Writers Talking Writers: Ben Okri on Christopher Okigbo and Katie Kitamura on Natalia Ginzburg

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who influenced them. This month, we spoke with 1991 Booker Prize recipient Ben Okri (The Famished Road, The Age of Magic) about the groundbreaking Nigerian poet-soldier Christopher Okigbo and 2021 National Book Award nominee Katie Kitamura (Intimacies, Audition) about Italian essayist and novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s powerful fusion of the personal and the political.

Ben Okri on Christopher Okigbo

What drew you to discussing Okigbo?

He’s one of the most powerful African poets of the 20th century, and there's something mysterious about him. He only published one book of poems—Labyrinths—which, fascinatingly, shares a title with Jorge Luis Borges. I don't know if Okigbo was aware of that, but there's lovely kinship in that for me. It's just the one volume of poems, and it's a mysterious volume ranging from childhood and ritual African rites of passage to poems about the Nigerian Civil War. We never really knew him well. He was gone by the time many of us grew up. He died in the '60s, so he is an enigmatic figure.

There is a long tradition of the "poet-soldier." Do you think he fell into that category?

Yeah, he's very much in that class. He’s very much a Byronic figure, because Byron is another one who was a poet and a soldier and died in a war. It's a very rare class of poets. There’s not that many. And Okigbo went to war willingly. He wasn’t like the Great War poets of England and the Second World War poets, where their poetry was an expression of the horror of war, and in some cases the unwillingness and involuntary quality of war. He knew what he was doing. He went to this war almost as an act of sacrifice, which is what puts him in the Byronic class in a way—dying for a cause that you believe in.

I read that he was particularly enamored with Virgil, and you can really see that influence, but set within his own context.

He had this great breadth of knowledge of poetry and culture. He was the one who introduced me in a very intimate way to the Epic of Gilgamesh. And as you said to Virgil, to Picasso…but the reference is always very coded and quiet and subtly done. He’s never noisy.

What do you think writers can learn from him?

First of all, you have to understand that he was a poet's poet, and in the early part of his career, the most famous part of his career, as one of the most celebrated poets in Africa, there was something about him that was majestic and mysterious and enigmatic, and there was something slightly disdainful about him. He was the kind of poet who would say, I do not write poems for non-poets. Non-poets, don't bother to read me. You're not gonna get this. He very famously said,"There's no such thing as an African writer, there’s only good and bad writers." He made many of these universalist statements early on in his career, aloof and elevated in his idea of the poet's calling as one of the most noble and untouchable things. And then this aloof poet takes to the gun. Wow! What a turnaround. What a change. What a transformation.

So what can one learn from Okibo? What can other poets learn? I think you learn a tremendous sense of commitment and deep sacrifice to your vocation as a poet. For him, the word transfigures the world. For him the word is invested with the quality of myth. For him, culture, creativity, and utterance are all hewn of the same spiritual cloth. He was a ritualist. He tells us to drink from our traditions, but never forget to be of the world. And he manages, always, a great beauty, a great lyricism, and great clarity and great mystery at the same time. Half the time people can't make out what he's saying in his poems, and yet they're so clear. For me, that’s one of the highest kinds of poetry. Poetry that's clear, but at the same time mysterious.

Katie Kitamura on Natalia Ginzburg

What drew you to Natalia Ginzburg’s work?

I think for me, it's her interest in language as a system of power, and her recording of family and national history. You see that very clearly in a book like Family Lexicon—one of her most important books—which tells the story of her family and at the same time a larger story of the experience of the Second World War through the vocabulary of the family. And I think the way she positions that individual experience against this very large-scale backdrop of history is really powerful, and I think it is what we're all trying to do but only a few really manage.

There’s a lot of debate about whether we should separate an artist’s biography from their work, but Ginzburg’s writing is intertwined with her life, politics, and her work as an activist. What do you think about that?

I think that's one of the most important and vital things about her. Another writer who pairs with her is Anna Seghers, who wrote the great novel Transit. Her novels were written during the war, as it is taking place. For me, I'm such a slow writer. I metabolize things so slowly, and when I look at writers like Seghers or Ginzburg, and I think about the speed and the authority with which they wrote about what was taking place around them in the moment, it's very humbling. Ginsburg is always writing for context, and it's impossible to read her work outside the context of her politics and activism and the historical events that she was a part of.

But I suppose the thing that I admire is that she's never didactic. There is nothing polemical about her writing, really. I think she understands that there are a lot of different ways to write about politics, and there are a lot of different ways to write about history, but I think what the novel does really well is look at history and politics through the lens of individual experience. And I think she does that through her very careful observation of very ordinary things—like sitting in a cafe or reading the newspaper or writing a letter or doing your grocery shopping. And I think one of the things that that does is it contextualizes everything we do in every life within a great political context.

Which of her books do you think is a good place to enter into her work?

I think the essays are excellent. In terms of the fiction, the novel that I've returned to the most is The Dry Heart. It’s a very short book. It comes in at around 80 pages. It’s one of the most vertiginous, absorbing pieces of fiction I've ever read. It has this extraordinary opening with a woman killing her husband, and then it drops back into the past, and it kind of moves very slowly back to the present to show how the protagonist arrived at the point of killing her husband. And it's absolutely caustic in its observations of love and marriage as an institution and as a form of coercion and entrapment. I think the book that it reminds me of the most is Tove Ditlevson’s Copenhagen Trilogy, the third volume, Dependency. It kind of eats you alive, as a book.

What do you think writers should learn from Ginzburg?

I think I would return to that question you asked earlier, about political context. One of my favorite pieces of information about Natalia Ginzburg is that she has a small part in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and I find that somehow completely mind-blowing. But of course, it absolutely makes sense, because she was deeply engaged in a literary and artistic and political community in Italy at the time. She worked for a very long time as an editor at [the publisher] Einaudi, and she also worked on an anti-fascist newspaper, and she wrote from a context that she observed meticulously and critically and never didactically. And I think we're all writing from a place. You could be writing historical fiction, you could be writing climate fiction set in the future, but you're still really writing from the place of now, and it shows up in your work. And I think being faithful and being conscious and being attentive to that fact is something that I always hope student writers will gain from reading her work.

So often, especially now, with writers it can feel like, if only I could get rid of the mess of my everyday life and find time to write my fiction, then I would write a better book. And I think something about looking at Ginzburg… she had a family, she had—even apart from her very deep political and artistic and literary commitments—she had a lot happening in her life, and she wrote from inside of that. And that's something that is very moving to me, and it is a very good reminder.