The Writings of Ben Okri Transcending the Local and the National

Introduction The Writings of Ben Okri: Transcending the Local and the National The Writings of Ben Okri Blurb While African Literature Studies show a tendency to gloss over the essentially diasporic nature of many African writings, this study engages with the conceit of émigré identity in specific relation to Ben Okri Through Homi K Bhabha, new readings of Okri’s earlier works reveal a mimicry that speaks of an unconscious tethering to a colonial past The severing of this past coincides with the author’s own migration to London where, confronted with the image of his own difference, he initiates a reconceptualisation of his creative practice that redirects him back to his African heritage While a Yoruba resourcebase forms the kernel of this process, his contact with other epistemologies makes his work decidedly hybridic in nature Through the fields of Postcolonial Studies, Diaporic Criticism and Anthropological Studies, this comprehensive study situates Ben Okri’s literary oeuvre within a globalised African consciousness that embraces all humanity Maurice O’Connor was born in Dublin and is currently associate professor at the University of Cádiz, Spain where he read his Ph.D on Ben Okri His research interests are centred around Anglophone African and Indian literatures Introduction A Translated Man: Ben Okri’s Literary Journey The Writings of Ben Okri Introduction Contents Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgements 10 Writing Nigeria Creating in Isolation 23 A Revisited Landscape 37 Emerging from the Shadows 49 An Abiku Narrative 66 The Semiotics of Violence and the Grotesque 81 Magical Reality 88 The Transcending Road 105 The Phenomenology of Sound 115 10 Translating Africa in London 135 Conclusion 145 Bibliography 148 The Writings of Ben Okri Abbreviations FASFlowers and Shadows TLW The Landscapes Within DL Dangerous Love IAS Incidents at the Shrine SNC Stars of the New Curfew TFR The Famished Road SOE Songs of Enchantment IF Infinite Riches IA In Arcadia Introduction Preface B en Okri has been one of the most prolific African writers to come on the scene in the last fifteen years and his contribution to the forwarding of African writing has been paramount Of Nigerian origin, he is now a permanent resident in London where he enjoys a high and respectable profile amongst the British literary establishment A selfconfessed Nigerian-Londoner, these two categories are what mark him as a man and as a writer To fully understand the development within his narrative and poetic discourse one must appreciate the complexities of this hyphenated identity and how it exercises its ambiguous draw upon his writing Up until the present moment, the majority of literary critics have included Okri’s work within a Nigerian national school of literature, the most salient example being Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Literature: Orality & History in the Work of Rev Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, & Ben Okri (1997) Quayson historicises Nigerian literatures written in English within the context of cultural nationalism, and situates the works of Tutuola, Soyinka and Okri as response to the availability of a wider cultural dynamics within the Nigerian nation-state This leads him to the conclusion that the varying appropriations of Yoruba resource-bases by these writers were metonymic of wider national realities (Quayson, 1997: 164) While Quayson is correct in tracing this link through Samuel Johnson, and documenting how Okri incorporates Yoruba resource-base into his narratives, he limits his analysis to the nation space and ignores the hybridic nature of The Writings of Ben Okri Okri’s literary discourse which is essentially a diasporic phenomenon This debate on a national school of literature brings up the question of nation, an issue that has been discussed upon at great length in the field of postcolonial studies and which is one we shall not be rehashing here Suffice to say that, while poststructural theory has correctly elucidated upon the discursive nature of nation and of its fictional quality, national cohesion is something African states desperately need; although this cohesion must not be achieved through despotism or be a dominant ethnic will imposing itself upon minor ones Situating Okri as a cosmopolitan and migrant writer brings into play a distinct set of critical tools with which to explore his trajectory as a writer as compared to the African writer based in Africa The diasporic experience can be metaphorically defined as an occupation of the liminal zone between the borders of nation, and this subjectivity is distinct to the organic hybridity of the African writer who, while enjoying sojourns in Europe or North America, always returns home If we accept that, as Stuart Hall (1990) assures us, cultural practice is an ongoing production of identity that is never complete, then Okri, through his narratives, is exploring a new sense of identity that, while projected onto the homeland of Nigeria, does in fact embrace a non-essential pan-African consciousness Our exploration of Okri as a diasporic African writer rather than one who fits into the category of a Nigerian national is, nonetheless, not a questioning of nation It is, however, an analysis of identity and how a day-to-day existence which is removed from one’s place of origin exercises a profound influence on self-perception and, in the case of the writer, the narrativisation of the self which is fundamental to the creative process Framed within this hypothesis, our study shall examine the transition that has occurred in Okri’s writings from Flowers and Shadows to The Famished Road trilogy, omitting those novels not set within an African context We shall evidence how the author strategically moved away from his mimetic engagement Introduction with Western canon to develop complex and hybridic narratives that negotiated African identity through the English novel To contextualise this move we shall employ Homi K Bhabha’s theoretical findings on the time-lag―the temporal break in representation inherent to the signifying process It is within this in-between space of cultural annunciation where Okri forges his genre of Afro-modernity―a non-essentialist understanding of cultural and political practices that represents a modern subjectivity capable of expressing that singular modernity of African-derived peoples For this reason, we shall principally focus on how Okri renegotiates West African