STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW
by Ben Okri, 1989

Ben Okri's "Stars of the New Curfew" negotiates the transformation from hopeful egotism to hopeless social consciousness in postcolonial Nigeria. Its syncretic technique owes its familiarity to the magic realist tradition developed by Latin American writers somewhat earlier than the Nigerian tradition in which Okri participates. The Nigerian tradition is, in turn, a distinctively African response to cultural pressures and literary influences similar to those that created Latin American magic realism.

Exploring vincula with such indigenous or marginalized cultures as the Mayan or Afro-Cuban, the first generation of Latin American magic realists (Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier) produced works in the 1940s under the influence of modernism and French surrealism and continued to produce through the 1970s. Major works in the Nigerian tradition (Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola) began to appear in the late 1950s, along with the early works of the second generation of Latin American magic realists (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante). This generation transformed European, Anglo-American, and postcolonial writing through the so-called Boom of the 1960s. In the Latin American originals or in Indian, Trinidadian, African American, or Australian offshoots, a marginalized European sensibility revived indigenous folklore and history to present again the geography and sociocultural mix of syncretic colonial cultures. Since the base of the writers' cultural formation was European, European and American readers were enabled to see their own worlds as strange, in the tradition of Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Olaudah Equiano, the first Nigerian to publish his travels in English (1789). The African variant takes Africa as a base and demands that the reader enter an Africa in which a vigorous battle for ideological and cultural control is being waged.

In "The Stars of the New Curfew" the protagonist is a man who can find no work "for one of my qualification" and so takes a job as a patent medicine salesman. Having learned his trade and mastered his patter, he begins to have some success. Selling hope, he finds his cures worsen the diseases, and he begins to have nightmares with visions of worm-eaten, starving children and of other rotting victims. When his new boss develops a more powerful medicine, POWER DRUG, he becomes a "salesman of nightmares." Plying his trade on a bus, he sells to a Rastafarian and to the driver, who promptly races his lorry over a bridge into the river where the sewage runs. Seven people are drowned.

Fleeing responsibility, the protagonist makes his way back to his hometown, W., past the wreckage of unnumbered accidents. When he arrives, he lies and boasts to his old friends, remembers the triumphs and humiliations of his youth, and sees the same "disgustingly rich" families that had dominated the town in his childhood competing for power. In the palatial house of the rich Odeh, Chippendale vies with masks, gourds, and charms, glittering chandeliers with fiercely carved warriors and cured lion heads, tables of blue glass with tables of iroko wood, and photos of father with the head of state in a leopard skin or with a Japanese businessman. Outside this syncretic interior an unofficial curfew is enforced by the family's cultic dancers, marauding with their machetes, biting the heads off chickens, and terrorizing the town in preparation for a contest in which the two families will compete by burying the town in money. (Such a display actually took place in Nigeria before an election in 1983.)

Money is showered on the people—cold bills from a refrigerator and coins from a helicopter in the sky—while a Christian preacher rants against it. Assi's father is declared the winner, and a battle breaks out. Rain washes the print off the false money the people have struggled over, and the protagonist escapes by taxi, expecting that "the meteors of the new curfews blaze for two or three generations. Then afterwards their legacies are scattered by the winds and to the pariah dogs." He returns to his old job, understanding his nightmares but lapsing into a liminal life without hope, drinking his gourds of palm wine. His own nightmares have ceased, but he now sees all of the people's lives as a nightmare.

The subtitles of the story mark the trajectory of this comic, surreal allegory of power, deception, and self-deception: "The Nightmare of Salesmen"; "The Salesman of Nightmares"; "Es-cape to the Town of Scandals"; "The Children of the Curfew-makers" (a memory of adolescence in which, employed to carry love letters to a girl by Odeh and Assi, the rich sons, he seduces her instead; when she bores him to death, he escapes her, but the gangs of the competitive rich boys catch up with him and beat him until he sees stars); "Nightmare, the Preparation for Ritual" (a surreal dream sequence); "The Manufacturers of Reality" (the visit to Odeh); "The Crude Mythology of Survival" (the contest); and "Postscript."

