic jam takes place and the head of state is caught up in it. The effect is almost surreal, even as the story documents the immense poverty of the city, its physical filth, and its political oppression.

"A Hidden History" is a strange story that seems to be a kind of allegory about racism. Inhabitants from postcolonial lands come to the society of their former rulers but find all promises are delusory: "and all that time the inhabitants thought the world was growing bigger, it was actually being made smaller." They are eventually driven out by a government order, and the vacated houses fall to pieces and rot. There is a mob of the unemployed generation, and we are told that "the street had become the repository of all the invisible hatred of all those who lived around." The imagery becomes more and more explicitly vile—fleas, rats, vultures, street dogs—as those who remain deface the street.

More or less typical of the way that the stories move into fantasy is "Worlds That Flourish," which begins, "I was at work one day when a man came up to me and asked me my name." The narrator is fired from his job, something he takes quite calmly. Then his flat is robbed by two patient, rational men who treat him courteously. They are captured by police and name him as an accomplice and then a neighbor refuses to deny their claim. The story becomes more and more mysterious as the man drives out of town, into a village in the forest where he is expected and which seems to represent death in some form. Bizarre details are casually dropped into the narrative: "We passed a skyscraper that reflected the sunlight like blinding glass sheets." The story is written in the flat, deliberately simple prose of many of Okri's stories.

"In the City of Red Dust" is a long, compelling story that gives a portrait of life in a city under the oppressive rule of the military. It is the governor's 50th birthday, and throughout the story there is the constant motif of the planes flying overhead, performing endless dazzling maneuvers until the end when one of them crashes. The two main characters, Emokhai and Marjomi, eke out a precarious living, constantly in debt. Marjomi has a valuable type of blood and makes frequent visits to the hospital to sell it. Emokhai steals a wallet but it contains little money. They have sporadic episodes with women which come to nothing. Marjomi has been useless since his wife ran off with a truck-pusher: "With her departure his luck also seemed to have deserted him. He used to make a varied, if precarious, living gambling at poker and on the pools." It is a memorable portrait of a man so frustrated by life that his behavior always takes self-destructive forms. The story is a dramatization of its epigraph from Matthew: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." At the end, despite the friction between them and despite Marjomi's constant tension, the friendship between the two men is confirmed.

"Stars of the New Curfew is the longest story in the collection of that name, a satirical piece concerning a salesman named Arthur living in the town of Largos, who becomes subject to nightmares. He is selling panaceas to the poor and becomes guilty at the money they waste on what are essentially useless materials. Eventually the company for which he works develops a power-drug, which turns out to be so powerful that it leads to traffic accidents by power-crazed drivers and the death of seven people by drowning in an accident for which Arthur feels himself responsible.

He returns to the town of W, where he spent his adolescence, and finds two old classmates, Takwa and Amukpe. They remind him of an escapade in which he was involved, concerning the two richest students in the school, Odeh and Assi. Their frantic competition to see who is the wealthier of the two offers Okri rich material for satire. As is often the case with Okri, the story moves closer and closer toward the nightmarish and the surreal: "I began, I think, to hallucinate," says the narrator, and what follows is a series of horrific visions: "I passed the town's graveyard and saw the dead rising and screaming for children." When he returns he decides to open his own business. "My own nightmares had ceased but I had begun to see our lives as a bit of a nightmare. I think I prefer my former condition."

A kind of grim neorealism alternates in Okri's work with bleak comedy and a phantasmagorical world that involves magicians and herbalists, weird animals, dreams, and grotesque creatures such as multicolored snakes. In some ways his writing represents a kind of African attempt at magic realism.

—Laurie Clancy

See the essay on "Stars of the New Curfew."