Prayer For The Living: Ben Okri At The Yorkshire Storytelling Festival

Booker prizewinning novelist Ben Okri’s wonderful new book of tales, Prayer for the Living, has no chronology and no especial provenance, enabling him to wing wildly over time and space like an Orlando figure, given to the turning of despair and hubris, dislocation and loss, into fables for our time. His journey of transformation is inclusive in the best sense: ranging over the world’s topographies, he finds terrain in violent turmoil, historical archetypes disturbed by the intrusion of the tourist backward glance, the dangers of prejudice and preconception, and tableaux which exist most meaningfully in the mind’s eye. And in the stories which deal most viscerally with a dangerous present, we hear echoes of a rapacious colonial past in a new world order. The bomb strapped round the waist of the Boko Haram child in the shockingly immediate ‘Boko Haram(I)’ is a token of resurgent fundamentalism, which is, in turn, one indirect, but catastrophic, resonance of a landscape shaped by European colonialism.

And it is fitting that storytelling - Ben Okri’s métier by African heredity and instinct – is one of the best means of communicating love, disquiet, even an urge for satire. The renowned author’s forthcoming online visit to the Yorkshire Storytelling Festival is something of a coup for Settle Stories, the Arts organisation whose mandate to reach out is never compromised by a lack of ambition. Not delimited by geography, Settle Stories recognise that looking beyond regional and national boundaries opens doors of perception.

Okri’s own Nigerian origins are steeped in rich experiences which fire the imagination, and a propensity for storytelling that confers meaning on expression. A conduit for ancient traditions, Ben Okri might, here, almost be talking of the kind of surfeit of cataclysm and colour whose overflowing yielded the efflorescence of Art during the Renaissance:

‘Stories don’t come from a people poor in experience. It is only with an excess of experience that stories pour forth. But the stories depend on imagination too, the ability to process experience in abundantly useful ways’.

And in one sense, he is. An observer of the mysteries, ‘of the spaces that exist between our fixities’, he is a delver into the tunnels and recesses of experience, who recognises no temporal or spatial frontier. My lazy suggestion of a connection between the peripatetic nature of his writing and the itinerance of his own life was, not unreasonably, pulled up short in our interview by Okri’s corrective to our critical tendency to over-reading:

‘There are many people who have double cultures who have no interest in the liminal. I think we overdefine the world. The world is rich with ambiguities, with slippages of meaning, with paradox’.

That there is no need for the liminal because many human beings already accommodate several personae in one outwardly-defined existence, is the essence of an ambiguity that does not demand further deconstruction in the academy; people already live many different experiences.

Which is why, for Okri, a reading between the lines is more important than an intellectual framework of understanding. A close observation of how we are in the world, how we stand in relation to each other and in relation to our environment throws up, in any case, an abundance of metaphorical suggestion, and it is through a process of what Okri refers to as mental ‘distillation’ that fables are born, sometimes yielding the impression that life may bear a ‘fabular quality’. The mysterious visitant in Okri’s short story ‘Dreaming of Byzantium’ points to a common philosophical conceit: that the imagination is the most refulgent bearer of anticipatory glad tidings in the absence of travel. His words - ‘I can buy you a ticket to Istanbul and when you come back you can tell me which is more real’ – direct the ‘traveller’ to a greater knowledge of self, in a story of recognition and refreshed understanding. But, as Okri elaborates, the story’s service to liberation through mental journeying is paramount:

‘Many people travel but do not see. Often we see what we brought with us. How often is seeing a kind of ignorance. All true liberation is in the mind first. Byzantium is a mental, spiritual condition. If you cannot travel in your mind your physical travel will be limited. Reading is the greatest mental travel there is. With it we travel through time, through cultures, genders, histories. But then to have both, the presence and the imagination, how rich is that!’

The crossing of borders from fact to fiction, and sometimes to faction, is the representation of an imagination in a dialogue with the observed world and the stories which shape it. Several times in our conversation (itself a construct: the interview was conducted by email), Ben Okri uses the expression ‘story shaped’ to describe our reception of external events which, in turn, shape the stories we create to give them meaning, as though the association were in constant negotiation. To this extent, the power of storytelling to define new world orders is a given because the dialogue of observation, description, invention and re-invention shapes individual and collective outcomes. And stories remain relevant because they are also of the present:

‘The way coronavirus has affected us has been shaped by the story the Government told or failed to tell about it. The economy right now is a story being told. We haven’t found a way to tell the story of what environmental disaster would mean otherwise it would be a higher priority in our national and personal thinking and action’.

It is not difficult to see why Ben Okri’s optimism falters as the stories we inherit, and those we choose to define our experience, falter. The ‘constant battle of stories’ we prosecute amongst ourselves and with the extraneous world may sometimes be wrong-headed, self-delusory, susceptible to maleficent fictions. That the power to make positive changes is everywhere countered by faulty judgement, idiotic zeal, and destructive impulses, may be our valedictory:

‘The world of itself is magnificent. But it is us who make it a hell or a purgatory. The power is ours. The only cause for optimism is when we realise that we can make or unmake our world, and when we choose the brighter option’.

‘Choose wisely the stories you support’.




Ben Okri will be appearing live at the Yorkshire Storytelling Festival in a Crowdcast event on Sat. 22nd August at 7pm. More information here:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/YFOS2020-prayer-for-the-living/register


Prayer for the Living is published by Head of Zeus. Further information here: https://headofzeus.com/books/9781789544589