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This paper assesses positively the important contributions which Ato Quayson and Douglas McCabe have made to the understanding of Ben Okri's The Famished Road. But it questions whether placing the novel firmly in the context of Yoruba orality, as Quayson does, or in the tradition of New Age spirituality, as McCabe does, does not diminish the work unduly. It points out that Ben Okri did not take his Yoruba material directly from traditional folklore but from secondary sources in which the myths and legends of the Yoruba have been modified and re-interpreted and in The Famished Road the original folk narratives are further transfigured by close linkage with the myths and legends of other lands. Similarly, Azaro's chanting of the soft paradisal anthems of New Age travellers does not stand in the novel unchanged; it is absorbed and transformed by the context of a novel which deals with the problems of growing up and willingly accepting the burdens of an adult life. The article concludes, after a careful re-evaluation of leading episodes in the novel, that a broad late twentieth century context of existentialist thought and postmodern fiction is the proper background for appreciating a novel in which the extravagances of African folk art are adapted to contemporary myth of the culture hero.

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TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 26

Ben Okri's The Famished Road: A re-evaluation

This paper assesses positively the important contributions which Ato Quayson and Douglas McCabe have made to the understanding

of Ben Okri's

The Famished Road

. But it questions whether placing the novel firmly in the context of Yoruba orality, as Quayson

does, or in the tradition of New Age spirituality, as McCabe does, does not diminish the work unduly. It points out that Ben Okri

did not take his Yoruba material directly from traditional folklore but from secondary sources in which the myths and legends of

the Yoruba have been modified and re-interpreted and in

The Famished Road

the original folk narratives are further transfigured

by close linkage with the myths and legends of other lands. Similarly, Azaro's chanting of the soft paradisal anthems of New Age

travellers does not stand in the novel unchanged; it is absorbed and transformed by the context of a novel which deals with the

problems of growing up and willingly accepting the burdens of an adult life. The article concludes, after a careful re-evaluation

of leading episodes in the novel, that a broad late twentieth century context of existentialist thought and postmodern fiction is

the proper background for appreciating a novel in which the extravagances of African folk art are adapted to contemporary myth

of the culture hero. Key words: existentialism; New Age spirituality; postmodern Nigerian fiction; Yoruba folklore.

Ato Quayson's sixth chapter in his Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997)

must be the most authoritative study of Ben Okri's prize-winning novel, The Famished

Road (1991). Examining minutely the traditions of oral memory and myth-making

among the Yoruba as these traditions appear in the works of the Yoruba historian

Samuel Johnson, in the prose fantasies of Amos Tutuola and D. O. Fagunwa, and in

the prose and drama of the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Quayson makes

his deductions about the essential structures and protocols of the mythical imagination

among the Yoruba and brings these to bear upon a patient and eye-straining

examination of The Famished Road. Quayson is in no hurry to rush to interpretations

and judgments. Instead he looks closely at the materials and strength of the component

parts of the novel and provides in the process a model of how works of art should be

stripped to the bone and analyzed. If there are reservations to be expressed about this

meticulous study, it is that Ben Okri is, after all, more a Londoner than a Yoruba; and

that in paying so much attention to the sociology of the Yoruba, Quayson runs the

risk of not distinguishing enough between the social ethos and works of art produced

within that ethos.

Ben Okri's The Famished Road :

A re-evaluation

Ben Obumselu

Educated at the University College

Ibadan, Nigeria and Oxford University,

England, Ben Obumselu has had a

varied career. He has recently

published on Chinua Achebe and

Chris Okigbo and been engaged

in community work among the

Igbo people.

E-mail: odenaebele@yahoo.com

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 27

To those who doubt whether Okri's brief residence in Lagos from about 1976 to

1978 and his use of Yoruba folk characters are sufficient reasons to place him firmly in

the Yoruba tradition, Douglas McCabe's "Higher realities: New age spirituality in

Ben Okri's The Famished Road" is a welcome statement of support. For McCabe

postulates that the tradition in which the novel operates is to be found in the very

heart of London counterculture. He argues, to use his own words,

[…] that New Age spirituality – not postmodernism or postcolonialism – is the

most important cultural vector shaping The Famished Road […] that the features

often noticed by critics as distinguishing Okri's abiku novel – the adoption and

deployment of "African" narrative modes and ways of seeing the world, which

exist side by side with "Western" modes and ways; the continual references to

nationhood, elections, and the colonial period, the narrative's main motifs (e.g.,

roads and rivers, hunger and eating) […] – are all importantly determined by, and

subsumed within, New Age spiritual discourse and its attendant politics, so much

so that The Famished Road verges on being a New Age allegory. (McCabe 2005: 2).

