Journeys that Open Doors:

A Critical Analysis of Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew

By Joshua Allen

“Dreams are a part of reality. The best fiction has the effect on you that dreams
do. The best fiction can become dreams which can influence reality.”
-Ben Okri
 Introduction:
Threshold of the Journey

Full of blatant paradoxes, the stories in Stars of the New Curfew (SNC), though written in

English, ask much of the standard English-reading individual. The settings are not ones we

normally think of as English-speaking places. The images are not entirely those of English-

speaking culture. The narrators could help out their readers by reflecting, or having the

characters reflect, on the meaning of what they experience, but they do not do this. This internal

tension between what the characters perceive and their evaluation, or lack of evaluation, of those

perceptions leaves gaps in these stories that make them both interesting and puzzling. It could be

that there is an easy way to explain these gaps by categorizing this book as “postcolonial.” Doing

so tends to, for many critics,1 say that answers to such questions lie necessarily in the realm of

the socio-political atmosphere of a formerly colonized country. However, this “easy” explanation

becomes insufficient as we closely examine these texts.

The failure of these characters to examine their situations and make connections has

consequences for the reader. We feel the same dissociation from the text as we assume the

narrator of “Worlds that Flourish (Worlds)” feels when he sees handwriting on people’s faces and

hands. We feel further dissociation because we do not know what the narrator, for example, feels

about the handwriting and we do not know (because he refuses to reflect) why the narrator is

unconcerned with such a shocking phenomena. The narrators and the characters do not think

through the events for the benefit of the reader. Because of this refusal, the narrators have an

interesting complexity. In this way, the third person narrators of these stories are as much a

character as the first-person, active-character ones; even when the narrator, at first glance, seems

subdued. The language and situation of the characters and the narrators set up a space between us
See, for example, Andrew Armtrong’s “Speaking Through the Wound: Irruption and Memory in the Writing of Ben
1

Okri and Festus Iyayi” and Jacquiline Bardolph’s “Azaro, Saleem and Askar: Brothers in Allegory.
and them, making associations difficult even relative to objects or thoughts within a paragraph.

Yet the nature of this separation draws us in—to question the separation, and, in turn, to question

the characters and their motives and conclusions. In some cases we, like the narrators of

“Worlds,” “Stars of the New Curfew (Stars),” and “What the Tapster Saw (Tapster)” (with their

images of the fantastic and nightmarish) are in worlds we have no chance of fully understanding.

We can only learn the rules, as the tapster does, and hope we will not suffer brutal conks on the

head when we make presumptions.

The method each story has of drawing the reader into the world of these characters,

despite the surface objectivity, is the ancient motif of the quest. This motif is common in

literature, especially in myths, and is familiar to most readers. The traditional journey involves

four major components: crossing the threshold into the underworld (heaven, hell, jungle, New

York City, the subconscious, etc.), selecting or meeting the guide to the underworld, a series of

tests or experiences, and return to normal life where the protagonist integrates the experiences of

the underworld back into his (all of the protagonists in Stars are male) life or world-view

(Campbell 245-6).2 The last component, the integration, usually contains explanation of the

significance of the journey and its implications both to the protagonist and to the reader, but this

observation is missing or unfulfilling in the stories of SNC. One way to think of a quest is a

journey with a purpose, a goal, a Holy Grail—if you will. In this type of journey, the tests of the

protagonist often involve side-quests for objects that assist the protagonist in reaching the final

Grail, or challenges to the character’s values—chastity, honor, intellect, etc

Each of the characters in the stories of SNC is on a quest. None of them realizes it

because they each, in their own way, suffer from blindness of their own motivations. We see each

of them undergo a moment of real blindness, which symbolizes the blindness they have suffered

throughout. When they regain sight, tradition tells us that they should have a new perception
This version of the simplification of Campbell’s ideas about mythic adventures is due in no small part to Donna
2

Bauerly’s illustration in her “Course Packet” for English 596: Writers for the 21st Century.
about themselves and the world, but since we do not have the integration that we have in

traditional journeys, this epiphany is absent. At the end of each of their stories, none of them

reach a decisive end—none find the Holy Grail—and none even know for sure what their Holy

Grail would be if they found it. These texts invite the reader into the world of each of these

characters and ask the reader to decide what the Holy Grail is for each character. The mythic

connection draws the reader in and, as readers, we help create the images of the stories and

become part of the experience; thus, when we discover the character’s Grail, we discover Grails

of our own. What we are given for each character is strange, disconnected, sometimes discordant

images and sentences, as though the characters are not English speakers and thus do not have full

access to our language. As we aid in creating these stories, we share in the quest. The stories

force us to become the “Other” and from that we get experiences that twist what we thought we

knew about our own myths and ideas as well as those of Africa—a new twist on the idea of a

purely postcolonial piece of literature. Thus, when functioning as the ordinary reader, the reader

is the questing knight, but when functioning as the Other, the reader becomes his or her own

guide. Some see becoming the Other and seeing the world through their eyes as the end point,

but for Okri’s writing, it is only the beginning.

Omovo of “In the Shadow of War (Shadow)” journeys after the mysterious woman in the

black veil. She becomes his guide to a world he has never seen before, as well as the object he is

seeking—his Grail. Omovo’s first test comes before the physical journey even begins, when the

soldiers give him “ten kobo [a small denomination of coin]” and tell him, “[the woman in the

veil] is a spy. She helps our enemies. If you see her come and tell us at once, you hear?” (6).

Omovo, despite the fact that he walks by the soldiers because he “noticed that whenever children

went past the bar the soldiers called them, talked to them, and gave them some money” (5),

refuses the ten kobo. Whether his original motivation was to get the money or to hear what the
soldiers were telling the other children, this incident establishes his desire to protect the woman

in the veil in a chivalrous, classically heroic fashion.

His second test comes when he wakes up and sees the soldiers drinking palm-wine with

his father after they have murdered the woman. “Omovo rushed to his father and pointed

frantically at the two men” (9), illustrating the one power he has in the world of adults:

knowledge and the ability to share that knowledge. If he can tell somebody—his father—what

has happened, he can, in some way, give justice to the dead woman. His father prevents him

from talking, which is wise given the soldiers’ violent nature. Omovo, in the scope of the

narrative, fails to do justice to the woman in the veil and Omovo’s quest winds up being a

failure; he cannot protect the woman from the forces of violence. An obvious plot reason

explains why Omovo does not articulate the meaning of the events; he is a child unaware of the

danger he has put himself in while seeking his Grail. However, the story establishes a pattern of

non-reflection, carried on even by the adult characters.

In “Worlds,” the narrator embarks on four journeys, each of them quests. He fails the first

three times, while the last one remains unresolved, as its beginning ends the story. In the first

quest, his guide is his neighbor who challenges him: “You go around as if you don’t have any

eyes” (14). The narrator begins to journey around the city, to see and use his eyes, and is

horrified and repelled by what he sees. So he begins his second quest, and the reason it fails is

the same reason most quests fail, because he sets out “on a journey without a destination” (21).

His only goal is to escape; in this way, his second journey is a sort of anti-quest: a journey to

reject knowledge. During this anti-quest, he is forced to pick an artificial guide and rejects a real

one. The artificial guide he has no choice but to accept is his car, which “picked up speed, and

slowed down, of its own inscrutable volition” (22). It has taken on a life on its own and leads

him into the jungle, where he meets a real guide, whom he rejects in true anti-quest form. This
guide is the old man at the station who gives him a potential Grail when he says, “Stay where

you can be happy” (23). The narrator rejects the old man’s help and journeys further into the

wilderness, encountering stranger and stranger sights. The object of his anti-quest, his anti-Grail,

is the knowledge that he began to obtain while journeying in the city, perhaps best exemplified,

although not explained, by the writing he sees on the people’s hands and faces. This quest seems

to end with his death on the road. This sequence matches the description Campbell gives of a

mythic hero entering the Underworld, “The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power

of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (90).

As predicted by Campbell, the narrator’s death, instead of being the end of his story,

begins a third journey, to the land of the dead. Here, he meets several people who try to lead him

to a mysterious meeting. The first person the narrator meets is an old man at the threshold of this

land who tells him that “the people of the village are expecting you” (26). This first man is

Campbell’s “threshold guardian” (71) who guards the entryway to the Underworld and who is a

figure we will see again in “City.” The narrator meets his guide, a mysterious woman whose

“presence reassured [him]” (27) and for whom he “had the distinct and absurd feeling that [he]

knew her” (29). His Grail is this mysterious meeting that will take place soon, which another

guide in this afterlife, his dead neighbor, tells him about. The meeting, according to the dead

neighbor, is a meeting about “life and death” (31), the ultimate knowledge that was the subject of

so much turmoil in the book of Genesis. Like the handwriting, the narrator does not understand

what this Grail is or what it means. He chooses, again, to flee, aborting the quest on the verge of

completion and continuing his anti-quest to avoid knowledge. His final quest begins as the story

comes to a close. The guide, this time, is himself. He tells a traveler, echoing the old man he met

at the gas station, “find where you can be happy” (33; emphasis mine), and goes to seek the old

man, the rejected guide, who becomes his new Grail. The story ends here, at the beginning of this
quest and, although we do not know how it will end, we are hopeful for the narrator, because

now he has his Grail and his purpose, but at the same time we worry because although he is no

longer fleeing knowledge and changing perception, he cannot explain its meaning even for

himself, much less articulate it for the reader.

Emokhai and Marjomi in “In the City of Red Dust (City)” live what can only be

described as a non-quest. They seem to be two people who have, as Campbell puts it, refused the

quest (59). However, their cause is not completely lost as they may “like King Minos...through

titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown” (Campbell 59). Perhaps these two fail to

achieve what King Minos did, but although they seem static, Emokhai is almost always on the

move, either looking for Marjomi, for Dede, for a pocket to pick, for money, for marijuana.

Emokhai is, if anything, a man in search of a quest, a Grail that will bring him out of his current

situation of poverty. Emokhai and Marjomi may have refused the quest at some point before this

story begins, and they may have built an empire in the dust, but Emokhai, at least, is intent on

finding something that will lead him to a Grail, however small it may end up being.

Marjomi’s room is filled with “books on magic, alchemy, letter-writing, books on

fortune-telling, on how to communicate with spirits, a complete guide palmistry, and the sixteen

lessons of a correspondence course called Turning Experience Into Gold” (78); in other words,

books to find spirituality, purpose, and money—none of which have given him anything lasting.

Their lives are empty, having refused to live them to their potential; however, in the course of

their story, they accomplish several feats of traditional questors. Emokhai obtains the magic herb

(marijuana) after he correctly answers three challenges from the “threshold guardian” (security

guard). Marjomi sacrifices his lifeblood to save the damsel in distress (Dede). Emokhai’s

driftings seem devoid of any true Grail, but he and Marjomi still manage to accomplish some

worthy quest-like goals.

 The first real quest Emokhai embarks on in this story is near the end, after the plane has

crashed in the ghetto and Emokhai decides to seek out Dede. Her face is his guide as he trudges

through the streets, toward the bars. His quest, however, is too late as he learns Dede has tried to

kill herself and is now resting in a hospital and Marjomi has already acted as her knight in

shining armor and saved her life. So Emokhai goes on one more quest, to obtain the magic herb

from the evil wizard king (governor). This is a huge risk for Emokhai, the punishment is life

imprisonment, but he proceeds for this magical item, this mini-Grail, because it will accomplish

a bigger, truer quest.

His true Grail, for which the magic herb is merely a stepping-stone, is his friendship with

Marjomi and his love and friendship with Dede. Marjomi has saved Emokhai’s love by risking

his “unusually high-grade blood” and so Emokhai will save their friendship, which is strained,

with some high-grade pot. This, however, is unspoken. Neither Marjomi nor Emokhai offer

words of thanks to the other, and the narrator gives no interpretation of their smoking the

marijuana. The reader follows this journey and feels some satisfaction with the outcome, which

seems positive for the two men, but also feels unfulfilled because their reward is, after all, only

pot.

Arthur, the narrator of “Stars,” has a now-familiar problem. “Sometimes I think I missed

my real vocation,” he says, “but I am not wholly sure what it could have been” (84). Arthur is not

satisfied with his job; he invents brash theatrics which, “became so successful that people would

stop and watch me, but they didn’t buy very much of the medicine” (84-5). He is not a good

salesman because a part of him does not want to sell: “in a different time, I might have been well

regarded as an actor” (84). This is part of his quest, where the Grail is a vague notion of success

and job satisfaction, but when he becomes successful by learning the “surprisingly simple

methods” (85) of selling from his colleagues, he only gets more unhappy, more discontent, and
more assaulted by people he has harmed. This quest for success leads him to a bit of an

underworld, one that he is a member of: the world of the poor. He sees the drugs he sells having

disastrous effects on people who waste their money on his wares when they should be using it on

proper nutrition. He sees these horrors as a result of his desire to be a better salesman, to make

more of himself than what he is. This underworld ensnares him. He tries to quit selling “cures”

but “the only sales jobs to be obtained were ones that sold products which had to do with cures”

(89).

