Ben Okri’s stoku, “The Standeruppers” (2017): The Frightening Irony of the Anthropocene

Abstract

SummaryThis article is predicated on two principal sources: Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) and Ben Okri’s unpublished stoku, “The Standeruppers” (2017). It invokes Edward O. Wilson’s 2002 argument on the inherent dangers of the human trajectory: the irony of the survival of our own species. Kolbert dubs human[un]kind’s predatory proclivity that threatens creation, our “unnatural history”. Using Okri’s Olduvai Gorge inspired rock poems (Wild 2012) as allusive side references, the argument draws attention to his understanding of human nature and of humans in Nature. Both Okri’s stoku and his rock poems reveal the destructive nature of Homo sapiens, while subtly inculcating cosmic accord and natural harmony. In the context of the Okri oeuvre, my readings posit that the latter humanist strand awakens in the individual sympathies for all fellow creatures on planet earth, nurturing a sense of natural community. This viewpoint tempers the frightening irony of the Anthropocene or Holocene era in Yeats’s aphorism that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, by pointing to our animus/anima urges or the destructive/constructive dichotomy of human nature.