Interview with Ben Okri

Abstract

Introduction First, let me express my deep gratitude to you for taking time out of your busy schedule and the public demands made upon so celebrated a writer to talk to a reader who finds your works--be they poetic, dramatic, or prose--intriguing and compelling. I can well understand why the International Pen Club has you as their vice-president. Secondly, I must tell you that I would like to use this interview as the opening piece in a monograph of your works that 1 hope to publish shortly, containing articles by myself and also those by some of my postgraduate students at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Rosemary Gray: I'd like to begin by asking you to respond to my perception that throughout your oeuvre there seems to me to be a single guiding principle, a deeply embedded philosophical credo, if you like. Of course I could be mistaken, being driven in my reading of your work by my own horizons of expectation (to borrow a term from Robert Jauss). In other words, I may be being misled by my own reception aesthetics. The principle I refer to is, I believe, nowhere better expressed than towards the end of Songs of Enchantment when, from the silence of unblindedness, Azaro's father, in conversation with his son, a spirit-child, an abiku, is moved to muse that [t]he light comes out of the darkness. (1993:287) This is a catalyst for two other questions and for a request I should like to make, but perhaps you'd like to respond to my contention about your guiding principle before I pose the two questions that arise out of this one. Am I on the right track in attributing an innate optimism to you? Ben Okri: No, I wouldn't call it optimism so much as realism. But, it is important how one defines realism. Realism takes in what is seen, felt, touched; what is unknown and unseen. The primordial African spirit views reality from a wider spectrum [than the Western one]. It is informed by the metaphysical sense embedded in all the great traditions, but particularly in the African tradition. The African world view takes in the hierarchy of metaphysical beings which, in turn, leads to a number of essential questions: What constitutes one's reality? Is one's reality true only for that individual? Isn't our reality limited to what we are taught to see? A piano with only five keys is a reality. But, if we include all the keys, the white keys and the black keys, this is a different reality. So reality depends on our cultural perception of the keyboard of life. Using the full keyboard, Azaro's father discovered a new perception of fundamental questions, especially the question of what constitutes the nature of reality. Is it outside oneself or fatally linked to human sensibilities? How does one construct reality? One cannot truthfully tell an African tale according to Jane Austen's reality or an early-nineteenth-century English tale according to an African reality. Dialogue with the West is thus difficult because reality is not universal. R.G.: Is there an element of the Platonic notion of the and the here? B.O.: Yes, but also the Scandinavian concept of reality. I can draw it for you. [This Okri did in my copy of Starbook. R.G.: Although the author has himself emphasised the realistic dimensions of his work, this realism must be seen to embrace the ancestors, myths and legends, which are an integral part of the real world, of urban life and of rural life. Local beliefs are thus part of the real world, not parallel with, but contiguous to it. Elsewhere, I have referred to Okri's spirit-in-life beings as leading sentient double lives (see The English Academy Review 26(1) May 2009: 45). In Starbook, Okri states: Only in light can truth be found.... Beyond is where it really begins (2007: 118), which is itself an effective synopsis of what he writes in Birds of Heaven (1996: 12-13): The greatest inspiration, the most sublime ideas of living that have come down to humanity come from a higher realm, a happier realm, a place of pure dreams, a heaven of blessed notions. …