The coherence comes from the depth of intention. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, pondering how best to write about this huge and troubling subject. It is a subject that awakens in us primal fears and evasions. It is daunting, nightmarish, and hard to make sense of, all at the same time. So I thought I would use all the powers of literature to try and tackle it. I wanted to use its diverse forms and the power intrinsic to each to take the reader on a cubistic journey round the issue of the climate crisis.

Seeing these pieces gathered together, their shortness is marked – structurally, but also on a line level. It’s particularly conspicuous in your poetry, with lines often only small handful of words long. Could you talk a little about form, and shortness of form? 

We don’t have much time. The climate crisis has done something to time. We have a short time gap to turn things around and get the environment back on an even keel. The shortness of the forms and lines reflect the shortness of the time we’ve got. What I need to convey is so urgent that the long form feels oddly inappropriate. The existential nature of the crisis has compelled me to question the way I write. In one of the essays, I talk about a writing without waste. The writing has to match what is needed: truth, simplicity, a kind of Spartan beauty, passion, love, vision.

Has climate crisis always been in your work, in a way?

Only to the degree that I have always been sensitive to nature, to the air we breathe, to pollution, to exploitation, to deforestation. Some critics claim that a short story of mine in a volume called Stars of the New Curfew, a story called ‘What the Tapster Saw’, initiated a genre called petro-fiction. But it’s only recently I felt the need to face the subject head on. And it is a tough subject to tackle. It strains the limits of aesthetics. Can one write about the environment and it to still be art? My answer is yes. Absolutely. It can be art and fire.

I remember discussing ‘What the Tapster Saw’ and ‘petro-magic-realism’ in my now very-out-of-date master’s thesis. The thesis is out of date, I suppose, for the same reasons of short time that you mention above; it was too interested in the aesthetics of writing about climate and not enough also in the material conditions of writing about climate; too bothered with the art, not enough with both art and fire.

Would you say that your “purpose” for writing (to use that limiting old way of asking a writer why the write, when the answer is of course “because I am a writer” – sorry!) has changed over the decades?

It changes as I change, but it remains the same as I remain the same. I write for truth, for beauty, for justice, for playfulness, for innovation, for pleasure, to change the world, to stop the breath, to reveal, to question, to discover…

You’ve spoken elsewhere of the need for ‘a radical act of mass consciousness’ that would jolt us from the numb, passive, unthinking path to climate disaster we’re on. What might that look like, for you? And what function might literature and storytelling have in it?

I don’t know what it would look like. But I know what it would do. It would be like the spirit of solidarity and courage and awareness that was there during the Blitz. It would be a world where we are all pulling together to cut down on our emissions and our waste. It would be the beginning of a new civilisation, where we no longer do things that contribute to the death of our species. We would be thoughtful and aware. Our commerce would be creative, our government would act not only for the national interest but that of humanity as a whole. We would love our lives and have our virtues and vices, but we would be conscious that what we do impacts beautifully on the world. We wouldn’t be so selfish and naïve. For we are naïve in thinking that we can go on polluting in individual and societal ways and the environmental equation will still come out alright. I believe we are at a crossroads. One road continues our suicidal relationship with the earth all the way to hell. The other road leads to a wider humanity, a new species. That’s the starkness of the choice. When we know what has to be done, we will do it. I think it takes a crisis to bring out the best in us. But we don’t want to wake up to the crisis too late, when there is nothing more we can do. That is what literature can make happen. It can take us there, to the edge, to the hell we don’t want. It can show us a new road. It can make these things real and so empower our imagination and our will.

I think Tiger Work points to how what we consider “freedoms” are all contingent on, and dwarfed by, the idea at the collection’s heart. As someone with long involvement in the PEN movement, can I ask how, for you, the totality of climate crisis intersects with the idea of free expression, of the freedoms to read and write, listen and tell?

The first loss of freedom of expression passed into law was in response to climate activism. We no longer have the right to really protest. There, straightaway, is the intersection. Turns out that to talk properly and truly about climate change you need freedom of expression. Climate crisis and liberty are linked.

It feels to me that much of your work explores what we leave behind (to the world, yes, but also of the world). What do you want to leave behind?

Creative celebrations of truth, of clarity, of possibilities. Dreams of greater realities. A measure of our freedom.

Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first hand the consequences of war, and London. He has won many prizes over the years for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Art and Fire: An Interview with Ben Okri appeared first on English PEN.

