A reading of The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022) : Sir Ben Okri’s fire that burns and heals

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Ben Okri’s novel The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022) through the prism of an animist unconscious lens drawing, in particular, from Harry Garuba’s theory of Animist Materialism with its correlative Animist Unconscious. It seeks to show that the animist unconscious may lead to a reenchantment in an age of disenchantment and to a conjoining of African traditional and Western myth. The discussion begins with a brief reference to the historical-mythological figure of Sango, god of lightning in Nigeria, birthplace of Okri and Garuba, by way of explaining the paradox inherent in the cosmological axiom “fire that burns and heals” and to suggest that Sango’s “non-death suicide” and deification signifies a new principle that can unite permanence and change in a reflection of the melding of history (the catastrophe of slavery) and the narrative of resilience and love in the novel. This is followed, first, by pointing to the link between the Sango symbolism and Africa’s historical and cultural heritage and, secondly, by outlining Garuba’s Animist Poetics. The core of the essay focuses on the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the magical in the reading of the novel, where the magical signifies an expansion of consciousness. The presentation argues that Okri writes against the rift of magical realism, a phrase all too often used in critiques of the symbolic mode and alchemical writings of this Nigerian-born Londoner, concluding that the deployment of an animist unconscious lens serves to re-imbue the natural world with its lifeforce, spiritualizing the phenomenal world of Nature and its objects, a strategy that reedifies the reading, accentuating the artistic creativity that immortalizes the mythical tribe of itinerant Master Artists. And, as Alberto Manguel presciently observes in A History of Reading: “We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function” (7). But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?—Denis Diderot (1796)