Ben Okri

the spiritual beings the history of Nigeria Africa generally I feel like there's a lot to tell especially when you try to you know um merge it with fiction it just makes it more interesting so

Yeah, and doesn't Ben Okri do that? And he's Nigerian.

It's magical realism or what he writes about is so playful.

And he mixes stories of people with magic and animism and all these.

And I think that you're right.

We talked about this.

I think Chimamanda Adichie, Ben Okri, all these incredible writers that work also give it gifts that are able to express that in a way that is distinctly either Nigerian or something that Africans are able to do more so than, you know, Americans, you know?

yeah exactly so wow okay so um actually i'm wishing you the very best right moving forward and yes um whichever book you decide to write later on i'm always here i'm gonna i'm gonna check them out right and i'm your very big fan just so you know

That's how it feels to me.

[laughs] My favorite quote that those of you who have heard me speak before are probably familiar with, uh, about this, describing this, is for the, the opening of a novel called The Famished Road by the Nigerian author Ben Okri, and the opening lines of the book say, "In the beginning, there was a river." This is the fluidity, the movement, the aliveness of water.

"In the beginning, there was a river." And then the river was paved over and became a road.

This is the thinking mind, the small mind, the mind that wants to freeze and concretize and be efficient.

[chuckles]

No, no, that, that's, no, that's what community is because, right, my GOAT, my idol, Ben Okri, he held a webinar.

Journal- Johannesburg Institute Advanced Studies, they hosted him for the 35th year of The Famished Road celebrating it.

And he was saying something about we need new ways-

Isabel Allende en Chile.

Ben Okri en Nigeria.

Ese modo... narrativo que inventó García Márquez, o que él definió de manera tan clara, se convirtió en un lenguaje global para hablar de historias que el realismo convencional no podía sostener.

Though there's a critique there that I think deserves serious consideration, and I know you might push back on it.

The, but the word antagonist is throughout your book.

You know, "Somebody else sold the world, and eventually the antagonists outdo themselves by undoing themselves." Um, and another place, "Antagonists all over, mostly maskless as underprepared burglars, burglars." Um, you, you quote Ben Okri in an epigraph, "Hunger is an antagonist." I wonder if you could take us into what you're saying about antagonists, but also hunger, 'cause I think just in what you're saying there about, about, um, essentially feeling lost, not knowing how to be a man-

Mm-hmm

... that, that there's a hunger in that as well as a, as well as a, a violence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if y'all don't know Ben Okri, he's an incredible novelist, but also a poet who writes significant verse.

He was the first Black writer to win the Booker Prize back, I think, nineteen ninety-one.

And it seemed that openness means that I'm not sure whether the book was for an adult kind of thinking about how to pass on their love of reading to children, or in certain cases, the article seemed like they would be for younger readers.

So, for example, Ben Okri had, right in the beginning, a list of 10 and a half inclinations.

They're just s- sort of listed, 10 of them, and they're very inspirational.

You could imagine it in a classroom or in a library.

And I pretty much had this book from the Climate Optimism and Something Else event that I hosted like a year ago.

And pretty much it's a book by this Nigerian author, Ben Okri, who actually won the Booker Prize in 1991 for this book called The Famished Road.

I haven't read that one, but I've heard he's a really good author.

And this is a recent book of his.

Mm.

Ben Okri's been, Alice Walker's been there.

Mm.

Why, why these heavyweights and then nowadays, what, we don't know nothing?