Introduction: The Works of Ben Okri

Abstract

This issue of Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir literatuur-wetenskap, guest-edited by Rosemary Gray, is dedicated to works of Booker Prize-winning author, Ben Okri. Linear threads of utopianism, history and civilisation, language and writing, notions of reality, politics, literary aesthetics and intertextuality, postmodernism and postcolony form an interlacertine pattern that draws six articles together into coherent whole. It is, at once, easy and extremely difficult to critique Okri oeuvre. The paradox inheres in fact that, on one hand, Okri's writings provide richness and complexity that is both challenging and exhilarating for critic. On other hand, this Nigerian-born author's facility with words and his inimitable ability to capture in simple yet profound phrases oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed (to quote favourite Enlightenment author, Alexander Pope) tempt one to sidestep critique and invoke and facilitate Okri's own voice as self-evident. Consider, for example, two of Okri's comments in his recent Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town (12 September 2012), which embrace concerns that are explored in some depth in articles in this issue. Having pointed to African world's empathy with and support for struggle against apartheid, Okri first posed loaded question After nightmare is over, what are you doing with day? Then, reminding audience of last eighteen years of so-called liberation and propensity of neocolonialists to blame past, while enjoying fruits of present, he transposed adage They came; they saw; they conquered into an equally telling and all-embracing indictment of We came; we saw; we squandered! It is this same plain-speaking and cogent thinking that informs my conversation with Okri in London (16 February 2011), with which this issue begins. In this interview, Okri was quick to rebuff charge of optimism as evinced in aphorism light comes out of darkness in his Songs of Enchantment--part of his famed Famished Road trilogy--with cultural relativist redefinition of real, perceiving of reality as a keyboard of life. Responding to my comment that his novels depict an unusually robust relationship between child and either of its parents, Okri was quick to point out that the family is intimate theatre of life. The conversation ranges widely from philosophical, political and esoteric to debating nature of literature and civilising role of writer. Unlike so many black African writers, Okri tends to evince postmodernist rather than postcolonial consciousness because, as he says, We are not defined by history. The human spirit is limitless and our job as writers is to unveil. Leigh van Niekerk's article picks up on both optimistic and post-modernist strands. In her article Postmodernism's Pit Stops en Route to Utopia, she explores notions of language, history and death in In Arcadia. In close critical analysis of motifs, word usage and plot elements, and drawing on Gadamer and Heidegger, van Niekerk shows how philosophical hermeneutics, postmodernism and this novel are intertexts, each informing other in never-ending hermeneutic circle. The first of two comparative articles--one on Okri and Soyinka by Rosemary Gray and other on Okri and Blake by Pam van Schaik follows. …