Ben Okri - A time for new dreams

Ben Okri won the Booker prize in 1991 for The Famished Road . He has published ten novels, four volumes of short stories, four books of essays, and four collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than twenty-six languages. He also writes plays and filmscripts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a vice-president of English PEN and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London.

FICTION

Flowers and Shadows

The Landscapes Within

Incidents at the Shrine

Stars of the New Curfew

The Famished Road

Songs of Enchantment

Astonishing the Gods

Dangerous Love

Infinite Riches

In Arcadia

Starbook

The Comic Destiny (previously Tales of Freedom )

The Age of Magic

The Magic Lamp

The Freedom Artist

ESSAYS

Birds of Heaven

A Way of Being Free

The Mystery Feast

POETRY

An African Elegy

Mental Fight

Wild

Rise Like Lions (Anthology)

PLAYS

The Outsider

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First published in the UK in 2011 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

This updated paperback edition published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Ben Okri 2011, 2019

The moral right of Ben Okri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.

ISBN (PBO): 9781788549639

ISBN (E): 9781788549622

Typeset by Adrian McLaughlin

Cover images: Shutterstock

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East
58 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG

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To Paul Marsh

And out of the wilderness

The songbird sang:

Nothing is what it seems

When its a time for new dreams.

ANON, 20 TH CENTURY

Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:

On Childhood in Eye to Eye: Childhood (New Internationalist Publications, 1998); Writers and Nations in Royal Society of Literature Magazine, 2003; Platos Dream in The Times Higher Education Supplement , 2002; Photography and Immortality in BP Portrait Award 2009 (National Portrait Gallery, 2009); O, Ye who invest in Futures in The Caine Prize for Literature (New Internationalist Publications, 2000); excerpt from Dramatic Moments in the Encounter between Picasso and African Art in Ode Magazine, 2007; 10 Inclinations in Royal Society of Literature Magazine, 2006; Self-Censorship, the 2003 Scottish PEN Lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in the Herald (Glasgow), 2003; Healing the Africa Within in Ode Magazine, 2004; and A Time for New Dreams as A Time for New Values in The Times , 2008.

These essays are responses to aspects of the times. They are called poetic essays because their meaning is also to be found in their form. In some places a page is compressed into a line.

The aphorism is a tincture that dispenses with superfluous words. A thought ought to persuade by itself, by its truth and balance, the simplicity of its line, the clarity of its contour.

The cue is taken from drawing. A single line can lead the mind to terraces of contemplation. Naturally it depends on the line and the view.

Reading is an inner event. This is its abiding mystery. My art is often about getting out of the way. Sometimes though it is necessary to thunder, to waken with gongs and bells, to draw attention to what is coming, what is being done to us.

New dreaming is essential when times are difficult. It is through imagination that we transform time and compel new futures.

To dream here is synonymous with creating a new world in the mind, then shaping it with love and will. All true dreamers are heroes and heroines in the tough business of making possibilities real in the world.

Every book is a time capsule containing some essence of the period in which it was created. Writers speak to the future through the connecting membrane of time and the mind.

Every true book is a secret record of what the writer wrestled with in themselves and their times, what forces they summoned to help them through.

BEN OKRI

Little Venice, London, 2019

Heaven knows we need poetry now more than ever. We need the awkward truth of poetry. We need its indirect insistence on the magic of listening.

In a world of contending guns, the argument of bombs, and the madness of believing that only our side, our religion, our politics is right, a world fatally inclined towards war we need the voice that speaks to the highest in us.

We need the voice that speaks to our joys, our childhoods, and to the Gordian knots of our private and national condition. A voice that speaks to our doubts, our fears, and to all the unsuspected dimensions that make us both human and beings touched by the whisperings of the stars.

Poetry is closer to us than politics, and is as intrinsic to us as walking or eating.

We are, at birth, born into a condition of poetry and breathing. Birth is a poetic condition: it is spirit becoming flesh. Death is also a poetic condition: it is flesh becoming spirit again. It is the miracle of a circle completed, the unheard melody of a life returning to unmeasured silence.

Between birth and death what are our daily moments but a double condition that is primarily poetic: the odd conjunction between inner and outer, between that inner sense of timelessness and that outer evidence of transience?

Statesmen talk about matters of state; poets help us to resonate with the fundamental rhythm of life, the iambics of walking, the elliptical strophes of every unique way of talking, the mysterious pulse of living.

Poetry begins in us an inner dialogue. It suggests a private journey to ones own truth.

Let us bring together the voices of poetry from all over the world, and make our hearts a festival, a dreaming place, and our minds an academy of essentials under the stars.

Poetry is not just what poets write. Poetry is also the great river of soul-murmurings that runs within humanity. Poets merely bring this underground river to the surface for a moment, here and there, in cascades of sound and suggested meaning, through significant form.

The ancient oracles may be silent; and we may no longer believe in the many ways that the gods speak to us, or through us. But living means that we are the focus of many pressures: the demands of society, the strange pressures of being itself, of yearnings, inexplicable moods, dreams, and of feelings powerful with all the currents of mortal life.

We concentrate too much on our differences. Poetry returns us to the surprise of our similarities. It brings us back to the obscure sense that we are all members of a far-flung family, sharing feelings both unique to us and oddly universal.