Editorials
What Happens When Ben Okri’s Poems Are Given to Children
In a Peckham car park beneath a working railway, Okri performed three decades of writing alongside eighteen young people who had met only the day before. The result was tender, at times terrifying, and deliberately unresolved.
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Twenty-eight hours earlier, they had never met
Just below the Bold Tendencies rooftop, with its view across London, rattling trains sound throughout the Multi-Storey Car Park, home to the Concrete Concert Hall. Eighteen young performers come out to joyous applause, among them Alfiah Jade Brown, the poet who led the cast. They all wear T-shirts designed by Grace Wales Bonner and Ben Okri. Across their seats we see a range of ages, heights and faces. They seem relaxed, though their first rehearsal together was only twenty-eight hours earlier, when they met for the first time.
The stage is framed by eight multicoloured paper lampshades by the artist Rosemary Clunie, illustrated with childlike drawings. Clunie is Okri’s long-time collaborator: she painted the twenty-five images for The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age (2017), the book that shares the evening’s title, and here her images glow into the room. Their red, orange and yellow tones, alongside rainbow-coloured bulbs, shape the evening with a childlike simplicity, yet Okri’s words hit me hard as he reads his introduction. He speaks of the state of our world and of growing up in Peckham, including being racially attacked; at this, the commuter trains screech over his speech.
Okri reads surrounded by the young performers, his headset microphone letting him walk further into the audience, slowly moving from left to right as he reads. A young girl on the right speaks a line from the first poem, Finding the Present, from A Fire in My Head (2022); then a taller boy on the left reads the next. Most of the performance follows this format, with chorus and solo readings from the young performers.
Silence can also be noisy
In Breathing the Light, from A Fire in My Head, Okri reminds us of the life and death of George Floyd. He reads, “It was a kind of love your dying, a kind of gentleness”, and the trains screech even louder than before. Okri raises his voice to compete with them. At the end, the room falls silent. A woman in the front row dabs her eye with a tissue and a man on my left whispers “thank you”.
Soon afterwards, Okri acknowledges the passing trains as he walks into the centre of the room after a costume change. He is wearing a long white mantle loaned by Wales Bonner, a departure from his usual all-black uniform. After the performance I asked Okri about it; he told me the mantle gave him “a new command as a writer”. Twice during the evening the dancer Charlotte Jarvis appears briefly; at one point she erupts from the side of the room, arms shooting in different directions, almost striking the speakers beneath a ceiling built for cars.
Hope comes through young voices
The children’s high octaves ring through the car park. The quickened voices of the older performers bounce against the slower voices of the younger ones. A young girl urges us, “Can’t you hear the children weeping? Our love must save the world.” She sings her solo confidently, and the collective ruffle of poetry pages gives a sense of their small community. A strand of hope is offered here through voices still developing, voices that may shape their futures differently. Then the young people stand up to leave the stage, and Okri asks, “Why did they have to leave?”
“Lean in with our spirits”
When Part Five begins, we understand their departure. Until now, the works Okri has performed have come from 2017 to 2022; in Part Five he turns back to An African Elegy (1992). Here he speaks of politics and poverty, and performs phrases like “monolithic accidents on hungry roads”, a painful reminder for me of the fatal losses on neglected Nigerian roads. The trains passing add depth to the poetry, and as he looks at us he gesticulates to weight his words.
Later in the evening, before reading Boko Haram, from Prayer for the Living (2019), Okri asks us to lean in. At first I’m not sure what he means; we are already hanging on his words. He asks us to “lean in with our spirits”, because what follows may be more painful and troubling: an account of a young suicide bomber in northern Nigeria.
The children return, but the questions remain
The young performers return, bringing levity to the cool night, in a room where we have heard words of hope but also of destruction and the human consequences of unfair systems. It is terrifying to hear these poems delivered through the next generation, yet strands of hope run through their young voices. In a final reading, from Time to Be Real, Okri wishes for “A better world new, a world renewed”, and I’m reminded of his introduction. In the simplicity of the Concrete Concert Hall, Okri’s words may seem simpler than they really are. They’re easy to get into you, but once there, difficult questions are left unanswered.
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