Some Thoughts on the Stoku as a Form

Some Thoughts on the Stoku as a Form Ben Okri (bio) 1. The Stoku is an amalgam of the short story and the haiku. 2. It disregards the seventeen syllable requirement in favour of the two other conditions of the haiku, the weather, or atmosphere, and the flash, or brush of perception. 3. It is the smallest unit of fictionality. 4. It is story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, paradox, or vision. 5. Its nature is enigma as it finds tentative form in fiction. 6. By means of the Stoku that which was unknown reveals a translated existence. 7. Its origin is mysterious, its purpose revelation, its form compact, its subject infinite. 8. Thus worlds unknown can come into being in a lightning flash from the fertile darkness of the mind. 9. Stokus are serendipities, caught in the air. Reverse lightning. 10. A Stoku is designed to make us doubt reality. 11. It has three conditions: brevity, a dream-like quality, and a prosecution of reality. 12. Its secret purpose is to open up consciousness, to liberate it from the filters that make us perceive reality as we think it is, and to restore to consciousness a measure of its fluidity. 13. The Stoku is not an accident, but a crafted intuition. It has simultaneous perspectives. 14. The interpolation of unreality into reality, or the interleaving of reality into unreality. 15. Its mode is irony, its essence is ambiguity. [End Page 1044] Ben Okri BEN OKRI—novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and essayist—was born in Minna, Nigeria, but spent his early years in London, while his father studied law. Okri later returned to the UK to study at the University of Essex. He is author of more than eighteen books, including Incidents at the Shrine, The Famished Road (winner of the Booker Prize), An African Elegy, In Arcadia, Starbook, Tales of Freedom, and The Age of Magic. He has also received such literary prizes and awards as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Premio Palmi. From 1991 to 1993, he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1987 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2001 he was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire). In addition to being a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, he is also a Vice President of the English Centre of International PEN. He lives in London. Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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