Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

An analysis of Ben Okri’s “The Incandescence of the Wind” from An African Elegy (1992), republished in Rise Like Lions (2018) necessitates some exploration of the socio-political and biographical contexts in which the poem was generated. Wole Soyinka provides the background to the former in a personal narrative of the Nigerian crisis in his The Open Sore of a Continent (1996). The double entendre of both ‘incandescence’ and ‘wind’ in Okri’s elegiac protest poem suggests a discussion of diction, an aspect integral to Okri’s poetic aesthetics; the poet’s concern with linguistic exactitude is voiced throughout his multi-generic oeuvre. In Astonishing the Gods (1995), for instance, he surmises the act of naming causes things to disappear, and his lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge – later published in A Way of Being Free (1997) – is entitled “Beyond Words”. My subtitle, also taken from Okri’s first anthology of poems (An African Elegy 1992), points to the ameliorative guiding vision underpinning the Okrian oeuvre; the line occurs in a poem tellingly entitled, “Stammerings on Bedrock”. These aspects inform this interpretation of the poem, the characteristic theme of which is imaginative redemption of suffering and where the ugly facts of power politics become subservient to the Imaginatio Creatix.