OKRI, Ben 1959-

PERSONAL: Born March 15, 1959, in Minna, Nigeria. Education: Attended Urhobo College (Warri, Nigeria) and University of Essex. Hobbies and other interests: Music, art, theater, cinema, martial arts, good conversation, dancing, silence.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St. Martin's Lane, London WC2H 9EA, England.

CAREER: Novelist, poet, and author of short fiction. West Africa magazine, poetry editor, 1981-87; host of Network Africa, BBC World Service, 1984-85. Visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1991-93.

MEMBER: PEN International, Society of Authors.

AWARDS, HONORS: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, 1987; Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction, 1987; Booker Prize for fiction, 1991, for The Famished Road; Premio Letterario Internazionale Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore, 1993; Premio Grinzane Cavour, 1994; Crystal Award, 1995; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1997; Premio Palmi, 2000. Honorary D. Lit., University of Westminster, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Flowers and Shadows (novel), Longman (London, England), 1980.

The Landscapes Within (novel), Longman (London, England), 1981.

Incidents at the Shrine (short stories), Arrow Books (New York, NY), 1986.

Stars of the New Curfew (short stories), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1988, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

The Famished Road (novel), Cape (London, England), 1991, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 1992.

An African Elegy (poetry), Cape (London, England), 1992.

Songs of Enchantment (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

Astonishing the Gods (novel), Phoenix House (London, England), 1995, Orion, 1998.

Dangerous Love (novel), Phoenix House (London, England), 1996.

A Way of Being Free (novel), Phoenix House (London, England), 1997.

Infinite Riches (novel), Phoenix House (London, England), 1999.

In Arcadia (novel), Phoenix House (London, England), 2002.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Guardian, Observer, and New Statesman.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist, poet, and short-story writer Ben Okri continually seeks in his writings to capture the postindependent Nigerian world view, including that country's civil war and its ensuing violence and transformation, no matter how troubling or painful these events may be. In an essay written in 1991, Okri stated that "if the poet begins to speak only . . . of things he can effortlessly digest and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us . . . in restricted terms and exclusively with restricted language, then what hope is there for us." As Harry Garuba asserted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Even though the manner in which [Okri] explores these issues has sometimes become a matter of contention among his peers, there is . . . little doubt about the importance of his contribution to the development of the contemporary Nigerian novel." With publication of his 1992 novel The Famished Road, Okri was praised by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Okri "has ushered the African novel into its own post-modern era through a compelling extension of traditional oral forms that uncover the future in the past. But while The Famished Road may signal a new achievement for the African novel in English, it would be a dazzling achievement for any writer in any language."

Okri uses nightmarish imagery and surrealist contortions of reality to portray the bizarre social and political conditions existing inside Nigeria. "Dreams are the currency of Okri's writing," explained Giles Foden in the Times Literary Supplement, dreams "made of the stuff of Africa's colossal economic and political problems." An Economist reviewer noted of Okri's collective oeuvre, "It has often been hard to tell whether he was describing dream or reality—and it did not seem to matter much anyway." Critics have associated Okri's techniques with those practiced by magic realists, a school of writers who incorporate supernatural elements into otherwise realistic settings. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Stars of the New Curfew for the New York Times, commented that Okri's Africa "seems like a continent dreamed up, in tandem, by Hieronymus Bosch and Jorge Luis Borges—a land where history has quite literally become a nightmare." However, Okri insists that the supernatural elements in his works are realistic representations of the Nigerian experience, demonstrating the continuity between the realistic and mystical realms of experience that exists for Nigerians.

Beginning with his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, published when Okri was twenty-one years old, he has devoted much of his work to describing the political and social chaos wracking Nigeria, and the pictures he creates are dark and often violent. In his review of Incidents at the Shrine for the London Observer, Anthony Thwaite called Okri "an obsessive cataloguer of sweat, phlegm, ordure and vomit," while Kakutani noted that the author's characters "live in a state of suspended animation, their private lives overshadowed by political atrocities, whatever ideals they might have had eroded by the demands of day-to-day survival." The narrator of the title story in Stars of the New Curfew is a vagabond medicine salesman whose cures often backfire, sending people to violent, grisly deaths. He is constantly on the run from his victims, but cannot outrun his visions. An unnamed character in the story "Worlds That Flourish," also in Stars of the New Curfew, flees a hellish city only to find himself in a more literal hell where some people have wings but cannot fly, others have feet that face backward, and an old neighbor appears sporting three eyes. Susan Cronje, who called the book "an important comment on Nigerian society" in her review for the New Statesman, said that "Okri's writing is suffused with helpless anger at the alienation of Nigerian society, the corruption not only of the rulers but also of the ruled who seem to connive at their own oppression."