Energetic and inventive, the story begins with an uneasy, assertive, intrusive first-person narrator and moves to a more satisfying finale as the narrator subsides. Instead of a failing participant, focused on himself and his quest for success, the narrator becomes part of a larger context, a spectator who observers cautiously and critically. No longer complicit with the frenetic activity he satirizes, he is also unable to affect it.

Initially, "Stars of the New Curfew" resembles such ironic celebrations of the fast-talking, miracle-making huckster-hero as Gabriel García Márquez's "Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles" or "Big Mama's Funeral." Rhetorically, Okri suffers by comparison. Trailing the protagonist thinly across the page, the syntax produces a stronger impression of the "I" than of the bizarre reality evoked by his banter. When the egotistical narrator returns to his community, however, the protagonist becomes an ironic commentator, unlike García Márquez's characters. The reality that emerges is an intricate stew of folklore, modernity, corruption, ritual, magic, power, and politics in which reality is manufactured by power.

Like García Márquez, Okri claims that the magical quality of his text is a function of the reality he describes. He hears the voices and talks the talk. The perception and representation of reality as magical are, however, literary and cultural phenomena indebted to European surrealism and Nigerian developments. Okri underscores the literary nature of his project by incorporating a few lines of speech as it is actually spoken, a Nigerian folk English that cannot be read by English speakers outside the community. The sentence "The man wey no deh talk politics when people never chop don come-o!" is perhaps the strangest in the text, the most magical manifestation of all.

In the Nigerian tradition Tutuola and Achebe bear to Okri the relation that Asturias and Carpentier bear to García Márquez. The orientation of Tutuola and Asturias is deliberately folkloric. The writer invents tales that seem to be traditional stories retold but that are, in fact, his own inventions. Achebe and Carpentier adopt a more sympathetic, ironic, and analytic stance to the material. They represent "primitive" societies with a sympathetic but alienated eye, conscious of differences as well as of shared humanity. Okri synthesizes the approaches, combining the folkloric surreal with the sympathetic, ironic observer. Beyond such procedural similarities the Latin American analogy breaks down. There is no Latin American equivalent for medicine, the emblem of synthesis in Okri. Nor is there a Latin American or European equivalent for the protagonist's relationship to the girl/woman he seduces and abandons.

Medicine is a traditional African designation for power, healing, influence, and cures. In Achebe's Things Fall Apart medicine is spiritual, political, moral, and healing power. It explains why things happen, and it makes things happen. In Okri's "Stars of the New Curfew" medicine has at first only its modern, secondary meaning of patent medicine, aimed at curing the ills of the body. As the story progresses, however, it becomes evident that the people seeking cures need more than the medicine he provides and that the medicine provided by the drug of modern power only sickens the people more. Allegorically, the society is sick and needs better medicine. Medicine thus reassumes its older, traditional meanings even as the power of new patent medicine to cure the society's ills is questioned.

The quest for cures leads to the presence of the Rastafarian, who looks to Africa for salvation, or the Christian preacher at the back of the crowd who calls out, "For want of vision my people perish!" The traditional past promises no salvation, for its emblems and insignia have been taken over by the rich and powerful. The past is used to terrorize the present. Modernity offers no escape, for its benefits belong to the rich and powerful who have learned to "manufacture" reality. Sexual love does not supply the fulfillment on which the post-Enlightenment Western tradition pins its hopes and desires. The girl bores him. There is only the faint promise that the stars of the new curfew may be meteors, burning themselves out.

If they burn out, what then? Of his boss the protagonist observes, "Like most of our leaders, he creates a problem, then creates another problem to deal with the first one—on and on, endlessly fertile, always creatively spiralling to greater chaos." Recognizing that the boss does not take his own medicines, "I decided to quit and attempt to start up my own business." In the distance the Rastafarian's voice echoes, "Africa, we counting on yuh." Although there are signs of hope, futility is certain, and the story ends by turning in on itself. Between the experience of his own nightmares and the perception that all of their lives are a nightmare, the speaker ends by saying, "I think I prefer my former condition." That condition may be preferred, but it cannot be recovered. Although the story ends as hope meets futility, the spirals will continue, and there may come a time when there are new stars and no curfew.

—Regina Janes