BEN OKRI
BEN OKRI
Fight the power: the novelist knight tells us why we need new stories
Words by Jonathan Wright
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Portrait by Matt Bray
ACCORDING TO SIR BEN OKRI, PEOPLE TEND to “look a bit confused” when, thinking they live in a democracy, he tells them about his new novel, Waking The Warriors. “I feel as if the book was written under a cloud of censorship,” he says. That’s a big statement. In an era when accusations of cancellation are too easily thrown around, often by those on the extremes of political discourse, it seems important to tease out what Okri means. “[I’m describing something] more than cancellation,” he says, “but a kind of cloud hanging over us, and we can’t quite say the things we want to say.”
In part, Okri is talking about how it has become so difficult, even semi-criminalised, to protest over particular issues, such as global heating and Gaza. But he’s also referring to the quality of our public discourse. “Language has become flattened,” he says, “and the biggest flattening of language has come about through this whole period of the last seven or eight years of alternative truth – the whole notion now that a lie can be a truth, and that there can be many different kinds of truths, many of which absolutely oppose and indeed cancel out one another.”