Okri ‘meant to be read on many, many levels’
Author spins great riddles of existence into allegorical texts
Ben Okri, a prizewinning Nigerian British author, has never been easy to define. Throughout his 40-year career, critics have struggled to place him, labeling him a magical realist, an African realist, even a spiritual realist. And he has often forged new paths entirely.
His novel “The Last Gift of the Master Artists” is a case in point. It was originally published in Britain in 2007 as “Starbook,” and before its first release in the United States, Okri decided to completely refashion the text, accentuating aspects that he felt had been overlooked.
The novel opens in
Africa before the arrival of European colonizers, but soon a “white wind” appears, threatening to wipe out a group’s way of life and scatter “the tribe, its dream, its people, its art.” Okri was surprised, he said, that early critics had missed its allusions to the Atlantic slave trade. “They used words like ‘magical,’ ‘fairy tale,’ ‘enchantment’ — wonderful words,” he said, “but they missed that political edge.”
Reworking the novel took seven years; in the process, he said, the story took on a new urgency.
“This book has been rewritten under the fire of our times,” Okri, 63, said from his home in West London. “I thought I was revising one book, but I realized that I was actually writing a book about a world that was on the brink of catastrophe.”
Other Press has finally published “The Last Gift
of the Master Artists” in the United States, and a poetry collection, “A Fire in My Head,” followed. Both books feature Okri’s characteristic cosmic and mythic lens, and carry an existential weight in tune with the present moment.
American readers are getting a full sense of the breadth of Okri’s work, which spans genres, including novels and plays as well as poetry, essays and stories. His writing takes on the great riddles of existence — freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence — spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts.
“I’m an orchestral writer. I’m meant to be read on many, many levels,” Okri explained. “People expect me to be one kind of post-colonial writer, which I am, but I’m also many, many other things as well: I’m a stylist, a cubist, an innovator, a spiritual writer, an activist and environmental writer. I’m all of these things.”
Okri went unpublished in the United States for nearly 30 years. The reappearance of his work here comes at a time of deep reckoning and crisis — from the pandemic to political and ecological meltdowns — which has made his work feel all the more prescient.
In early 2020, Akashic released his novel “The Freedom Artist,” set in an “age of anxiety” that is beset by plagues, tyranny and rampant disinformation. An underground resistance movement swells into a mass uprising, spurred on by wizard-like bards and a single, cryptic line of graffiti: “Upwake!”
“The Freedom Artist” immediately resonated with his Akashic editor, Ibrahim Ahmad.
“The novel felt restorative to me as a reader — I had been craving a piece of writing that could so perfectly express both the utility and the primacy of fiction in a time of crisis,” Ahmad said. “Ben compels us out of our collective stupor, showing how easily our freedom — whether psychic, spiritual or political — can be imperiled.”
Okri has long been hailed as a literary and social visionary. His groundbreaking 1991 novel “The Famished Road,” about a spirit child named Azaro who navigates the shadow realms of contemporary Nigeria, received the Booker Prize and opened the way for a vibrant new generation of African writers. It was recently reissued in an Everyman’s Library edition on its 30th anniversary, the first African novel to receive such a release since Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.”
According to novelist Helon Habila, readers may be ready to move beyond a “narrow understanding of Africa and African literature” and appreciate Okri’s humanistic “craft and artistry.”
French scholar Vanessa
Guignery, who wrote a book about Okri, called him a “vocal town crier against injustice” whose elliptical approach encourages “reflection and even meditation.” She believes the renewed interest in his work reflects a “need for forms of writing and thinking that differ from what prevails in contemporary American literature.”
Okri is more enigmatic about his republication in the United States. “These things are a complete mystery,” he said. “Books have their own lives. Maybe nations go through a time when they just can’t hear certain kinds of voices.”
But he also feels that the increasing divisiveness in America has, paradoxically, made it more receptive to his “open tone.”
“I think the tremendous polarization that has taken place now kind of makes my voice easier to hear,” he said. “Because I don’t speak from either polarity. I’m speaking in the middle, in this profoundly human voice.”
Nigerian writer Okezie Nwoka finds Okri’s work more relevant now than ever. “His themes strike to the core of the human experience and get us to examine the metaphysical underpinnings of our
day-to-day realities,” said Nwoka, who was inspired by Okri to “be audacious” in his own writing. “Ben has shown me that African writing does not have to follow a single style — that it can be as fluid and diverse as African people.”
Okri remains philosophical about his work and its shifting fate. “I’m older and something has happened to my own voice as a writer — it’s deepened and gotten abridged and simplified at the same time,” he said with a grin. “I think this is a wonderful time to be reintroduced to America. You’re getting golden Ben, you know!”