Ben Okri's Writing: A New Genre
By Rachel Giesen
According to Parekh, Jagne, and Davies' bio-bibliography Postcolonial African Writers, Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Nigeria. He lives in London and received his higher education from the University of Essex (Pushpa Naidu Parekh, Siga Fatima Jagne, and Carole Boyce Davies 364). Ben Okri's "What the Tapster Saw" is a short story about a man who taps palm trees to make palm wine. One day, he falls out of his tree and into a coma, where he has vivid, violent dreams for a straight week, all related to the corruption of his country.Before I get to the story, however, I would like to talk for a moment about palm trees: Jennifer Wenzel says they used to be a lucrative business for a very long time, since approximately 1480 (Wenzel 452). Palm wine went bad relatively quickly, but palm oil and palm kernels were traded with England since they were extremely versatile. Palm oil was used as "an industrial lubricant, an edible oil, and in the making of soap, tin, and candles" (Wenzel 452), where the kernels were a food source and the trees themselves were used as building materials. In the Delta, "jars of palm oil even functioned as currency" (Wenzel 453). However, oil extraction has grown so explosively, and palm production has decreased drastically as a side effect, that Nigeria "became a net importer of vegetable oil in the 1980s" (Wenzel 453).
With the knowledge that palm tapping is somewhat of a dying art, we can get back to our Tapster and his nightmarish visions. In his dreams, the Tapster sees a snake, "roseate colored," that slithers over everything and seems to rule the alternate reality of the dreams. When the snake went swimming in a "viscous and unmoving river," the river became "clear and luminous" (Okri 185). Periodically, the Tapster encounters billboards that advertise increasingly violent messages from oil companies against local citizens. The oil companies are seen blowing up or cutting down the forests multiple times. At one point, they eviscerate the wood to get the oil, but leave the site after they cut open the earth, leaving oil and animal bones spewing out from the ground (Okri 189).
Voices are heard throughout the land that talk to each other as if the Tapster isn't there. Whenever the Tapster responds to the voices, he is in danger of being punished with blows to the head, but he can never predict them. He becomes afraid to act when these voices finally do seem to include him. He tries to run from his environment, but fails; he tries to destroy his environment and is punished by the voices. One of the voices provides him with thoughts to replace the ones that had been knocked out of the Tapster with all the blows, such as "the bigger mouth eats the smaller head" (Okri 191). After providing these thoughts, the Tapster thanks the voice.
Faulty bombs from an old war that never detonated suddenly explode, ruining bridges and roads (Okri 188). Lone travelers aren't safe and what's left of the roads are littered with skeletons. People the Tapster knows are secretly executed, killed by bullets named for their victims (Okri 189). He passes a man once who died while he was reading the Bible upside down, and when he passes the dead man again on his way back, he sees that it's himself (Okri 189-190).
Three turtles appear together several times, one of which has his herbalist friend's face, and they discuss ridiculous things, like how many moons there were that night and what amount of stars were in the sky at the time (Okri 192-193). It seems to the Tapster that the turtles talk about things they have no knowledge about, yet have all the authority over. At the end, when the Tapster finally wakes up in his herbalist friend's home, he sees two turtles in a shrine in a corner (Okri 194).
It is clear to the reader that all of this is symbolism: the plot is painted over with vivid parallels to current, realistic problems going on in the Niger Delta. The oil companies in Nigeria, namely Shell, destroy local forests and bodies of water to gain their black gold, and yet leave their wealth spewing out of the ground. They leave signs up that restrict the freedoms and autonomy of the local peoples and cultures. The snake is probably oil itself, as it is roseate colored and rules over all. The dreams are never split between night and day because the gas flares burn day and night in the Niger Delta.
The voices are the government and the oil companies that discuss money and trades without consent of the local people. Like the turtles, the government and oil companies don't know what they're doing, but they have all the authority anyway. When the local towns are included in negotiations, they are afraid, because they think they will get taken advantage of or they suspect that the decisions won't last. Not only that, but where the voices of the government and oil companies speak propaganda to the local people, the Tapster is given thoughts that are "better" than the ones he came into the dream world with.
The Tapster has no power over anything in his dreams, and neither do any of the local tribes of the Niger Delta over their land. Famous people are executed with intent, or "felled by bullets with their names on them" (Okri 189). Christianity is both difficult to understand and entirely unhelpful, as the Tapster sees when he finds himself dead with an upside down Bible (Okri 190).
Not only are the events of the Nigerian Oil Crisis influencing authors, but authors are influencing the events, too. "What the Tapster Saw" is an obvious reaction to the Oil Crisis. Everything in the short story is a symbol for something else happening in the nonfictional world, and it is a perfect example of influential literature. It is meant to alert readers who aren't living in the direct area to the issues at hand, and it does a wonderful job.
Ben Okri's "What the Tapster Saw" is best described by Jennifer Wenzel as "petro-magic realism," a subgenre of magic realism that focuses on oil and/or economic problems in a culture that has a history of magical stories. Petro-magic realism is told with a fantasy setting or plot (Wenzel 450), which definitely describes the story above.
For better or worse, Nigeria, and places like it, aren't going back to the way things were before oil companies came in. Politically, with the new leaders in government and with the growing wealth of the country that the oil boom has brought about, Nigeria is changed. Petro-magic realism is proof that the culture has changed, too; a genre adapted from traditional story telling to reflect current times. However, this genre can be used (and has been by Ben Okri) as a way to carry current events to a wider audience.
Works Cited
Okri, Ben. "What the Tapster Saw." Stars of the New Curfew. London: Vintage, 1989. 183-194. Print.
Pushpa Naidu Parekh, Siga Fatima Jagne, and Carole Boyce Davies. Postcolonial African Writers. Greenwood Press: Westport Connecticut, 1998. Print.
Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Towards a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 449-464.