There is good reason for this interpretation of the novel. In Books 4 and 5 and again in

the last two chapters, Azaro, the first person narrator of the story, lays heavy emphasis

on a millennial vision of world history and on prophesies of an imminent second

coming. These annunciations, couched sometimes in Pythagorean or even socialist

terms and sometimes in Krishna terms of a deluge of monsoon rains, appear to be

endorsed by Dad and Mum. Azaro even foresees the drowning of Western civilization

in a muddy ditch of its own making (Famished Road, 288). But even so, the novel must

be approached as an organic whole. McCabe seems to mistake Azaro's voice for Okri's

and he forecloses the possibility of a much broader interpretation in which all the

elements which he mentions mutually adjust their functions within an enveloping

imaginative form. McCabe seems also to identify the work of art far too much with a

system of thought in which that work might have some of its roots. To re-direct

attention to the mutual interpenetration and readjustment of one component by

other components in an organic imaginative form, this article attempts a detailed

review of the structure of The Famished Road.

As a starting point, it would be useful to remind readers of a rather obvious point

of literary basics which they would do well to keep in mind. Okri does not have to

believe that spirit children exist in the real world. In all probability, he does believe

that spirits and spirit children are out there. But he must not structure a novel on the

premise of that belief. Objectively, abiku may just be a notion in which West African

societies have taken refuge against the scourge of mosquito infestation and the

endemicity of sickle cell anemia in the sub-region. But a writer who holds this view

could still use an abiku in his work as a fictional convenience to achieve a particular

imaginative effect. In the same way, he could invent a Pegasus, a unicorn, Zeus or a

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 28

magic carpet. He does not thereby invite his readers to believe that these figments of

his imagination exist in the real world. What he asks of them is that they willingly

suspend disbelief as they watch his play or read his story. The signifier in literature is

hardly ever the same as the signified. Soyinka has a great deal to say about Ogun in

his poetry. At one point he refers to Ogun as "my god". But the reader does not have

to ask whether Soyinka believes, in any of the various meanings of that word, in the

god. J. K. Rowling's imaginative world in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a

place of enchantment and witchcraft. But the novelist does not ask us to believe in

wands, spells and magic rings. Defending the use of the fantastic in stories against

puritan attack, Philip Sidney argued four centuries ago that the fictional signifier in

a poem or a story must not be confused with the imaginative truth that is signified.

The signifier could be as fantastic and false as it chooses to be because in that regard

the work of art "nothing affirmes and therefore nothing lyeth" (Sidney 1957: 59).

The Famished Road cannot affirm that spirit children exist in the real world. What,

as a vehicle for experience and not a register of facts, the novel can do is to provide an

other-worldly sensibility, which can feel and describe African conditions with horror

as a spirit exiled for a season "to taste the bitter fruits of time"(338) would feel and

describe them. The novel needs the disgust and nausea which Azaro's point of view

entails. The theme is essentially that of a famished land in need of nourishment and

no interpretation of the novel can stand if it fails to take cognizance of the value of

Azaro's consciousness in the presentation of this theme. In an interview with Jane

Wilkinson (1992: 84), Okri suggests that everybody could be seen as an abiku. He does

not just mean that we all have a spiritual nature. He means also that Azaro's rejection

of his circumstances is bound up with the natural aspiration of the human spirit for

more and more fullness of life. But Azaro is not just disgusted and appalled. He is

unable to understand the human condition. The West African novel of spiritual outcry

started with Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965), Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People

(1966), and Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born (1968). The Famished Road (1991)

takes this tradition one step further by introducing the unusual perspective of a spirit

child as narrator.

Azaro is often lost in the forest, in the streets, in the market and in his nightmares.

