Stars of the New Curfew

If we except the first story, "In the Shadow of War", which seemed slight and unworthy of the rest, STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW contains five topnotch stories by Nigerian author Ben Okri. To use a `national' adjective like that is sometimes to say everything and sometimes to say nothing. In this case, it is obvious that though you can take Okri out of Nigeria (he lives in London), you cannot take Nigeria out of Okri. The gritty, sweaty, illogical desperation of his characters, hanging on to life by hook or by crook in the slums of Lagos or provincial towns, is so vivid that so-called "magical realism" seems more like "realism". The smell of sewerage and dried fish, the clash of traffic, drums and trumpets, the spieling of patent medicine salesmen, the dust, the heaps of garbage, the roar of military trucks and aircraft drown out your disbelief. Okri is the Tutuola of the modern age, a more controlled, a more polished Yoruba tale spinner with none of the hopes of the more-placid colonial era when independence was only a goal. Published after 28 years of freedom, these stories reflect the chaos, the corruption, the lost chances and the waste of human abilities and natural resources. Maybe they are just stories, maybe they are a protest from the soul---what has happened to our Nigeria ? The military governor's birthday where one of the crazily zooming planes celebrating the occasion crashes into a slum----the competition of two wealthy families in a small town which takes the form of a money-throwing contest in which poor and unlucky fellow citizens abase themselves by fighting over notes and coins---the irony of a bewildered Rastafarian from the long-vanished diaspora, returned to preach and cry out "Africa, we counting on yuh !" in the streets of chaos and ruin. People live on their wits, people live at the expense of others' health and earnings, violence rules, the beautiful girl will die, life is cheap, yet dearly held for all that. The last story, "What the Tapster Saw", ripped from the same cloth as Tutuola's "The Palm-wine Drinkard", is a tale as told by the traditionally powerless to deliver subtle messages about affairs in the real world without pointing any fingers. It can be a message for Nigeria, it can be just the fantastic wanderings of a storyteller's fevered brain. These are wonderful stories, Okri is a worthy addition to the pantheon of Nigerian literature. "There are several ways to burn in your own fire."(p.191) Here they are.

To the reader from New York who keeps accusing me of "name-dropping..."-- Let's see: one pertinent aspect of that widely scattered body of literature which tends (rightly or wrongly) to get lumped under the "Magic Realism" moniker is that it is a product of the inherent traditions/belief/folklore of a sociological, religious, or ethnic group. The "magic" is that particular set of customs and beliefs; the "realism" is the industrial or technological world of the 20th century; much of what moves this literature is where and how those two divergent sets of forces meet, and what new forces are consequently drummed up in the lives of the people who at such moments are, as it were, caught between two worlds. To my own addled mind, one of the reasons the majority of attempts at recreating that "Magic Realism" experience in a first world setting (with a few notable exceptions, which I'll not name here, in this valiant late-night attempt to resist the all-encompassing temptation to name-drop, oh anonymous reader from NYC, capital of namedropping -- but anyone who gives a damn is welcome to e-mail me) have FAILED, is that over here in the free and easy USA, we're less and less tied to those older belief-systems as the decades dribble by, and as a culture we've already been through that old-vs.-new adjustment period, albeit with perhaps less dramatic literary results, which again I'll forego name-dropping or otherwise referencing here...Now, that said, let me add that I don't have a degree in anything, I'm not nor have I ever been some smug Ivory-towered academic, I neither know nor give a damn thing about current trends in literary theory, and I write these reviews (a) as a lifelong addict of the Good Read, and (b) as a way of breaking up the sludgy hours of my work-days. So what's your problem, anonymous reader from New York? It's real easy to go through and systematically undermine someone's attempts at vanity bylines when you remain anonymous...As for this book (which ill-deserves both your and my turning it into a dung-flinging contest): in much of his work, Ben Okri writes of the old Africa ("non-linear," my friend, in that IF you do your homework you will find in Africa's rich and varied folklore many elements and thought-forms which do not correspond whatsoever to our own inherent belief-systems) meeting the New Africa, with its fledgling regimes, colonialist after-effects, poverty, disease, and famine. The old meets the new; interesting things happen; an innovative writer makes them still more interesting by the way he tells a story -- simple enough for you?So far as I know, Mr. Okri, though African by birth, makes his base in London; and I myself have never been to Africa to check on the validity or invalidity of his strange visions. Perhaps it's all gossamer and literary candyfloss with no reference-points in the real world. But -- anonymous reader from New York (whom, I get the feeling, I know from somewhe

As strange as a dream in which one is eaten alive by fire-ants and yet somehow allthewhile conscious thereof, of one's own diffusion and dispersal down those thousands of tiny red gullets... Reference points are Amos Tutuola, definitely, the jerking sudden announced transformatives of the folklore of the Yoruba, et al (I have no idea to which African tribe Okri can trace his own origins), and more modern explorers of the amorphous boundaries between civilization and the wilderness -- between Nature's grunting Id and Society's gilt-edged Superego -- like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges, John Crowley, Russell Hoban, Isabel Allende, Jamaica Kincaid's "At the Bottom of ther River", Danilo Kis, etc., plus Aime Cesaire and his fellow "Negritude" poets. It is the shifting, blinking, writhing non-linearity of African culture distilled into 20th century English, rife with the governments which make even their modern Italian counterparts seem stable by comparison. I don't have the book next to me at the moment -- as usual, someone borrowed it and never returned it -- but it's half-dozen stories are a wonder of nightmare-logic and tableau-instability-complexes, in vibrant equatorial polytones, especially the one about the men who sell their blood... Hope he keeps it up.

Just a lot of name-dropping, don't you think