ABSTRACT
Heeding the nostalgic imperative, Ben Okri revisits the trauma of growing up amid Nigeria’s internecine strife in The Landscapes Within (1981), “Laughter Beneath the Bridge” from Incidents at the Shrine (1993) and the title story from A Prayer for the Living (2019) that captures the “perfection of chaos” as he reassesses the Niger Delta region of his birth in an imagined journey towards death from starvation, thus closing the hermeneutic circle of the magnetic pull of memory. Situated in its historical-political context, the chapter interrogates the polemics of theories of memory, Marxist petro-fiction and the so-called “magical realism” in three stages that represent Okri’s positive choice to define himself as a Nigerian writer in keeping with his appraisal of the significance and worth of African ideological constructedness. For Okri, memory operates as a typological circle where internal and external perspectives fuse, and where recollection overcomes the barrier of temporal and spatial remoteness of events. The conclusion seeks to summarize the role of the writer as a conceptual artist, highlighting the beauty, complexity and diversity of the stories and the ways in which Okri uses symbolism to create a dialogue between memories of his African heritage and the influence of modern Western values.
