Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri

Okri has lamented the narrow presentation of the continent to white European readers, but his reading should be a lot wider



Ben Okri: Mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness

In his recent Guardian essay, “A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness”, Ben Okri laments the “tyranny of subject” over black and African writers, and gives instructions for achieving greatness. Black and African writers, writes Okri, must attain “mental freedom”: we must stop writing about “overwhelming subjects” such as slavery, colonialism, poverty, and war.

For Okri, mental tyranny is defined by repetition and prescription: the problem with black fiction is the repetition of overwhelming subjects, which is prescribed by the demands of a white reading public. It is odd, then, that his essay consists almost entirely of repetition and prescription. His piece immediately recalls Helon Habila’s review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, published last year, also in the Guardian, in which Habila worries that African fiction is being distorted by an aesthetic of suffering. It recalls Njabulo S Ndebele’s objection to South Africa’s literature of “spectacle” in the 1980s (“Rediscovery of the Ordinary”), and Gerald Moore’s longing for more “private and particular observation” from Francophone African writers in the 1960s (“Towards Realism in French African Writing”). The charge that black and African writing is too political dismisses, with one blow, both the world we live in and the possibilities of political literature. It’s beyond depressing to hear a writer of Okri’s stature, who himself writes powerfully about overwhelming subjects, board this broken-down train.

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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/30/african-writers-instructions-ben-okri