by Ben Okri
33
If anyone questions the validity of these great religions, it may be because they have failed us, let us down, made us smaller. By ‘us’ I do not mean adherents and the devout. I mean the entire human race. For in their names, in their codes and earthly domination, they have unleashed nightmares upon us. They have unleashed pogroms, beastly wars, vile inquisitions; they have sanctified slavery, racial hatred, and an almost universal uncharitability.
34
It may be that in the dream of their orthodoxy some of the great religions lost touch with noble love that inspired and sustained their births in the first place. They lost touch with the suffering of the people, with hunger. They lost touch with the basic compassion without which even the most beautifully inspired religion becomes an empty shell of dogma.
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It may be that writers too have failed us. For, seduced by their freedom, their freedom to entertain, they may have been ignoring the monsters growling in our sleep, monsters that may, one day, devour us.
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Writers have one great responsibility: to write beautifully, which is to say to write well. Within this responsibility is that of being truthful. To charm, to amuse, to enchant, to take us out of ourselves, these are all part of beauty. But there is a parallel responsibility: and that is to sing a little about the realities of the age, to leave some sort of magical record of what they saw and dreamt while they were alive (because they can’t really do it the same way when dead), and to bear witness in their unique manner to the beauties, the ordinariness, and the horrors of their times.
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Writers are dangerous when they tell the truth.
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Writers are also dangerous when they tell lies.
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We are all witnesses.
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Carry on for as long as life carries you.
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If you can’t give, you may as well learn.
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Sometimes the opposite is best.
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It is not what you have experienced that makes you greater, but what you have faced, what you have transcended, what you have unlearned.
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The best things are beyond words.
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The human race is not yet free.
The Joys of Storytelling II
1
When I write of storytelling I use the word ‘joys’ with a certain touch of irony. I know as well as anyone else how dangerous stories are, and how dangerous for the storyteller they can be. Colleagues have been jailed, tortured, murdered, poisoned, brutalised, hounded into exile, excommunicated, excoriated, and driven mad because of the joys of storytelling. Colleagues have died homeless, in the streets, unloved, unread, misunderstood, shunned, thought mad, ostracised, and have driven themselves into the dark spaces of the imagination from which there is no return, in pursuit of the joys of storytelling.
Art is a harsh goddess: her gifts are ambiguous. On her altars, many have perished. I can think of one, already an icon of free-speech, who is a visible prisoner of our age, under a death sentence, a death-in-waiting, because of the ironic joys.
Storytelling, practised with full consciousness and an oxygenated sense of responsibility, is one of the most dangerous and liberating of human activities. Life is dangerous. It is not surprising that stories are also sometimes dangerous. A mutant star, red hot in its brief ascendancy, sometimes rules over the fates of true storytellers. But another star, golden in its universal glow, confers great hidden benedictions and blessings on practitioners and readers alike.
Regardless of the ambiguous dark side, artists always feel the craftsman’s cool ecstasy and the dreamer’s serene joy when creating. And the reader always feels the joy in the dangers when immersing.
2
In storytelling there is always transgression, and in all art. Without transgression, without the red boundary, there is no danger, no risk, no frisson, no experiment, no discovery, and no creativity. Without extending some hidden or visible frontier of the possible, without disturbing something of the incomplete order of things, there is no challenge, and no pleasure, and certainly no joy. All true artists suspect that if the world really knew what they were doing they would be punished. Quietly, or dramatically, storytellers are reorganisers of accepted reality, dreamers of alternative histories, disturbers of deceitful sleep.
The transgression may appear to be perfectly innocent and blameless, and even singularly undramatic. It could take the form of simply entering the inner life of another, or being old-fashioned in an era that favours restless experiment, or in favouring narrative in a time that prefers fractured voices. More quixotically, it could take the form of going boldly and brightly against the accepted canons of the age.
The transgression could take a more extreme form – that of saying something so true that it is shocking. There is nothing more shocking or more dangerous or more upsetting to individuals and nations than truth. Giving truth direct narrative expression is to give it a public explosion. The truth – Truth – SHRIEKS: it wakes up all the hidden bullies, the hidden policemen, and the incipient dictators and tyrants of the land. The truth could simply be something that everyone sees and knows already, something that we all live with, sleep with, and wake up to, and die as a result of – the truth could be something so obvious and familiar, but which no one has uttered. It could be there, alive, dormant, visible to all like a white mountain, like an ugly song, like a bleeding face, but no one has uttered its existence, no one has spoken its reality, no one has really seen it, burned in it, agonised in its suppuration, and finally cried it out. And while it lives, uncried out, it devours us, this unacceptable truth that we accept in silence. The truth can be our hidden selves turned monstrous (and visible to us in the mirror if only we look with the good eye and not the askew eye); or the truth could be the pollulating bacteria of our secret desires (agendas), and all the unrealities and lies and all the consequences of our strange unhappy actions that we spend all our time hiding from and avoiding. Praise be unto those that cry out the truth; for they are cultural and spiritual heroes.
