Booker award-winning author of The Famished Road and Star Book, Ben Okri was born in Nigeria and now lives in London. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and he has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the eloquent writer’s sessions at the Jaipur Literature Festival were hailed enthusiastically by a rapt audience.
You’ve mentioned previously that Homer and Sophocles are two inspirations, which I found interesting because they’re both Western classical writers. What exactly is it about them that inspires you?
I’m going to be really honest with you, when I say this to classicists, they’re appalled. But Homer reminds me of Africa. Homer reminds me of certain aspects of my childhood, of the world. And over the years I’ve asked myself, what is it, why is that the case? And I think in most modern novels there’s an elaborate dance of relationships. In Homer, certainly in the Iliad, it’s very direct. When people hate one another, it’s a passionate and a clear hatred. It’s an epic hatred. It’s very primal. It’s not modulated, it’s not hidden. In that sense, I just felt that starkness and that strength of the way things were felt.
Also, the mythic universe. Growing up in Nigeria, I just felt I was growing up in a world of myth. It’s something I miss. I miss the world of myth. The world of myth is the world of imagination. It’s the world of a deep underlined pattern that runs through our experience. And in England you don’t get that. It’s there but it’s very etiolated. Indians that I’ve spoken to say that the same thing is true here. There’s a big presence of life and death.
Which of Homer’s works do you prefer - The Iliad or the Odyssey?
The one I reread the most is the Odyssey but I’m aware that the Iliad is greater. But the Odyssey is the one I love the most. And the reason is quite simple – it’s because the Odyssey is about homecoming and that’s what human condition is. That’s all we do. We’re born and then we go home.
You’ve described yourself as a ‘universal spiritualist’. There’s been a lot of discourse about religion, literature and censorship during this year’s festival. What are your thoughts on this?
Let’s stress one thing. Great literature emerged from the impulse of spirituality. The great Greek epics, the great tragedies – they all came out of great rituals and religion. In India, we know that the sources of literature are the great Vedas and the Mahabharatha, those are the prime sources of literature.
In a certain sense literature hinges, literature encroaches on an aspect of the response to the spiritual part of religion. And that’s because literature constantly speaks to our souls, our hearts, our consciousness, our minds. It touches a place in us, the same place that religion does but with a different quality of reverence.
I don’t think literature is at war with religion. I don’t think they are enemies of one another, nor should they be, in any case. I think they’re complementary. Religion reconciles our soul to the infinite and connects our soul to the eternal and literature connects us to the earth, to ‘the now’, to life,
Literature is the bread of life. Religion is the wine of life.
They’re complementary, there’s no war. In fact one should enrich the other. Literature is not there to destroy religion nor should religion destroy literature because if religion destroys literature, religion destroys the basis which speaks to us. It is like two circles which intersect one another and in relation to the festival and the whole Salman Rushdie thing, it’s unfortunate that one (the religious aspect) has such a negative impact on literature. It’s not the job of religion to legislate on literature. It really isn’t. Nor is it the job of literature to legislate on religion. It should be a mutual respect.
You write poetry, fiction and essays so in one sense you wear a lot of hats. The structure and form of these differ. How do you balance all of these roles?
It’s not different hats. It’s one hat – it’s a very adjustable hat. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the impulse for creativity is pure. This is something that I’ve analyzed a lot. You have an impulse, you don’t feel it. it’s almost like an illness or the first pangs of love. You have something inside and you want to express it and as it begins to pull out the form of some expression you discover to your surprise that it’s a poem or you discover it’s a short story or a novel. Sometimes I’ve had a feeling it was a novel and I’ve thought ‘oh my God, it’s going to be a big book’ and when it came out, it was a tiny little poem. The original primal place is undifferentiated in its impulse. It’s only when it’s expressed that it chooses the form it’s going to take. It’s not a case of you changing its form, it’s a matter of listening to what it is. I don’t choose, things choose themselves.
Writing about the unconventional
It’s difficult to write about good people says Lionel Shriver as she discusses her most controversial work‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, that was recently turned into a movie
Most people resign themselves to the names given to them – but then again, Lionel Shriver isn’t most people. As we talk at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Lionel Shriver explains that she is tired of being questioned about her change of name and insists that there was no profound reason behind her choice. “I liked it. That’s it. I was 15 years old –what do you expect?” she says wryly. “Think about it from your perspective. If every time you met someone you had to explain your name and why it was your name. Wouldn’t it get trying?”
