Ben Okri | Every Leaf a Hallelujah and Astonishing the Gods

Recorded February 28, 2022
In conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor of Literature, Yale University, and author of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics
One of Nigeria’s most celebrated authors, Ben Okri is the author of many post-colonial novels, poetry, short story collections, and essays. He rose to international fame in 1980 upon the publication of his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, and is perhaps best known for The Famished Road, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize. A fable about the realities we create for ourselves, Astonishing the Gods was included, almost 25 years after its publication, in the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” list. Every Leaf a Hallelujah, the tale of a young girl searching for a special flower that can cure her ill mother, is a modern-day fairytale written to be read by adults and children alike.
Cajetan Iheka is Associate Professor of English at Yale University, author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature, editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and coeditor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.

[@trishlane3577]

I bought last act of the master artist at a second hand book shop - was just drawn to the cover - - haven’t heard of you before but now can safely say that everything you write feels true - thank you -for nourishing my soul

[@Tubeyoruba]

"The forest has always been for us a home and a place of regeneration, not a place where you go and pick yams .."

[@rosemaryclunie3413]

Wonderful conversation. Ben Okri is always inspiring and magnificent

[@Tubeyoruba]

Women of my world unite
even when the knights
plan to harm the earth
remember that you can ignite
healing from the feelings you share...
(Diary of a Lagos Bobo August 7th 2019).

[@Tubeyoruba]

"Framed in another way should African Poets bother writing beautiful lines about environmental issues? This question is apposite considering the observation made 15 years ago by William Slymaker (2001) when he stated that "there is no rush by African literary and culture critics to adopt ecocriticism of the literature of the environment as they are promulgated from many of the world's metropolitan centers."