Transgression can also simply reside in creating a beautiful thing. Sometimes the creation of a beautiful thing in a broken resentful age can be an affront to the living, a denial of their suffering. Sometimes beauty can be accusatory. It can place an intolerable question mark over the most complacent and thick-skinned lives. Beauty can become a burden, an unbearable exposure of collective cowardice and sloth and smallness of spirit in an era of malice, an era of failure.
The joy of transgressing beautifully, of taking readers to places they wouldn’t willingly go, this joy of seducing or dragging readers in spite of themselves to places deep in them where wonders lurk beside terrors, this delicate art of planting delayed repeat explosions and revelations in the reader’s mind, and doing this while enchanting them – this is one of the most mysterious joys of all. It suggests that, at bottom, and never wanting to admit it, we really want to face the hidden Minotaur within, we want the drains unblocked within, we want the frozen river of our blood and compassion to flow again, we want the pain so that we can be free. It is just that we want this unpleasant job of facing the dead and rotting thoughts, habits, desires, notions, and traditions to be done with our collusion, with our secret consent. And we would much prefer to be enchanted or to laugh or to be taken out of ourselves while the horrors are being faced, while the ghosts are being exorcised. And we hope afterwards that we will be lighter for it all, and that the gods of harmony will again, for a while, reside in us. With great books we are sometimes granted this grace.
3
There are no joys without mountains having been climbed. There are no joys without the nightmares which precede them and spring them into the light.
I have hinted at some of the joys of storytelling, now let me rhapsodise briefly about the nightmares of the art.
There is the unnatural possession by an idea, the ins
omnia of writing, the intractability of the material, the impossibility of fully realising all the subtle possibilities of one’s heaven-sent ideas or one’s hell-sent notions. There is the pain and suffering of life, and then the agony that is part of the work, and which also informs it. There is the horror of never being able to write again, the misunderstanding of the work, the too quick understanding of critics and friends, the loneliness and solitude of writing, the difficult responsibility of speaking out, and the necessity of silence. There is the great suffering that is an intrinsic part of love, the love of one’s work, the love of the world, and of humanity. There is the unbargained-for cost of telling stories – the hounding by dictators, military leaders, spy networks, secret services, all those with their own agendas, all those who like or dislike only through the screen or filter of their ideologies or insecurities. There are other costs – the death-threats, the enmities incurred by the innocence of the word, the demons of rivalry, the degrading competition which leads the best practitioners, if they submit, away from their beautiful journey. The more frightening nightmares lie in the hidden menace of writing, the possible boundaries of art which shade off into the mists of madness, the possibility that the writer can get unmoored in the imagination, lost in the ocean of the unconscious, lost in the dark realms of the mind, an explorer who never returns from the arctic wastes and mountains of the interior. And then there is the silence of the world, an indifference in which the work has to find its way, finding fellow spirits and friends, or creating its own earth of affection from which to grow and flower.
4
The joys that spring from the challenges are profound. And the challenges are always there. As long as there are human beings there will be challenges. Let no one speak to me of frontiers exhausted, all challenges met, all problems resolved. There is always the joy of discovering, uncovering, and forging new forms, new ways, new structures of enchantment, new narratives, new kinds of storytelling, of slipping into the reader’s mind, of fascinating, of stimulating and disturbing the world’s certainties and asking strong new questions, or finding new solutions to ancient conundrums of narrative and reality.
There is always the joy of rediscovering old ways of telling stories, of stumbling upon paths and roads not fully travelled along, of extending old lodes, old pleasures, of continuing old dreams.
There is always the joy of finding new ways of telling stories without telling stories, new ways of sustaining interest, of making the reader turn the page, new ways of lodging hidden or unstated narratives in the mind – compacted narratives, tangential fictions which are in fact whole long periods of folded time.
There is the joy of creating glinting images, submarine lights, wonderful philosophies, and narratives which are melodies, melodies which are moods, moods which will become tracts of childhood and forgotten lovely moments. To create stories and moods which retroactively become a living dreaming part of the reader’s experience, to awaken dormant enchantments, to face concealed terrors, to uncover fears and survive them in stories, to do these things in the reader’s colluding mind, seems to me to belong to the small unsung miracles of the narrative art.
