Ben Okri, Novelist HARDtalk

Now on BBC News it is time for HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk, I am

Stephen Sackur. The stories we tell ourselves tells much about the Times

and places we live in. What should we make of the fiction coming out of

Africa in the two generation since the continent are merged from

colonial rule. How free are the African storytellers to explore the

richness and diversity of the continent? My guess is the

international novelist and poet, Ben Okri. His life has straddled Nigeria

and the UK. Is a such a thing as an African voice? -- there.

Ben Okri, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you very much. I have interviewed

many novelists but never one that has published two works of fiction

by the ripe old age of 22. What gave you the so young to weave stories?

It is hard to say because my original impulse was to be a

scientist. I was fascinated by innovation, by ways in which one can

shape the world through the mind. Science and its analysis was my

initial dream. Science draped in materialism, but your stories mixed

white we would call reality and fantasy -- with what. For the right

of those two things are very important. Patron is amount of

rationality -- a tremendous amount of rationality. You can also tell a

great piece of writing by that which clarity cannot do. That which

analysis cannot achieve, the layers of thought cannot get to. It is

intuitive. The wisdoms of the heart, as it were. The wisdoms of

the heart, I wonder if some of those came through the traditions of

storytelling that your mother in particular was deeply embedded

with. Not just my mother, but she was the greatest exponent of

enigmatic storytelling. She always told me stories that were in direct.

It took me a long time to learn the value of indirection. We tend to

think that direct stories are the best stories, and they are in

certain circumstances, but the ones that haunt us are the indirect

ones. Are you saying that she would not give you rules to live by but

she would tell you allegories? If I was listening wrong she would say

let me tell you a story. And she would tell me one that appears to

have no point. Sometimes she would not finish the story and I would be

left with an unfinished story. It may me think about what you were

saying what more. I came up with ten different combinations and

conclusions from these mysterious and indirect story. And it has now

become an important part of my writing practice, even my

conversation with friends, I'm very insulated because of that reason.

You go around about the direct answers. I think indirection is much

more fascinating and much more conversationally explorative.

