SOURCE: A review of Stars of the New Curfew, in VLS, No. 79, October, 1989, p. 8.

In the following review, Wood discusses Okri's use of language and thematic focus in the short story collection Stars of the New Curfew.

Once, when traveling in Africa, I asked a friend whether he ever confused the languages he knew. "Do you sometimes, for instance, find yourself speaking English when you're thinking Twi?" No, he said: "Languages to me are clothes, and I'm a natty dresser wherever I go."

Ben Okri sports his languages, too. Born in Nigeria, Okri lives and writes in London, the dying heart of Nigeria's erstwhile oppressor. Stars of the New Curfew, his second collection of short stories, measures the remains left behind by colonials—and the decay administered by their African inheritors—in a distinctly African-English idiom, a choice combination of Nigerian and European styles, politics, and myths. The...