{"id":15840,"date":"2020-10-14T09:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T07:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=15840"},"modified":"2021-04-01T11:04:31","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T09:04:31","slug":"dangerous-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2020\/10\/14\/dangerous-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A reworking of an earlier book titled The Landscapes Within<\/em>, Dangerous Love<\/em> (1996) is a novel by Ben Okri, the first Black author to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991 with The Famished Road<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, during the 1970s, Dangerous Love<\/em> follows the story of Omovo, a young man who finds himself trapped in a life that is anything but easy: his mother is dead and his brothers escaped a home controlled by a recently remarried, violent and disillusioned father. The only things that are keeping Omovo together are his two sources of love: the art of painting and Ifeyiwa, a beautiful woman who, despite reciprocating his feelings, is already married to a man she was forced to accept as her husband. Art and love are the two biggest forces in Omovo\u2019s life, sources of light in a world that is still fighting against the ghosts of the past and the heavy burden of all the lives lost during the Biafran Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art plays such a relevant role within the novel that Dangerous Love<\/em> could be considered, more than a Bildungsroman<\/em>, as a K\u00fcnstlerroman<\/em>: the term refers to the artist\u2019s growth into maturity, both from the perspective of his artistic productions and of his understanding of Art as a tool of liberation for society at large. At the beginning of the novel, painting is an unconscious act for Omovo, a relief and an escape from the pain of reality, but one that does not hold a real purpose. After a painful process of personal growth, however, Omovo will come to conceive of Art not only as an individual act of emancipation but also as a form of resistance against a corrupted society that still has not atoned for the fathers\u2019 faults. The Nigeria described by Okri is a country that has been destroyed by years of colonialism and civil war, a country that seems incapable of finding its identity again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this sense, the novel also explores the conflictual gap between generations: on the one side, there is the old generation of Omovo\u2019s father that has been humiliated and exploited throughout decades of colonial rule; on the other side, there is the new generation Omovo belongs to, the one that will be the future of Nigeria. However, the youths find themselves trapped in a limbo of cultural ambivalence and mimicry, hating their white oppressors while at the same time desiring to be part of Western society, blinded by wealth and promises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As above mentioned, the novel is also the story of the love between Omovo and Ifeyiwa: what first started as an innocent friendship, soon turns into a dangerous passion. A dangerous love, as the title recites, because of the violent antagonism of Ifeyiwa\u2019s husband, but also because love can be a force that takes control of our lives, making us forget and sacrifice our own selves. Dangerous Love<\/em> is also a bit of a choral novel, constellated by various characters whose different stories all have one thing in common: a desire for redemption from a past that still seems to command the present. A story about an individual Bildung<\/em> that translates into a nation\u2019s collective attempt at salvation. And a story about the power of love and art as tools for the construction of a cultural identity finally liberated from the ghosts of past tragedies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, during the 1970s, Dangerous Love follows the story of Omovo, a young man who finds himself trapped in a life that is anything but easy: his mother is dead and his brothers escaped a home controlled by a recently remarried, violent and disillusioned father.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":15836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[15,185,199],"class_list":["post-15840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-ben-okri","tag-nigeria","tag-novel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15843,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840\/revisions\/15843"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}