In an effort to find work for a company with some integrity, he goes to CURES

UNLIMITED, where his second journey to the underworld begins. His guide this time is his

boss, the owner of CURES UNLIMITED. When Arthur becomes afflicted with terrible dreams,

he begins to fear sleep; his boss responds by forcing him to eat more of the drugs they sell. This

keeps him awake, but gives him more vivid nightmares. After an herbalist apparently cures him

of his nightmares, his boss presents an even stronger drug, POWER-DRUG which he sells on a

bus causing a surreal, nightmarish scene that very nearly sends him to the actual world of the

dead.

Arthur then embarks on a physical journey in a quest to rid himself of the horrors of

Lagos and this journey has close parallels with his previous descents into the underworld through

nightmares and drugs. He hops in a taxi and heads for his hometown of W. The driver, “doped to

the eyeballs” (109), acts as the ferryman for this current quest that, like the second journey of

“Worlds,” is an anti-quest of escape. Once in W. we meet Arthur’s two guides, Takwa and

Amukpe, as well as the potential antagonists/evil kings, the mean-spirited men Odeh and Assi.

Takwa and Amukpe reintroduce Arthur to Odeh who belittles him. Arthur gets caught in a flood,

which is enhanced to nightmare status by POWER-DRUG. These events culminate in a huge

political gathering where Odeh and Assi’s fathers, in an attempt to outdo each other, cause a

mass, hysterical riot. Arthur’s journey ends as he returns to his regular life in Lagos.

For the first time in SNC, we see a character reach the integration phase of the journey—

which seems appropriate considering this is the title story and thus emphasized above the others.

He has time to reflect on what has happened to him, how it has affected him, and his appraisal is

thoroughly pessimistic. Instead of being a better person, more heroic, more in harmony with his

universe, he realizes that he actually preferred his life before the journey and wished he could

return to the state of chaotic nightmares. His journey ends in failure because, although it was

complete and thorough, it lacked the most important element of the quest, the Grail.

As a substitute for a real Grail, Arthur tries to seek after a vague notion of “the good old

days” of youth. What he finds is what he always knew to be true, the good old days were not

good and the people from those days are no different now than they were then. The reader

completes this quest with Arthur and feels ready for grand insight into Arthur’s condition and

finds that his condition is that of waking nightmare. This is because the Grail that Arthur thought

he was seeking was not the one he was seeking. In reality, Arthur was on an anti-quest away

from his true Grail: knowledge. When he fails, knowledge is thrust upon him and he cannot cope

with this reality. Thus his attempt at integration is done with spite for the knowledge he hoped to

escape. His only respite left in life is bitter pessimism and alcohol. The one literal integration

alienates the reader and leaves a desire for a better answer than the one Arthur gives.

The next story, “When the Lights Return (Lights),” is the most explicit example of the

journey motif as well as the quest. This story openly alludes to the myth of Orpheus and its

journey parallels the journey Orpheus makes to the underworld to save Eurydice. Ede has a fight

with his girlfriend, Maria, when she refuses to have sex with him. She tells him her rejection will

kill her, but he does not understand. Three weeks later, overcome with the guilt and pangs of
loss, Ede decides to go visit Maria and his journey begins. Ede’s only guide is his memory and

dreams of Maria; he sees her face throughout his journey—she is his Grail, clearly defined. He

knows where she lives and how to get there, but the challenges are everywhere. He must

overcome a strange prophetess, brutal policemen, the living dead, a city bathed in darkness and

numerous pitfalls. When he arrives, he finds Maria on the verge of death. Here, he fails to

become Orpheus. Orpheus, after charming Hades with his beautiful music, failed because of lack

of faith; he had to know his love was behind him and did the one thing Hades told him he

couldn’t do: look to make sure she was behind him.

Ede fails because he is not Orpheus—his music cannot charm death itself. He has not

composed the song for Maria in time, his singing fails to charm anyone and he ends up leaving

Maria, who dies. Soon after, Ede is killed after he accidentally disturbs a woman’s wares booth.

This parallels Orpheus dying at the hands of the Thracian women, but Ede’s death is more tragic,

in a way, because his gift, unlike Orpheus’s, is never fully realized. While Orpheus fails because

of lack of faith, Ede fails because of lack faithfulness to Maria and to his duty to Maria. Although

Ede, for the first time in SNC, actually has a Grail in sight, it slips through his fingers because of

his own shortsightedness and his own lack of heroism (expressed here as musical ability). He

comes closest to the Grail, the object of his quest, but cannot take it home with him because he is

not pure of heart and intention. His punishment for his lack of purity is death. Ede’s moment of

integration never happens because of his violent end. The reader is left with separation from the

character we have been asked to follow. The narrator ends with a visit to Ede’s mother, who

waits at home for him. The reader can empathize with this mother because the reader, like the

mother, is left waiting for Ede, knowing he will not come back to reveal his secrets.

The tapster, in “Tapster,” dies very quickly in the story, but it is not a punishment as it

was for Ede. The tapster dies in a simple accident. His death, as it was for the narrator of
“Worlds,” is the beginning of a new journey. What is different about this story is that the tapster

foresees his death and the person that could act as guide, Tabasco, rejects him. “Tabasco was too

busy to pay much attention to what the tapster was saying” (183) and so the tapster begins his

journey on his own. When he enters the underworld, he sees Tabasco as a turtle. Here, too,

Tabasco offers no advice or guidance, but only “urinated in the tapster’s direction” (185). So the

tapster is on his own, encountering an afterlife of strange imagery, as we saw in “Worlds.”

Lacking a proper guide to the afterlife, he is prompted, by knocks on the head from an unseen

source, to seek, to quest, for some sort of truth. These knocks on the head become his guide as he

seeks for a way to behave properly with the denizens of the afterlife. Proper behavior in the

afterlife is a clue to a Grail he does not and possibly cannot understand.

When the tapster wakes up, an act he has neither power to control nor any knowledge of

how it may have happened, he learns from Tabasco that he has been dead for seven days.

Tabasco feels guilty, offering—partly tongue-in-cheek—to pay the tapster for their excellent

“conversation” (194). He knows, because he was not allowed to directly participate in the

tapster’s journey, that he has missed a chance to be the tapster’s guide. He was not able to go

“inside his head” (184) as he was with the hunter and could only stand on the sidelines. This

story explores the possibility of the journey without a guide. The tapster’s only guide are the

“hard-knocks” of experience which tell him nothing until he does something wrong.

We, again, get no scene of integration, but we are not left feeling as though the tapster is

as delighted as Tabasco by his stint in the afterlife. This journey for the tapster, lacking all but the

most basic movement of life to death, death to life, is almost entirely an intellectual journey. As

such, it is sort of a metaphor or guide for understanding the true journeys the other characters

have taken. What we understand from “Tapster” is that journeys and quests are less about

movement and action, and more about perception and understanding—not even true
understanding in the encompassing sense, but an understanding only of perception and changes

in perception. We realize, now, why sight and perception have been such important recurring

themes throughout this book: they are the point, the true Grail, not the means to the Grail. We

also see, through the eyes of the tapster, that the true Grail is just as elusive as the false or

unknown ones were. In the tapster’s last bold communication, he defies the mystical voice and

does not receive any knocks, which implies that what he is saying is correct, despite his dissent

from what the voice is telling him, however the tapster is no closer to understanding why he is

correct to disagree now when he was not earlier.

As we have now seen, the only story with an integration phase of the journey is “Stars”

and the integration for Arthur is sadly unfulfilling. Thus, Okri sends the reader on a quest. The

reader’s Grail is to discover these missing integration phases for each of Okri’s quests. These

quests take the reader through a series of doors into rooms where we face tests, like all people

who push their way through on a quest. Most of these doors lead to new doorways and new

challenges. However, unlike the literary quest, the reader must act as his or her own guide on this

quest. This can happen because, as we have seen, the reader takes on a dual nature as both

questing knight and Other within each story. This mysterious concept of the “Other” is that

which is not identically “us” (the reader, in this case). What Caputo, commenting on Derrida,

calls the “still small voices” (52) that speak from within and from without a text. This includes

the voices within our own selves that call out something different than the acceptable version of

ourselves we normally present. This presents a difficulty in the reader’s quest for a Grail in that

the Grail, because of these “still small voices,” is constantly out of reach. However, as in most

quests, what is more important than the Grail is the questing person’s internal transformation

brought on by seeking after the illusive Grail. The reader who pursues this quest for

understanding Okri’s text will have such a transformation. This transformation will give the
reader a new perception of self and of the Other, within and without. The reader has crossed the

threshold and begun the quest, now the tests begin.

 Door 1:
Omovo’s World—A Test of Openness to an Alien Culture

The individual narrator of each story is the reader’s guide to each of these strange rooms

we visit. In two cases the narrator is the first person protagonist, telling his story in the past

tense. In the other four we have narrators who share a basic abiding principal of objectivity. Our

guides in these other stories require us to add much of our own perceptions to the story. The

narrators require us to draw connections, to subordinate and determine the relative importance of

individual statements. One critic makes a similar statement specifically about the opening of

“Lights” when he says:

The language of the passage is interesting in the way in which it strings together various images
while avoiding the imposition of a pattern of subordination between them as they fall into Ede’s
field of perception. (Quayson 110)

With few changes, one could make this exact same statement about the opening of “Shadow” and

it applies generally to the stories of SNC both in the global narrative sense and even within a

paragraph. For instance, the opening paragraph of “Shadow” reads: “That afternoon three

soldiers came to the village. They scattered the goats and chickens. They went to the palm-frond

bar and ordered a calabash of palm-wine. They drank amidst the files” (3). The connection

between the statements is not what we would expect, there is no dependence inter-relating the

statements, only the pronouns which all link the statements back up the soldiers and the order of

the statements, which implies a common and linear temporality. Each action is given equal

weight. Cause and effect is blurred, almost eliminated, in this paragraph. There are no

expectations attached to these people, the soldiers—no judgments. Thus, the test the reader

encounters in this room is the experience of this alien culture. The reader must make connections

within in the text while remaining open to this culture, without the judgments we may bring to it.
 Opening the door to this room, we learn that the protagonist, Omovo, a boy, and the

narrator seem to share that same sort of mindset: innocent objectivity. When critic Bill

Hemminger says of Azaro, the protagonist in Okri’s The Famished Road, that we do not get a

“worked-out account of the psychological development of Azaro” (70), we see that the same

applies to Omovo. The boy is really, except for his situation perhaps, somewhat generic as far as

young boys go. He does not analyze situations from his own unique perspective. The boy does

not think about the soldiers or the woman in the veil and what they mean. He does not recognize

the threat they pose, as armed men, even at the end. However, the narrator is not as detached as

he would have you believe. The unspoken rule of narration is that the narrator does not tell you

things he does not think are important. We have begun a quest, with the narrator as our guide, to

discover what the significance of the soldiers and the woman is. We must seek to know why the

narrator finds them, and Omovo, important.

The new room we have entered contains four arcs of perception with Omovo: how he

views the woman, how he views the soldiers, how he views his world, and how he views his

father. The last in this list is not as clear as the others, or maybe it points to an ambiguity in all of

these arcs. The reader ends with a perception of the father, because the story ends with his words

and actions. One critic, Armstrong, is critical of the father, saying, “the boy has been betrayed by

the person he should most be able to trust” (180).3 This seems unfair, however, given that earlier

in the story we hear the father say, “Turn off the radio. It’s bad for a child to listen to news of

war” (SNC 4). That statement sounds protective, not betraying. So it is likely that the father’s

final action, given the proximity of the soldiers, is one of protection of his son. Surely he knows

what the soldiers are capable of, and knows that they brought his son back from the jungle. He

may not know the entire story at this point, but he probably suspects some foul play and so

protects his son by quieting him and taking him to bed. For Omovo’s part, we do not get any
3
Armstrong makes this comment en passant as part of his agenda of showing how these stories are all commentaries
on the Nigerian Civil War.
thoughts or feelings on this matter. This is a door within this room that the narrator leaves closed

and it is an important door because we sense that behind it lies the answer to the questions of this

story, but it is one we must open ourselves.

