Ben Okri, my new intellectual crush!

Ben Okri was Africa's most famous novelist and poet who won a Man Booker Prize for The Famished Road.  Being oblivious to the literary world and not much into poems, I didn't think of his visit to the Storymoja Hay Festival as big of a deal as everyone else, until I went to one of his readings.  I am now a total believer and fan! He is such a genius of beautiful words/brilliant sentences, sees life with such depth and openness, and has the courage to continuously pioneer a new frontier of thoughts in order to move the civilization forward.

Okri is fascinated with the many realities of humanity, the duality of life, this constant push and pull between form and spirits, and how one makes the most out of the constraint of form.  "Too much form means not enough spirit and too much spirit means not enough form".  In fact, human life itself illustrates such struggle.  We are all bound in our 6' x 2' form, our bodies, yet what's contained within our bodies are so much more!  Our spirit can expand in time and space and imagine what life is like hundreds of years ago or empathize with someone else from a different land and tradition.  We are constantly learning and trying to balance our spirits desire to expand with the practical constraint of our form.  Same duality can be seen in atoms with the opposing force of separating and attracting; that force is what makes up the world, and what makes the world interesting and beautiful.

The opening paragraph of The Famished Road reads beautifully..."In the beginning, there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.  And because the road was once a river, it was always hungry"  River is water, water is fluid and full of possibilities, but it lacks form, you cannot control it.  Once it becomes the rigid road, it loses some of its original fluidity and creativity, however, the form brings other values by connecting people/traditions, enabling commerce...etc. Something is lost, but something is also gained from it.  I think this resembles human life as well...when we were first born into this world, we have many dreams, and it's limitless, we can fly around the world with Peter Pan or have a tea party with teddy bears...as we grow, we become more rigid as we "define" who we are, what we want, and start to pass quick judgement to things we think we know we don't like or don't want.  We take a more rigid form based on our tradition, language, and experiences.  This form allows us to focus, to add functional value to the world, to the economy, but it suffocate our ability to dream.  Because we once was able to dream without limit, we will always long for those dream and creativity after we have taken our forms. (just think, many of us working 8-5 jobs often doubt if this is it for our lives?  will we ever be able to do something more interesting?) The struggle and the beauty, I suppose, is in the "balance"...and in the balance we can find sanity and love and joy in life.  How to achieve such balance perhaps is the learning for our life times.

Another interesting way Ben Okri has explored this was by released a poem one sentence a day on Twitter earlier this year, with the word limits on Twitter, he is challenged to not waste any words and strive to have words work together so that each word end up express more than it could on its own.   Here was his poem, a great way to state a New Year resolution, isn't it?

O that abstract garden of being
Tells me to be brave, and clear,
In the fire of living,
And in the journey through the year.
So I will grow me like an oak tree
And make life’s honey like a bee.
Each day I will walk an interesting mile
And with the sun I’ll share a smile.
I will play again like a child,
And celebrate what’s wild.
I will swim in every sea or river,
And reflect the light of the sublime giver.
I will be at ease with opposition,
And will cultivate intuition.
I will walk the surprising streets,
And dance to life’s unexpected beats.
I will notice all the phases of the moon
And try not to act too late or too soon.
I will write something new every day
And look at paintings in an alternative way.
I’ll not dream the same way twice;
But I’ll not be shy to repeat what’s nice.
I’ll have the courage, when needed, to change;
And I won’t forget that life is strange.
And so I’ll learn to love the simple things
As well as the complexity that life brings.
Good or bad I’ll learn to treat the same
And I’ll not forget that it’s all a mysterious game.
I’ll not let that general fear of death run my life
Into the higher realms I will enter
O that abstract garden, make me clear,
Make me brave, without fear.
I intend to love this rich new year.

Another one of his twitter poems:

I sing a new freedom
I sing a new freedom
Freedom with discipline.
We need freedom to rise higher.
Be true to yourself
In the follies of our times.
Become what you are
In this era of economic crimes.
Only the free in spirit
Will find their way out of this maze.
We are children of the stars.
We ought to amaze.

...and my favourite one:
As clouds pass above our heads
So time passes through our lives.
Where does it go,
And when it passes,
What do we have to show?
We can plant deeds in time
As gardners plant roses.
We can plant thoughts, or good words too
Especially if they are noble and true.
Time is an act of consciousness:
One of the greatest forces
Of the material world.
We ought to use time
Like emperors of the mind:
Do magic things that the future,
Surprised, will find.
We could change our life today
And seek out a higher way.
The Buddha sat beneath a tree
And from all illusion became free.
And as we travel on this life that is a sea
We can glimpse eternity.
We can join that growing fight
To stop our world being plunged into night.
We can wake to the power of our voice
Change the world with the power of our choice.
But there is nothing we can do
If we don’t begin to think anew.
We are not much more than what we think;
In our minds we swim or sink.
If there is one secret I’d like to share
It’s that we are what we dream
Or what we fear.
So dream a good dream today
And keep it going in every way.
Let each moment of our life
Somehow help the good fight
Or help spread some light.
The wise say life is a dream;
And soon the dream is done.
But what you did in the dream
Is all that counts beneath the sun.
The dream is real, and the real is a dream
Each one of us is a powerful being.
Wake up to what you are,
You are a sun, you are a star.
Wake up to what you can be.
Search, search for a new destiny

• His BBC interview on the economic meltdown and his new book A Time for New Dreams
• Ben Okri Lines in potentis: while a bit mythical, deeply inspiring
• Ben Okri reads from his new book A Time for New Dreams
• Ben Okri reads selected poems
• Some interesting Ben Okri quotes to ponder:
• “We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”
• “Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible."
• "Tolerance depends on the quality of imagination, the capacity to step out of your own world view into another...but you can only do that when you have respect for other world views and believe in the possibility of other validities"
• "Life demands constant openness"
• "Literature is a magic mirror that allows us to see ourselves much more clearly' and 'The writers job is to look deep, listen profoundly and write truthfully"

He says that poets are often weird people, they are like a wrecked ship...because they are not whole, they have the capability to let the world's spirit enter them and create works that serves as mirror to humanity.  This explains a lot, and I've now have a new found respect for artists and poets.