Dreams of cultural violence: Ben Okri and the politics of the imagination

Abstract

This paper explores the difficult relationship between politics and dreaming. It suggests that contrary to Western readings of the dream as an essentially private experience, Ben Okri's writing explores the effects of the unconscious and mythical on the conscious world. For Okri, power struggles make their presence known in sleep as much as they do during the day; cultural violence moves from dreams to the realities of ghetto life and back again in a transaction that makes a seamless connection between consciousness and the unconscious. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's Sense and Non‐Sense of Revolt, the paper concludes by suggesting that geographies of bodies and continents are liberated when they recognise the power of the dream to effect a form of revolt through altering the place of things.