– he must have had something German, with that name –
who lived alone with his mother, like a man …
My classmates were equipped with sexual insults
for the foaming lace of the English women playing Wimbledon,
but I watched them blandly on our rented set
behind drawn curtains, without ever getting the point.
My building-projects were as ambitious as the Tower of Babel.
Something automotive of my construction limped across the floor
to no purpose, only lugging its heavy battery.
Was there perhaps some future for Christiaan Barnard,
or the electric car, a milk-float groaning like a sacred heart?
I imagined Moog as von Moog, a mad German scientist.
His synthesizer was supposed to be the last word in versatility,
but when I first heard it on Chicory Tip’s
Son of My Father, it was just a unisono metallic drone,
five notes, as inhibited and pleonastic as the title.
My father bought a gramophone, a black box,
and played late Beethoven on it, which my mother was always
to associate with her miscarriage of that year.
I was forever carrying it up to my room,
and quietly playing through my infant collection of singles,
Led Zeppelin, The Tremeloes, My Sweet Lord…
The drums cut like a scalpel across the other instruments.
Sometimes the turntable rotated slowly, then everything
went flat, and I thought how with a little more care
it could have been all right. There again, so many things
were undependable … My first-ever British accent wavered
between Pakistani and Welsh. I called Bruce’s record shop
just for someone to talk to. He said, ‘Certainly, Madam.’
Weeks later, it was ‘Yes sir, you can bring your children.’
It seemed I had engineered my own birth in the new country.
Ben Okri
[1959–]
Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. He was educated in Nigeria and at the University of Essex in Colchester, where he received a BA in comparative literature. In 1981 he became poetry editor of the journal West Africa, a position he held for the next six years. In 1984 he also worked as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service programme Network Africa. Okri is a full-time writer and occasional reviewer for the Guardian, the Observer and the New Statesman.
Okri’s first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), is an understated yet emotional portrayal of a young Nigerian boy’s journey into adulthood. Published when Okri was twenty-one, the novel adheres to a conventional structure, one which Okri would abandon for a more experimental form in his next book, The Landscapes Within (1981). With a precise, compassionate writing style that earned him comparisons with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Okri tells the tale of a painter who is confronted with social and political corruption. Okri continued to move away from literary convention with his next two short-story collections, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1989). In the former, his settings include Nigeria during the time of the Civil War, the depressed streets of London and a fictional landscape that is a dreamlike amalgam of African sensibilities and Margaret Thatcher’s England. In both volumes Okri uses hallucinatory, sometimes nightmarish images. He continued to employ ‘magic realism’ in his next novel, Famished Road (1991), a sensuous tale filled with bizarre characters and narrated by a ‘spirit child’, it won the 1991 Booker Prize. Two years later Okri published a sequel, Songs of Enchantment. His latest novels are Astonishing the Gods (1995) and Dangerous Love (1996).
Okri’s work returns us to the alienation of the British writers of African origin in the eighteenth-century. In his story ‘Disparities’ (1986) the narrator is at different times at odds with British society in terms of class, race and the ‘simple’ ability to support himself in a relentlessly hostileLondon. This is a terrifying vision of a late-twentieth-century Britain that is thoroughly unreceptive, a country in which, despite the plurality of cultures and people, a ‘visitor’ can become a ‘stranger’ before he or she knows quite what has happened.
Disparities
I do not know what season it is. It might be spring, summer or winter, for all anyone cares. Autumn always misses me for some reason. It probably is winter. It always seems to be winter in this damn poxy place. When the sun is up and people make a nuisance of themselves, revealing flaccid and shapeless bodies, I am always aware of a chill in my marrow. My fingers tremble. My toes squash together. And my teeth chatter. That is the worst; there is more. And when the severity of the grey weather returns, when the seasons run into one another, and when advertisements everywhere irritate the eye and spirit – depicting vivid roses, family togetherness and laughter mouth-deep – I cannot help feeling that civilizations are based on an uneasy yoking of lies; and that is precisely when the sight of flowers and pubs and massive white houses and people depresses me most; when, in fact, I am most nauseated. Then I have constant fits of puking, nervous tremulation and withdrawal symptoms so merciless that I cannot separate the world from the sharp exultant pangs in my chest. My resistance is low. The only season I know from this side of the battering days is starvation. I know it is warm when I have filled my stomach with a tin of baked beans; it is tepid when I must have had a piece of toast; and it is cold when I have bloated my stomach on a pint of milk some idiot left standing on a doorstep. When an individual learns to cope with the absurdity of seasons without changing trivial externalities – them in my estimation, they have acquired the most vital trappings of culture. All else is just overlaid loneliness and desperation and group brutality.
The trouble is I lived in a house for a few days. My first house. It was all peaceful and full of dogshit and totally decrepit. The walls had been broken down, cushions torn, the windows fitted with gashed rubbish-bin linings. It was a lovely place; I had never before found such serenity. To have a house, that is the end of the journey of our solitude.
Then, of all the horrible things that can happen to disrupt such a discovery – a bunch of undergraduates moved in upstairs. They made a hell of a lot of noise, had long drinking and smoking parties, talked about books and 1940s clothes and turbans and dope from exotic places and the Vice-Chancellor. They brought with them a large tape-recorder and played reggae and heavy metal music. Then they brought in mattresses, pillows, food, lampshades, silk screens and large lurid posters and books. Imagine my revulsion. They talked about Marx and Lévi-Strauss and Sartre and now and then one of the girls would say how easy it was to appreciate those bastards (she said this laughingly) when one is stoned.