ontology in relation to his narrative epistemology, and shall furthermore expound on his representation of Nigerian post-independence concerns 10 The Writings of Ben Okri Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues Rafael Galán, Leonor Acosta, Rafael Vélez and Asunción Varo from the Literature Department at the University of Cádiz for their support To Sudesh Mishra, Felicity Hand and Christopher Rollason for sharing their knowledge and resources A special thanks to Sharmilla Beezmohun for her timely corrections and comments on a late draft of the text, and also to R.K Dhawan for believing in this project To Carmen my wife who has always been at my side even when I was absent, and for her gift of joy she gave to us; our daughter Erina Introduction 149 Many of the digressions in the Famished Road trilogy can be classed within the genre of utopian writing Pamela NevilleSington and David Sington (1993) in their Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers have Changed the Modern World have argued that utopian thinkers have had positive effects on the modern world One of the founding arguments of utopian thinking is the idea of the tablu rasa, what Corbusier defined as a ‘building on a clear site’, which was a metaphor for tearing down the edifice of social structures and starting from scratch However, while utopian ideologies have been the forerunners of many modern political initiatives, one might question how the dreamed paradise that Okri constructs offers real political and social agency for those living in Africa today Okri is aware of this utopian ideological that suggests a break with the past is somewhat chimerical and that one cannot ignore certain historical and materialist realities ‘Harmonies of Politics and Heart’ registers this inconsistency in assuring us: Mastery of material problems: No spiritual way can reconcile Itself truthfully with the raw wound Of starving multitudes (Mental Fight, 41) While double-consciousness empowers and affords an intellectual confidence that sees beyond the authority of the Western cultural sign to detect its inherent flaws, one would have to question if cultural hybridity gives real agency to those subjects living at the edges of capital or within those neocolonial spaces where basic human rights and material needs are not guaranteed by the state There is also the questionable ‘abandoning’ of the subaltern’s fixed notions of autochthonous culture and identity that survived colonial indoctrination Postmodern notions of the fractured self and a de-centring of knowledge are fine for societies which have got beyond issues of basic material needs, health care, a decent education system etc., and are sufficiently sophisticated to put cultural essentialisms up for scrutiny In the case of the majority of modern African states, the empowerment we speak about in relation to hybridity refers 150 The Writings of Ben Okri moreover to a limited urban section of the society, while a vast number of African intellectuals opt for migrancy Hybridity as a model of empowerment within an African context is therefore contingent to these aforementioned material realities and to the increased mobility within space which wealth affords With reference to Okri, we felt it important to reveal how his narrative discourse was strongly influenced by his diasporic condition The abiku motif as an expression of the need for national cohesion also represented that subjectivity poised between Lagos and London, and the sometimes invisible condition of migrancy The image of a fractured national body we identified in The Landscapes Within was also detected by Quayson (1999) in Famished Road trilogy through the trope of disability So, while Okri expresses his desire for Nigeria to escape the tragedy of its birth-death-rebirth cycle, his ‘national allegory’ is much more complex than simple It has been important for us to demonstrate how the narration of nation within the abiku trilogy was also the need to imagine a homogeneous homeland from the unhomely location of London As a young writer, Okri commenced his journey to the old metropolis where he had to negotiate the conflicting aspects that make up a postcolonial identity As Harish Trivedi (2005) correctly indicates, when Bhabha speaks of translation, he is also referring to the idea of a physical ‘bringing across’ which speaks of the diasporic movement of peoples The motif of Rushdie’s ‘translated man’ refers to Okri’s ‘translation’ from Lagos to London and to the ‘newness’ he brought with him—a difference which, when transformed into discourse, reveals the interstitial Within this in-between space emerge narratives that go beyond notions of mimesis of ‘original and copy’ or a division between past and present The cultural translation that Okri performs in his writings is what Bhabha defines as the ‘translational transnational’ In our study, we have been exploring the link between how Okri recreated an image of home within the alien landscape of London and how this process activated an exploration and reconceptualisation of diverse cultural material which included Introduction 151 West African resource-base and a European literary tradition We evidenced how Okri emerged from the shadows of mimicry to transform his own personal relationship with a colonial past to create a new literary space We located this transformation within the sign of black difference which questions notions of black essentialism and a return to the African organic community Rather than belonging to one ethnic group or one nation, this ‘black sign’ is a disseminated phenomenon which not only pertains to Africa but also to the black Atlantic or to the African diaspora Through this process of cultural translation, Okri achieves a bridging of Africa with the multicultural site of London and the global Bibliography Primary Sources Achebe, Chinua (1958) Things Fall Apart London: Penguin Classics [2001] _ (1966) A Man of the People London: Penguin Classics [2001] Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1967) A Grain of Wheat London: Penguin [2002] _ (1977) Petals of Blood London: Penguin Classics [2002] Okri, Ben (1979) Flowers and Shadows London: Longman Drumbeat _ (1981) The Landscapes Within London: Longman _ (1986) Incidents at the Shrine London: Vintage [1993] _ (1988) Stars of the New Curfew London: Vintage [1999] _ (1991) The Famished Road London: Vintage [1992] _ (1992) An African Elegy London: Jonathan Cape _ (1993) Songs of Enchantment London: 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