‘Boko’ is a Latin alphabet that was used to write down the Hausa Language, which, as you can imagine, the Hausa-Fulani scholars distrusted, favouring their own. ‘Haram’, in Islam refers to that which is forbidden and ill-willed. The term has been politicised and colonised by the war on terror narrative to mean ‘Western education is bad’. But given the historical context, ‘Boko Haram’ – the term popularly used for fundamentalist Islamic extremists operating in Nigeria right now – in its earliest conception culturally meant ‘This foreign script is wrong’, ‘This symbol of colonisation is bad’, ‘Why the hell are we using these weird squiggly lines anyway? Oh right, they’ll kill us if we don’t,’ and, above all, ‘Our culture is good enough for us’.

In my book #Afterhours, I re-write my childhood by narratively, culturally and historically translating/transposing poems by British and Irish poets. One such poem is ‘Shooting Script’ by Seamus Heaney. Here, Heaney describes the Irish script being eroded by water, symbolic, I believe, of British military power:

And just when it looks as if it is all over –
Tracking shots of a long wave up a strand
That breaks towards the point of a stick writing and writing
Words in the old script in the running sand.

I saw in this the erosion of ‘Ajami’ with ‘Boko’ and, for history is locked in language, the erasure of aspects of my ancient culture. Much happened after direct British rule left Nigeria. The Christian and English-educated Nigerians who had grown wealthy under the colonial capitalist powers came north and permeated various facets of the historically Islamic life and culture. They bought up huge swathes of land, which severely disrupted nomadic cattle herders and drove them to destitution and poverty. Out of work, angry at the new culture that ostracised and brutalised them, these young men were (and still are) drawn to ‘Boko Haram’ who promise security, wealth, community and brotherhood. Violence erupted in the late seventies and, in this context, my Christian mother met my Muslim father and they fell in love.

Of the five-hundred languages in Nigeria, my father grew up speaking two, Hausa and Edo, and my mother grew up speaking Isoko. English, imposed in schools across Nigeria, became the official language and, wishing to create an environment that would best equip us for the future, English was the only language spoken in our household. It isn’t my father’s tongue, my mother’s tongue, or my mother tongue, yet it is all I speak and write in. Of the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa main nation-tribes in Nigeria, by my father I am a Hausa man. I like to think that the nomadic literary tradition, which ceased with ‘Boko’ and English and is coded in my blood, became unlocked when we left Nigeria in 1996, when we became international nomads, or immigrants.

#Afterhours covers this period, from 1984 to 2002, from when I was born to when I turned eighteen and settled in London. Those years, in which I lived and learned in Nigeria, Ireland and England, fostered querulous and often contradicting voices, yet much of my creative output grows where they intersect. I belong to all three worlds, or none of them. Dublin, where I spent the least amount of time, is where I started truly grappling with art. The love and enthusiasm I have for literature was sowed in me by an Irish basketball coach who loved John Keats as much as he did a crossover; the tasks he set us, the journeys of introspection and interrogation needed to fully engage with poetry, invited me to criss-cross my own internal borders.

Much of the world has changed since 1984. Britain has been systematically shutting down its international embassies or making needle-eyes of visa granting processes. The wealth in ‘The Commonwealth’ is all but myth. Climate change (which creates opportunities for ‘Boko Haram’ in the form of disenfranchised young) is adding great numbers to the global migration crisis. There are sixty-five million displaced people presently, numbers not seen since the Second World War, and all this is set against the rise in far right nationalism here in the West, whose child is Britain’s exit from the European Union, whose child is racial profiling and attacks on people of colour in the streets of London.

Those sixty-five million who have crossed borders to survive, as my parents had to, will have children, border-crossing-offspring who will consider themselves citizens of the world, as I do. Last year, when the British Prime Minister said, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, the implication was that we who are multi-placed will never be British, or British enough. The implication is ‘nativism or else…’. To choose nativism is to deny my Hausa-hood and my inner Irishman, to flatten the tumult of my rich mixing to a single English plain plane. The choice means a crisis of identity and sanity. It is not a choice for me. I am ‘or else’, and I have to be.

One way to consider #Afterhours as a text is as an exploration of how possible it is to contain multitudes, to be one and many. In translating and transposing the poems, I hope to demonstrate how transient and borderless cultures can be when built on understanding. Just as the Fulani married the Hausa, and my mother married my father, the book marries contemporary British history with Nigeria’s, and I thank my Irish teacher for the space to understand. I spent twelve months as the National Poetry Library’s Poet in Residence, flipping through their archives looking for poems I could reset. To write was to carry myself and roam through British history and culture, but to read was to roam even further.