Omovo’s view of the woman is something that apparently changes through the course of

the story, but this is another case where a lot of the change is left to the reader. The descriptions

of the woman and her actions leave a door of interpretation open to the reader by withholding

Omovo’s interpretation. We know that Omovo, when he starts to follow the woman, “completely

forgot to determine if she had a shadow, or whether her feet touched the ground” (6) which were

the two things he had heard from the neighborhood children about the woman. He seems to have

forgotten that she may be a witch or, as the soldiers tell him, a “spy” (6). This is the first change,

or perhaps it is no change since we never know for certain that Omovo believed what the other

children and the soldiers told him.

The definite change in his perception of the woman is physical and comes at the end,

when her veil is torn off: “Her head was bald, and disfigured with a deep corrugation. There was

a livid gash along the side of her face” (8). His underworld guide and his Grail is a physical

freak. While she probably is not the witch that the townsfolk made her out to be, she is not some

perfect beauty beneath the veil either. However, her physical lack of beauty, as we have seen,

does not detract from the fact that she is a good person. Omovo follows the woman past portents

of evil: “the intact skeleton of a large animal,” “A snake” slithering through the “undergrowth,”

“loud music and people singing war slogans” (7) and arrives at this scene:

He followed the woman till they came to a rough camp on the plain below. Shadowy figures
moved about in the half-light of the cave. The woman went to them. The figures surrounded her
and touched her and led her into the cave. He heard their weary voices thanking her. When the
woman reappeared she was without the basket. Children with kwashiorkor stomachs and women
wearing rags led her half-way up the hill. Then, reluctantly, touching her as if they might not see
her again, they went back. (7)
If the soldiers were correct, and she is a spy—an agent of the enemy—then the enemy the

soldiers speak of is pretty pathetic. The “kwashiorkor stomachs” of the children indicates that

they are starving and near death. The rags of the women imply that they are nothing more than

poor war refugees. Omovo makes no comment on these matters; we do not know how his

perception has changed, if at all.

Part of the reason we cannot speak definitively about Omovo’s perception of the woman

is that we do not know the answer to a basic question: Why does Omovo follow the woman in

the first place? On the one hand, Omovo’s mother is conspicuously absent in this story. There is

an implication that this is the role of the woman in the veil, to be a mother for Omovo. She is

already a mother for the people in the cave who she takes a “red basket” to. Is it that Omovo

seeks this same motherly attention? On the other hand, her description as a spy, a woman out of

reach from Omovo, and a mysterious witch-figure could also imply a sexual attraction for

Omovo. He could be seeking answers to her mysteries as a way of entering into the adult world

of sexuality.

Besides her description lending credence to this theory, the fact that Omovo is annoyed

with his father and does not want to listen to him implies Omovo may be in the midst of an

Oedipal phase. This is another door that the reader must explore alone. The narrator does not

give more than these implied motivations. Omovo, for his part, may even be too young to really

know what he seeks from this woman. His Grail is the woman, but what about the woman he

specifically seeks knowledge of is a mystery to the end. There is a definite door of perception

presented to the reader, however. We are in Omovo’s world without expectation, being the first

story in this book. We may choose, as Omovo must choose, to accept or reject the explanations

we have heard of the woman, but either way her position as a good person in the midst of
troubled times is fairly clear. She is not aiding insurgency, only offering comfort to starving

people who have nothing to do with fighting in a war.

What we do see of Omovo’s perception is a direct change immediately following the

woman’s veil being ripped off. After the woman leaves the cave, Omovo follows her to a river

where he sees “capsized canoes and trailing waterlogged clothes” and “floating items of

sacrifice: loaves of polythene wrappers, gourds of food, Coca-Cola cans” (7); in short, the river

is nothing but a trash heap. However, on second glance, Omovo sees something different: “When

he looked at the canoes again they had changed into shapes of swollen dead animals. He saw

outdated currencies on the riverbank. He noticed a terrible smell in the air” (7). We do not know

why his perception changes at this point, it could be due to something as minor as the changing

cloud cover in the moonlight, but the point may be just that Omovo took the time to look again.

This is the same pattern he follows with the woman in the veil. He hears what the children say,

but he takes the time to follow her and see if she is really a witch or a spy, or if she is something

more.

After the woman’s veil is torn off and he sees her true face, Omovo has another revelation

about the items in and around the river: “The lights changed over the forest and for the first time

Omovo saw that the dead animals on the river were in fact the corpses of grown men. Their

bodies were tangled with river-weed and their eyes were bloated” (8). This time the narrator does

attribute the change in perception to a change in light, but the proximity of the sentence to the

woman’s veil being ripped off implies (by the pattern of temporality established in the first

paragraph) that these events are linked. Again, cause and effect are unclear, but this seems to

imply that Omovo’s changed view of the woman has led to a changed view of the world. Shortly

after, the woman becomes another dead body on the riverside. Omovo’s quest, however
chivalrous or noble his intentions were to start, has ended in failure and cowardice: “He ran

through the forest screaming” (8).

On the other hand, Omovo is only a child. He blacks out after tripping over some tree

roots and when he awakens, Omovo experiences the first of what will be a recurring pattern

throughout SNC, he cannot see: “He waved his fingers in front of his face and saw nothing.

Mistaking the darkness for blindness he screamed” (9). Omovo’s blindness is literal but it is

caused not by a failure on his part, but by an absence of light, the same way he mis-perceived the

dead bodies for canoes and animals. This instance of blindness metaphorically explains his

relationship to the woman, as well. We do not know for sure whether or not Omovo believed the

other children who said of the woman “that she had no shadow...that her feet never touched the

ground” (5), but the fact that narrator takes the opportunity to point out that Omovo forgets to

look for those things is a strong implication that he believes the other children. Thus the

revelation that this woman is not some witch or ghost as these children apparently believe, comes

when Omovo has new metaphorical light, when he sees her feed the poor children. He was blind

to the truth of this woman until the new light came and so if his Grail was knowledge of the

woman in the veil, he has succeeded, even if he has failed to protect her in true knightly fashion.

Omovo’s perception of the soldiers changes in a more subtle way. He does not appear to

trust them from the beginning, as evidenced by the fact we have already seen, that he refuses

their money. The difference in the beginning is that Omovo is not sufficiently afraid of these

men, despite their guns and their drinking, to stay away from them. He is also not sufficiently

worried to warn the woman before she reaches a place where she is vulnerable. At the end of the

story, “Omovo, overcome with delirium, began to tell his father what he had seen” (9), but his

father carries him away before he can get them both killed. Again, we do not know what Omovo

thinks about the soldiers, but, as we saw with his father, he does allow his father to carry him
away and they do not get shot by these men; this, together with the fact that Omovo only tells his

story in “delirium” implies that Omovo knows these men are dangerous. In the end, because of

what the reader has seen, the reader knows this too and so it is easy to side with the father in his

decision to quiet his son at this time.

By leaving out these sorts of reactions and definites about Omovo, the narrator of this

story is inviting the reader to fill in the gaps—to open the doors and see what is on the other side

for each individual reader. Whether Omovo recognizes what the woman has done for the starving

children is ambiguous, but the door is presented for the reader to walk through. Omovo’s

perception changes and the reader’s perception changes as well. We go from not making

connections, to entering the world of the Other in blindness as we approach this book. The

narrator, through Omovo, guides the reader into this world slowly, showing us the world by

casting it in different lights, then asking us to determine what we see. Whether Omovo knows the

threat of soldiers against a woman who is trapped and alone is doubtful, but the reader does—we

need only to read “City” to see what soldiers are capable of when it comes to women. Omovo’s

perception changes on a basic, child-like level as he sees new images in new light, but Omovo is

perhaps incapable at his young age of making the connections, the subordinations. This is the

quest of the reader, with the narrator as our guide. Omovo is as incapable, at this point, of

sophisticated introspection as the reader is incapable of thorough examination of his situation

and motivations. This is a new world for the reader even more than it is for Omovo, and we

approach it like children to see what it can show us. This is the character we meet first in SNC

and his story requires us to fill in the gaps of interpretation which invites us to see the subsequent

stories also as stories of places and people we will not immediately understand and should

therefore not jump to judgments or dismissals. Our immediate feeling of dissociation is real, but
the unopened doors draw us into Omovo’s world and the worlds of the remaining stories by

asking us to make connections, to contribute to the story rather than passively observe it.
 Door 2:
Esoteric Realm—A Test of Spirituality

We meet the narrator of “Worlds” (whom I will henceforth dub N) in a way similar to the

way we met Omovo. “I was at work one day...” (13) is an unspecific way of describing a day

which will begin a journey for N that will be very unusual. This continues the pattern of

assigning neither significance nor temporal certainty to events that “Shadow” established. This

time our narrator is first-person active. N is relating the story of his journey, but N takes

dissociation a step further than the narrator of “Shadow” by failing to name himself or anyone he

meets except with the most rudimentary descriptions of “neighbor,” “old man,” and “my dead

wife.” It is as though he is an objective, third person, almost disinterested voice, although the

things he describes are very personal and somewhat tragic. Like the narrator of “Shadow,” N

does not give insight into the main characters’ thoughts or reactions to the events that unfold.

This is odd since N has the most direct access to these thoughts. It sparks the question: Is N

doing this intentionally, or is he incapable of self-analysis? The reader feels immediate

dissociation, despite having already read “Shadow” because N is dissociated from the events. His

distance from his thoughts and emotions becomes our own. Thus, the test this time for the reader

is one of the spiritual dimension. N encounters an esoteric realm far beyond anything we would

view as normal, and yet there are aspects of this realm that seem very commonplace to the

Western mind. The reader must discover how this strange view of spirituality fits or does not fit

into his or her own way of thinking.

On this nonspecific “one day,” N gets fired and learns, from his neighbor, that he is blind

to the condition of his neighborhood, which starts him on the journey to death and rebirth, which

N felt was significant enough to tell to others—as evidenced by the first-person narration. N has
little emotion, at first, he “left the job without bitterness” (13) and has no reaction when his

neighbor tells him, “Since your wife died you’ve stopped using your eyes” (14); this is the first

we even hear about N’s dead wife, and the only other time is when he is fleeing the land of the

dead and realizes the mysterious female guide was her all along. He seems very much like one of

the people Omovo sees “stumbl[ing] about their various tasks as if they were sleep-walking” (5).

N, like the narrator of “Shadow” has a detachment from the world, from even his own life, that is

mystifying. He is a man determined not to perceive the world; he is exactly how his neighbor

describes him, a man whose “stopped using [his] eyes.” This dissociation from the world, though

jarring at first, draws the reader toward numerous doors. N’s way of telling his story demands

explanation, but provides none. It is left for the reader to open the doors.

Like Omovo, N goes through blindness and regains his ability to see each time, in the

physical sense, but in the sense of perception and noticing the world as well as noticing his own

thoughts and feelings, it is less clear he ever overcomes his blindness. He starts off in blindness

to even the simplest things. “Haven’t you noticed that most of the compound people are gone?”

his neighbor asks him. “Gone where?” he asks back. His neighbor answers, “Run Away. To

safety” (14). The fact that the neighbor uses the word “safety” implies that there is danger where

they live. N has not noticed. A few hours after this conversation, N is robbed blind by a pleasant

group of bandits who, “chatted to [him] about how bad the roads were and how terrible the

government was and how there were so many checkpoints around” (14). The bandit, on leaving,

threatens N by saying, “If you so much as cough after we’ve gone I will shoot out your eyes”

(15). This is the first of several physical threats against N’s eyes. Later, in jail, “photographers

came and flashed their cameras in [their] eyes” (16). Also, while on his anti-quest from the city,

people emerge from the forest when he hits a goat with his car and their hands reach into his

windows, “grasping for [his] eyes” (23), and just during his car crash, “wind, rain, and bits of
glass momentarily blinded [N]” (24). Finally, when he is in the land of the dead, “suddenly [he]

realized that [he] couldn’t see” (26). The final act, his true instance of literal blindness, is a

culmination of the threat of blindness N has suffered all along, as well as a realization of the

blindness his neighbor told him about in the beginning.

With N’s retrieval of sight, however, we do not get the final relief of blindness we would

expect. N fled his quest for knowledge in the city and when faced with the ultimate knowledge,

the knowledge of “life and death” that his dead neighbor promises him, he flees again. All this

after he regains his sight. This is not to say he is not changed by this experience, but the fact that

he “found that [he] was not running forwards, but backwards” (31) when he flees the land of the

dead implies that he is regressing to a former state instead of moving ahead in his development.

In fact, it is only after he leaves the land filled with dead people that he “became aware that [he]

could see spirits” (32). This line is more significant now, though, because he is in the land of the

living and it is the crucial door presented to the reader to either prove that he has not regressed

into blindness but has moved forward to a new state, or to prove that his pattern of blindness is

continuing even after his strange experiences.

