Ben Okri on climate crisis, the purpose of writing, and what we leave behind.

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Ben – thank you for talking with me. Tiger Work, your collected short works on climate crisis, has a great sense of coherence to it. I’m always interested in how – and why and when – collections are drawn together. So, why these pieces, why in this way, why now?

The coherence comes from the depth of intention. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, pondering how best to write about this huge and troubling subject. It is a subject that awakens in us primal fears and evasions. It is daunting, nightmarish, and hard to make sense of, all at the same time. So I thought I would use all the powers of literature to try and tackle it. I wanted to use its diverse forms and the power intrinsic to each to take the reader on a cubistic journey round the issue of the climate crisis.

Seeing these pieces gathered together, their shortness is marked – structurally, but also on a line level. It’s particularly conspicuous in your poetry, with lines often only small handful of words long. Could you talk a little about form, and shortness of form? 

We don’t have much time. The climate crisis has done something to time. We have a short time gap to turn things around and get the environment back on an even keel. The shortness of the forms and lines reflect the shortness of the time we’ve got. What I need to convey is so urgent that the long form feels oddly inappropriate. The existential nature of the crisis has compelled me to question the way I write. In one of the essays, I talk about a writing without waste. The writing has to match what is needed: truth, simplicity, a kind of Spartan beauty, passion, love, vision.

Has climate crisis always been in your work, in a way?

Only to the degree that I have always been sensitive to nature, to the air we breathe, to pollution, to exploitation, to deforestation. Some critics claim that a short story of mine in a volume called Stars of the New Curfew, a story called ‘What the Tapster Saw’, initiated a genre called petro-fiction. But it’s only recently I felt the need to face the subject head on. And it is a tough subject to tackle. It strains the limits of aesthetics. Can one write about the environment and it to still be art? My answer is yes. Absolutely. It can be art and fire.

I remember discussing ‘What the Tapster Saw’ and ‘petro-magic-realism’ in my now very-out-of-date master’s thesis. The thesis is out of date, I suppose, for the same reasons of short time that you mention above; it was too interested in the aesthetics of writing about climate and not enough also in the material conditions of writing about climate; too bothered with the art, not enough with both art and fire.

Would you say that your “purpose” for writing (to use that limiting old way of asking a writer why the write, when the answer is of course “because I am a writer” – sorry!) has changed over the decades?

It changes as I change, but it remains the same as I remain the same. I write for truth, for beauty, for justice, for playfulness, for innovation, for pleasure, to change the world, to stop the breath, to reveal, to question, to discover…

You’ve spoken elsewhere of the need for ‘a radical act of mass consciousness’ that would jolt us from the numb, passive, unthinking path to climate disaster we’re on. What might that look like, for you? And what function might literature and storytelling have in it?

I don’t know what it would look like. But I know what it would do. It would be like the spirit of solidarity and courage and awareness that was there during the Blitz. It would be a world where we are all pulling together to cut down on our emissions and our waste. It would be the beginning of a new civilisation, where we no longer do things that contribute to the death of our species. We would be thoughtful and aware. Our commerce would be creative, our government would act not only for the national interest but that of humanity as a whole. We would love our lives and have our virtues and vices, but we would be conscious that what we do impacts beautifully on the world. We wouldn’t be so selfish and naïve. For we are naïve in thinking that we can go on polluting in individual and societal ways and the environmental equation will still come out alright. I believe we are at a crossroads. One road continues our suicidal relationship with the earth all the way to hell. The other road leads to a wider humanity, a new species. That’s the starkness of the choice. When we know what has to be done, we will do it. I think it takes a crisis to bring out the best in us. But we don’t want to wake up to the crisis too late, when there is nothing more we can do. That is what literature can make happen. It can take us there, to the edge, to the hell we don’t want. It can show us a new road. It can make these things real and so empower our imagination and our will.

I think Tiger Work points to how what we consider “freedoms” are all contingent on, and dwarfed by, the idea at the collection’s heart. As someone with long involvement in the PEN movement, can I ask how, for you, the totality of climate crisis intersects with the idea of free expression, of the freedoms to read and write, listen and tell?

The first loss of freedom of expression passed into law was in response to climate activism. We no longer have the right to really protest. There, straightaway, is the intersection. Turns out that to talk properly and truly about climate change you need freedom of expression. Climate crisis and liberty are linked.

It feels to me that much of your work explores what we leave behind (to the world, yes, but also of the world). What do you want to leave behind?

Creative celebrations of truth, of clarity, of possibilities. Dreams of greater realities. A measure of our freedom.

Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first hand the consequences of war, and London. He has won many prizes over the years for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

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