We are living in an age of discovery and exploration. There are new frontiers in science, astronomy, mathematics, molecular biology, and communications. It is no surprise that there should also be new frontiers being explored in art. This is especially true in visual art with all its new chaotic outgrowths in this long transitional era when many things are being born and their newness still shocks and repels us. If the artists continue to develop, in retrospect this may be seen as an era of immense experimentation and energy, of the extension of old boundaries, the exploration of unexhausted mines and quarries. In literature, this pushing back of the frontiers lies in the marvel of planting beautiful epiphanic dynamites within innocent-seeming texts or in obscure-seeming books. This feeling that books, that words can once again trouble the sleep of ancient powers; this joyful challenge to the centrality of realism; this eternal questioning of what reality really is; this healing assault on homogeneity; this quest for magical new realms; this playful ambush on the ivory tower and its guardsmen who police the accepted frontiers of what is considered valid in narrative terms; this unsung age of happy and tragic literary warriors and enchanters and healers; this creation of texts which are dreams that keep changing, fluid texts which rewrite themselves when the reader isn’t looking, texts which are dreams that change you as you read them, dreams which are texts which you write in the duration of contact between the eye and the page; all these marvels, acts of private and public courage, all this and much more constitutes for me the joys of storytelling. In the struggle to extend our song, we are all of us extending and participating in the ever unfolding story of humanity and literary tradition – but extending it, I hope, not only on to musty shelves where well-meaning scholars make smaller the worlds within words, but extending it, I pray, into the raw world, into the dreams of the living, into their struggles, their suffering, their joys.
Leaping out of Shakespeare’s Terror
Five Meditations on Othello
1
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Othello since I saw a production of the play in London’s Barbican. It was the first time I had seen it performed on stage. As far as I could tell, I was the only black person in the audience. The seats beside me were occupied by three white girls. They noisily crackled their packets of sweets and giggled a lot. I wanted to tell them to be quiet. But I suspected that if I spoke faces would turn towards me. After a while I couldn’t bear it any longer. When I spoke, what I feared happened. Faces turned, eyes lit up in recognition. My skin glowed. I felt myself illuminated, unable to hide.
I used to agree with C. L. R. James that Othello is not a play about race. The Royal Shakespeare Company thought so as well. They had Ben Kingsley play Othello in the tradition of the Arab Moor that Edmund Kean made popular in the nineteenth century. Ben Kingsley played the part lyrically, it was obvious that he had been doing some unsuccessful weight-lifting to give the character the stature it deserves, but there were times when his colour made nonsense of the role. The stage lighting often made it difficult to see the difference between his complexion and that of the other actors and actresses. The chromatic tension of the play was thereby rendered harmless. In addition, they imposed on the play a vaguely homosexual theme and a psychiatric condition, the Othello syndrome, a form of psychotic jealousy. None of these helped to make the play credible. These three elements join the long theatrical tradition of evading the terrors that are at the heart of the play.
Often, when people don’t really want to face something, they become pretentious. The whole business of Othello as an Arab was popularised by Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb. They did not want to face the full implications of Othello’s blackness. They did not want him in their dreams. They also did not want to confront the powerful sexual element in the play. If you take away Othello’s colour then you don’t really have the magnitude of the tragedy. A ‘tawny Othello’ is much more comfortable to take. If it did not begin as a play about race, then its history has made it one.
The emotional explosiveness of Othello depends utterly on seeing it on stage. Othello’s colour is not real on the page. It can be avoided. Coleridge confessed to the ‘beautiful compromise’ he made in reading the play. But when he saw it on stage he was revolted by the ‘wedded caresses’ of Othello and Desdemona. Reducing the colour diminishes the force of the sex. Together they can be quite unbearable.
Shakespeare chose his tragic figure well, and then stacked the cards against him. Othello is the only black man in the universe of the play. He is isolated by colour. He cannot hide. And his position of great authority in society makes his isolation deeper. It is a terrifying position to be in. Honourable, trusting, and surrounded by people who might see him as their worst nightmare. The loneliness of colour made worse by the solitude of power. Trapped in a code of honour, to whom could he turn? Who cou
ld he trust? It was safer for him to trust those who seemed trustworthy. To begin to doubt would bring on insanity, for he would have to doubt everyone. And then his mortal terror would begin. He would find himself in the labyrinths of that nightmare of history from which there is no escape. That is perhaps why towards the end of the play his dementia thunders as if in the monstrous echo chamber of his own skin.
2
Every age presents Othello in relation to how they perceive the other. What else can explain the residual hostility of critics towards black actors playing the role? It took thirty-two years for English critics to accept Ira Aldridge in the nineteenth century. His Othello was successful everywhere else. When the celebrated Paul Robeson played the part in 1943 critics said it was like seeing the play for the first time and that Iago became ‘a credible villain’ when a black man acted Othello. And yet, Othello, fifty years later, continues to be white underneath.
Our perception of the other gives the measure of our humanity, our courage, and our imagination. Iago represents those who cannot accept the other. He cannot accept himself. He makes colour the victim of his failings. The imagery of black as unnatural comes from Iago. He smears it through the play. It is an extraordinary idea: Shakespeare presents this character who is black, and therefore visually alien, and then shows that he is not so alien after all, and paints his humanity right down to his jealous soul. On the other hand we have Iago, who is white, familiar, but who is actually the real alien to humanity and love. It’s almost as if Shakespeare was saying: ‘It is not those who look different who are the real strangers. For the dangerous ones to succeed in their evil they will be of your familiar colour, and speak with your voice. Don’t look for them in startling differences. Look for them within, where they are harder to find.’ Iago is a schemer who functions, unrecognised, in the pack, in the crowds.