The biggest mystery left unsolved and unevaluated by N is the writing he sees on

people’s faces and hands. He never comments on this or tries to determine the implication

because he has been, until he leaves the land of the dead, trying to flee knowledge. Whatever the

handwriting represents, it is something fantastic, some other dimension of reality that he cannot

cope with because it is outside of normal experience. When, in the forest after he leaves the land

of the dead, N begins to see spirits, he is beginning to perceive the world as containing more than

it originally did. When he starts on his final quest, for “the old man’s shack” he is in a new state

of mind, he wants to “find where [he] can be happy” and this is the first solid goal he has had

since the beginning of the story. This seems to imply a positive outcome for N. He is beginning,
as the reader is beginning, to accept new experiences. What separates the reader from N is that N

is of the world he is dissociated from, whereas the reader, probably, is not.

This alliance of ignorance between the reader and N presents many possible doors of

perception to the reader. Perhaps N does not comment on his situation because he cannot

understand it. As a human being, like the reader, what he sees happening in his city is too terrible

to deal with. He cannot connect to his world, even to himself, perhaps because the world is

alienating him. The reader sees that normal rules of law and logic refuse to hold up as N journeys

through and away from the city. This would be jarring for anyone; so it may be that N, despite

being from this world, is so jarred by his experiences that he cannot connect with the world, let

alone draw connections for the reader. His return to vision and his beginning of a new quest is

incomplete because he has not yet found a way to describe what is happening to him.

This story ends with hope that N is starting to open his eyes, starting to see the world as it

is, with all its mystery and wonder. Similarly, the reader does not, at the end of the story, have

answers to all the questions. We never learn N’s real name, we never get into his psyche and we

never learn what the writing he saw says or means, but the reader, like N, has been on a journey

of imagination that for N is as real as any of the other journeys. We learn, along with N, not to

flee from knowledge, however fantastic and odd it may seem at first, because the anti-quest is

doomed to fail and knowledge will find us one way or another. We hope N’s anti-quest, finally,

has failed, because he can see the spirits even in life, which means knowledge that he tried to

deny, the knowledge of life and death, is starting to hit him. He has not, like his dead neighbor,

opened the divine-seeing third eye, but the fact that he is no longer walking around “as if [he

doesn’t] have any eyes” (14) is a vast improvement in his situation and his perception. For the

reader, this story asks us to remain open to possibilities beyond our normal realms of perception,

to open doors to other interpretations of the world. We approach the book like children, like
Omovo, and we continue as objective observes, not quite able to connect ourselves to the images

we see, like N. However, the fact that we continue to pursue the words for whatever truths we

can find implies that we, like N, are willing to continue our journey.
 Door 3:
Wasted Talents—A Test of Recognizing Heroic Deeds

The epigraph, Matthew 25:29, on the entrance to this new room, “City,” is taken from a

parable of Jesus about wasted talents (money),4 but the metaphorical extension of “talent” is not

a new idea or even a stretch from the parable’s standard interpretation. This story is unique in

that we get a lot of background description of the main characters, Marjomi and Emokhai; this

opens a lot of new doors we have not seen so far. The narrator also uses a lot of subordination,

which helps eliminate some of the objective distance that was so strong in the previous two

stories, but the cost is that the narrator also uses a lot of passives—implying the important events

of these characters lives are merely things that happen to them, not things they have caused. This

story is the second longest of the book because the narrator seems to take forever to get around to

anything important, to say what took the previous narrators very little time to say. The immediate

impression, then, is more personal for the reader—less dissociated. The test the reader

encounters in this story is of this passivity that we experience from the narrator and from the

lives of the characters. Can the reader reconcile Emokhai and Marjomi’s inaction and the

presence of the dust and heat in the town these two men live in, and make anything out about the

nature of their talents—in what ways they are like the different servants of the Biblical story in

Matthew?

Due to the length of this story, the imagery is repeated again and again until the reader is

as worn down as Emokhai and Marjomi. The prevailing image in this story is the dust. It

pervades every section of the story and the city. The second most prevalent image is the color

red; the third is blood. Everything in this story has a red tint: the dust, the people, the blood, the
4
Summary: A man gives talents to three of his servants, the amount according to their ability. Two invest and double
their talents, the third buries it away. The master is pleased with the first two, but punishes the third, saying to him
the epigraph of this story.
fire, and the sun. Even the money Marjomi and Emokhai receive, the naira, has a literal red tint

as well as a metaphoric red tint—it is blood money. Everything in the story, at some point, is

covered with the red dust in the town these two men live in. It is as though the sun beats down on

everything, making it old and idle, slow moving, and worn out. Neither Emokhai nor Marjomi do

anything, things only happen to them. The two men make a living giving their blood for talents

(naira). They waste their talents on booze, gambling and fights. Their lives seem as devoid of life

and action as is possible in two human beings. The reader, beat down by the repetition of images

and character inaction, feels dissociation because it seems as though the lives of the characters

are going nowhere, that nothing will happen to them. The generic setting of this story puts it

more in the realm of one of Okri’s earlier novels, The Landscapes Within in which, as critic

Charles Nnolim points out, “The accusing finger is pointed at no particular government or

society, but at the uncertainties attendant on the precariousness of existence” (68).5 Emokhai and

Marjomi occupy a space only vaguely interpretable as Africa because their plight is not tied into

the specifics of their country. However, important things do happen to these two men, and we see

their perceptions of their world change, as well as the reader’s perception of their lives.

The arcs of perception in this room, despite the now prevalent use of subordinating and

temporal conjunctions, still rely heavily on the reader. The narrator spends a long time setting up

the governor, demonstrating his power and his inadequacy. The narrator gives us several scenes

showing Emokhai and Marjomi’s desperation, their incessant gambling, fighting and boozing.

The narrator spends long passages giving us the history of each of the characters, especially as it

relates to Dede and how both men dated her, but neither really loves her anymore. We see

reference after reference to the planes practicing their maneuvers overhead. None of his seems to

go anywhere until the last few pages where things begin to move quickly. By the resolution, we

5
This comment is applicable to Okri in the context the larger scope of his work because SNC marks a transition in
his career from straight realism, as in The Landscapes Within to the more “magical” realism we see in SNC and The
Famished Road. (Quayson 102)
have to rethink what the narrator has told us thus far, about the relationships between the

characters. It takes the shocking moments of Dede’s revelation to Emokhai and her subsequent

suicide attempt before all the characters and the reader are able to change their perception of the

events. This compacting of action at the end of a long story demonstrates how the lives of these

two men could easily have slipped into oblivion. The reader is left to draw the connections and

re-evaluate the position of these two men and their relationship to each other and to Dede, since

they do not.

The moment where Emokhai’s perceptions begin to change is when Dede asks him,

“Didn’t you hear what the soldiers did to me?” (73) six pages from the end of a forty-two-page

story. What Emokhai had heard “wasn’t that she used to go out with a soldier, but that she had

been with five of them. They said she made a lot of money out of it” (70). This does not explain

her total lack of sexual interest considering that when they used to go out, “she was also sexually

so insatiable that when they were alone he couldn’t do anything else” (61). Emokhai had thought

she was just a tramp, but then “her emphasis [of the question] changed the slant of what he had

heard” (73) and he realizes that she had not “gone out” with five soldiers, but had been raped by

them. However, no one directly says this in the text. We come to this realization the same way

Emokhai does, slowly.

What gets the reader to that realization is the evidence of her lack of interest, her violence

toward Emokhai’s sexual advances and, if the reader has not yet caught on, the fact that when

she sees the soldiers coming at her later, she cuts her own throat. Emokhai’s response to the

knowledge of the torture Dede has gone through is to push her away. This is a theme we have

seen before—N does the same thing when knowledge begins to invade his quiet life. When

Emokhai sees the metaphoric story written on Dede’s face, he cannot handle this knowledge

because it forces him out of his humdrum life and forces him to see life differently. Life is not
the endless party that Emokhai has tried to convince himself it was, as shown by his constant

journeying for drink, money and friends. Instead the reality of his world is the one where

desperate men must sell their only personal possession in constant supply—blood—to stay alive.

This door is left open for the reader by Emokhai’s previous and subsequent actions, although he

never directly addresses this issue himself.

It is the midst of this revelation on the part of Emokhai and the reader that the plane

crashes in the ghetto. The immediate effect of the plane crash is that it kicks up “a massive cloud

of red dust, plaster and smoke [which] obscured [Dede] as she disappeared around the corner”

(74). This is Emokhai’s moment of physical blindness, similar to the one Omovo and N

experienced, and it marks a change in perception for Emokhai, a realization of his true Grail. The

plane crash results in the soldiers’ coming, which results in Dede’s suicide attempt. The plane

crash is merely an accident, but it is also a punctuation mark demonstrating the gravity of the

revelation, the earth shaking consequences. It shows Emokhai’s world as one of the constant

threat of random death, even from something that was supposed to be a part of a celebration of

the governor’s birthday; a party should have offered relief for the people of the ghetto, not death.

Emokhai does not acknowledge the effect of the plane, but his instinct is to leave the area and

seek out Dede, implying that he knows he must flee death and inaction.

This leads to Emokhai’s quest for Dede, where he learns her fate and his friend’s brave

sacrifice for a woman whom earlier he had told “was too fat, that she was just the type of woman

who preferred truck-pushers and soldiers” and who he “was about to hit her when Emokhai

caught his hand” (66). We do not know, because Emokhai does not think about it and the narrator

does not tell us, what Emokhai’s true feelings are for Dede. He treats her like a sex object, an

unattractive one at that, but then seeks her out when he realizes she is in pain. He prevents

Marjomi from hitting her and even “drew up to the man” (67) who molests her in the bar, but
pushes her away because he feels ashamed by her pain. When he finds out his efforts have failed,

and that Dede has tried to kill herself, only to be saved by the one who treated her the most

harshly—Marjomi—Emokhai realizes he must do something to repay his friend. The one thing

Emokhai can do for his friends is get a hold of some marijuana. This decision is not overt, maybe

not even conscious, but Emokhai does seek out the marijuana and shares it with Marjomi after he

recovers from the blood loss caused by giving some of his precious life fluid to save Dede. When

Emokhai goes to do this, and meets the security guard, the security guard has a familiar ailment:

he is blind, but only in one eye.

We have seen total blindness and regained sight as metaphors for changing perceptions,

at least the beginning of changing perceptions. We have seen Emokhai’s moment of blindness

preceding his journey to find Dede, which was too late. We have also seen a man with three eyes,

N’s neighbor in “Worlds,” which is the traditional symbol of divine sight. This is the first

character whose blindness is partial and permanent. This security guard’s one eye is not all-

seeing, but he uses it more than other characters use their two good eyes. He sees things which

pass the average citizen by, like “the most dazzling collection of cars [bringing] invisible guest to

parties which rocked the city every night” and the “state’s vanished enemies” who had been shot,

then buried in “unmarked graves” (77). These things are revelations to the reader, but Emokhai

gives them no special attention, he is on a quest, after all. This gatekeeper has no power except as

the keeper of the marijuana. He spends his days “dreaming [he] watch[es] over these farms” (76-

7), which is just an illusion of power. When Emokhai obtains what he wants from this man

without fear of repercussion, Emokhai demonstrates that his eyes are no longer closed, he can

now see better than the one-eyed man, even if he can only act on his new perception with a

meager gift of drugs. His bravery may be poorly directed but it demonstrates that he cares about

Dede. Whether what he feels is romantic love, human fellowship, or just deep friendship we do
not know, but the door is open for us to guess that Emokhai would have gladly given his blood to

save her as Marjomi did.

The revelations, like the narratorial style, are gradual and subtle, but present. The quest is

there, though obscured by the number of incidental journeys Emokhai takes. Unlike the previous

characters, for whom the quests happened quickly, Emokhai and Marjomi are characters

paralyzed by an inability to perceive what is important to them and an inability to act because of

the chaos of their town and their lives. When they do quest, their quests are successful, though

the Grails may not be glorious. This demonstrates the parable that is the epigraph. Their talents

are wasted because the soil in which they are planted cannot supply them with what they need to

dream and grow.

This is not a realization these two men come to, but it is one that the reader reaches by

connecting the clues the narrator gives us and forcing us to examine why now, of all times,

Emokhai finally has a quest and a Grail. We see in this story the quest fulfilled, but it is a Grail of

such un-glory that we still feel empty of optimism. Emokhai’s greatest success would be a failure

to most people. The reader is then left with a perception changed of these men of inaction.