Okri tries to fuse Azaro's experience of spiritual anguish and disgust with a criticism

of political and economic conditions. But the two things are not the same. "I was

frightened by the feeling," Azaro complains, "that there was no escape from the hard

things of the world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds…" (Famished Road ,

161). These wounds as the afflictions of poverty and misgovernment are capable of

remedy. As the essential grossness and contingency of the created world, the wounds

are beyond remedy.

Okri shows extraordinary imaginative resourcefulness in the selection and

accumulation of detail to dramatize Azaro's experience of disgust. But this disgust is

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 29

often existential, not political. In the market, for instance, he can hardly bear the sight

of the merchandise on display:

There were stalls of goods everywhere. And filling the air with the smells and

aromas of the market place, the rotting vegetables, the fresh fruits, the raw meat,

roasted meat, stinking fish, the feathers of wild birds and stuffed parrots, the

wafting odors of roasted corn and fresh-dyed cloth, cow dung and sahelian perfume,

and pepper-bursts which heated the eye balls and tickled the nostrils. And just as

there were many smells, so there were many voices, loud and clashing voices

which were indistinguishable from the unholy fecundity of things. (Famished Road ,

161).

The phrase "unholy fecundity of things" is an objection to the riot of things because

they are pointless; and "unholy" is a disincarnate spirit's sneer at the absurdity of all

earthly things. There is perhaps an allusion in this passage to the many occasions in

Le Nausee in which Sartre's hero speaks about "the tasteless obscenity of life" and the

"terrifying and obscene nakedness" of all things. It is with this existential horror that

Azaro speaks of roads, markets, mazes, labyrinths and the nightmares of the world.

His descriptions may refer in an unclear metaphoric way, as they must do, to political

and economic realities in African nations. But the main thrust is ontological. The

human world is an obscene jungle in which the individual is lost and incapable of

achieving rationality. Azaro's complaints about roads repeat, among other things, the

complaints of Kafka's moral pilgrim in The Castle :

The roads seemed to me then [Azaro says] to have a cruel and infinite imagination.

All the roads multiplied, reproducing themselves, subdividing themselves, like

snakes, tail in their mouth, twisting themselves into labyrinths. The road was the

worst hallucination of them all, leading towards home and then away from it,

without end, with too many signs, and no directions. The road became my torment,

my aimless pilgrimage, and I found myself merely walking to discover where all

the roads lead to, where they end. (Famished Road, 114–15).

It will be recalled that in the opening chapter of The Castle , Kafka's hero finds that the

short road which goes to the Castle "did not lead up to the castle hill, it only made

towards it and then, as if deliberately, turned aside…."(Kafka 1957: 17). The reference

is not directed to political conditions in Africa or anywhere else. It is about the mystery

of the road of life. Another similar passage will establish this point.

It was very dark; I was hungry, wet, lost; and I heard voices all around me, the

twittering vicious voices of my spirit companions wailing in disappointment. I ran

till the road became a river of voices, every tree, car, and face talking at me, cats

crossing my path, people with odd night faces staring at me knowingly. At crossroads

people glared and seemed to float towards me menacingly. I fled all through the

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 30

night. The road was endless. One road led to a thousand others, which in turn fed

into paths, which ended in avenues and cul-de-sacs. (Famished Road, 112–13).

Azaro is not just frightened of the road of life; he is also terrified by human faces and

voices. In the episode in which he has his first sexual arousal, he is amazed at his own

human impulses as the woman pulls him roughly "against her groin and intoxicating

smells staggered me like a new kind of dangerous wine" (Famished Road, 272). His

defensiveness is predictable and he deals with the crisis by describing the event

purely clinically.

Even in reporting politics, Azaro typically omits, except incidentally, any reference

to the motives which explain the activities he describes. The effect is deliberately

disconcerting. He sees, laments and mocks, as primal human infirmities, the aggressive

instinct and will to power, which seem to be the root of politics. The political thugs

who do battle against each other go to the trenches "with absolute disinterested

ferocity", "without passion, without politics even" (Famished Road , 193). The opening

paragraph of the description of this engagement is worth recalling for its suggestion

of an unbridgeable distance between the narrator and the actors.

