"Like most people, I've been on a search for the true purpose and meaning of life," he continues. "I'm a child of civil war and I've experienced exile, homelessness and I'm a kind of a prince on my mother's side, so I know suffering. I've lived in the ghetto and I've had this wide range of paradoxical experiences. So if you've been through the kind of experiences I have, you find yourself drawn to asking questions about suffering and its causes, solutions and cure. But you can't stop at human suffering, you have to go beyond it, and Arcadia was just one of those things I found on my quest."
Awarded the Booker Prize in 1991, The Famished Road was the first volume in a trio of books that includes 1993's Songs for Enchantment and 1995's Astonishing The Gods. Centring around a spirit child called Azaro, it takes place in an unnamed African country, which nevertheless bears a resemblance to war-torn Nigeria. But while The Famished Road propelled Okri on to the literary map, he also believes its success has held him back, with many commentators suggesting he was letting himself down by not writing about his homeland.
"When I published In Arcadia 12 years ago, there were some critics who were wondering what the hell I was doing, writing a book set in France, as in shouldn't I be concentrating on my natural territory of Africa?" he recalls. "There was an implied sense of being locked in a cupboard and that it was all right for the white English or French writers to write about France, Portugal, America or wherever they want to. But for us black African writers; we have to confine ourselves to the African condition. It just seemed to me to be a nonsense."
Proclaiming it to be "a cry for freedom", Okri has a warning for younger African writers. "Don't imprison yourself, feel free to write about whatever you want to write about and be true to the depth of your feelings and the hunger of the material," he says, insisting the ability to resist being pigeonholed is equally relevant in other countries such as New Zealand. "It's a gross imputation on the artistic freedom of people to say they must only write about the place they come from. Whatever happened to the fact that you're born into the world and all the cultures and streams of the world affect us one way or another? What about migration, travel, the inter-change of ideas and the reflection of other people through your own experience? It's something some people need to get over. Otherwise some of us have to limit ourselves while others have no limitations while others have complete, unlimited freedom. It's just very crazy!"
Significantly, in The Age Of Magic, Okri refers to how some individuals might feel nostalgic for a kind of mythic or Arcadian Africa, even though they have never actually visited the continent. "It's a very movable concept, as the idea of Arcadia differs for different people and for some people, it's Africa," he says. "I've been very lucky in finding this idea that has deep roots in Western culture but it doesn't only apply to Western culture. You can find it anywhere you have someone saying they have a hunger for some private paradise, for somewhere they can escape to and just be themselves. Whether it's a place, a book or a piece of music."
Admitting "we're very lucky to get this latest part", as he spent more than a decade working on The Age Of Magic, Okri is unsure when or even if the final part of his Arcadian sequence will ever see the light of day. "At the moment, I'm writing a mixture of essays and short stories. There is a novel there somewhere but you're probably not going to hear from it for a while. It takes a while to do these things and that's because each new novel for me is like a new universe or a new harmony. I can't write a new novel with the ideas and aesthetics I had with the old one. Every new novel is a new Ben Okri. It's a very exhausted and exhaustive process."
Ben Okri will appear At the Auckland Writers Festival next weekend at the Aotea Centre.
- Canvas