Nothing on par with what happens to Omovo and N happens to Emokhai and Marjomi. We

realize at the end, however, that the mystery and wonder of the world that is missing in this story

is exactly what is missing in the characters’ lives. Their lives are slow and pointless until they are

given a real crisis, at which point they step up with real bravery and conviction. The reader is

drawn into their lives because although they seem to occupy the same world as the previous two

stories, their lives are quietly desperate and average, and the reader is left to judge if their lives

ever had or ever will hold a promise of something greater.

 Door 4:
Auctioning Stars—A Test of Self-Knowledge

In contrast to N of “Worlds,” Arthur, the narrator of “Stars,” is intimately connected to his

world and his own thoughts and feelings. He uses his eyes and does not like what he sees others

and himself doing. He reflects, at one point, that he can “note all this now with a certain

serenity” (108) which is much more of a jump into intimate introspection than we have seen so

far. This does not mean that we feel no dissociation with Arthur. His world is still more chaotic in

reality than we like to think our worlds are. Also, we do not learn his name until fifteen pages

into the story, so there is still a distance between him and us. He also avoids naming the town of

his childhood, except with the moniker “W,” although he does name Lagos, the city he lives in.

The spacing between language, time and place persists even this far into the book, while the

intimacy with the characters grows ever closer. This distance is what keeps us from blindly

accepting Arthur’s conclusions at the end. We, as readers, still retain enough objectivity to

examine Arthur’s other possible motivations, to evaluate what he thinks of as his Grail and the

actual Grail he moves toward. In this way, we test the limits, through objective observance of

another’s attempt, of self-knowledge and introspection. We try to discover why Arthur cannot

succeed despite his own phase of integration.

The closer intimacy of this story makes sense because this is the title story and thus has

special emphasis. We have journeyed thus far into worlds that we do not understand. We came to

them as children and we realize, at this point, that we are ready for thorough examination into the

thoughts and emotions of the characters. We are ready to open the door into the characters now,

finally. What we see is depressing, to say the least. Arthur has an arc of perception about his

world that goes from bad to worse. He is not as paralyzed as Emokhai and Marjomi were, nor is
he a sleepwalker or a child like N and Omovo were. However, his life still seems to lack

direction, or rather the direction it is taking is bad and Arthur has no power to alter it. Arthur

drives himself to a sort of paralysis of perception by his constant introspection—at least it

appears this way on the surface. However, we have already seen that Arthur’s problem was that

he was trying to escape knowledge, to deny his Grail. Since denial and forced acceptance is the

arc this story follows, it ends up being the only logical conclusion that Arthur would find the

knowledge forced on him to be depressing and unfulfilling.

The general change in perception for Arthur occurs as he wakes from a world of

nightmares into a nightmare world. His world is one that seesaws between nightmare of reality

and nightmare of sleep. The people he sells drugs to come back to him, “misbegotten and

deformed” (87); Arthur finds it “quite scary seeing a horde of worm-eaten people pouring at me

every day at work” (87). They are like the people N meets in the afterlife of “Worlds” who sport

“three legs and elongated necks” (28), “wings that didn’t help them fly,” and “feet which were

turned backwards” (32) all of whom are spirits of the dead and frightening in the nightmare

logic. Arthur’s “deformed” people, unlike N’s, are not of the world of the dead or of nightmares,

but of reality—a reality that he has brought about with his unethical pandering of useless drugs.

These images of reality haunt Arthur because he knows the life he is pursuing is not the one he

would like to, but as we have already seen, he is powerless to change the course of his life. His

quest—or rather anti-quest—to rid himself of these problems, of the nightmares he is creating,

leads him to CURES UNLIMITED.

Here we get the tilt of the seesaw—from reality to nightmares: “I first became aware of

the persistence of my nightmares when I met my new boss” (89). Arthur escapes one form of

nightmare and enters another, the nightmares of sleep. The people he has hurt recur in his

dreams, as well as the people he goes to for help. Arthur knows, he perceives, why these
nightmares of waking and sleep plague him. He knows that he should not be a salesman and that

his drugs are no good, but Arthur is trapped. He has temporarily escaped the consequences of his

previous actions, but the images still haunt him—he is still powerless to change his life. All his

introspection does not result in action, in new behavior. Is it possible that the trend Anna Smith

noticed in The Famished Road, where “the capacity to feel, dream and imagine must be restored

by violent means” (46) is the true meaning behind his horrible nightmares? This does not seem to

be the case for Arthur, as we will see, but it opens up a new room of possibility of the nature of

dreams and violence for the reader that will come into play most prominently in “Tapster.”

Here the seesaw again tilts back to reality. We are slowly discovering the real meaning of

Arthur’s journey. Although he is perhaps too close to the truth to see it, we realize his true

journey is not toward peace, but away from knowledge. His nightmares plague him because he is

not accepting the reality of the people he is harming; he is not taking responsibility for his

actions. The reader, a step removed from Arthur can look through that door and see Arthur is

constantly trying to deny knowledge. Like N did physically, Arthur hopes to do mentally.

The device that Arthur uses to rid himself of nightmares and put himself back into the

nightmare of reality is a visit to an herbalist. He visits him when, finally, “it got so bad that on a

given day I couldn’t tell whether I was in real life or in one of my dreams” (95). The herbalist

immediately notices a terrible “evil eye” (95) on Arthur and his solution is to blindfold him. This

is an interesting solution because the herbalist could have seen an extra eye on Arthur as the third

eye of divine sight from Indian mythology, the same third eye that the dead neighbor seems to

sport in “Worlds.” The possible implication at this point for the reader is that Arthur has gained

sight and possesses knowledge that is important and that he should be trying to evaluate and

integrate into his life. Instead he, with the herbalist as his facilitator, sees the eye as “evil” and

something that must be destroyed.

 So, he takes away all of Arthur’s vision in an attempt to erase the third, inner vision

which is causing Arthur’s nightmare world. The herbalist follows up this artificial blinding with

real blinding when he “whipped off the blindfold and blew a handful of ground peppers into [his]

eyes” (96). This blindness lasts for three days, matching Saul’s length of blindness from the

divine light on the road to Damascus in the Bible. Saul’s loss of vision lasted three days and

when he was cured, he instantly rejected his formerly evil ways and became a follower of Jesus.6

As we have already seen, the motif of blindness to returned sight does not give similar changes

in perception to the characters of SNC. However, the previous blindings have led to some sort of

new perceptions, even if not of the scale of Saul’s. With Arthur, because the journey he is

undertaking is an anti-quest, his new sight does not give him a renewed world-view, because

Arthur is failing to escape the knowledge that pursues him. In a way, his new sight ironically

masks a new phase of blindness.

Arthur’s blindness gives him a revelation of a sort: “Then slowly my eyes opened to the

madness I had been living with all those years” (96). The nightmares of reality again come to

replace his nightmares of sleep. It is in this tilt of the seesaw of perception that Arthur has the

surreal bus ride where he sells POWER-DRUG to the driver and nearly dies. Arthur cannot

handle this new world, which is again a nightmare, so he continues his anti-quest toward W. in

the hopes that he can escape the knowledge of the pain and suffering he is powerless to cure. The

reader realizes that this is not the beginning of a new quest, merely the extension of what Arthur

has been trying to do all along.

This section of Arthur’s anti-quest is more in the guise of a real quest than was N’s in

“Worlds.” He chooses a guide, two of them, and has a destination, if not a Grail. The result is the

same: he fails. In W. he experiences the nightmares of the dreams in Lagos while he is awake.

Like his dream where he “would be in the corner of a nameless constellation.... [Where] the stars
6
Okri himself invites comparisons and contrasts to Biblical passages by using epigraphs from the Bible (as we have
seen) and quoting/paraphrasing the Bible throughout his work.
in the sky were the objects of the auctioneer’s block” (92). Being in W. reminds Arthur of the

nightmare of his childhood, when the town bullies “tied [him] to a tree and three rotten oranges

at [him]” then left him there, “counting the stars...for three days” (121). He then has an

experience like his nightmare where all the people whom he has harmed “pursued [him] with

machetes” (92) when he leaves the bully Odeh’s house and it begins to rain. Arthur hears, “bells

and clanging machetes” (128) as two “rival cults” (129) begin fighting. In this chaos of battle he

sees “young men with diseases that melted their faces, beautiful girls with snakes coming out of

their ears...the dead rising and screaming for children” (129) and this crowd of nightmares he

sees while fully awake he is convinced is after him, like they were in his dreams.

These waking nightmares, these distorted visions of horror and memory, are the other

side of the coin for the instances of true human horror Arthur finds in W. which culminates in a

riot during the political rally a little while later. Assi and Odeh’s father, competing for power,

throw money on the crowd of people, which causes a riot. The key revelation for Arthur after this

riot is when he looks at the money so many people have just been fighting over and sees that

“one side of the currencies was authentic, but the other side washed away and became blank. We

had been fighting for joke currencies” (140). This revelation, this change of perception for Arthur

means for him that his quest has failed. W. has no more to offer than did Lagos and is no more an

escape from his nightmares than sleep is. He has been fooling himself, the reader realizes, that he

is on a quest to rid himself of evil—the money represents independence from selling which

Arthur seeks—when actually he was on an anti-quest from the knowledge that the world is hard

and frightening. Money and independence from work—from pushing his drugs—is a false Grail,

as fake as the naira notes. With this knowledge, this new realization about the workings of the

world, Arthur has no choice but to abandon his quest and return to Lagos. This implies that
Arthur has finally failed in his anti-quest, that now he must examine the truth of his world and

accept its consequences for himself.

Arthur makes an effort, after returning to Lagos, to reform his life. His old boss dashes

these hopes when he tells Arthur, “Your photograph has been all over he newspaper . . . so no one

will give you a job” (141). So he resumes his former job, selling POWER-DRUG. Arthur is in

conflict because he can neither escape the knowledge he has of the world nor can he do anything

to change his actions. His solution is to drown his perception at “the nearest bar” in large jugs of

“calabash and palm-wine” (144). “There are few consolations for an honest man,” he says, “and

no one is really sure if this isn’t the only chance a poor man has on this planet” (143). We saw N

in “World” fleeing knowledge and yet knowledge caught up with him. We were hopeful that now

he would be able to pursue some greater Grail. Then we saw Emokhai and Marjomi whose real

talents and real bravery waste away like dust. Now we have Arthur who has knowledge and

introspection but no way to act on either. All his introspection, his desire for a better Grail lead

nowhere because he is one of the people of the planet without power—one of the people on the

auction block rather than one of the buyers. This is why, in the end, he says “I think I prefer my

former condition” (144). Arthur does not know he is seeking a higher Grail, a higher knowledge,

and so once he has this knowledge, he is powerless to act on it. This is the paradox of

knowledge: it is a liberation and a prison. The reader is left feeling divided about Arthur’s

condition.

On the one hand, we have been led to believe so far that knowledge is the Holy Grail that

all these characters move toward. On the other hand, Arthur seems to have this Grail and can do

nothing about it. It is possible that Arthur does not amend his life because he does not want to,

that living a life of denial has paralyzed him from real action. This perception is one the reader

can take away from this story. However, rather than being one who, as Hawley puts it, “learns
how to make the most of it” (31), the reader can also see that Arthur literally can do

nothing about his position. He is poor man cursed with rich knowledge and he drinks away his

pain because he fails to make the most of it. The words of the Jamaican, “Africa, we counting on

yuh” (144), haunt the narrator because he is trapped in a world over which he has perception, but

no influence. His dreams have no positive effect and he does not learn to use his dreams for

positive means; thus, his introspection and his intelligence are wasted in the world he lives in—

used for nothing more than profiteering for his basic human needs. The reader sees that Arthur’s

problem is not will, but opportunity.

Arthur’s condition is the condition that the other characters thus far have experienced.

Their perceptions open, but along with a new world-view, they acquire a realization that they are

powerless to affect the world. Omovo cannot bring justice to the soldiers for the woman in the

veil’s murder. N flees the knowledge of life and death for place where he can just be happy.

Emokhai and Marjomi use their talents only to perpetuate their sorry condition. Arthur can only

dream of starting a new company and has the vague notion that this Grail will be better. His

company, unlike the others he has worked for, will find true cures, cause less harm. The reader

has seen him want this, and seen him do nothing solid to get this, and so we realize that this Grail

is unattainable, given the powerlessness of Arthur.

