One of the nice thing about working for a university is that there are always speakers and events, which are often free or not very expensive for students and faculty members. Last week, I was able to attend a reading and Q&A session with the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and I wrote down a few thoughts that I wanted to share here.

First, it’s always fascinating to hear good writers talk about their process. I’ve only read a little of Okri’s work so far, but what I read was an essay on writing that was very smart, so I wanted to hear what he had to say. And I found that his perspective on being a writer from Nigeria was similar to what I’ve heard from at least some Central European writers. His view on writing felt right for Hungary as well — at least for the way I write about Hungary.

Okri lived through the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960, which resulted in mass casualties from both the war itself and the resulting poverty and starvation. The war followed a long period of British colonial rule, so the people of Nigeria suffered the double trauma of colonization and civil strife. It was a very different environment than the one we were experiencing at that reading, sitting in conference room chairs arranged in neat rows, in a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that showed the Charles River at night, with the lights of Cambridge across the river and Boston to the right of us, as the river bends. If you looked carefully, you could have seen the gold dome of the Statehouse. It was the serenely privileged light of a city that had not been in a war for two hundred years, and as I sat there, I remembered the spring of 2022, when I was in Budapest and the war started just one country over, in Ukraine.

First there was an introduction by the novelist Ha Jin, then a conversation, then a reading, then a Q&A. Here is what Okri said that struck me enough that I wrote it down, and I scribbled for some of the conversation and most of the Q&A. The Q&A always ends up being the most interesting part of these sorts of presentations, and it is always left for last, so it’s usually done in a rush — which is unfortunate.

Nigeria, Okri said, according to my notes, is a palimpsest of realities — like Hungary, I would add. In that sort of situation, Western conventions of storytelling don’t work. When you have sedimented realities — that was the word I wrote down, and I think it came directly from him — you can’t tell a story in a linear way, so your choice of structure is already poetic and fantastical. Which means (I think, if I’m transcribing and explaining correctly), that sort of reality can only be represented, realistically represented, in a non-Western, non-linear fashion. He mentioned disliking the term magical realism, and I’ve noticed that everyone described as writing magical realism dislikes the word — it’s only people who themselves claim to write magical realism, usually from a solidly European tradition, who seem to like it. And he said that he started with his mother’s stories. That was his original experience of narrative.

I wrote down a series of statements about story. This is a sort of paraphrase:

Stories are the oldest human technology. They organize the chaos of existence. They create a clarity within that chaos, allowing us to see the world. They simplify, and in doing so, they give us a path forward. Stories are also a storage mechanism for cultural wisdom. They function as coded realities. They hold time — he paused, then said, “They hold the essence of time” (this is a direct quotation, I believe). I think I understand this in several ways. Stories hold the time of the story itself — they contain something that happens, a particular narrative, like a cup. They capture time, but they also take time. A story is not a painting: to experience it, you need to spend the time to read it. I feel as though this is somehow very important, but I’m not yet sure why. It has to do, I suppose, with the distinctive form of the story — it is not even a poem, which happens all at once. A story is the closest artistic event to a human life, which also takes time. Then he said, “I’m fascinated by stories that are impossible to tell,” and, “The deepest things are impossible to find a narrative for.”

When he was asked about what we face right now, the overwhelming problem of climate change, he said, and I’ve written this down on a card so I can remember it:

“We either transform or we perish.”

Write that down, because you’ll find that you need it in your own life, but we also need it as a civilization. Either we transform as a global society, or we perish, taking a lot of other species with us. We’ll find out which it is in the next few generations.

The most important idea for me, in terms of writing, came during the conversation, and then I asked about it in the Q&A. It was the idea of an aesthetic code. The aesthetic code of a story, said Okri, is the code by which the story can best be understood. For example, he wrote a story and later realized that it could best be understood as a series of gaps. This reminded me of what Henry James wrote about his novel The Golden Bowl: that when he started writing is, he envisioned it as a movement. Everything would revolve around Milly Theale without touching her. She would be the delicate center of the novel, but the action would move around and around her. When I first read this, I was fascinated by the idea of starting a novel with a movement. But I think many stories can be envisioned in this ways — they can be visualized. They have a particular shape, like sculpture or dance. In the Q&A, I asked him if he was aware of the story’s aesthetic code while he was writing it, and he said that sometimes, not always — that understanding it was like grace, but a grace that is earned through hard work. Which I think is a wonderful thought.

The other most important idea is something I’ve thought about before: it’s of the story as fractal. Okri did not actually call it that — he just said that the story should contain everything, just as reality contains everything. In reality, you look at one small thing (say, the way someone walks), and it contains so much — the whole history of that person, the things that have happened to them. Actors know this. When a really good actor develops a character, she thinks about how that character moves, and the way a character walks down a street can project the essence of the character. The small part contains the whole. Okri implied that stories functioned like this — although they show only a small part of reality, they somehow contain all of it, and the story itself is a fractal in that a small part of it also contains the entire story, so that a sentence can express the essence of that particular narrative (just as a character’s walk can express the character). I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, and I’m also not sure this is what Okri meant, because so much of my own thinking is wrapped up in it. But I remember reading, once, that a Jackson Pollock painting from his mature period had that fractal structure, whereas one from his earlier, less mature period did not, and it affected how I think about writing.

He also said, and here I’m paraphrasing again, that a novel walks in a constant dialog of oppositions. This reminded me of how I used to talk about writing when I was teaching in an MFA program. I used to say, what are you putting in tension in this scene? What things are pulling against each other? It doesn’t matter how much action you include, if nothing is in tension. Without that tension, your reader won’t feel anything, won’t be interested in anything. Things need to be in opposition to each other, whether it’s the galactic forces of good and evil or two friends having a disagreement.

Finally, he talked about dreams as a parallel reality, and described writing as making dreams real for people. I think this is important. Our minds can’t deal with the world all the time. We are created to shut down for part of every day, so that our minds can go do something else. They can go elsewhere. I have found that my dreams are often ways of processing my daytime anxieties, which is probably why I so often dream of being lost in either large cities or their equally large transit systems. Or more recently, in enormous airports. Stories can function in the same way. They are waking dreams that help us organize and deal with the anxieties of our existence. They create meaning for us.

And my final note from the reading had to do with The Odyssey. I didn’t write down the specific context for this statement, but toward the end of his talk, Okri said that it encapsulated a basic human narrative: “We’re all just trying to get home.”

I think that’s true, but I think we’re also all just trying to create home, to find our families, belong and find meaning for our lives. And that is what stories help us do.

The Famished Road is the book for which Okri received a Booker Prize.