The American author of So Much For That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award), The Post-Birthday World and of the bestseller We Need to Talk about Kevin (which won the 2005 Orange Prize and was recently adapted into a movie) is very much in demand at the Jaipur Literary Festival. My time is limited and I have to fight the urge to throw my arms around her, confess undying adoration and debate alternate book endings. Instead, we draw up chairs and talk about Kevin, our mutual love for TV series, among other things
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| A still from the movie version of ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ |
Shriver who writes about emotionally interesting, unconventional subjects (mass murderers or obesity for instance) explains that she wanted to be a writer shortly after she learned to read. From staples like Babar, Curious George and Where the wild things are and several years of science fiction she advanced onto a diet of the big books (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, The Great Gatsby) when she resolved to be a writer.
Shriver’s 2003 novel, ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ is a series of letters from Eva Katchadourian to her husband, Franklin. It’s less of a story and more of a back-story, laying the foundation for the events which have unfurled.
In a session at the festival Shriver explained that we’re all comfortably dependent on the myth that our parents love us unreservedly and our tendency to rely on this bedrock. The novel explores the enormous pressure on women to be flooded with adoration for their children, unravels the culture of parent blaming and the complex nature of the mother-child bond. Despite this, Shriver insists that Kevin is a traditional novel. She explains that the epistolary technique was purely decorative and merely a tonally important choice. “I decided that that worked on a manipulative level and it makes the narrator seem a little less self-indulgent,” says Shriver.
The moral ambivalence of We Need to Talk about Kevin continues right to the end and the reluctance of publishers to touch the book (the novel was sent to 20 agents in the US and subsequently 30 different publishers in the UK, all of whom turned it down) is testament to its dark, risky nature.
“I think it’s very hard to say what goodness is,” opines Shriver, “Goodness is one of the hardest things to write about, which I tried to do in my last novel. It tends to be flat, obvious and even a little off-putting as it easily slides to self-righteousness. It’s really hard to write a good character and make them likeable. In my last book, the protagonist is truly virtuous and is somebody on who everyone else always depends and therefore he tends to be taken advantage of. One of the ways I write about goodness in that book is to constantly be asking that question ‘is this guy good or is he just a sucker? Is this a strength or weakness?’ I’m constantly testing that quality as to what it is.”
With the release of the film adaptation starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller, the book has a generated a surge of renewed interest which brings us to the subject of book adaptations. For Shriver, two in particular stand out. “Revolutionary Road” and “The Age of Innocence” says Shriver, “I think they’re both very faithful to the book but not in any way that makes the films seem stifled or too obsequious.”
Shriver affirmed at the festival that the film and the book coexist nicely, with the film almost being a trailer for the book. “In terms of the film with ‘Kevin’ I have to say when the actual script goes flat is when they don’t use my dialogue. Lynne Ramsey is a very good director, not a great writer. Fortunately, she has a lot of other tricks in her bag and you don’t notice so much when dialogue is flat because the acting is very good. But I was envious of Richard Yates and that respectfulness and the fact that they really brought that dialogue alive. The Age of Innocence is also an unusually respectful job - still vital, but very moving. Scorsese restrained himself and it’s not a typical Scorsese film. He obviously loved the book and in both instances you can tell the filmmaker loved the books.”
We’ve talked about Kevin and it’s time to discuss Lionel. Shriver remains baffled by the reputation of sternness and austerity which precedes her. “I don’t know where this comes from, frankly. I had an argument with someone in Paris recently who most insisted that my public persona was ‘stern’ as she called it and I don’t understand this. It must be a couple of quotes and opinions which have travelled or get lots of hits. I’m not especially stern. I think you can tell from my books that I have a sense of humour,” she explains, “I don’t like this characterization. I have a good time. I’m not especially judgemental or mean or standoffish and I’m mystified from where this characterization is derived.”
“I’m a sucker for mini-series. so like everyone else in the UK I watch every episode of Downton Abbey – including the Christmas special” confesses Shriver, “I’m really sorry that Desperate Housewives is going to be over and I even watched Brothers and Sisters faithfully.”
With writers taking to social media increasingly, to engage with readers has Shriver been tempted to do the same? “I’m afraid I’ve been a total Luddite in this respect,” she confesses, “I’m not on Twitter, I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Myspace - I’m sure that shows my age and someone was really pushing me the other day that I should get on Twitter because that is essentially where journalists are getting their information. It’s increasingly as if you’re not on the internet. You do a Google search and you don’t get anything on Lionel Shriver because Lionel Shriver’s not on the web. And of course, I wouldn’t want that so I may have to consider the Twitter thing but it doesn’t attract me.”
With a tour in the US for her book, The New Republic and more literary festivals in 2012, Shriver quips that her New Year’s resolution is to say ‘no’ more. “Most of all I want to finish my new book to the best of my ability and then to do the rewrites.”
Pix by
Aamina Nizar
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