 Door 5:
A New Light—A Test of Understanding Myths

In Ede and Maria’s story, the distance between the reader and the characters begins to

telescope again. The narrator returns to the more objective language we saw in “Shadow” and

“Worlds”; although we do get more of Ede’s thoughts during this story, it is not with the intimacy

of “Stars.” The passage opens similarly to “Shadow” with a series of un-subordinated sentences:

“Ede had been singing at a poorly attended concert when the power failed. The hotel didn’t have

any electric generators. The audience shouted for their money to be returned, then they left in

disgust” (147). We see the same pattern of atemporality. We do not know where we are or when

for a while; the sentences have a disconnected, hollow unity that requires the reader to make

connections and place the events in time. The method of drawing us into the story is that the

narrator forms parallels between what happens to Ede and the Orpheus myth, but these parallels

also act as a separation. Okri makes an interesting comment on this aspect of this story, though

he was not referring specifically to “Lights”:

We’ve looked too much in that direction [the direction of the effects of colonialism on Africa] and
have forgotten about our own aesthetic frames. Even though that was there and took place and
invaded the social structure, it’s quite possible that it didn’t invade our spiritual and aesthetic and
mythic internal structures, one would probably say that a true invasion takes place not when a
society has been taken over by another society in terms of its infrastructure, but in terms of its
mind and its dreams and its myths, and its perceptions of reality. (Wilkinson 86)

The Orpheus myth is ancient, though well known, Western, and seems concrete and in some

ways untouchable. The test, then, for the reader is of the limit of our Western culture and its

mythic base. The question becomes, in part, how does this story avoid the trap of being

overtaken, mythically and spiritually, by the colonial presence—considering its basis is a myth

from the West—and what this might mean, reflexively, for the myth itself?
 If Ede is really Orpheus and Maria is Eurydice, then we have no chance of knowing them

as real people, but only as mythic archetypes. The narrator and the characters show, however,

that this is not a one-to-one correspondence between this story and the Orpheus myth. One of the

insights that this calls for from the reader, then, is to examine how this story differs from

Orpheus. Another way of phrasing the above question, then, may be: in what ways does Ede fail

to be Orpheus, and how does Maria’s condition differ from Eurydice’s?

Ede’s journey through the city to reach Maria has many parallels to Orpheus’s journeying

through the underworld to save Eurydice. Both Orpheus’ and Ede’s quests end in catastrophic

failure. Part of Ede’s failure, which is much different from Orpheus’s is that Ede, though similar,

is not Orpheus. Orpheus’s wife Eurydice was a nymph whom he charmed with his music. Ede’s

music is not charming, nor even very popular. His concerts are “poorly attended” and his

audience “shouted for their money to be returned” (147). He has an album that has sold well, but

his music does not inspire the very trees and rocks to move. Ede is a man plagued with only

“small successes” (156). Maria tells him, later, “In another dream you sat in a dark room,

singing. No one was listening to you except me” (170) highlighting his failure as an artist. His

concert fails because the electricity fails and this indicates another difference between Ede and

Orpheus: Orpheus’s concert was the forest and nature, Ede is restrained by technology, “I can’t

sing till the lights return” (154) he helplessly tells a dream-vision of Maria who begs for a song

to save her. Ede also does not charm Maria, quite the opposite, “when she came to see him, after

a week’s lack of contact...she looked so beautiful and her eyes were so sad that he forgot all

about his petty irritations” (148). She charms him and calms him, but he is clueless about the real

effect she has. Also, when the moment of truth come for Ede to sing a song and bring his love

back from the dead, he gets “carried away with his improvisations” and Maria asks him to stop,

adding, “Or do you think you are Orpheus?” (173), implying that she does not think so. His song
starts well but becomes aimless, a caricature of real music because Ede cannot take Maria or

himself seriously because he “lacks compassion” (Quayson 105).

Ede fails in his quest to save Maria partly because he never fully perceives Maria. They

have a disconnection, a failure to communicate: she is dying from a strange illness and he keeps

trying to kiss her. Before she leaves his house for the last time, the narrator notes, “he didn’t

notice that she had begun to change” (148). Earlier when she came by, Ede, “without asking how

she was, or whether she was feeling better...locked the door and began to kiss her” (148). He sees

Maria, who he thinks of as his Grail in his journey through the city, only as a sexual object.

When she tries to tell him of the visions she has had on her sickbed, he thinks, “She really is a

strange girl.... What did she smoke?” (177) as though her struggles and perceptions are invalid,

caused by drugs. As Quayson comments, “That Ede is a chauvinist is not in doubt” (104). When

he tells her of his acts of bravery through the city to her house, she retorts, “So what? I make that

journey every day. Every single day. On my way home from work” (168). With that we realize

the lie of Ede’s quest. He makes a journey and suffers greatly for his love, but it is not Maria who

is his true Grail, it is only his suffering. He wants pity, preferably in the form of sex. He ignores

her pain and her illness. We get a hint of the illness which kills her as early as the first page:

“after a while she said she didn’t feel well” (147), which Ede dismisses, then as her being “too

soft, too frail, a bit of a spoil-sport” (148) thinking she has faked her illness to avoid having sex

with him. Ede seems to be the male version Dede from “City,” whose sexual appetite drowned

out all other activities in her relationship with Emokhai. The reader understands Ede’s blindness

as a lack of compassion or empathy—necessary requirements for love—and so we know that his

quest will be doomed.

Ede is a man who thinks he has his Grail. His quest is one that he thinks he knows what

the outcome will be. He imagines himself as the hero that the other characters have failed to be—
the Orpheus who will save his Eurydice. However, what we saw in the other stories was that the

quest for the Grail as the character sees it is a delusion and that the true quest is a quest of greater

perception, greater knowledge. Ede, on the other hand, avoids those who might give him insights

because “he was scared of the visions they might evoke” (158). He is not in control of his own

physical perception, like when “It struck Ede that he had been absent-mindedly staring at the

soldier” (159) who gives chase to flog him. A little later, he mistakes a homeless man laying on a

rubbish pile for a dead man. To him Maria is “enveloped in a haze, slightly beyond

comprehension” (161). Yet he sees her everywhere, all through the ghetto and in his dreams. She

is the knowledge that he yearns for, but cannot come to grips with. He understands no more

about Maria at the end of the story than he did at the beginning. His moment of revelation comes

too late. “For a moment his eyes clouded and in the ethereal mist Maria came to him, luminous

in a white dress. When his eyes cleared he felt different” (177). This is Ede’s moment in which

he realizes that Maria is his quest, not the possession of Maria, as he had previously thought.

However, immediately after this newfound perception, Ede finds out Maria is dead and after that,

he is killed.

Ede is one of three characters who die in SNC and the only one who experiences no

afterlife. The afterlife of his life was the journey through the hell of the “infernal ghetto” (161),

but his true Grail, knowledge, remains out of his grasp. The only motion he makes toward true

knowledge happens so close to the end of his life, that it is useless. Ede’s death is at the hands of

the market women, paralleling Orpheus’s death at the hands of the Thracian women. Ede’s death,

however, is a just death—he is punished for his lack of perception. So deluded was Ede that it

takes him until it is too late to realize, as we have seen in the other characters, that his Grail was

not the true Grail. He has some talent, as a musician and some bravery but by expending his

efforts in a false direction, his quest becomes an anti- or at least a non-quest. He gets, instead of
the Grail he thinks he deserved—which no one really gets—and instead of the Grail he should

have gotten—new knowledge and a deeper understanding for Maria—nothing except a brutal

death.

The answer to the question we posed, then, is that this story avoids the trap of being

spiritually and mythically invaded by Western ideas by recasting the Orpheus myth in a unique

way, with an African ghetto substituted for Hades and a complex female character substituted for

the archetypal Eurydice. This gives the reader a chance to rethink that myth—to make it less

untouchable—as well as think about the new ideas in this story independent of that myth. It is

possible that this story illustrates that Orpheus himself was no great hero, but a coward too afraid

to make the real sacrifice to spend eternity with his love: suicide. Perhaps Orpheus’s talent, like

Ede’s was really a waste, a means to achieve a selfish end.

We have seen what happens when a protagonist, Arthur, finally must accept and deal with

his Grail without the proper tools to deal with it. Ede’s journey is, in this sense, a regression from

Arthur because Ede is too close-minded about the possibilities of Maria to understand that there

is knowledge there to obtain. He lacks not only the skills to reach his Grail, but also the

necessary perception to see beyond the false Grail. The narrator opens the door for the reader to

see how a true Grail can dance in front of a person’s eyes without his even realizing it. Orpheus

had his chance to integrate what he learned from his journey into his life and he chose the way of

the selfish hermit, for which he was punished by death. Ede gets no time to reflect on his failure,

only for the briefest moment does he see what he has let slip away and then he is killed. The

narrator does not explicitly call Ede’s death a punishment or make any judgments on the killing;

however, the reader sees the parallels the narrator has established and has the objectivity the

narrator has provided to be able to see cause and effect, should the reader choose to.
 Door 6:
School of Hard Knocks—A Test of Experience

The title of this story, “What the Tapster Saw,” makes it clear that perception will play an

important role. The story’s opening establishes a safe distance from the narrative: “There once

was an excellent tapster...” (183) gives the story an immediate, as Quayson puts it, “folktale”

feel, telling us that this story will be of “a mythical mode instead of a realist one” (Quayson 116).

This is a safe distance because it gives the obvious escape from the text that we have not had yet

in this book. If this is just a folktale then the characters are just archetypes, not real people, and

thus they are not like us—only examples of humans instead of actual humans. Happening this

late in the book, it seems that this ending is a chance for the reader to escape the harsh realities

we have so far witnessed. This narrator opens the door to allow the reader to cast all the previous

stories in this same light, as simple folktales. However, we have already seen that this sort of

distance is a method of maintaining objectivity, not a method of dismissal, so it seems to be the

wrong move to dismiss this final story in this way. Instead, we can examine the real purpose of

folktales: to tell people something about themselves they did not already know. In other words,

to teach people a lesson about the way the world works. Our test is against the experience, both

the experience of reading the other stories and the experiences we bring to the book from the

outside world.

The tapster’s journey into the underworld starts very early. He dreams of dying as the

story opens. After his guide, Tabasco, rejects him, he has no choice but to go back to work. The

tapster, lacking a guide, is not sure what his dream means, he “managed to forget his dream by

the time he fell asleep” (184) and thinks no more on it. He does not perceive it as prophetic, or

important enough to keep him from his day’s work. When he gets to the edge of the forest where
he intends to tap, he sees a sign that reads: “DELTA OIL COMPANY: THIS AREA IS BEING

DRILLED. TRESPASSERS IN DANGER,” which he stares at “without comprehension” (184).

The tapster cannot see the obvious danger. Later, after he has died, he sees another sign of

warning: “DELTA OIL COMPANY: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PERSECUTED” (185) that he

ignores and winds up at the river where he suffers at the hands of unseen forces. In the midst of

this, the tapster has his moment of temporary blindness caused by, “the morning sun, striking

him with an oblique glare” (184). This blindness causes his fall and his death, and after this he

sees the second sign that he ignores. The reader realizes that the tapster is not one who will easily

change his perceptions. To him, the denizens of the Other-world are jokes. This is a lesson that

the reader already knows; having journey through the land of nightmares and reality with Arthur

and the land of the dead with N, we know that the Other-ness of these stories is an expression of

harsh reality.

The tapster, while in the clearing of the underworld, receives several communications

from a strange voice whose speaker he never sees. The first thing the voice tells him is “don’t

turn round” (185) which his impulse is to obey. Given that he receives no knocks on the head at

this point, he seems to have chosen wisely. However, this correct choice is followed by his

laughing at “ecstasy” (185) on the face of the turtle that looks like Tabasco, which makes it look

“positively fiendish” (186). This action earns him a knock on the head. He laughs again with the

same result. The knocks make him feel like “the substance of his being” (186) is dissolving. We,

the reader and the tapster, do not yet know what to make of these knocks on the head, but it

seems clear that they are the reward of improper behavior. The tapster is learning, as the reader is

constantly learning, that without a guide in the land of the Other, we are bound to suffer

misgivings and misperceptions and that only by learning from those misperceptions can we

develop a truer understanding of the Other.

 The second instance of knocks on the head comes when the tapster “abused the place, its

terrible inhabitants, its unchanging landscape” that he is “unable to escape” (187). This implies

that neither laughter nor cursing is an appropriate response to the tapster’s situation. His

perception, finally, begins to change. He learns patience, he learns “not to listen to the birth

groaning within the eggs” which are the product of him and a strange creature he never sees. He

learns “that when he kept still everything else around him reflected his stillness” (187). This

seems to mean that the tapster can manipulate this world around him, but it takes patience,

restraint and close observations. This reflects the reader’s knowledge of patience, as we learned

in “City.” Empathy with the Other and climactic action can be slow in coming, but the stillness

can speak to us much as the action.

