Of Coffee, Wayanad, and Ben Okri
Stepping Outside the Western Literary Lens
#onhisbirthdaytoday
Well, almost seven years ago, during the summer of 2019, we were holidaying in Wayanad.
A holiday in the forests demands a certain kind of a book that connects with the forests ain’t it? 😊
A book that spoke the same ancient, untamed language as the forests!
And that is how Nigerian-born British poet and novelist Ben Okri’s In Arcadia found its way into my travel bag. 😊
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| [Clicked in Wayanad, May 2019] |
Okri didn’t disappoint me though! As the mornings in Wayanad unfolded with the calls of the birds echoing through the mist, Okri’s dense prose offered its own kind of lively terrain to navigate. Sitting on a quiet veranda, with a warm cup of coffee and the sprawling forest stretching out ahead, the lines between the physical world and the written word began to blur ever so gently!
However, on an aside, I should admit that, initially I found it a tad bit difficult to read through the pages of Part One, Book One of the journey!
Even last week, a professor from Madurai, confessed to me that she couldn’t complete Ben Okri as she found him a tad bit difficult to read! Same with my friend Premjith, who found Ben (The Famished Road) a bit difficult albeit engaging!
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| [In Readers' Rendezvous - Our Little WhatsApp Community of Readers] |
Well, this difficulty that we all encountered, I should confess, is probably because of our Eurocentric notions of approaching a story, or so, I feel!
One reason why a great fan of Okri - Rosemary Alice Gray - feels that, the book has “suffered surprising critical neglect” all these years.
She adds to ask, “Is this perhaps indicative of a failure to read Ben Okri on his own terms?”
Although there have been one or two positive reviews of In Arcadia, negative criticism predominates even among those who do address narrative technique. Consider Bruce King, for example, who dismisses the novel with his comment – “Except as a metaphor of life as a journey, the story in itself seems purposeless as there are few events and little narrative development” [The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri, Rosemary Alice Gray].
I personally feel (alongside critic Rosemary) that, this is exactly something that sets apart Okri in contemporary literature - his refusal to be confined by traditional aesthetic boundaries, and European frameworks of writing! That’s one reason why Bruce King and his ilk are quite critical of Okri. ☹
Added, while many compartmentalise him alongside a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or a Salman Rushdie under the umbrella of magical realism, Okri's approach is distinctly rooted in African cosmology, modernist experimentation, and a profound environmental consciousness, with a unique literary voice, which he calls trans-realism or spiritual realism.
In this regard, Okri’s work resonates deeply within the study of ecotheology! He positions the natural world - particularly the African forest - as a vibrant, multidimensional space. It is simultaneously a dwelling place for spirits, a site of profound psychological interiority, and a physical landscape suffering the ecological catastrophe of neocolonial deforestation.
In order to correct our destructive trajectory, Ben Okri coined the term “existential creativity” as a direct, urgent and artistic response to the global climate emergency and the profound “depth of denial” surrounding it. Doesn’t he anticipate Amitav Ghosh as well?
Indeed, Okri deliberately distances this concept from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, which he characterises as negative. Instead, Okri’s framework is deeply visionary. It is an urgent call to make use of literature to “re-dream society”, and thereby use narrative as a tool for profound ecological and spiritual healing rather than surrendering to despair.
Existential creativity hence demands that writing be stripped of unnecessary frills and vanity. Every word must serve the function of waking the reader up, blending stark, unvarnished truth with aesthetic beauty to pierce through societal apathy
Although Okri blends European literary conventions with African oral storytelling traditions and modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques, he deliberately subverts forms like the Bildungsroman (the coming-of-age novel). Rather than focusing solely on an individual’s psychological growth, Okri examines how political power and systemic corruption dictate the lives, poverty, and deaths of vulnerable populations.
Quite interestingly, Okri uses language not just to describe a postcolonial reality, but to ritually reconstruct it, challenging readers to step completely outside Western, linear perceptions of existence.
Ben Okri’s “forest fables” for example – serve to completely reimagine the traditional Western fairytale. Instead of simply using nature as a backdrop for a moral lesson, Okri elevates the environment to the focal point of the narrative.
To Okri then, the Forest becomes a sentient archive. While traditional Western fables (like those of the Brothers Grimm), often depict the forest as a dark, passive space - a place of danger, chaos, or testing for the human protagonist, Okri seeks to portray the forest as an active, highly conscious entity. Trees are not just timber; they are ancient beings that hold the memory of the world, communicate with one another, and observe human folly. The forest is a living archive of history and spirituality, rather than just a setting to be conquered or feared.
To this end, he also coined the word, ‘stoku’, plural: stokus) as a unique, hybrid literary form that is an amalgam of the short story and the haiku. While traditional (aka Western) short stories rely on a structural arc – the exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution, a stoku entirely abandons this framework of reference, that he feels, weighs down the story. Instead, it is designed to capture what Okri calls a “flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox.”
Coming back to where we started –
Similarly, Ben Okri’s 2002 novel titled, In Arcadia is yet another philosophical and meditative departure from the Eurocentric frameworks of fictionality. It uses the framework of a physical trip across Europe to explore deep psychological and spiritual landscapes. (Reminded of Atwood’s Journey to the Interior?)
The plot follows a disparate London television crew - a director, a cameraman, a presenter, and the protagonist, Lao - who board a train to France and Switzerland to film a documentary about “Arcadia”.
In classical myth, Arcadia is the ultimate pastoral paradise, representing humanity’s perfect harmony with nature. The novel questions whether such a pristine, green narrative can still exist, or even be genuinely imagined, in a modern, industrialised, and often cynical world.
This journey towards “arcadia” forces the characters to travel through the metaphorical underworld of their own minds and the very real, dark history of Europe. As the train traverses landscapes scarred by the immense traumas of the World Wars, the characters grapple with their own alienation and inner demons.
Okri suggests that true Arcadia cannot be found through escapism. Instead, one must actively process and heal from both personal and historical trauma before any sense of inner peace can be achieved.
Arcadia then, is not a geographical location, but an internal state of grace and healing that we must actively construct within ourselves, says Okri.
Okri’s fables hence seek to celebrate the interconnectedness of the human and the more-than-human, linking human survival directly to the ecological health of the planet.
In his 2021 novel titled, Every Leaf a Hallelujah, the protagonist, a young girl named Mangoshi, journeys into the forest to find a specific flower to cure her dying mother. However, to her shock, she discovers that the forest itself is dying due to human deforestation. Okri here compares the mother’s illness to the illness of mother Earth. To heal humanity, then, the characters must first heal the natural world.
And that’s exactly the USP of Ben! By merging trans-realism with the urgent realities of the climate crisis, he transforms the traditional fable into a profound manifesto of the environment!
Some of his famous quotes have now become my hot favourites! I’ve shared some of them wherever I get the chance to give an invited talk!
Here are a few of those lovely pearls -
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn’t correct me, she’d tell me a story.
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.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean.
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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.
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery.
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