Okri

“The following tales are properly called “stokus.” A stoku is an amalgam of short story and haiku. It is story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox.

It’s origin is mysterious, its purpose is revelation, its form compact, its subject infinite. Its nature is enigma as it finds tentative form in fiction, like the figure materializing from a cloud, or a being emerging from vaporous block of marble.

By means of the stoku, that which was unknown reveals, in the medium of words, a translated existence. Thus worlds unknown can come into being in a lightning flash from the darkness of the mind.

Stokus are serendipities, caught in the air, reverse lightning.

I offer them humbly as tales found on the shore, in enchanted dawns.”

— Ben Okri, Tales of Freedom (2009)

Read a heartbreakingly beautiful stoku HERE.