The tapster’s lessons are not over yet, though. He has to relearn a previous lesson with

the third instance of knocks on the head. He crawls into the borehole that houses some of this

world’s strange inhabitants and sees a snake that laughs and looks “so ridiculous” that “the

tapster laughed as well” (190). This time the knocks on the head “put him out for what could

have been aeons of time” (190) and when he comes to, he finds his perception changed, so that

when he leaves the borehole, he sees that the man he had passed on the way in who “had died

reading the bible upside-down” looks “exactly like him” (190). Perhaps the knocks on the head

are harder this time because this is a lesson that the tapster should already have learned: not to

laugh at the creatures of the afterlife. If they are, by inference, spirits, then the things they do are

beyond the tapster’s simple understanding and are not the subject of jokes. Whether the changes

of perception in the tapster after the knocks on the head are significant or not we do not know,

but we know that he is noticing things he did not notice before. Even simple things like the fact

that the dead man he sees looks like himself apparently have to be beaten into his head.
 The next instance of knocks happens shortly after he escapes the borehole. He decides to

pass the time by telling himself stories, “but he found that whatever he told himself that was

subversive was simultaneously censored by the knocks” (190). This is a new rule for the tapster,

but something is beginning to change in him. When the knocks come now, he no longer fears

them, instead “he counted the knocks. He grew used to them” (190). This implies that he is not

stopping his subversive story telling, but merely accepting the knocks he is receiving; his

behavior is no longer changed by the knocks. This is especially clear in the next exchange

between the tapster and the voice. The voice asks him, “Do you like it here?” to which he

responds “No” and then he waits for a knock, but “it didn’t arrive” (190). He has not learned all

the rules, just yet, but he is starting to sense when he says something wrong. The difference here

is that the tapster is telling the simple truth and the voice seems to recognize this. Perhaps as a

test of his knowledge, the tapster again speaks against the voice, this time contradicting the voice

when it tells him “you humans only understand pain” (191). The tapster “waited for a knock. It

came” (191). His contradiction of the voice this time is not the simple truth since, despite the fact

that the tapster is growing used to the knocks, his behavior has still changed as a result of them,

just as the reader has had doors opened by the text that we can use to develop our own

perceptions and truths.

The final instance of knocks on the head comes as the tapster exits the world of the

afterlife. As the voice promised, “we will have to beat you out” (190) and so he receives several

knocks on the head, releases a mighty sneeze, and wakes up. His awakening is demonstrated as

another instance of temporary blindness: “A blue cloud passed before his eyes” (194) and reveals

Tabasco—the real one. As we have already seen, these moments of blindness do not, as they did

for Saul, denote complete reversals of perception, but only the beginning of new sight. The

tapster still has a lot to learn, but he has also learned a lot in his quest into the afterlife. The
differences in the tapster’s journey from the other journeys we have seen is that the tapster had

no guide and no clear Grail. What he learns along the way is that the afterlife and the spirits are

no laughing matter and that they have power and authority over even humans. This is his change

in perception and, although he may not realize it, his true Grail.

Beyond being a demonstration of the true Grail, the ones all the other characters have

really been searching for, this story also demonstrates the limits of seeking the true Grail. The

tapster does not know that this is the object of his quest, maybe not even by the end. His final

words to the mysterious voice are “Thank you” (191), indicating he has learned something, if

only to pay attention to what the spirits are telling him. However, since we do not see scenes of

integration for the tapster, we do not know if the tapster takes these lessons to heart or continues

in his carefree existence. This is the connection that the reader is left to make. We have seen, in

SNC, spirits in the afterlife as well as spirits in the real world and many of them are threatening,

but many more seemed to want to help the people who came across them. We do not get a scene

of integration in “Tapster” because, as the title clearly demonstrates, this story is only about

revealing his perception. The challenge given by this lack of integration is to the reader. These

stories have shown the doors of perception to the reader; it is up to the reader to integrate those

perceptions.
 Exiting the Underworld:
The Missing Explanations: The Reader’s Grail

We stated earlier that there are four parts of a journey. There is the entry into the Other-

world, the selection of the guide, the challenges and the integration. The reader has entered the

Other-world by reading the stories, the text is the guide we have selected and the challenges were

interpreting the images and motifs that recur throughout the book as well as those unique to each

story. We discovered that what was missing in each of these quests throughout SNC was the

scene of integration. Now we have entered all of the rooms and looked at the doors within. The

reader is nearing the end of his or her own quest and we are now ready to complete our own

journeys with the integration that Okri has denied us. By theorizing what the true integrations are

for each character in this story and what the reader brings to the story, we can get a sense of our

own journey completed.

Omovo is a boy of indeterminate age; however, he appears to be a young, preadolescent

boy because he does not have thoughts of sexuality that mark normal adolescents, although he

does have some of the rebellious tendencies. However, the average reader is probably past

adolescence and so has access to information that Omovo does not. In this light, the woman in

the veil, given the absence of Omovo’s mother and the mysteriousness of her veil, seems to

represent both the maternal and sexual side of women. She is everything he wants to know about

women and represents the potential for Omovo to reach sexual maturity. However, Omovo

misses this opportunity—thankfully so—as the woman fights back against the soldiers. More

than likely, had she not spit in the soldier’s face when she did, she would have been raped and

Omovo would have seen. This is not the ideal form of sexual initiation for a young boy. The

reader understands the subtext that Omovo does not and understands the potential consequences
to Omovo had the scene played out as it might have. This is an obscure door in this story, but an

important one that we see implied by what the narrator leaves out—mainly the mother—and

what he puts in—mainly her mysterious nature and the violence of the soldiers.

Omovo’s integration, then, is a door Okri leaves closed. However, we can see that the

worlds of war, sex and power have thrust themselves upon Omovo. Thus, it is less important that

we see Omovo dealing with these new worlds, and more important that the reader understands

that Omovo is merely a boy trying to deal with an adult situation. The narrator asks us implicitly,

by making Omovo’s character so generic and without psychological depth beyond what we

would expect from a normal child, to compare the events in Omovo’s story to our own lives and

ask ourselves what we would have done in this situation with this information. It is a difficult

question and it opens many other doors into the nature of war, violence, and growing up

impoverished that only the reader can successfully answer for him or herself.

What we do get from Omovo, at the end, is inaction. In contrast to the beginning of the

story, where he is “irritated with his father” (3) and later, when his father tells him of eclipses,

“Omovo didn’t believe him” (4). This early defiance, the mark of the early adolescence Omovo

exhibits, is gone in the end. Whatever he or we feel about what has happened, Omovo is no

longer able to guide us. Not only does it pose the door for us to open as we reflect on the story

about how we would react to such a situation, but also Omovo’s story asks us apply this lesson to

all the stories—to become the Other even as we come to recognize the Other of ourselves.

One aspect of “Worlds” that makes it difficult to pin down is the fact that N begins to

experience evidence of a spiritual world before his car crash. Since the crash marks his most

literal trip to the afterlife, it seems that this is the point of his death, but since we have evidence

of strange goings-on before N crashes, his point of contact with the spiritual world is more

ambiguous. His journey is so fraught with nightmarish logic—he gets arrested for crimes
perpetrated against him, he sees literal writing on people’s faces and hands, he gets attacked by

mysterious figures from the forest while on the road, etc.—that it is possible to take the entire

story as a trip through an afterlife that follows N around, becoming more pronounced as more

things happen to him. In this way, the trip he takes to the land of the dead is not a break in the

text, but a continuation of a motif in the text. It could be that N is dead from the beginning of the

story, and that he is like Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense, insisting that he is still a part

of this world. This could explain why he cannot remember even his own name and why

important events of his life, such as the death of his wife, remain hidden from him, unexplored

even when brought to light. It could be a denial of his own death, in denying that the world is

changing around him.

This is a door we are shown by N himself by inferring the meaning of what he encounters

in this story. However, even a more literal reading must allow for a spirituality that is creeping

into N’s life against his will. N’s control over his life slips from his grasp—even his car refuses

to obey him. The writing he sees on first other people’s faces, then his own, seems to imply that

there are stories there available for him to understand that he cannot deal with. Whatever he is in

denial about—his wife’s death, his own death, the horrible state of being in his city—it is

something he keeps actively denying until almost the very end. The integration that the reader

experiences must reflect and connect these disparate parts into coherence, because that is what

humans do and that is what N refuses to do, which the story demonstrates as being the wrong

path for N, and by implication for us. If we can believe N, that there are things which happen in

the reality of his story outside our understanding, then we can start to see the world through the

Other’s eyes. Integration of this story involves a recognition that each individual and each culture

does not have the final say on what constitutes reality. The story is a metaphorical exploration for

the reader on the possibilities that lie outside our own understanding. This story draws on some
Yoruba mythology, some Western mythology, and also creates some of its own mythology

because it denies that even Yoruba mythology holds a monopoly because the truth is something

new and strange—so far undiscovered, and perhaps undiscoverable, by human beings.

As we reexamine “City,” trying to determine what the integration for the reader on this

leg of the journey must encompass, we must see where we have already been. The epigraph,

from the Bible, points the way in that it acknowledges truth in Western understanding, but

presents it in a context that is not Western. Like the sorts of things N experiences, the story is an

amalgamation of different cultural ideas, what Okpala calls a “kind of polylingualism that

challenges the centrality of English Language” (104). She goes on to cite an example from The

Famished Road that combines two Nigerian ideas—a kind of malaria medicine, dogonyaro, and

a kind of alcoholic beverage, ogogoro—with an English description of their combination,

“yellow alcohol.” Okpala explains that, “In using such a representation as ‘yellow alcohol,’ Okri

has migrated his native concept into an English vocabulary, while creating ideas that may seem

alien and decontextualized to Igbo and non-Igbo readers alike” (107). This example generalizes

to the stories of SNC as well. We have already seen this in “Worlds” and we get further examples

throughout—perhaps best exemplified by the story “Lights.” These mixed ideas, despite their

initial impenetrability, expand our understanding of what we know by forcing us to investigate

the parts we do not understand further for complete comprehension.

“City” starts with this juxtaposition of the Western parable of the talents and plays it out,

as we have seen, in a city in Nigeria. This story goes on to present other ideas we can relate to:

sex, rape, drugs and friendship. Using more intimate language, we at first assume that the doors

are more open in this room, but the story ends on a such a low-key note, that its difficult, at first,

to see the point. On reflection, we understand that we have just entered a room much more

similar to our own world than either “Shadow” or “Worlds” yet we still must examine the
differences in order to make sense of the situation. Unlike the average Western city, this city is

apparently ruled by a sort of fascist dictator who revels in his own glory. In this context, the two

men sell the only thing they can posses that others cannot, their blood. Marjomi has “richer”

blood than Emokhai and so the hospital is more willing to put his life in danger to obtain his

blood. The reader can see what Emokhai and Marjomi cannot, that this world, though it is the

only one they know, is not the only world that exists. We see pot as a punishment to the user and

to society rather than a reward. We see poverty and selling your blood as acts of desperation

rather than liberation. It is this contrast that we must integrate, as Western readers, into our

understanding of these two men. The world contains not only spiritual differences—which are

some sort of mixture between Western, African and something else—but also cultural and social

differences, which mix those elements. Thus, the reader sees a familiar Biblical story in a new

light, with new insight brought by combining Western ideas, African ideas and individual

imagination.

What happens, then, in “Stars” is a combination of all the above ideas. Arthur is trapped

socially, culturally, economically and spiritually. His upbringing in the village of W. left him ill

prepared for the more Western context of the city. He makes due, but nightmares persist in

torturing him. This room, for the reader, is a nexus of the ideas we have already explored; it

brings in pieces of each of the previous stories and contrasts them with each other. The reader

feels ill at ease in each setting—Lagos and W—and then recognizes that this is true of Arthur as

well. While we might recognize that there are people in our world who, like Arthur, fall between

the cracks of civilization in the West, we see those people as atypical. Arthur is not atypical in his

world. Several other people he meets have the same life, and the average person he sells to are

not fringe, but the norm. What seems atypical is typical and this is what the reader comes to

understand, by the end. The sort of existential misery that Arthur finds himself in the end is not a
result of his being in a postcolonial country, but of his living in a time where the dominate

thought makes the typical atypical. The room we inhabit with Arthur is intimate and forces us to

see how we all struggle with similar issues and how we are all in danger of falling through the

cracks of a society that does not have time to cater to anyone but the elite.

