There
is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most
alive during the process of composition. And that inner part, that inner glow,
is timeless, and it functions beyond time. It drinks from deep waters. It has
the stillness and the dance and the radiance of firmament.
In our next pitstop on this delightful
literary sojourn into the ‘Self’, let’s hop on to the Künstlerroman from off
the Bildungs!
Yess! Such kindred spirit with the
Bildungsroman is its twin sister the Künstlerroman!
 |
| Ben Okri |
While the Bildungsroman is often called
the formation novel, the Künstlerroman, is called the artist novel as such!
Ben Okri is one such postmodern writer,
who dabbles with gusto on the Künstlerroman! Although Ben today is widely known
for his Booker-winning novel The Famished
Road, there are other equally powerful texts from off the Pen of Ben, that
have an equal or even a better claim to fame!
Indeed, most of his works are a candid
celebration of the ‘personal space,’ a space that’s so sacred and a kinda
sanctum sanctorum to the artist!
And this personal space, or downtime, has
such a ‘hallowed be thy name’ to Ben!
Two of his works, (guys shake the dust
off your feet from off his Famished Road
for once! And thank you for that!) ;-)
Well, yesss! Two of his works that deserve
such huge credit have always been relegated to the periphery of his oeuvre whenever and wherever there’s been a discussion on his writing!
They happen to be on my personal
favourites too!
The first is, The Landscapes Within, (later reworked and republished as Dangerous Love!)
And the second is, A Way of Being Free!
The
Landscapes Within has so telling a title that speaks much
for its lustre and its sheen!
Blame it on the utterly incapacitated government
in Nigeria, in the postwar context, [the traumatic civil war that resulted in
the death of more than a million Nigerians, and that forms the crux of many
artistic renderings, including Achebe’s ‘Refugee Mother and Child’], now the
people of the land – every one of them - feel so very claustrophobic on the outside,
so sickening and so traumatized on the outside, much akin to helpless, clueless
‘trapped rats’, due much to the mounting social vices that only pile up by the
dozen each passing day!
In this backdrop, the protagonist of the
novel, Omovo feels so traumatized looking at the outside conditions around him,
and hence seeks to find his secure solace in his beautifully created landscape ‘within’,
where he becomes his own canvas! In other words, the artist himself becomes his
own art!
To Omovo, this journey within, or the
journey to the empowerment of his Self, is the most realistic journeys of all, in
his society plagued by a host of evils and vices! Hence, his drawings and his
paintings become for him a sort of default ‘refuge in the time of storm’ and
more for the artist ‘within’ him!
From the first of the two, The Landscapes Within, let’s now quickly
move on to the second one from Ben!
The second is, A Way of Being Free!
I guess, Ben’s claim to fame would sure
hinge on the latter, A Way of Being Free!
If at all he deserves another hugey,
biggy prize on him, like, say the Nobel, (yesss! It ain’t too tall a claim at that
for such an impactful writer as Ben!) it would sure be for A Way of Being Free and I very much bet a dime on that!
Dear readers, I am of the firm and
convinced opinion, that this read should be on the library stacks and on your
personal book shelves as well!
I’m giving y’all some snippets for
excerpts from off this marvelous read from the pen of Ben!
I sure guess this read would be a real
motivational, therapeutic, inspirational read of sorts!
In short it would be a real ‘unputdownable’
book of sorts, for all passionate, lovely, committed literary minds out there!
This collection of twelve essays, A Way of Being Free is second only to Rushdie’s
Imaginary Homelands, which again,
coincidentally, is divided into twelve sections! Bingo to that!
As the saying of yore goes,
We define ourselves to others through our
stories!
How trueeyyy!
Abiding true to this adage, Ben’s amazing
style of writing in his Way of Being Free
on a range of very interesting topics that include his lovely lovelier
loveliest takes on writing, reading, inspiration, creativity, religion and the
power of storytelling, all attest to the fact that there’s so much more to Ben than
meets the eye!
What a refreshingly new perspective he’s
got to the act of reading! The way he hooks us through every word and every
line, every phrase and every paragraph of his pages, in such a gripping, riveting
and engaging way, sure makes this book such an inviting, toothsome, awesome and
fulsome treat of sorts for the ardent literary soul!
Giving y’all some lovely-o-lovely
snippets from Ben’s A Way of Being Free,
for y’all to go real crazy over Ben and his delightfully mighty lines that
impact the heart, mind and soul too deep for description!
Here goes Ben –
Make sure you’ve got a regal recline on a
sette or a couch, with your yummiest of cappuccino es in tow, before you go ahead and read
these soul-nourishing lines!
Here goes Ben, on redreaming, on
counterfactual realities, on alternate realities -
The
worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our
task, as creative participants in the universe, to redream our world. The fact
of possessing imagination means that everything can be redreamed. Each reality
can have its alternative possibilities. Human beings are blessed with the
necessity of transformation.
And this one that bemoans the
irresponsible storyteller -
Beware
of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their
gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could
unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people.
And sample this, on the impactfulness of
storytelling! -
A
great challenge for our age and future ages: to do for storytelling what Joyce
did for language – to take it to the highest levels of enchantment and magic;
to impact into story infinite richness and convergences; to make story flow
with serenity, with eternity.
Wait! That’s not all –
In
a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by
stories, we also live in them.
One
way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way,
we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in
ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it
with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we
change or lives.
What
hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of
violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated
public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human
beings?
The
only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The
only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of
imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some
way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.
And hey presto! Look at his awesome take
on the art of reading!
Reading,
therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this
tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters,
continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit
next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited,
enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the
reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the
creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
On the power of stories and their impact
on us –
In
a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by
stories, we also live in them.
One
way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way,
we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in
ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it
with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we
change or lives.
So intense, ain’t he!
And before I sign off on Ben, here’s to
his health and longyyy prosperity –
The
earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it
would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries
with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them
into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one
more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight.
I
can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of
the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or
heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all
voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the
ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded
guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had
to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon
up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite
qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land.
The
old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on
those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or
with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's
battle with a fabulous beast - the beast that is in the hero.
The
storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and
incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories
of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became
the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of
ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries,
the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things,
the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of
victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat
victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods.
They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of
being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change.
These
old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends
and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to
go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the
unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into
the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them.
They had to see clearly.
They
risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better
futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the
interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal
imagination.
And
I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties
collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the
dark descending nights ahead - I think that now we need those fictional old
bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their
courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a
fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We
need them to be whole again.
And the last is for sure the real icing
on the cake –
Such a profound glorification on the
celebration of the ‘Self’, the inner self, the ‘inner glow’! which according to
Ben has such a delightful lustre and radiance of its own! Its aura and its
sheen is real indescribable!
The
intelligence that shaped the universe, shaped you. There is an inner part of
us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the
process of composition. And that inner part, that inner glow, is timeless, and
it functions beyond time. It drinks from deep waters. It has the stillness and
the dance and the radiance of firmament. When one is most absorbed in the act
of creation one almost feels that one is wandering in the great corridors of
all minds. Creativity makes us part of it all.
Abou ‘Ben’ – May thy tribe increase!
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