Indirection makes you dance wears direction just makes you shake

hands. I will try to make you dance in this conversation. To talk to you

about something I raised in the introduction. You were born in

Nigeria, and spent some of your childhood in south London and then

went back to Nigeria at the time of great conflict in the country. You

are from Africa, but you are from the West as well, does that mean you

are an outsider to those cultures. I'm an outsider and insider to both

cultures. Nigeria is an incredible possibly eat as it has to do with

synthesis. -- place to be because. During the Civil War, having to deal

with the difficulty of my upbringing, someone has to reconcile

the deeply divided nation in the division in a sense. Did that colour

you a great deal? Because he was so young at the time. Of course. I

don't know how young you were at the time, so did you see death? I saw

bodies floating on the banks, I saw people dead and shot. I lost friends

and people just disappeared on the street, relations just vanished. You

saw armoured trucks driving past and bombs being dropped. The war was

important part of my consciousness. All the questions I find myself

asking about life in my writing. I tell you what interests me about

that. You have commented upon the propensity of a lot of young African

writers to write about the problems and the sufferings of African people

in a direct way. US said that there should be room for more imagination,

more at ambition, more creativity when they write about their own

stories -- you said. I haven't written directly about them and that

is why I know that direct is not the best way. I have written directly

about them, I have thought correctly about them and I are Frederick Lee

about them and they are very powerful and they can be very

important and they are very important in terms of bearing

witness to a particular period of the nation's history. Of a people's

history. Particular to the struggles and injustices. We're talking about

literature here, we're not talking about journalism or just making a

record. We're talking about literature which is more than the

sum total of our suffering, it is also the sum total of our dreams,

playfulness and hope. Is a place of humour, sense of dance, sense of

astonishment. Is a huge universe. Dreams, fantasy, magic they are all

elements that appear in the Famished Road. I wonder when you won the

prize for the book, 20 years on, is today's Nigeria still full of

magic, myth, tradition as it was then. Of course it is. Tradition

will never entirely disappears. It is so richly steeped. It is not

going to go, ever. It might be deleted and changed by Western

modes, but it is still there. It focuses on the main protagonists who

is a spirit child who comes to a earth and then returns to the spirit

realm and is reincarnated many times. This particular one stays on

earth. You still engage with what is happening in the city and with his

parents. I wonder whether, because you spend most of your time outside

Nigeria, you could write that sort of talk today so deeply embedded in

a culture and a spirit that is of its place and that is not your place

any more. I don't think the writer has any fixed place in that sense. I

think the real place of the writer is actually what has shaped the

matrix of the imagination. And that does not leave you when you go. Has

the Ben Okri changed? Because of experience the Ben Okri must be a

different man than wrote that book. More tranquil I might think. Candi

Ben Okri writes the book now? Because he has written it already.

I'm a great believer of not repeating it. We need to constantly

evolve and take on new challenges. For me, one of the really important

challenges of being a writer is being able to witness, on as many

levels of possible to the fullest of one experience. My express has

evolved. -- experience. How do you respond when some African writers

get annoyed that when you call for them to be as free as they can with

their imaginations, you seem to be prescriptive because you are telling

them what they are writing at the moment is a bit monotonous and

bleak. No. I will do you a quote -- give. The charge that it is too

political dismisses in one blow but the world that we live in and the

possibilities of a political literature and it is beyond

depressing hearing a writer of Ben Okri's stature who writes powerfully

about the subjects to board what she calls, this broken down train. I

think she needs to do some rethinking. I don't think the

writer's main point is to be political. The primary

responsibility is to bear witness to what it is to be human in the

fullest possible sense. And the political is only one aspect of

this. When I wrote that essay, I was particularly concerned about what it

means to have a literature. To have a body of work that you call

literature. And I look at the literatures of many peoples and I am

a little bit envious. In Spanish you are very serious writers, political

and playful writers. Europe looks that speak to all the different

moods that you want to experience. You can actually read the literature

and go through a 100 different moods. I think that is what it is.

It gives full witnessed as to what it means to be human. I want our

literature, of Africa, to have that fullness and richness so that you

can read it on all different levels on different days, different times

of the year. Whatever is going on in the road and be delighted and

stimulated to thought. To have that vastness. I understand. I'm not just

simply saying to seize and use what it means to be a writer to day. Is

it actually counter-productive to talk about a black or African

literature? In a way, is that not just what Western voices tend to

do? And why should you even play that game? It is not a game I am

playing. I'm silly talking about looking at a body of literature. Why

say there is one body from east to west, north to south, is so

different. There is such is -- a thing as African literature. I have

a lot of problems with it but I need to acknowledge that it is there. It

count as a body and it is taught all over the world. I have read it very

deeply and I was simply making a comment not about the past, not

about the past because you cannot change the past but about the

future. The essay was meant to be a teasing piece of rotation to open up

our campus and be as full as we want. We don't only need to write

about sufferings, saying to the under generation, sees your freedom.

The other prescription that areas is just to be free.

A final thought on the process of writing and creating and that is the

audience, particularly the audience in Africa. Here is the words of a

Nigerian writer and novelist. She says literary audiences in many

African countries simply sit and wait until Western critics crown a

new writer. Then they begin applauding that person. Is there

some truth in that? There is a small amount of truth in that, but not the

total truth. There are many writers that have emerged from Africa that

have been very productive... But internationally acclaimed because of

the success they have had with African audiences rather than

Western audiences? Yes. Some of the great early writers like Achebe were

known first in Nigeria. Achebe was acclaimed first in Nigeria. He was

loved and enjoyed among Africans we before the British and Americans

caught on. Achebe was... We love them we before they were discovered

in America and England. What about Ben Okri? I was known in Nigeria we

before. I had a big readership in Nigeria before I came to England.

