Art An Antidote in Dangerous Love by Ben Okri

Ben Okri (1959) is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, aphorist, playwright, and writer of film-scripts. He is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist, considered one of the foremost African authors in the postmodern and post-colonial traditions, Okri has always maintained the categorization of his work as Magical Realism. Okri’s sixth novel Dangerous love (1996) is the portrait of an artist as a young man. It is the reworking of Okri’s early novel, The Landscapes Within (1981). In this novel the painter protagonist Omovo is in a disturbing slumscape, oppressively real. Dangerous love tells a love story with subtle political and artistic freedom undertones. It narrates the story of Omovo, a painter who is the lover of Ifeyiwa, a young woman living in a poor neighborhood of Lagos. The aim of the main character is to become an artist or to practice his art which insists him to go through very difficult processes and thorny paths. Art is placed above life where the values of bourgeois society are rejected. There are some aspects which makes him develop the impartial observation and creative expressive power required of an artist. He is heartbroken and feels guilty by the experiences he gone through. Painting makes him approach life in a different dimension. Painting serves as an antidote for Omovo to forget and leave everything behind in his struggle with life.