The penultimate story, “Lights,” puts us in a bigger room, that of the myth. It is tempting,

for the reader, to isolate this aspect of the story and focus only on how this story is similar to or

different from the Orpheus myth. What happens when the reader begins to integrate the findings

of this story is that the passage at the end throws a wrench into this view:

Deep in the marketplace, amid all the cacophony, a woman sang in a voice of agonized sweetness.
In Ede’s street the electric bulb swayed in the breeze. The dogs barked at the dust. The wind
sighed over the rooftops. Neighbours were quiet, and couples had made up their quarrels. Ede’s
mother stayed up that night, listening to the frogs croaking all over the marshland. (179-80)

Orpheus never had a mother, or if he did, she was some abstract goddess, not one who stayed up

waiting for him when he did not return after the Thracian women had their way with him. This

small, intimate scene of peace at the end gives the reader time to reflect on the story that we have

participated in and gives a quiet image of a woman intimately connected with our Orpheus-like

character. In this we realize that the story of Ede and Maria is not a myth, but a story of people.

In seeing the myth play out in Lagos, Nigeria, it comes closer to home and presents a truer

understanding of human beings—which perhaps was the initial purpose of the myth. While

Quayson’s assessment, “since the urban condition is a function of arbitrary political, economic

and institutional structures, [Ede] cannot recuperate a voice adequate to the task of alleviating

Maria’s condition” (108-9), rings true as a summary of Ede’s conflict, the other thing we, as

readers, learn from this story is something about the nature of love.

Is it love that makes Ede pursue Maria through Lagos? Is love the reason Ede’s mother is

sitting, alone, listening to the frogs? This intimate, though mythic, story, asks these questions for

the Westerner about these characters and about Orpheus’s character. Often, we take for granted
that Orpheus and Eurydice’s love was ideal, but this story questions that assumption. Beyond

that, by combining this evaluation of a well-known myth with some of the social and political

struggles of Nigeria, this story universalizes these questions. Where, in the previous stories, we

saw rooms combining elements of spirituality, social policy and politics, here we have an

assessment that combines Western and African ideas about love into a unique understanding of

the most personal of human emotions.

The leads into “Tapster” which draws back from the previous, more intimate, look at

characters to the more objective view we saw in “Shadow” and “Worlds.” Quayson compares

this story to one by Amos Tutuolo, The Palm-wine Drinkard and his Tapster in the Deads’ Town

(116).7 Tutuolo is famous in African literature for telling primarily African myths or very

folktale-like stories (Quayson 44). The difference here is that Tutuolo always included “an

affirmation of the titanic stature of the hero” (Quayson 119) where Tutuolo would show how the

hero’s journey affected his normal life. This would be the scene of integration that we have

already seen is absent in each of these stories. This story marks the end of this book and so the

integration for the reader includes not only an understanding of this story, but also an

understanding of the journey of reading the book.

We, again, see elements that this story is combining Western and African beliefs. The

tapster sees a dead man reading the Bible as physical evidence that this is still taking place.

However, this story, unlike the others, gives us a way out. There is a door in bright red colors at

the far end of this room for those who are skeptical. We find out, at the end of this story, that the

tapster has been in Tabasco’s room. This is a perfect explanation, if the tapster was merely in a

coma and not dead, for his seeing Tabasco’s face on the turtle in the land of the dead. We also

see, in the end, that Tabasco has a shrine with “two green glass eyes” like the snake in the

afterlife and “two turtles in a green basic” (194) which sit on a fountain, very much like what
He also shows the numerous differences between these two writers. His claim is that Okri pushes the folktale genre
7

much further than Tutuolo did.

greets the tapster on his arrival to the underworld. Even the second sign he sees from Delta Oil

Company could be an unconscious re-interpretation of the first sign that he probably passed by

again as he was taken out of the field where he fell. This ending tells us that it is OK not to

believe any of the fantastic images we have seen so far, that we are free to return to our normal

lives with no integration. There’s the door, if we want to walk through it.

This door, however, is a trick. We know that not all the images we have seen, not even all

the stories so far, are easily explained in terms of the supernatural—which must, in our rational

way of thinking, have rational explanations. Nothing remotely supernatural happens to Marjomi,

Emokhai and Omovo or even, one could argue, to Arthur. So, even if we pass through this door,

we have things that we cannot explain. Not even if we, instead, pass through the door marked

“postcolonial” can we explain away everything. The integration of this final story takes place

after the integrations of all the other stories and so already the quest has transformed the reader—

even if the reader decides, like N, not to examine his or her experience. We may already have a

hint of the truth of the matter: Arthur’s nightmares that failed to restore his “capacity to feel,

dream and imagine” (Smith 46). With the tapster, we do not know if his experience restored his

capacity, but he, along with the reader, now has the tools to do what Arthur could not. What this

story provides is a way of examining the experiences of the other stories and this story itself. It is

a learning process through which we integrate old and new, familiar and different into a new

synthesis of understanding. If we take away nothing else, we still have the memory of experience

that becomes a point of comparison for our remaining experiences.

This is why the “postcolonial” label does not fully explain these stories. Okri does not do

what many have done before him and reject this experience, or lament it, or question how to

return to something more “pure.” Instead, he confronts these challenges head on, integrating

these ideas into a new idea—a new world-view—that is valuable both for an African reader and
for a Western reader. This book practices, not just preaches, unity of ideas and deeper

understanding of interplays of modes of thought. This is a strange, new room we find ourselves

in—like the tapster—and is fruitful to explore in its own right.

 False Grails:
Recognizing the Transformation

What emerges from this study of journeys these characters undertake and the perceptual

changes they undergo is that, in every case, the Holy Grail that they seek—the immediate goal in

front of them—is a false one. Whether they are seeking to have their eyes opened or not, this is

the result of their quests. When they try to shut their eyes, they find them forced open again as

the mystery and majesty of life refuses to be ignored—should they, like N of “Worlds” persist in

fleeing, they wind up dead, which is merely the beginning of a new journey. For the reader, the

implications are slightly different. The Holy Grail the reader seeks is meaning, but the stories,

the very words that compose them, are all false Grails. We seek in literature and in these stories

solid truth but find disconnected ambiguities, which are, themselves, a form of truth. Unified

meaning remains elusive, but the reader’s perceptions open to new worlds, to ways of seeing the

world as the Other, be it strictly African or not.

Christopher Okigbo writes, “We carry in our worlds that flourish / our worlds that have

failed” (epigraph of SNC) and this is true, necessary. It may be, in fact that our worlds that

flourish are our worlds that fail since only by failing to reach the Holy Grail—the false Grail—

we desire, do we continue to strive for newer and better Grails. As Campbell puts it, “the two

kingdoms [the land we know and the “darkness” beyond] are actually one” (217). The ultimate

prize, according to Campbell, is to become the “Master” of both worlds (229). However, being

the Master is, for the reader, like finding unified meaning: it is constantly illusive. None of the

journeys in Stars of the New Curfew ends satisfactorily—few end with even a hint of

conclusiveness—but each gives us a glimpse of striving, a hope that we can at least move toward

mastery of both worlds and that this movement, this quest, will enrich our lives. It must be a
constant movement because what we have learned is that if our Grail is clearly defined and found

then our lives become a computation, without strife or tension, but also without the hope that

strife and tension give to improvement and advancement.

Ato Quayson, despite many great insights into two of these stories, remarks that though

these short stories “can be discussed fruitfully on their own, we cannot draw conclusions as to

their full significance without turning to the novels [The Famished Road and Songs of

Enchantment]” (120). His book seeks to study transformations in Nigerian writing and for his

purposes, this may be true; however, this notion that Okri’s stories are useful only as tools to

evaluate his much more popular novels is one that he shares with many other critics. There is a

similar notion that these stories are useful only in what they tell us about Nigeria and the

“postcolonial” experience.

I reject this idea, since all literature leads to insight into the mind of the Other, even when

we ourselves are that Other. It is trite to say that the only important aspect of these stories is the

specific Other they tell us about. It denies the reality of another human being because it pigeon-

holes Okri’s writing into only being about living in Nigeria and only about war, rather than being

about universal currents that human beings share. It makes the stories mere voyeurisms, mere

informational expositions on the current state of Nigeria in the postcolonial world, different than

the more “valid” forms of literature from the West which touch on issues of philosophy, art, love,

etc.

Of course, one could argue that my points would not be possible if Okri did not write

from the standpoint of the Other—if he were not so acutely aware of his Other-ness in Western

culture. This may be true, but it denies the Other that is present in, for instance, Gravity’s

Rainbow or The Things They Carried8 or any of many books written by Westerners who feel

outside of average Western culture. True there are many things in Okri that relate back to specific
I picked these two works because they are firmly “postmodern” in that they employ lots of discordant images and
8

metafiction in their telling, the point is that any work I could have named would be equally valid.
Yoruba and African folktales and religious practices, but my point is that this does not detract

from their universality. Okri blends Yoruba myth, Western myth, African experience and Western

experience into something fresh which teaches us about being from those different traditions, and

ways in which we are all Other, we are all united in that we have perceptions that can and must

change as we experience new facets of life.

The reader of this book experiences strange new worlds and then, when we examine the

text closely, we see that these strange new worlds are really only a doorway into knowledge of

others, and the aspects of life not easily explained by more realistic literature or science. As

Derrida says, “culture is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is

different from itself” (13)—meaning that each of those aspects of reality contains tensions and

conflict. By reading this book, we open ourselves to that change and to those experiences and we

come to realize that Derrida was right and they were already there, just waiting for someone to

shed new light on them.

It is easy to see these stories as “postcolonial” because the man who wrote them is from a

country that was a colony of Britain. The term implies a struggle for identity, for socio-political

solidarity, in a world of existentialist fear of choice. The word has also come to mean something

about isolation, communities of people in fear of their neighboring communities, in fear of the

Other. In some cases we see these places, such as Nigeria, as worlds that, to this point, have

failed. However, what this terminology implies is that the state of “postcolonial,” of being ruled

by an oppressive Other, is a localized one, one that belongs to people living in such distant and

strange places as Nigeria. It fails to recognize the postcolonial condition of the world, of all

communities, because all communities “carry within [their] worlds that flourish / [their] worlds

that have failed.” Every place on earth is one ruled by the Other, including within ourselves

because we are all torn and ambiguous—we are all shades of gray, not black and white. To give a
piece of literature the label “postcolonial” is an attempt to separate the experiences of the

literature from our own experiences, to look at it as outsiders, as Others, and to try to glean what

we can about a foreign place, making sure to remind ourselves constantly of the distance

between us and them. It makes us into voyeurs, peeking into a world that is not our own and

asking what hardships the poor people of this world suffer, and taking a bit of satisfaction in

thinking about how different the Other is from ourselves. This is the true fallacy of labels.

It is also, for the time, a necessary fallacy. It is necessary to create a category to put new

literature into so that we can introduce it into the realm of the institution and be accepted when

we study it. However, it is a term that we must then immediately push against, expand the

boundaries of. In doing so, in seeking for this Grail of inclusion, we also must recognize the

limits of our boundaries as Americans or British or what-have-you, not just the boundaries of

postcolonial. These stories ask us, in our own quests, to recognize that falsehood of our Grails

and to strive forever better Grails, to “learn to read...‘otherwise’ (autrement), to hear within...the

stirring of other possibilities” (Derrida 57).

 Bibliography
Works Cited

Aizenberg, Edna. “‘I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial

Hybridity.” World Literature Today 73.3 (Summer 1999): 461-6.

Armstrong, Andrew. “Speaking through the Wound: Irruption and Memory in the Writing of Ben

Okri and Festus Iyayi.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13.2 (December 2000): 173-

83.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Derrida, Jacques, and John D. Caputo. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with

Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham UP, 1997.

Hawley, John C. “Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Post-modernity.” Research in

African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 30-9.

Hemminger, Bill. “The Way of the Spirit.” Research in African Literatures 32.1 (Spring 2001):

66-82.

Nnolim, Charles E. “The Time Is Out of Joint: Ben Okri as a Social Critic.” Commonwealth

Novel in English 6.1-2 (Spring-Fall 1993): 61-8.

Okpala, Jude Chudi. “Deterritorialization, Black British Writers, and the Case of Ben Okri.”

BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review 6.2 (2001): 97-113.

Okri, Ben. Stars of the New Curfew. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos

Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997.

Smith, Anna. “Dreams of Cultural Violence: Ben Okri and the politics of the Imagination.”

World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000): 44-54.

Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and

Novelists. Porthsmouth: Heinemann, 1992.

Works Consulted

Balzer, C. D. “Mme-dolph and the Question of (Postcolonial) Art.” Commonwealth Essays and

Studies 18.2 (Spring 1996): 13-20.

Okri, Ben. “CA Interview.” Contemporary Authors. Vol. 138. Ed. Donna Olendorf. Detroit: Gale,

1993. 336-41.

Tunca, Daria. The Ben Okri Bibliography. 28 February 2005. 15 January 2005.

<http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/uer/d-german/L3/boindex.html>.