ABSTRACT
Taking its prompt from the 1930s Senghorian Negritude injunction “to protect … intellectuals of the black Diaspora against literary conformism” (Anosie 86), this chapter argues that Ben Okri goes beyond the postcolonial/decolonial thrust of many of his peers, writing to heal the revolt against civilisation. This celebrated First Wave poet, novelist, short storyteller, dramatist, and film script writer found his “authentic ‘negro’ personality” early, giving voice to his dream of becoming a novelist at the tender age of nineteen with his debut novel, Flowers and Shadows in 1980, an exposé of rampant corruption written in a Lagos ghetto (The Guardian 5 January 2022). The climax of this Nigerian-Londoner's literary achievement is his 2019 novel, The Freedom Artist that, indicative of his diasporic consciousness, challenges perceptions of reality in the sleeping world of capitalism, violence and man-made catastrophes that spread fear throughout the world of the living-dead. Defying closure, Okri paves the way as a world literary authority, braiding philosophy, mythology, genre-making, art and voyeurism within a distinctly transnational-Afropolitan aesthetic that has won global acclaim. For instance, his 1991 Booker Prize novel, The Famished Road, is now an Everyman Classic and, in 2021, Astonishing the Gods (2014; 1995) was selected as one of BBC's “100 novels that shaped the world.” This chapter hones in on his 2019 magnum opus and his 2021 folktale, Every Leaf a Hallelujah to illustrate how the visionary imaginary in Okri guides us beyond the grain of literary conformism through an eco-humanist lens to recalibrate what it means to be civilised. Both books are urgent wake-up calls that masterfully synthesise past and present, hope and despair, reality and magic, politics and literature.
