Mythic Conjunctions in Transit: Ontopoiesis in Ben Okri's An African Elegy and Mental Fight and Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt

Abstract

Summary Drawing on Ben Okri's A Time for New Dreams (2011) and Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World ([1976]1995), this article adopts a literary aesthetics approach, explaining that mythic conjunctions are inherent in ontopoiesis or the self-induced development of consciousness (Tymeniecka 1992). Okri (2011: 27) argues that self-creativity or innovation “come from being able first to see what is there, and not there; to hear what is said, and not said …. And … the art of intuition”, whereas for Soyinka ([1976]1995: 3) “man's attempt to externalise and communicate his inner intuitions” gives rise to cultural mythology. “In Asian and European antiquity … man did, like the African, exist within a cosmic totality, did possess a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic pheno-menon,” he asserts (p. 3.). The poems selected reveal that mythic conjunctions are inherent in such non-dualistic insights. In Okri's poetry (1992 & 1999), a higher state of consciousness or “illumination” is the basis for life's transitions wrought largely through spirit awakenings via a retrieval of traditional geocosmic horizons; in Soyinka's (1972), such transitions accrue from a conscious reconstruction of the human self, affected by the trauma of solitary confinement.