Transcending Historical Violence: Uses of Myth and Fable in Ben Okri’s "Starbook”

Violence is a leitmotif of contemporary African literature. In addition to reconstructing their past of colonization and slavery, African writers have increasingly denounced the brutality of postcolonial history, as shown by the multiple images of conflict (class, gender, generational, religious, ethnic) with which their narratives are interspersed. What differs, however, are the modes of representation of past and present traumas. While some writers have opted for realistic and historiographic approaches to these traumas, others have developed alternative strategies by reworking the legendary lore of two traditions (western and indigenous) and projecting chronicled patterns of violence onto the ahistoricized dimension of myth. The narratives resulting from such experimentation not only invite a reflection on the formal innovations introduced by their authors. They also point to different ways of conceptualizing, and being reconciled with, the cruelty inherent in old and recent African history, which acquires new meanings and appears more redeemable if viewed from a not purely deterministic perspective. The article explores the specific ‘mythical method’ developed by Ben Okri who, in representing violence, revives a legacy of myths and fables to deconstruct “the lies and propaganda which have been used to oppress” human beings (A Way of Being Free, 58). As he explains in his essays, Okri attributes the horrors of human (and African) history to the false myths created by the powerful, and encourages a cross-cultural rethinking of the lore of forefathers as a strategy of resistance against the “manufactured realities” of the present (A Way of Being Free, 49). In his view, contemporary artists have a main responsibility: they must destroy today’s mythologies (see Barthes) and promote spiritual growth by reawakening the magic and mystery of the stories of antiquity. Okri pursues this objective by reactivating the palingenetic power of original myths which gave shape to human experiences, both in Africa and in the Western world. Naturalistically crude in its details but transposed into an imaginative dimension, the violence of African history becomes, in his fiction, a catalyst for future regeneration which is achieved through two mythically codified rituals: initiation and sacrifice. The article focuses on Starbook (2007), a stylistically hybrid novel which offers a fabulous reconstruction of the tragedy of slavery. By conflating realism with romance and fable, and by intertwining myths recurring in diverse cultures (the golden age, the fall, the pharmakos, the child-saviour, the magical work of art), Okri narrates the Black Atlantic diaspora from an ahistorical perspective which, without diminishing its elements of brutality and loss, encourages its reinterpretation as a temporary, albeit painful, episode in the continent’s age-long history. As the narrator announces in the conclusion, the events told in the novel are just fragments of a book of life which continues to be written and, as such, can still generate wonders: “All is not lost. Greater times are yet to be born” (Starbook, 421). Unlike most postmodernists, who expose and desacralize the hegemonic discourses encoded within traditional fables, the author of Starbook embeds myth within the novel-form to give an epic quality to his narrative. If it is true that he denounces the false mythologies of our age, it is also true that he revives the potential creativity of ancient lore and, in so doing, creates a generically hybrid text which provides an alternative to the main traditions of slavery literature.