Ben Okri’s generational protest poem, “The Incandescence of the Wind”

Abstract

The central premise in this article is that Ben Okri's generational protest poem, “The Incandescence of the Wind”, first published in An African Elegy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) and republished in Rise like Lions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018), seeks to make sense of a profoundly disturbing encounter with contemporary reality through a revisioning of nationhood and poetic responsibility in war-torn Nigeria in 1982. The argument draws on Wole Soyinka's The Open Sore of a Continent (New York: Oxford, 1996) and aligns its poetic aesthetic with Percy Bysshe Shelley's belief that literature can change the world (“A Defence of Poetry” [1821], in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, edited by V. Leitch, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). The article explores the ways in which Okri intertwines the key threads of doomed nationhood and imaginative transmutation to suggest a road less travelled. As a native-born Nigerian poet, he believes he has a responsibility to remonstrate in order to heal. His is a concern for the political pressures that impinge on a nation at war with itself. His ameliorative guiding vision informs this interpretation of the poem, the characteristic theme of which is imaginative redemption of suffering by re-visioning the imagi/Nation.