Ontopoiesis in Ben Okri’s Poetic Oeuvre and A Time for New Dreams (2011)

Abstract

Drawing on Ben Okri’s A Time for New Dreams (2011), this paper adopts a literary aesthetics approach. Motifs of cosmic conjunctions inform Okri’s An African Elegy ([1992]1997) and, more especially, Mental Fight (1999), subtitled “An anti-spell for the 21st century”. The paper will suggest that inherent in this subtitle is the concept of ontopoiesis or the self-induced development of consciousness as propounded by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life (2004). Ontopoiesis thus embraces the self-creative activity of consciousness, which Okri himself has emphasized: “All our creativity, our innovations, our discovery,” says Okri in A Time for New Dreams (27), “come from being able first to see what is there, and not there; to hear what is said, and not said … the art of intuition”. The article draws on a world view of a cosmic totality, perceiving of ontopoiesis as akin to Wole Soyinka’s notion of self-apprehension: to “his gravity-bound apprehension of self,” as “inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon” ([1976]1995: 3). The argument attempts to show that mythic conjunctions are inherent in this cosmogony. The paper uses selected poems from Okri’s two anthologies in order to explore his ontopoietic aesthetics. “We ought to conjoin faith in evidence with a need for self-discovery,” Okri avers in A Time for New Dreams (28). In his poetry ([1992]1997, 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 geo-cosmic horizons. The argument shows that, in the poems in the tellingly entitled Mental Fight (1999), such transitions likewise accrue from a conscious reconstruction of the human self, affected by materialism pitted against the forces of the cosmos, and concludes by illustrating Okri’s belief in the creative artist’s civilizing role through a revitalization of psycho-spiritual life.