Ben Okri's Writing: A New Genre
By Rachel Giesen
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 about palm trees: [introduce source with a signal phrase to provide a booken effect] 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 production has grown so massively, and palm production has decreased so much, 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). It's [the river? or because of the constant gas flaring?] never dark in his dreams. 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 provide him with thoughts that it 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, he sees that it's himself (Okri 189-190).
Three turtles appear 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: there is only a small amount of plot, painted over with vivid symbolism. In Nigeria, the oil companies, 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 suspect that the decisions won't last. Not only that, but the voices of the government and oil companies speak propaganda to the local people, and the Tapster is given thoughts that are "better" than the ones he came into the dream world with.
The Tapster has no power over the creatures 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
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). What adds another layer of depth on this new type of genre is the identity of the author behind the work in question. According to Parekh, Jagne, and Davies' bio-bibliography Postcolonial African Writers, Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Nigeria. He lives in London and got his higher education from the University of Essex (Parekh [include all three authors unless only Parekh wrote this part--then we need a more specific reference to that part] 364). Most importantly, "What the Tapster Saw" relies on "Yoruba narrative and cosmological tradition" (Wenzel 458), when Okri is actually Urhobo. Wenzel believes that Okri invites the idea of a nation-wide identity in literature for Nigeria, instead of tribes focusing on their own stories. [Tie this section more to the purpose of the project. What does Okri's story contribute to our understanding of the Niger Delta and Nigeria's oil economy and history? What Wenzel says about how oil is considered a magical substance promising wealth for little to no work may be relevant, for example. Read Wenzel's other essay too.]
a quotation
[Rachel, I've uploaded four images into the media files, namely one of an oil palm plantation photo, a photo of a palm wine tapster I've also used in the image header (though it cuts too much off perhaps). Feel free to use any of these as you wish (or not) in your page. As I suggested, I'd like to see more about the author, more context on his magic realism, and more engagement with Jennifer Wenzel's essays on the story. Following Wenzel, it might be worthwhile to say something about palm wine and palm oil in the Nigerian/African/global economy as well. For context in relation to our project, it may be significant that Okri's story was written before Saro-Wiwa forms MOSOP.]
Work Cited
Okri, Ben. "What the Tapster Saw." Stars of the New Curfew. London: Vintage, 1989. 183-194. Print.
Parekh, Jagne, and Davies [include first names if you can]. Postcolonial African Writers. [missing place of publication] Greenwood Press, 1998. Print.
Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Towards a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 449-464.
[include additional sources as well]
