In Honour of Oral Tradition : The Historical Category and Technique of Aesthetic Transfer and Its Decolonising Effect in Ben Okri’s Starbook

Abstract

Imbuing contemporary literary traditions with African oral material is a fashionable and important practice, which gives African literature its unique epistemic texture and aesthetic sense. Contemporary writers of African literature borrow from African legends, myths, proverbs and riddles, and other folkloric material, thus realising a new approach to literature production. This article explores Ben Okri’s novel, Starbook, in search of how the writer advances the utilisation and transformation of folkloric material in the production of his narrative. It reveals the widespread utilisation of oral material in written African literature (with Starbook as an example)—aesthetic transfer. The article presents aesthetic transfer as a method that advances African oral material in archival and transformative ways, keeping the material alive and relevant. In Starbook, it appears in two categories, i.e., i) the literary category of oral tradition in the form of formulae genres such as riddles, parables, and proverbs; ii) the historical category of oral tradition in the form of narratives based on myths, legends, and history. The article focuses on the second category. It draws from the conceptual work of Charles Bodunde who says that current aesthetic practices among Black artists indicate a growing interest in the techniques of the oral artists who situate their art in the African social and cosmic settings. It adopts the textual analysis method, which is qualitative by nature, to explore Okri’s Starbook. The findings are that Okri harnesses certain material borrowed and moulded after guides gleaned from oral tradition such as myth, legend, history, and some stylistics or formulaic proclivities of storytelling.