That was the basis of my rather useful confidence, actually. We have

taught us for a Bible fiction and tried to place it in context, but

you also do right politically. -- talked about your fiction. But you

have been very direct on political matters, particularly the current

crisis in Nigeria, Boko Haram's insurgency and endemic corruption,

and you have said that Nigerians cannot just blame their leaders,

they have to accept that their leaders and their failings are very

much a reflection of themselves. It is a double problem. It is very much

a problem of leadership but there is also the problem of collective

sponsorship. We have lead to much at the doors of our leaders and we have

been let down and not by them, but I think we need a different kind of

emphasis now. I think that collective responsibility... I feel

very strongly that a nation is changed not only when leaders

implement great changes but when the people themselves realise the power

that they have with their voice and protests. Even as a writer rather

than a politician, you do have a duty to engage? If I choose to have

that duty, yes. Your message seems to be that every human being has

that duty. Every human being has the right and responsibility to engage

and change their world if they choose to. One cannot impose. You

cannot go up to people and say that you must be engaging. People might

not want to today this year. That is freedom as well. I think that what

we're talking about here is that it is better and richer for the world

if individuals take an active interest in the world, yes, but you

cannot impose it on them. Back in 2012, this is something that he

said. He said the unrest taking place right now as a result of Boko

Haram is in my view attaining critical mass. There is too much

pussyfooting around, too much false intellectualisation. This, he said,

is a war to the very end. He said that in 2012. Is that something you

believe about Nigeria and Boko Haram today? I don't know what he means by

water the very end. But it is a critical right back row. And it is

not just a war with or against Boko Haram, it is something much deeper

than that. I think it has today with many things not properly

acknowledged about the state of Nigeria today. The hidden religious

conflicts, hidden religious agendas of various parties, various

individuals. But more profoundly, I think it is poverty. I think that

poverty plays into this in a very profound manner. The sense of

injustice, the sense of deeply inequitable distribution of wealth.

Many of the areas where Boko Haram has gained its biggest success are

areas of incredible social... To see it as an ideological problem, to try

and get deep inside the strand of Wahhabi Salafist jihadi thought and

to see it in that sense is too narrow and a mistake in your view?

It is too narrow. That has to be done but there is also a war --

bigger social programme that these take place as well. Nigeria just

needs to be raised up. The level of its poverty in some parts of the

north. If I were that poor, I would do almost anything. I would be as

angry. I would go to whoever... You would kill? I would not kill but

lack there is a lot of anger in the country and it is not just the

Koran. Boko Haram is just one strand. There are other strands

emerging because of that, because of this same thing I'm talking about.

The Niger Delta is one such strand as well. There are quite a few that

are tugging away at the body politic, tugging away at the

coherent shape of the nation. I have said it many times that we are

constantly on the brink of disintegration. If we don't, for the

right sort of reforms or policies to truly transform that country, that

deep outrage of the country will continue. Your interest in politics

goes beyond Nigeria. It is interesting that the new leader of

the UK Labour Party quoted you in his most recent conference speech.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome,

to endure, to transform Antonov. -- and to love. He picked up on your

message that even politicians have to be creative people. Just remind

us what you wrote in response to that. I will have to get my

glasses. Yes, it was a poem that I wrote in reaction to politics in our

times and it goes like this. It looks with hard eyes at the hard

world and shakes it with a ruler's edge, measuring what is possible

against a claim, support and votes. And it went on to say something like

this. We live in hard times that have lost this tough art of dreaming

the best for its people, or so we are told by cynics and doomsayers.

But dreaming? Is that what politicians are meant to do? They're

supposed to be practical implement as a policy. But policies have to be

trapped. They have been as a policy. But policies have to be

trapped. They have have to be trapped. They have to be implement

against a background of what politicians believe is best for

people. Politics without dreams is arid and barren. It is a machine for

winning elections. What we need are politicians with great dreams for

their people, with a sense of justice, but also the practical

capacity to win votes. Those things are important. If you ask me which

one is more important, I will say without any hesitation that the

people who dream greatest are the ones we need the most. I really

believe that we need great dreams. But dream is generally don't win

elections. That is not true. They always do. Bill Clinton, JFK,

Lincoln. Winston Churchill. He saw dreams of the possibility of coming

through that great War when nobody else did. That is what a true

dreamer does. They see things that others don't quite see yet and then

they worked really hard to make it possible. We need both in politics.

We need both in literature. We need both in journalism. We need great

dreamers and great achievers in practical dreams. I think it is too

early to talk about whether people are elected or not. And amid all of

this, I think resilience is very, very important. But you in your

literature will keep dreaming. Keep dreaming, keep being resilient and

keep being practical. Thank you.