Tiger Work

May 1, 2023
Grave warnings for humankind. Booker Prize winner Okri gathers poems, essays, and tales into a collection that conveys an urgent message about humans' "suicidal relationship with the earth." Each piece reflects the author's frustration over our failure to act in the face of "ample evidence" that we have brought our environment to the brink of disaster. "We are proliferating disease and illness," he writes. "I think it is nature's revenge for strangling her, for tampering with her, and for being divorced from her. We are isolated and rootless in our lack of belief in anything." In one piece, travelers from the distant future explore the "rich evidence of life" on our long-deserted planet. Earth, they decide, was "the most beautiful of the planets that we saw in our journeys across the galaxies," but, sadly, they discern that it had been inhabited by "a rather parochial and tribal species, bedevilled by ideas of race and gender." Another piece reveals politicians' arrogant denials of climate change, while others offer dystopian visions of humanity's last days. One long narrative follows a man and woman as they struggle to reinvent the world that greed has destroyed. "We say that there is a climate emergency," writes Okri. "But it is truer to say that there is a humanity emergency." He beseeches Earth itself to "teach us with your silent wisdom how to live again, how to be simple again, and how to rise to the greatness and sense of universal justice that is our divine inheritance." Artists, especially, should dedicate themselves "to nothing short of redreaming society." To that end, he advocates what he calls "existential creativity": "it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species." He urges "ferocity / To protect our humanity," adding: "Can't you hear the / Future weeping?" An artist's ardent plea for change.

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