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Africa's Magical Musician of Prose
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11001 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1993 |
2,431 Words |
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
SONGS OF ENCHANTMENT
Ben Okri Nan
A. Talese / Doubleday, 1993
Perhaps the way to understand the mesmerizing effect of Ben Okri's writing is not by beginning with his celebrated recent novels but, instead, by examining "A Prayer from the Living," published earlier this year on the op-ed page of the New York Times. In his powerful response to the famine in Somalia (and, more specifically, to the arrival of American troops in the country), Okri defines a central moral dilemma of our time: involvement in cultures other than our own, which so often in the past has meant misunderstanding and blindness to other peoples' ways. Moreover, from the terse perspective of "A Prayer from the Living," it is possible to decode an understanding of the author's much more demanding and complex longer narratives.
The unnamed narrator of "A Prayer from the Living," speaking as part of the collective whole, begins by declaring, "We entered the town of the dying at sunset." The greater world is referred to as "the perfection of chaos"; the dead are described as "more joyful," as "happier than we are," even "more alive than we are." In animistic terms, death is not an end but, rather, a transition, something not fearful but inevitable, perhaps even desirable. "The only people who weren't dead were the dead," we are told. Singing jubilantly, they appear relieved of life's turmoil, particularly physical suffering.
In this last town in the world, the narrator searches for his family and his lover, realizing that death makes everyone his kin. The narration is starkly unsettling, juxtaposing the luminous souls of the dying with TV images of starving bodies. There is an eerie sense of being present at a horrifying event, yet watching it from the security of our own living rooms. Approaching a school, the narrator is aware of his dying strength and of a century of history repeating itself, "because none of us ever learned our lesson, or loved enough from our pain." These ideas--the healing power of love and the inability of human beings to learn anything from history--are central to Okri's recent work.
The school is filled with the dead, yet "the air didn't have death in it" but prayer instead. Moreover, the dead are alive, both serene and connected to others. "I felt they had made the room holy" says the narrator, "because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer." As he prays, he hears the "anguished cry of all
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