Okri's 1991 novel, The Famished Road, which received England's prestigious Booker Prize, further explores the Nigerian dilemma. Charles R. Larson, writing in World & I, remarked that "the power of Ben Okri's magnificent novel is that it encapsulates a critical stage in the history of a nation . . . by chronicling one character's quest for freedom and individuation." The Famished Road's main character is Azaro, an abiku child torn between the spirit and natural world. Azaro's struggle to free himself from the spirit realm is paralleled by his father's immersion into politics to fight the oppression of the poor. The novel introduces a host of people all of whom "blend together . . . to show us a world which may look to the naked eye like an unattractive ghetto, but which is as spiritually gleaming and beautiful as all the palaces in Heaven—thanks to the everyday, continuing miracle of human love," wrote Carolyn See in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

By novel's end, Azaro recognizes the similarities between the nation and the abiku; each is forced to make sacrifices to reach maturity and a new state of being. This affirming ending also "allows rare access to the profuse magic that survives best in the dim forests of their spirit," according to Rob Nixon of the Village Voice. Similarly, in her appraisal for the London Observer, Linda Grant commented, "Okri's gift is to present a world view from inside a belief system." Detroit Free Press contributor John Gallagher deemed the work "a majestically difficult novel that may join the ranks of greatness."

In Songs of Enchantment, Okri continues the story and themes raised in The Famished Road. However, while the focus in the first book is on the efforts of Azaro's parents to keep him among the living, the second book deals with what Charles R. Larson described in Chicago's Tribune Books as "an equally difficult battle to restore the greater community to its earlier harmony and cohesiveness." As Azaro further chronicles the oppression that has hold of his village and his family, the landscape increasingly becomes intermingled with the political and social chaos. At one point, Azaro leaves the village with his father: "It was impossible to determine how long we had been running, or how far we had travelled. But after awhile, it seemed as if Dad had been running in a straight line which paradoxically curved into an enchanted circle. We couldn't break out of the forest." This sequence functions metaphorically, as Azaro comes to realize that the entire nation of Nigeria is undergoing a similarly debilitating series of changes. Because of this, Songs of Enchantment more clearly explicates Okri's concerns with the problems visited upon Africa after decolonization. Wrote Larson, "The wonder of Songs of Enchantment . . . is that it carries on so richly the saga of nation building implying that countries that have broken the colonial yoke may face an even more difficult struggle."

Okri further makes use of the dreamlike world he is so adept at creating, as well as the world of suspended disbelief inherent to the folk tale. For The Songs of Enchantment is closer to a collection of folk tales than to the novel, and this form further emphasizes Okri's theme of redemption as well as the confusion that is visited upon Azaro and his countrymen. As Judy Cooke pointed out in the New Statesman, "Many folk tales are working towards a creation myth, examining causation and identity. . . . Okri's work is perhaps best enjoyed in this context."

After winning the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, Okri, like many award-winning authors, found himself expected to duplicate this success with his subsequent works. Not surprising, perhaps, his more recent work, penned in different styles and with different intents, has been received more critically. In a World Literature Today review, for example, Bruce King noted that while The Famished Road is "marvelous," Okri's subsequent books, such as Songs of Enchantment have been "repetitious, and endless telling of adventures among the spirits and their influence on society."

As an example of such repetition, like Songs of Enchantment, Dangerous Love is a reworking of Okri's second novel, The Landscapes Within, published fifteen years earlier. Dangerous Love tells the story of Omovo, a young clerk in a chemicals firm who in his spare time paints canvases which depict his bleak ghetto surroundings. Although the "dangerous love" of the title refers to Omovo's love affair with a married woman, the spiritual evil that has consumed Nigeria makes Omovo's art—the belief that he can re-dream his world—just as dangerous.

