"You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones"
About this Quote
Childhood here isn’t a nursery of comforting folklore; it’s a competitive writers room. Okri frames Nigerian storytelling as a social contract with teeth: keep the room interested or lose it. That small rule - you “weren’t allowed” to repeat what everyone already knew - turns narrative into a live economy where attention is earned, not granted. The intent is partly autobiographical, but it’s also a manifesto: originality isn’t a romantic flourish, it’s a communal discipline learned early.
The subtext pushes against the lazy idea of “traditional” cultures as merely preservers of inherited tales. Okri reminds you that tradition can be an engine for invention. The prohibition on familiar stories doesn’t reject the past; it demands transformation. In a postcolonial context where Nigeria is often reduced to a handful of exportable narratives (poverty, corruption, conflict, “resilience”), the line reads like a quiet refusal to be summarized. If everyone already “knows” your story, it’s probably because someone else has been telling it for you.
As a poet-novelist shaped by Yoruba-inflected cosmology and political upheaval, Okri’s point also lands as an ethics of imagination. Dreaming up new ones isn’t escapism; it’s survival training. When reality is unstable, invention becomes a way to regain agency, to re-author the terms of experience. The result is a portrait of storytelling not as decorative culture, but as a formative pressure that teaches risk, improvisation, and the courage to surprise.
The subtext pushes against the lazy idea of “traditional” cultures as merely preservers of inherited tales. Okri reminds you that tradition can be an engine for invention. The prohibition on familiar stories doesn’t reject the past; it demands transformation. In a postcolonial context where Nigeria is often reduced to a handful of exportable narratives (poverty, corruption, conflict, “resilience”), the line reads like a quiet refusal to be summarized. If everyone already “knows” your story, it’s probably because someone else has been telling it for you.
As a poet-novelist shaped by Yoruba-inflected cosmology and political upheaval, Okri’s point also lands as an ethics of imagination. Dreaming up new ones isn’t escapism; it’s survival training. When reality is unstable, invention becomes a way to regain agency, to re-author the terms of experience. The result is a portrait of storytelling not as decorative culture, but as a formative pressure that teaches risk, improvisation, and the courage to surprise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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