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.