Dangerous Love is essentially a künstlerroman—a novel that traces the evolution of an artist—for Omovo uses his art as a way of finding a spiritual place for himself. Alan Riach wrote in Contemporary Novelists of The Landscapes Within, "Social and political corruption are the condition and context of Omovo's artistic effort." Indeed, throughout the novel Omovo debates with himself and his friends the role of the Nigerian artist and the art they produce. However, the uncompromising reality of the Nigeria presented by the novelist—the slums, the poverty, the corruption—make it clear that Okri does not hold to this view. As Ruth Pavey wrote in the New Statesman, he "conveys a poignant sense of a generation caught between languages and identities. . . . More poignant still is the hindsight we now have: that their fears for the future were better founded than their hopes."

Michael Kerrigan wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that in Dangerous Love "painter-protagonist, Omovo, is as lost as the reader is in a disturbing slum-scape which, though all too oppressively real, seems to clamor for allegorical interpretation." However, it is in Astonishing the Gods that Okri truly creates such a landscape; Alev Adil wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that in his 1995 novel Okri "has jettisoned reality altogether, preferring to inhabit an allegorical space that bears no scars or traces of modernity whatsoever." The novel's nameless hero, upon learning to read and thus discovering that he and his people are invisible because they are not included in any history books, sets out on a quest to become visible. However, the quest turns into a spiritual journey of understanding for the hero, who achieves perfect invisibility after a series of tests that culminates in his naming of the Invisibles' dream: "creativity and grace." The message of the hero's embracing of his natural state is dual. Wrote Amit Chauduri in the Spectator, readers can approach Astonishing the Gods "as an affirmation and celebration of the creativity and contributions of those communities which are, to all purposes, 'invisible' to the greater world, and also as an autobiography of an African writer who has 'arrived,' in every sense of that word, in the West."

New Statesman reviewer Guy Mannes-Abbott, who interpreted Astonishing the Gods as a work "about language and change," compared Okri's belief, as demonstrated in the novel, in the ability of language to create possibilities for his own language, which he finds "properly worked and exact." Mannes-Abbott concluded that Astonishing the Gods is "an impressive, brave and often beautiful little book that is not for the literal-minded." Similarly, Charles R. Larson in the Nation called Astonishing the Gods "the most remarkable novel" of Okri's career, and welcomed it as "a dazzling and unabashedly spiritual narrative at a time when most writers are afraid to articulate matters of the soul in public."

Okri's 2002 offering, In Arcadia—a "variation on Astonishing Gods," to quote King in World Literature Today—follows the activities of a film crew as it travels throughout Europe attempting to film a modernday Arcadia, or paradise. While King found the work unsuccessful as a novel, noting that, "except as a metaphor of life as a journey, the story itself seems purposeless as there are few events and little narrative development," he found it engaging for other reasons. It is "interesting—as the novel becomes art criticism, cultural history, meditation—but the great truths offered appear as cliches," or what New Statesman's William Skidelsky dubbed "Okri's portentous sermonising," which is "often tiresome." Despite In Arcadia's alleged faults, Skidelsky found that the author's "writing has a certain magisterial quality; Okri's disregard for plot and plausibility is perversely charming." "In occasional flashes of humour," the critic added, "he shows that he is not incapable of laughing at his own pretensions. Would that he laughed more often."

Reviewing the short fiction included in Incidents at the Shrine, Sara Maitland said of Okri in the New Statesman that "sentence by sentence he turns in beautiful, strong prose, dense with lyricism and metaphor, skipping elegantly along the edge of surrealism and never collapsing into it." Okri's descriptions of Nigeria are so finely etched that locale takes on a life of its own, maintained the reviewer. Similar qualities were commended by Maureen Freely in the short stories contained in Stars of the New Curfew, prompting her to write in the London Observer: "There are many novelists who write as well as Okri, many who share his gift for recreating the texture of everyday life, many who can cut through the surface to expose, as he does, the myths our elders and betters use to keep us in our place. There are very few novelists who can do all three. The fact that Ben Okri has done so in short stories, without ever losing his balance, his humour, or his edge, makes his accomplishment all the more exceptional."

