Author of over 20 books and Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri is a prominent figure in the literary world. His writing inspires readers the world over. Critics and scholars have celebrated the many ways his work re-imagines African lives and invents stunningly beautiful worlds from Africa’s myths, legends, histories, and folklore.
When I thought of someone with whom to talk through someone of the urgent issues facing our time, issues having to do with African literature, it had to be Okri. First, because his life and work have an interesting relationship to time. They straddle two millennia. But also because as someone who arrived on the literary scene in the early ’90s, he has seen the best and the worst of contemporary African literary culture. I knew he’d bring clarity and insight to the current state of things.
In this interview conducted via email, we talk about social media, decolonization, the future of African literature, the power in dreaming, and more.
Ainehi Edoro-Glines
From Achebe, to Awoonor, to Emecheta, the last 10 years has seen a long line of literary greats die and become ancestors. What should we make of the fact that we are the generation living to see these people, who started it all, pass on to the beyond?
Ben Okri
It is an important stage for our literature. In a sense the real literature of a people begins with the passing of writers into the realm of ancestors. Literature begins with the dead. For that is when we can start to see the meanings of their works which may have been concealed from us when they were alive. Their body of work derives new authority from death. Then a literature begins to cohere. The books read us. They move from their fixed sphere of time and come alive in a new way in ours. They are no longer what we thought they were. Then the works really begin to speak. It is only now, with many of the pioneers moving on to a higher sphere, that the literature moves to a higher sphere too. They take us up with them. First books begin as publicity and marketing. Often, before their time, they are taught. Then the books are about the authors. If we see ourselves and our times in them we do so dimly. With the passing of the years some of the books become living classics. But really they are provisionally so.
