Ben Okri: ‘We are poised on the edge of a crisis’

Although he has lived in London for 20 years, and hasn't set foot in his homeland for almost as long – "for all sorts of complicated reasons," he says with a sigh – Ben Okri is still deeply preoccupied by events in Nigeria.

The Man Booker-winning novelist and poet, in signature black beret, is these days an illuminating occasional presence on the BBC Newsnight sofa, where he recently paid tribute to Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou. His soft-spoken, measured tones are therefore comforting and familiar. But there is no mistaking his alarm.

“Nobody,” he says, warning of a looming emergency in his native land, “seems quite yet to have grasped the enormity of the danger.”

He is referring to the kidnapping, in the town of Chibok in April, of 276 schoolgirls by the jihadist militants of Boko Haram. The group had been running a low-level anti-government insurgency in that powerhouse African nation of 175 million people for half a decade or more. But recently its campaign has escalated dramatically.

“The abduction of those schoolchildren has nothing to do with God,” Okri says. “Nothing whatsoever. It is an act of violence, an act of terror and great cruelty, not only against fellow human beings but also against fellow Nigerians. We are now poised on the edge of a very grave crisis. A crisis that, if not contained, could trigger something terrible in our country . . . Something we probably don’t want even to contemplate.”

The author of The Famished Road has little faith in the Nigerian government's ability to resolve the issue. And although the news story has slipped from front pages in recent weeks, he remains convinced that external actors hold the keys to its resolution. "This is a problem that grew very large while the Nigerian authorities slept. Now it has become a situation beyond anything the government is equipped to deal with. It requires the help of the international community."

Unfortunate burdens

Yet as keen as Okri is to offer an opinion on the trouble brewing in his home country, he also makes clear that he resents sometimes being called on to offer opinions on just about any problem or upheaval that arises anywhere in Africa.

The American or African media would hardly expect Roddy Doyle to articulate the aspirations of Ukrainian separatists, or Joseph O'Connor to account for the rise in popularity of the Front National in France. So why should an author from Nigeria be expected to field questions on Zimbabwe or South Sudan?

“This is something I talked about recently in South Africa,” Okri says. “That one of the unfortunate burdens the writer from Africa still lingers under is that they must be defined in relation to causes and issues. We haven’t managed yet to transform the perception of our writing so that it is perceived entirely on the plane of writing.”

If any author has earned the right to be judged on his body of work it is Okri. Even if he has yet to repeat the success of his acclaimed first book, his subsequent output of novels, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and “stokus” – part short stories, part haikus – over the past two decades has been nothing short of staggering.

The 55-year-old, who is travelling to Bantry next weekend to speak at West Cork Literary Festival, sees strong similarities between Irish and Nigerian storytelling. In each case a strong literary tradition was preceded by an equally rich aural tradition.

“In Nigeria you grow up with stories that your mother and your father or the village told you. Stories you told one another in a circle in the moonlight. Everything is communicated to you in stories, and people tell them in such exuberant and exaggerated ways. Storytelling is a river that flows right through the heart of our consciousness.

"That's what I was trying to capture in the Famished Road trilogy, and that's something I think has resonance with the Irish tradition, too."

Since publishing the final instalment of that trilogy, Infinite Riches, in 1998, Okri has published only two novels. But he rejects any suggestion that he has fallen out of love with the art form.

If he is less prolific a writer of novels now than he was in the 1990s, he says, that is only because the work he puts into them these days is more rigorous and exacting. His 2002 novel, In Arcadia, dealt with happiness, art, the nature of evil and travel. Starbook (2007) examined the slave trade from an African perspective.

"Those are pretty big themes. They take time to work out. Starbook alone took the best part of five years to write. It was just distilling, distilling, distilling. As one gets older, one agonises more about sentences. Everything takes longer. But I haven't fallen out of love with the novel. If anything I've fallen deeper in love with it."

Indeed he has a new one, The Age of Magic, due to be published later this year. But has he not gone on record to voice frustration with the way the novel has developed as an art form? He bristles.

“You’ve touched upon, well, not a sore point but one of my battle cries. The novel in the early part of the 20th century made an astonishing leap. As an Irish person you will know this. Ireland made an extraordinary contribution to the evolution of the novel. Since then there’s been a progressive retreat from that great leap.”

Music, painting and dance have all progressed, he says, but one could read most novels today and believe that the likes of Joyce and Proust had never written.

Retreat from the novel

“The novel is – and I want to stress this – one of the greatest forms of the human consciousness for expression. But the novel can only be as good as our grasp of the richness of consciousness. So the retreat from the novel is almost itself a signal that we are retreating from the richness of consciousness. That we have folded ourselves back into the richness of consciousness.”

Despite comparisons to writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, Okri has always rejected the tag of magic realism. Yet his work undoubtedly requires readers to take successive leaps of imagination.

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, to learn that the author himself suffers from a crippling fear of flying. He didn’t travel by air for many years, and it prevented him from going to many places he would have liked.

But that all changed in 2008, when the London Times asked him to cover Barack Obama's presidential campaign. "I knew it was a historic moment, and I couldn't really say no. But following his campaign meant flying all over America. And by the time that was done, I was back flying."

How has he rated the former Illinois senator’s performance in office? “If one is at all disappointed, it is not Obama one is disappointed in. It is the system. He’s just been frustrated by an ethos. But he has still made an enormous contribution. He’s changed the temperature of the world. He really has.

“Can’t you feel it?”

An Evening With Ben Okri is on Sunday, July 6th, as part of West Cork Literary Festival