Okri continues to explore the tensions between hope and despair in language critics have consistently praised as graceful, controlled, and spare. "His fiction is full of the thresholds of (im)possibility, of mutability and self-renewal," lauded Mannes-Abbott in the New Statesman, "and is rendered in correspondingly unrestricted language: rich, opaque, sometimes rapturous."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Adewale, Maja-Pearce, A Mask Dancing: NigerianNovelists of the Eighties, Hans Zell Publishers (London, England), 1992.

Agyeman-Duah, Ivor, Some African Voices of OurTime, Anansesem Publications (Accra, Ghana), 1995.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 87, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 157: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Emenyonu, Ernest, editor, Literature and Society:Selected Essays on African Literataure, Zim Pan-African Publishers (Oguta, Nigeria), 1986.

Fraser, Robert, Ben Okri: Toward the Invisible City, Northcote House Educational Publishers, 2002.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak, editor, Essays on African Writing2, Heinemann (London, England), 1995.

Moh, Felicia Alu, Ben Okri: An Introduction to HisEarly Fiction, Michigan State University Press (East Lansing, MI), 2002.

Okri, Ben, Songs of Enchantment, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

Oxford, J. Currey, Strategic Transformations inNigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1997.

Rutherford, Anna, editor, From Commonwealth toPost-Colonial, Dangaroo (Sydney, Australia), 1992.

periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, November 23, 1987; July 10, 1992.

Detroit Free Press, August 30, 1992, p. P9.

Economist, June 15, 1996, p. 3.

Independent (London, England), October 24, 1991, Robert Winder, "The Road to Discovery"; March 3, 1993, Paul Taylor, "Dreams of a Boy on Earth"; March 23, 1993, Hunter Davis, "Ben Okri's Green-Apple, Left-Handed Sort of Day."

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 24, 1989, pp. 3, 13; June 8, 1992, p. 6.

Nation, May 27, 1996, p. 31.

New Statesman, October 7, 2002, William Skidelsky, review of In Arcadia, p. 55.

New Statesman, May 9, 1986, p. 35; July 13, 1986, p. 27; July 25, 1986, p. 30; October 17, 1986, p. 36; July 29, 1988, pp. 43-44; March 26, 1993, p. 41; March 24, 1995, p. 25; April 12, 1996, p. 37.

New Statesman & Society, March 22, 1991, p. 44.

New York Times, July 28, 1989.

New York Times Book Review, August 13, 1989, p. 12; June 28, 1992, pp. 3, 20; October 10, 1993.

Observer (London, England), July 10, 1988, p. 42; October 27, 1991, Linda Grant, "The Lonely Road from Twilight to Hard Sun," p. 61.

Spectator (London, England), April 1, 1995, p. 33; August 22, 1998, Andrew Barrow, review of Infinite Riches, pp. 34-35; September 28, 2002, Jeremy Treglown, review of In Arcadia, pp. 68-69.

Times (London, England), October 24, 1991, Philip Howard, "There Is Wonder Here"; March 13, 1993, Lorraine Griffiths, "Okri: Biography"; March 25, 1993, James Wodall, "In the Land of Fighting Ghosts"; April 7, 1996.

Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 1986, p. 863; August 5-11, 1988, p. 857; April 19, 1991, p. 22; April 17, 1992, p 8; March 10, 1995; April 5, 1996, p. 26; September 11, 1998, review of Infinite Riches, p. 23.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 16, 1989, p. 6; June 14, 1992; October 10, 1993, p. 1.

Village Voice, August 25, 1992, p. 87.

Washington Post, August 7, 1989.

Washington Post Book World, May 24, 1992; October 3, 1993.

World & I, March, 1992, pp. 383-387.

World Literature Today, spring, 1990, p. 349; April-June, 2003, Bruce King, review of In Arcadia, pp. 86-67.

World Literature Written in English, fall, 1988, Abioseh Michael Porter, "Ben Okri's The Landscapes Within: A Metaphor for Personal and National Development."*