Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The paper begins with a brief discussion of ’the cradle of civilization’, and an outline of the BA-RA relationship, a pivotal concept that underpins both the generative poem and its migration into a play, seen through the prism of a 4000-year-old Egyptian poem, Sinuhe. This is followed by a summary of the 1875 BCE funerary autobiography. A comparison of the framing poem with Ben Okri’s drama, Changing Destiny, serves to explore the transfer and transformation of key ideas of what it means to be human and the nature of exile and homecoming. The discussion is bolstered by theories of hospitality encapsulated in Merle Williams’s 2020 Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South. I conclude by arguing that despite the four-century gap and the dearth of literary criticism, the ideas in the poem, transferred and transformed by Okri in his drama, resonate powerfully with our times.