Like Drinking Water: A Conversation with Ben Okri
Kaya Purchase (KP): The character of Madame Sosostris has a history of being reworked by great writers. There was Auden’s Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, and then T.S. Eliot’s manifestation in ‘The Wasteland’. What was it about this character that so interested you? Ben Okri (BO): First of all, she’s got a great name, right? It was her prophetic role in ‘The Wasteland’ that really interested me. Eliot worked with the novelistic version and made this narrow column of prophecy and irony out of her. I needed a figure like that for the complicated story I was trying to tell about our broken-hearted times, times of war, of the failure of our politics, of the loss of all manner of institutions and rights. In my last book, Tiger Work, there’s a whole section of a long poem that is called ‘The Broken.’ I’m slightly haunted by this concept of brokenness. However, I didn’t want it to be an obviously political thing. I wanted it to be embedded in relationships, so that it doesn’t...
