BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Ben Okri is no doubt the best writer of the post-Achebe, post-Soyinka Nigerian generation of writers. Okri can claim this status not only because he has won the most prestigious British literary award, namely the Booker of Booker for “The Famished Road”, a monumental novel which is more African in structure, theme and technique than a Nigeria tale of power, poverty, corruption, repression and hopelessness. I know Ben Okri since his young years when he was regularly contributing short stories and non-fiction to the prestigious British magazine known as The New Statesman, a left-leaning literary-cum-political review.
One can say that Okri built his early literary career with Statesman stories that first revealed his talent as an artist who exposed his country’s post-colonial or post-independence malaise unequalled by any of his contemporaries. What is interesting about his early and later writings was that he lived and studied in Britain while he wrote like a Nigerian or African living on the continent and observing the lives of the poor and most oppressed and repressed members of Nigerian societies irrespective of tribe or ethnicity. Okri speaks from the point of view of class, humanism with an obvious sympathy to the most impoverished among the wretched of the earth in his country as it is evident from “The Famished Road”. Maybe this was due to the left-leaning politics he espoused during his younger years in Britain.
In my opinion Okri’s predecessors who excelled in post-colonial literature authors like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the most renowned among many of them, were either novelists or poet and dramatists turned novelists like the great Wole Soyinka who has written a long and impressive novel about Nigeria’s most recent maladies, called “Chronicles of the Happiest people on Earth”. According to “Conversation”, an online literary review site, that reported about the book in the following words, “This year, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka published his first novel in 48 years, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. His previous novels were The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973). Fiction is not Soyinka’s most favored medium. He is a dramatist first, as well as being a poet, essayist and memoirist in a career whose creative energies have never waned.”
What is interesting about Soyinka, Ben Okri and even Chinua Achebe is the fact that a unifying factor runs through their writings, whether novels, dramas, poems or essays. This unifying common thread that runs through all of them is what one prominent critic called, the fact that all of them anchored their writings in an “African world”, meaning that their writings are not only about Nigeria but also about Africa as a whole.
According to the piece of literary critic in “conversation” “Soyinka’s early fiction sought to anchor the day-to-day lives of his characters in the cultural matrix of what he called “the African world”. As his essays show, that matrix was defined mainly in terms of Yoruba mythology, but the emphasis was not exclusive; in fact he was just as likely to draw on Shakespeare and classical European sources as the adventures of the Yoruba deities.” This is done in contradistinction to Western tradition of the novel or any literary product that is often anchored on the regional or urban environment the authors know best.
In this sense, the writings most American authors are regional in character like mark Twain’s tales based on his experiences of the Mississippi river or William Faulkner’s novels based on the slave-owning region south of the Mississippi. Ernest Hemingway’s may perhaps be a writer who was not confined to specific region as his writings transcend American realities and go as far as Europe to convey his experience of the second world war and the post-war years in Spain and France that produced masterpieces like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or his Parisian debut novel, “The Sun Also Shines”.
Nigerian writers on the contrary are not confined to their Yoruba or Igbo backgrounds but speak for all of Africa although this is not unique to Nigerian authors. Kenyan author Ngugi wa Tiongo, too transcends his kikuyu background to speak of Kenya and Africa in his masterpiece novel “Wizard of the Crow”. So, most prominent Africa writers have overcome the ethnic and tribal worlds that narrowed their visions and stilted their perspective to embrace African realities in general and become the mouthpieces of an entire continent. This is the power of art and literature that unifies people rather than divide them, speak to their common humanity rather than confine them to their narrow tribal or ethnic world that speak only to people imprisoned in their narrow tribal worlds that keep them apart from humanity by creating the illusions of exclusiveness or superiority complex that are at the source of the bloody ethnic conflicts that are shaking many African countries at present. Thus, to be a true African writer, it is not enough to stick to the narrow tribal ethnic worlds or to their national identities but to the continental realties that are the supreme unifying factors that can lead African to genuine freedom and unity. Politics does not unify people but art and literature can.
It is also a characteristic of post-independence Nigerian writers who did not embrace race, ethnicity or tribe and instead widened their views to embrace humanity, African identity. This was also true to poets as well as to prose fiction writers. One of the best Nigerian poets, Christopher Okigbo was a poet that had transcended the notion and realities of tribe or ethnicity. As one critic noted, “Okigbo was a poet who disdained labels. He would be appalled to be written about as a writer of color. For him there are only two kinds of writers: bad ones and good ones. Color, tribe, nationality meant nothing (italics mine) to his aristocratic sense of the universality of poetry.”
To comeback to Ben Okri and his short stories, one is inevitably drawn to “Stars of the New Curfew” which a collection of six short stories in a book of 194 pages. Ben Okri is not primarily a short story writer. As I said above, he is a superb novelist who has written perhaps one of the best novels about Africa like “the Famished Road” or “Songs of Enchantment”. The most important stories in the collection like “Stars of the New Curfew” and “World that Flourish” are about as well as the minor ones like the story entitled, “When the Lights Return” or “the city of Red Dust” are about lives under Nigerian military regimes and the oppression and repression the people suffer from under one-man military dictatorships or police violence and brutality. Some of them with the Biafra civil war or the post-war realities as backgrounds to their characters’ lives.
There is an interesting passage in the short story entitled, “When the lights Return” in which the main character Ede and a soldier manning the mobs in the streets, probably in the wake of the military coup, speak to one another in the manner of policemen anywhere in Africa and give the story a wider perspective or a sense or aspect of the “African world” about which Okri writes with courage and fluency. This is not however an analysis of the stories and it would be unnecessary to go deeper into them or go beyond indicating the common themes that tie one story to the other.
Many authors and literary critics have expressed their praises to Ben Okri’s novels as well his collection of short stories. One review about his collection of short stories in “Stars of the New Curfew” said for instance that the Africa Ben Okri writes about that, “this Africa is not the fault of people like Emokhai, the hero of “the City of Red Dust” who has to sell his own blood to settle his bar bill during the governor’s birthday celebrations. Instead it is the shambles created by those who rule in order that they may rule: small, vicious men bringing the world down to their level…”
Wole Soyinka, the doyen of Nigerian letters wrote about Ben Okri’s short stories in the following terms, “The stories in STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW are mostly set in the teeming streets of Lagos, a city stricken with fear and confusion in the aftermath of a civil war. In a few brief sentences, Ben Okri captures the arrogance and faceless indifference of the military forces who patrol the margins of these stories.”
The post-independence political realities of Nigeria as well as Africa in general are changing fast and in place of military dictators we now have political and intellectual elites who are replacing the old masters and divide the people of Africa along the lines of tribal, ethnic or nationalist lines in order to reproduced the old realties of poverty, conflicts and sufferings for Africans. Art and literature in Africa still have the same concerns and their objectives remain the emancipation of the common people of Africa, a vision that has not so far realized despite the heroic struggles of writers and artists. The journey may prove very long but the objectives are not fortunately unattainable.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 4 AUGUST 2022