In the diabolical heat of that afternoon six illegitimate sons of minor warlords,

whom I first thought were minotaurs, enacted a battle of ascendancies. They fought

near the burnt van. No one came to separate them. They lashed at one another

with long sticks, clubs, and whips. They all looked alike. They were the

interchangeable faces of violence and politics. (Famished Road, 192).

The impression is that the narrator does not understand what is going on and that he

sees it predominantly as spectacle.

Yoruba folklore establishes the main outline of Okri's portrait of Azaro. But in

filling in the details, of the music-filled paradise which is Azaro's spiritual home, of

the mazes, labyrinths and lonely crowds which are the backdrop of daily life, of

intolerable poverty and misery in city slums, and of disgust and anguish as existential

responses to the human condition, Okri consults the folklore of many lands, the

tradition of the West African political novel, and contemporary world literature.

Okri's insight into Azaro's sensibility in particular appears to have benefitted from

the study of the absurdist and existential traditions in England and France most

especially of Sartre's Le Nausee. In creating the character of his narrator, Okri shows an

astonishing capacity for the hybridization and synthesis of literary traditions, which

is what we should expect in a novelist who spent his formative years in the melting

pot of contemporary London.

To correct the impression that New Age optimism is the main burden of The Famished

Road, it would be necessary to show that the structure of the novel taken as a whole is

against the dance and song which Azaro presents so positively in his first chapter and

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 31

that Azaro's love of unearned pleasure is disconfirmed at the end of the story. It

should be recalled that the first chapter of the novel is full of images of spirit children

as they frolic on the shore with "fauns, fairies, and beautiful beings" and that "tender

sibyls, benign sprites, and the serene presences of our ancestors" bathe them "with

divine rainbows." "Wondrous spirits danced around us to the music of gods, uttering

golden chants and lapis lazuli incantations." But even in these opening pages, these

deep ecstasies are distanced and criticized as being self-indulgent and possibly

deceptive. For we are told that spirit children "disliked the rigors of existence," that

they are "unwilling to come to terms with life" and live in "a world of pure

dreams"(Famished Road , 3-6). This warning suggests that the narrative will show the

reader in due course a more satisfactory human ideal.

Azaro's personal story follows a trajectory of moral development from the love of

indolent ease to the discovery of the Ogun ideal of creative living. He learns to love

his parents and to bear his share of the burden of their very difficult life. The process

of healing begins when Azaro takes the first step in bonding with his mother. She has

had a fever and suddenly loses consciousness. "Grief threw me to the floor," Azaro

says, "and I thrashed about and wailed because I thought Mum had died" (Famished

Road, 57). The relationship deepens and reaches its peak by the middle of the story.

The next time, Mum only speaks about dying and Azaro falls down in a faint. "Misery

filled me like water fills a deep well after a heavy down pour"( Famished Road , 229). He

recovers only when apparently his mother kisses him. Similarly Azaro gradually

learns to identify with Dad. He takes the first step after seeing and sympathizing with

a porter staggering under the crushing load of three bags of salt.

He wobbled in all directions, banging into stalls, toppling tables of fresh fish and neat

piles of oranges, staggering into traders' wares, trampling on basins of snails. Women

screamed at him, pulling at his trousers. He went on staggering, balancing the weights,

slipping and miraculously regaining his footage, grunting and swearing, uttering

the words 'more!' "more!" under his breath, and when he went past me noticed that

his crossed eyes were almost normal under the crush, and his muscles trembled

uncontrollably, and he groaned so deeply, and he gave off such an unearthly smell of

sweat and oppression that I suddenly burst into tears. (Famished Road , 145–46).

It is worth noticing that the language and the substance of this episode, like most

episodes cited in this article, are rational and realistic in their conception. Okri indeed

grants some power of agency to his supernaturals. Spirit children throw stones; a

three-headed monster abducts Azaro; and the forests are full to bursting with spirit

dwarfs, hunchbacks and antelopes. But they do not shape the major situations,

influence character, or determine the overall structure and meaning of events. In this

regard, The Famished Road is unlike any of the magical fantasies of Tutuola or Fagunwa.

