ChapterMagical Realism and Cosmopolitanism pp 71-106Vernacular (Hu)manism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Rooted in the nation of Okri’s birth, Nigeria, Ben Okri’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road (1991) enacts an imagined return to origins for Okri, what the character Azaro might call a “homecoming” (Famished 28). Pietro Deandrea suggests, further, that the “Nigerian urban ghetto” in which Famished Road is set is based on Lagos, the city where Okri spent his youth (48). However, the narrative tunnels backward in time not only toward Okri’s own beginnings (he was born in 1959), but also that of independent Nigeria (born in 1960). Situated in a moment preceding the corruption within the nation’s internal leadership, its civil war (the Biafran War of 1967–70), and border disputes, the narrative unfolds at the dawning of the nation’s independence. If the nation is one prominent issue within Famished Road, however, it is one that must be viewed alongside the corresponding salience of human being.
These dual points of particularity and universality constitute a crucial conceptual ambit treated by the narrative, one to which Okri himself has nodded: “…[O]ne may be writing about Nigeria, but that terrain may be the place in which one can best see very strong universal concerns” (“Ben Okri” Ross 337). What follows will explore this landscape. Share this content on Facebook Share this content on Twitter Share this content on LinkedIn Vernacular (Hu)manism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism British and Irish Literature To view the rest of this content please follow the download PDF link above. Slept Badly: A Love Poem, and: Reveal, and: Awake the Stone Ancient Ties of Karma: A Stoku Amina Abstracted: A New Play Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend Ben Okri: A Man of Many Arts On My Artistic Collaboration with Ben Okri Food, Ritual, and Death Some Thoughts on the Stoku as a Form
For the Dreamdrift and Paradise Tears. Between Magic and Everyday Life The Poet Looks Ahead Film stills from N: The Madness of Reason An Interview with Ben Okri The Dialogue of the Big and the Small: The Poetry of Ben Okri Transcending Historical Violence: Uses of Myth and Fable in Ben Okri’s Starbook Things of Poverty and War: Ben Okri and Thing Theory Journeys of Artistic and Social Exploration: Katabatic Influences in Ben Okri’s Fiction The Famished Road after Postmodernism: African Modernism and the Politics of Subalternity “Redreaming the World”: The Poetry of Ben Okri Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies: From Africa to the Antilles by Edgard Sankara (review) Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (review) A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives ed. by Betsy Hearne, and Roberta Seelinger Trites (review) The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness by Veronica T. Watson (review)
Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo by Kameelah L. Martin (review) Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination by Rosamond King (review) The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945–1950 by Stephanie Brown (review) Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 by Paula T. Connolly (review) The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century by Wycliffe Bennett, and Hazel Bennett (review) See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid (review) Ben Okri: A Selective Bibliography Author and Title Index to Callaloo Volume 38: (Whole Numbers 143–145, 147) Find out how to access preview-only content ChapterThe Cosmos and the Creative Imagination Volume 119 of the series Analecta Husserliana pp 73-82Ben Okri’s The Landscapes Within (1981): The Unfinished Story * Final gross prices may vary according to local VAT.
This paper begins with an initial justification of the chosen title and argues for the idea of The Landscapes Within effectively becoming the eponymous hero of a tale, the trajectory of which is the inner workings of the mind of the artist-protagonist, Omovo. Drawing on Ben Okri’s own sense of the incompleteness of this, his second novel, which he was later to rewrite as Dangerous Love, it invokes Milan Kundera’s discussion of the significance of an ‘unfinished’ story in the sense of what has not been achieved. The critique of this novel focuses on the ‘unachieved’ in terms of its relation between Omovo’s stolen and confiscated and unfinished paintings and Kundera’s three new categories of art: the art of radical divestment, the art of novelistic counterpoint and the art of the specifically novelistic essay. It concludes by briefly justifying the paper’s claim that, in this novel, art, like philosophy, deals with inner reality, with ‘the landscapes within.’ ‘Philosophy,’ says Okri consciously articulating the artistic procsess or the imaginatio creatrix in operation ‘is most powerful when it revolves into story.
But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy.’ Ben Okri’s The Landscapes Within (1981): The Unfinished Story The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Springer International Publishing Switzerland Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel Ben Okri’s The Landscapes WithinI learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does. Born: March 15, 1959 The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing. Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space. The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man. The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell. I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings. I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
I believe in leavening. You can't have words sticking out too much, like promontories. They disturb the density. You have to flatten them, or raise the surrounding terrain. Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret. To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home. One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world. Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure. You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria.
We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones. Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible. Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that. I study people all the time. For some reason, we're not very good at seeing what's there or hearing what we're hearing. When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self. Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.