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Introduction: Ben Okri's Songs of Enchantment
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10997 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1993 |
255 Words |
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Ben Okri, the Nigerian author who two years ago won Britain's Booker Prize for The Famished Road, has returned with a sequel. Songs of Enchantment continues the adventures of Azaro, a remarkably sentient child in an impoverished village caught in the chaotic, often brutal, political upheavals of postcolonial Africa.
Okri draws from Yoruba traditions, creating a sense of reality uniquely African. This he accomplishes, unlike other African writers, without employing African idioms, rhythms, or speech and descriptive patterns. Okri works his prose magic entirely with English, elaborating on the spirit consciousness of a paranormal child. The hypnotic narrative, like the narrator, migrates freely between the physical world and the spiritual realm; this viewpoint has been described as "spiritual realism."
The story opens with the breakdown of Azaro's family, as his mother, driven by grinding poverty and despair, goes to work for the demonic owner of a local tavern. Azaro and his father struggle to find a way to reunite their family and to set their young nation to rights.
Commentator Vinay Dharwadker, a poet and professor of literature who explores the novel in depth, writes that Songs of Enchantment gives us "as complete a contemporary alternative to a Western understanding or representation of Africa as we can get now." Literary scholar Charles Larson describes Okri's artistic metamorphosis in an essay on the author's previous works. In moving from absorption with contemporary events to concern with the human heart, Ben Okri has emerged as a voice of hope.
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