Azaro's development is the process of his coming to maturity emotionally, morally

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 32

and intellectually and this process is triggered by the growth of his powers of bonding,

affection and sympathy. Soon after his encounter with the human beast of burden,

Dad appears on the scene burdened with an even heavier load. Azaro reports how

deeply he suffered when Dad is insulted and how he followed him at a distance

"grieving for the cuts and wounds on his arm"(Famished Road , 149). As Azaro wakes

up to the sanctity of human affection, his spirit companions turn against him, threaten,

blackmail, and kidnap him. He escapes and returns to his parents. But when he

breaks a neighbour's window pane in an effort to ward off his friends, Dad and Mum

both cane him mercilessly. He suffers a relapse.

Okri's treatment of Azaro's descent during his relapse towards the House of the

Dead throws some light on the imaginative freedom a novelist may exercise in picking

and choosing and combining motifs, symbols and episodes from many cultures. The

road down which Azaro and his three-headed guide travel, is possibly the Greek

road to Lethe's wharf. But it is transformed by mystical ideas about the spiral stairs

which the dead must descend, their need before they are born again to undergo

punishment and purgation, and the cycles of astrological transformation in the course

of the Great Year. At the same time, Okri makes allusions to Krishna's flight on the

back of the great bird Garuda who takes him through heaven and earth and through

universal history (Frith 1976: 110ff). Meanwhile Mum and Dad have called in a

babalawo who kills a cockerel to appease the ancestors and mutters powerful

incantations to guide Azaro's soul safely up the winding stairs. Some readers will, of

course, believe that it is the renewal of love in the family which restores Azaro's

confidence in living. Okri does not choose one set of protocols instead of another. He

creates a magpie composite in which readers from different cultures will each find a

familiar motif to stimulate the imagination.

At the end of the story, Azaro is a new person. He remembers the enchanting song

of the sirens but he is not moved by it. He now wants, as Dad's slogan phrases it, "to

be a man" carrying his part of the burden of the world. In Dad's last fight, Azaro is an

able second standing in Dad's corner, shouting useful instructions to him and in the

critical moment of the fight, he takes the significant initiative of seizing the Old

Sorcerer and wheeling him out into the night. His closing words: "I wanted the

liberty of limitation, to have to find or create new roads for this one which is so

hungry, this road of our refusal to be"(Famished Road, 487).

But although Azaro's conversion is in a sense the presiding theme of The Famished

Road, Azaro is not the hero of his own narrative. His story is burdened far too much

with getting lost, treading the labyrinth, and fighting off the advances of his ethereal

friends that he has no time to exemplify the positive values which his conversion

entails. It is not Azaro but Dad who is the iconic and normative figure in the story. As

Quayson has shown, Dad is modelled on the figure of Ogun the favorite deity of the

Yoruba pantheon (Quayson 1997: 139ff). Ogun in folklore, ritual, odu Ifa and

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 33

mythology is the spirit of creative enterprise and innovation. He presides over roads.

As a historical figure, he is said to have been the first metallurgist, hunter, and farmer,

but as a deity he has risen to be the Muse and author of ijala poetry, an irate warrior

god who delights in the blood even of his own men, a founder and destroyer of cities,

fire bringer, child giver, and the innovator who changes the raw gifts of nature into

the amenities of civilized life (Barnes 1989: 57). Although Okri has some knowledge of

odu Ifa in which Ogun's dirty habits are emphasized, the god came to him mostly

second-hand through Soyinka's works most especially A Dance of the Forest (1963), The

Road (1965), Idanre and Other Poems (1967) and Ogun Abibiman (1976). Thus by the time

the warrior god reached Okri, he had already made the transition from folk art into

literary history.

In Soyinka's work, Ogun is the god of creation, a deity "aflame with seed", the

maker and destroyer of all things in an eternal process of change. Before creation and

the making of mankind, Ogun made his way into primeval darkness and chaos where

he built the bridge, which takes immortals into the sub-lunar world. This primordial

opening of the door to heavenly blessings is symbolized annually by the stormy

deluge of the first rains.

Okri may, however, have gone beyond Soyinka in his search for the true Ogun.

