Intervention: An Interview with Ben Okri

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• InterventionAn Interview with Ben Okri
• Frederick Luis Aldama

Ben Okri's creative energy and reach knows no bounds. His breathtaking repertoire spans an impressive collection of books that give new shape to nonfiction and fiction forms across all genres. His awe-inspiring accolades are legion, including prestigious honorary doctorates from around the globe, the revered Booker Prize, and being knighted for services to literature. He's this, and much more. He's our modern-day planetary Griot—a master storyteller whose interwoven voices create soul-stirring, multilayered choral works that guide us from illusion to truth, from suffering to transcendence, and from mere words to meaningful action. In his words, he's an "orchestral writer" who is meant to be absorbed directly, and at the subliminal.

Born and raised in Nigeria, then finding his way to London in adulthood, Ben has weathered loss, torment, and hardship, surviving civil wars, death threats, and homelessness. His truths simmer subtly beneath the surface of his works, which masterfully guide us to experience new emotions, thoughts, and perspectives on the world we inhabit. From the raw and gritty debut novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), to the enchanting spirit-child-narrated triptych series that includes The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993), and Infinite Riches (1998), to the innovative Haiku-shaped short stories in Tales of Freedom (2009), renamed as The Comic Destiny, and more recent creations like the dystopic The Freedom Artist (2019), the award-winning play The Outsider (2017), the poignant children's ecological fable Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021), and the piercing-truth poems in A Fire in My Head (2023), Ben leads us on a transformative journey. Here and in his many works not mentioned, Ben tears apart the scripts that straitjacket self-perceptions and destructive master narratives. He asks us to pause, listen, and act. He powerfully reminds that without the vital spark of literature, music, and all art forms, the world dies.

I had the great pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Ben Okri. His quiet, deeply thoughtful presence and puissant words exemplified how both [End Page 48] in his art and in his soul, he is one of our great catalysts of imaginative and real change.

frederick luis aldama:

I remember when you won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road back in 1991. I was finishing my undergrad degree in literature and reading Hanif Kureishi, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Kazuo Ishiguro. You along with these titans of global literature marked a huge watershed for me. I dedicated my PhD studies to literature, especially focused on drawing connections between Latino and so-called "empire writes back" authors like yourself. You were a breath of fresh air for world literature.

ben okri:

That was an incredible time, Frederick.

fla:

I'm getting ahead of myself, Ben. Let me start by asking, when did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

bo:

I wasn't like Salinger, Hemingway, or Capote, who began writing very young. Already at age eleven, Capote was writing for hours every day. I didn't have the luxury of thinking of myself as a writer at such a young age. I wish I had. It would have made my struggles later so much easier. I was really good at math and physics. I was convinced I was going to become a scientist—an innovator. I was going to create things. I was very serious about it.

fla:

Yet you found your way to literature.

bo:

I was always reading—and from an early age. I loved Shakespeare, the Russians, and the Greeks. I read Ibsen in translation. And though there's no real parallel between Norwegian and Nigerian societies, I found an unlikely affinity with Ibsen. With the Russians, it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky at this stage, it was Chekhov that resonated with me as a Nigerian, perhaps because Chekhov wrote during a time when Russia was getting over its feudal period, stumbling toward some kind of democracy—much like Nigeria for me during this period. The energy of people working the land had suddenly been freed.

At that time, too, there was...