Books are borderless as breath, and the last poem in #Afterhours engages that ‘right’ to roam. In it, I talk about a project I founded called The Midnight Run, where I gather strangers to migrate through a city from dusk to dawn. I invite local artists to run interactive workshops on anything from poetry writing, to interpretive dance, to basketball. I create a safe space for anonymity; for them to be whoever they wish. Relating to this, I reset a poem by Andrew Motion called ‘Aftermath’; it is about journeying into the countryside. My version is about travelling through the city and looking for space. It begins:

I feel like an exiled child going walkabout by night
for the first time, packing everything I can imagine
I’ll need: spare socks, rain coat, assorted fruit, map
of central London, notebooks, pencils and a torch.

The post The right/write to roam appeared first on English PEN.

The Nobel Laureate Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has recently been nominated to the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and voting is currently taking place. This welcome and ground-breaking nomination – if elected, Soyinka will be the first ever African to hold the post – brings a renewed attention to his poetry, which is part of an extraordinary opus including drama, novels, memoirs and criticism. Soyinka writes in English and he brings to the language rich flavours of African names, folklore and landscape, in a register that marries his country’s heritage with European tradition. Like his other writing, his urgent poems draw deeply from the mythology of the Yoruba tribe and the local culture, yet they reverberate with what he calls his ‘abiding religion – human liberty’.

Soyinka’s poetry crosses the Mediterranean like a boat loaded with African people risking their lives, whether in search of freedom or simply a better life. His poem ‘Migrations’ has recently been etched on the graves of refugees who did not reach the shore of Italy breathing. Soyinka’s poem, called by the Italian authorities a carezza (a caress, soothing touch) gives dignity to those who died and comfort to their families. It bridges the deadly gap between a continent that sheds its people into the sea and a continent that looks bewildered at the human loss. It rests at the uncomfortable boundaries between those who have and those who have not, remaining engaged with the real world.

Born in 1934 and educated in Nigeria, Soyinka took a doctorate from the University of Leeds in 1973 and worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1960 he returned to Africa. His writing opposes colonialism and political corruption, and reflects a commitment to the dignity of people. In 1967, during the Civil War in Nigeria, Soyinka wrote an article in which he appealed for ceasefire. For this he was imprisoned and sent into solitary confinement for nearly two years. His experience as prisoner led to work imbued with a personal sense of sacrifice – a personal testimony – for the way in which poetry fights for justice. His collection of poems A Shuttle in the Crypt, which he describes as ‘a map of the course trodden by the mind, not a record of the actual struggle against a vegetable existence’, intimates to the reader the agonies of solitary confinement. His poems are by turn meditative, prophetic and angry. Yet they breathe a sense of resilience. In the poem ‘To the Madmen over the Wall’, he refuses descent into madness even as he shows to the reader the extent to which the mind is wrung by incarceration:

Howl, howl
Your fill and overripeness of the heart,
I may not come with you
Companions of the broken buoy
I may not seek
The harbour of your drifting shore.

‘When Seasons Change’ meditates on the solitude of confinement in high register:

Shrouds of seasons gone, peeled
From time’s corpses, mouse-eaten thoughts
You flutter upon solitude in winds
Armed in shrapnels from the shell of vision
Veils on the altar of unplighted troths
Cobweb hangings on the throne of death
In solitude.

Wilfred Owen’s war poems, WB Yeats, Eliot and Shakespeare come to mind when reading these lines. In a world where engaged poetry either sounds like propaganda or is ignored as such, there is a lot to learn from Soyinka’s defiant language and his ability to face the hard truths as a poet.

Since 1986, when Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature for works in which he ‘fashions the drama of existence’ with ‘poetic overtones’, he has been sought as a speaker and lecturer all over the world whilst continuing to hold teaching posts in Nigeria. He brings with him the feeling of the wider human community and a sense of conviction about art’s necessity when dealing with difficult subjects.

When I first came to Soyinka’s work in the late 1990s, it was these lines that kept going through my mind: ‘Slaves do not possess their kind. Nor do / The truly free’ (‘Funeral Sermon, Soweto’, from Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems). Soyinka writes about the discomfiting reality of our ‘civilised world’ with devastating clarity and depth. He shows the gap between the free-kind and the slave-kind of the human race, pointing to a solution. What makes me return to Soyinka’s poems is his insistence on resilience and liberty, and the way in which he works this insistence into a language that remains in the heart and mind long after the book is closed.

Wole Soyinka’s poetry collections include: Idandre & Other Poems (1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), Ogun Abibiman (1976), Mandela’s Earth (1989), and Samarkand and Other Markets I have Known (2002).

The post Wole Soyinka’s poetry: the insistence on liberty appeared first on English PEN.