Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Minna, in central Nigeria. His parents, who were Urhobo and Igbo, took him to England when he was 2, for his father to study law, and returned, to Lagos, in 1966. Two years later, aged only 9 or 10, Ben began attending high school at Warri, not far from Biafra and the civil war (which went from 1967-70). In 1978, he left to study comparative literature at Essex University, and I think the UK has been his home ever since.
The protagonist of The Famished Road (1991) is a young boy, Azaro, the only living son of very poor parents, in an unnamed market town on the edge of a forest. The action, such as it is, takes place over the course of a year – from dry season, through wet – with, in the background, an electoral struggle building up between the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor.
I wasn’t clear what the period was, but then, near the end, Okri talks of “seizing power from the white people that ruled us”, and of “the Colonial Administration” (p. 408-9) which implies we are in the late 1950s, although whether the elections were for the Federal Parliament (in 1959), or for one of the three Regional parliaments, presumably the West (in 1957), is not said.
In any case, Okri is writing outside of his experience both of the times, and of the lives of the very poor. The person(s) who wrote his Wiki entry posits that Okri may have heard about children experiencing visitations from spirits, which Azaro does, from his schoolmates at Warri.
Which brings us to Okri’s literary environment. The Famished Road was his third novel. The Britannica site says of his earlier work: “His first novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), employ surrealistic images to depict the corruption and lunacy of a politically scarred country. The short-story collections Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988) portray the essential link in Nigerian culture between the physical world and the world of the spirits.”
That is, living and studying in England, he begins writing within the dominant postmodern paradigm, but is drawn towards ‘Magic Realism’, which in literature is generally held to have its beginnings in Latin America, with, in particular, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Notable works featuring MR following Marquez, included Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988); and Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984).
Of his African predecessors, Chinua Achebe’s fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), was “a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles”; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s sixth, Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986) seems to be realist, but also about how legends take hold, as is his later Wizard of the Crow.
Of course I am aware that a name other than Magic Realism is needed to describe Indigenous worlds in which life ‘here’ is continuous with or includes the spirit world, but MR is the name the movement had at the time. Rushdie in particular was already incorporating the religious/spirit world into his fiction; and I think the young Ben Okri could see how that might work even more powerfully in an African context.
I have written previously that Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (2023) is one of the great works of abstract literature. I think we may say the same of The Famished Road which barely has a narrative structure at all, but consists of a stream of gloriously described sequences. Reading it is like standing before Picasso’s Guernica – many shapes are discernable within it; it is difficult to ascribe meaning to the overall work; and you are overcome with wonder. There is also some pleasing circularity in the idea that early C20th abstract artists in Europe were influenced by stylized sculptures from Africa (Picasso’s African Period).
How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay.
The voice of the novel is Azaro’s, as he tells firstly of his birth, his unwillingness to leave the spirit world, and then of his life, in a ‘compound’, in which each family has one room, shares a latrine and a bathhouse, and cooks outside in the yard. The other families, with whom he lives so closely, are never named or described, not even the children with whom he must sometimes play.
His parents are Mum and Dad; the old blind man in the house across the street is only ever the old blind man, and a photographer is only ever the photographer. Through the whole 500 pages, the only people named are the owner of the local bar, Madame Koto; and, well into the book, the boy, Ade, who becomes his friend; and Helen, the beautiful young woman leading a family of grossly disfigured beggars. Azaro is ostensibly a schoolboy, but although he mentions sometimes going to or returning from school, it plays no part in the story.
And yet the book teems with people. Neighbours, creditors, country relatives, strangers are forever crowding in to their one room, spilling out along the passage, across the concrete front verandah, and out into the street. As with both Mister Johnson and No Longer at Ease, whenever there is a little money then more is borrowed to supply whoever turns up, with food and drink.
And teems with spirits; working all the time to get Azaro to return; working through Madame Koto and the old blind man; pervading the forest, the road. There is always someone dying, being brought back from the dead. Here it is Azaro, being led home by a spirit
When I thought I could no longer bear the pain underfoot and the hunger, when the roadside became littered with dried corpses, skeletons of babies, skulls chattering rhymed verse, the road changed into a green stream … ‘Soon we will get to the great river,’ said the spirit. ‘Be grateful. When we cross the river there is no turning back. Your companions and the whole of the spirit world and the goddess of the spirit-rivers will have a wonderful banquet awaiting you, because you are their prodigal friend.’
What is the story? Dad works as a lumper, unloading lorries loaded with bagged cement and salt; Mum, makes a tiny living hawking in the street or at a stall in the market downtown. Madame Koto gets Azaro to sit in her bar for ‘good luck’ and feeds him peppersoup and palm wine.
Madame Koto associates with the Party of the Rich, and prospers, becoming the first in the area to have the electricity connected, to get a car. The thugs who drive around the streets canvassing for votes come to Madame Koto’s to drink and pick up prostitutes.
Mum who supports the Party of the Poor is constantly harassed and forced to move on by their opponents.
Dad dreams of being a boxer, the Black Tyger, begins training, constantly shadowboxing; unaware that Mum starves herself to feed him up. There is a fight, out in the street, which he almost loses and then wins; and another in which it is clear the old blind man is holding him back by wizardry. Dad dreams of becoming rich, of feeding the beggars and building them schools.
It sounds like very little and yet there is action on every page. An amazing work.
.
Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Jonathon Cape, London, 1991. 500pp.
Brona has also published her review today – in fact, I meant to post this review next week, but today’s review is not yet ready, not even close – and anyway you might find it interesting to read them together.
Where I discussed Magic Realism you’ll see that Bron says “Okri developed a new writing style he called “trans-realism” or “a realism with many more dimensions” or being “inside and outside of realism”.”
The Australian Legend 