For Ogun is a road explorer and long before the colonial era, he had penetrated the

old kingdoms of Benin, Igala, and Dahomey. He also boarded the slave ships of Britain

and Spain and gradually made inroads into Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Argentina and

Brazil. More lately, he is known to have made converts in Florida, South Carolina,

California and New York (see Barnes 1989: chapters 4, 5). Although many of these last

congregations are said to be non-racial, Ogun in the New World is the god of the

outcast, the poor, the colonized, the insulted and injured and the wretched of the

earth. John Mason of the Yoruba Theological Archministry of Brooklyn sums up the

significance of Ogun in the New World by saying that "Ogun is the clearer of the path

and creator of the road that allows both men and deities to travel from one level of

reality to the next" (Famished Road, 353). The multiplicity of functions in Yoruba folk

traditions is set aside. Ogun is still quick to anger but he is essentially a friend who

offers present help in times of trouble. It is in this benign light that Okri depicts Ogun

in The Famished Road.

There is no need to follow Dad's doings in the story step by step. He bears the

crushing sack of his responsibilities as a householder who struggles, in pain and

humiliation and without resources, to support his family in a city slum. At first he is a

porter for cement and salt and then a night soil man. But he soon becomes a bruiser

and brawler who fights in defence of his family and the poor of the slums. In this role,

he follows in the footsteps of folklore wrestlers who defeat all comers including the

champions of the spirit world. As a fighter Dad is a representation of man's "titanic

struggle with the elemental forces that would destroy man's soul", as Quayson rightly

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 34

observes (Quayson 1997: 140). Again and again Azaro associates Dad with lightning,

thunder, the wind, a lion, and the tiger after whom he is nicknamed and during the

fight against the ghost of 'Yellow Jaguar ', Dad is shown summoning the basic resources

of nature to his side. "He was going back to water, to the earth, to the road, to soft

things. I felt a strange energy rising from him. He was drawing from the night, and the

air, the road, his friends"(Famished Road , 357). The image is not the portrait of a man

whom we can meet in the street nor even just a heroic figure. It is an image of the

primordial energy of life struggling blindly and desperately against circumstances.

Dad is the god immanent in all nature. The idea cannot be realized realistically. Okri

tries to express the imaginative intuition in an idiom of cartoons and hyperboles.

Sometimes the impression is comic as in the episode when Dad fights rats, mosquitoes,

and the chair with his massive jaws set, his muscles rippling, and his neck rigid

(Famished Road , 95). The reader has to connect this image with similar conceptions in

the European romantic and symbolist traditions. Dad is life which in the midst of the

material forms that constitute its real existence must struggle and writhe and stumble

blindly and endlessly towards higher and higher realizations of its possibilities. The

audacity of this conception is one of the attractions of The Famished Road , and the image

is in direct opposition to the soft ideal, which Azaro represents. Azaro is mistaken not

just because his orientation is receptive and hedonistic but also because he is looking

for an easy and ready-made road. Dad reads him a harsh creative lesson on this score:

I was coming down the road [Dad says], singing, drinking, and then the road said

to me: "Watch yourself". So I abused the road. Then it turned into a river, and I

swam. It turned into fire and I sweated. It transformed into a tiger, and I killed it

with one blow. And then it shrank into a big rat and I shouted at it and it ran, like the

creditors. And then it dissolved into mud and I lost my shoe. (Famished Road, 94).

The Ogun positives of fearlessness, resolution and creative improvisation are lost to

readers who do not distinguish sufficiently between the fantastic and sometimes comic

signifier and the rigors of the signified. The difficulty of holding the two dimensions

in tension and in balance is the main challenge of writing The Famished Road.

The conception of Dad is rational and contemporary. Yet Okri chooses to picture

him in mythical terms. In the same way and for the same reason, he presents Madam

Koto as a witch. But we must not be beguiled into thinking that Okri is operating

within the protocols of traditional folklore. Okri adopts traditional motifs in order to

re-interpret and update them. It is useful to consider how guardedly he introduces

the notion of witchcraft as an explanation of Madame Koto's conduct. Azaro does not

say unequivocally that Madam is a witch. He says with many hesitations and

reservations that there are rumours, legends and myths about her unusual character.

She is handsome, generous, hardworking and self-reliant. She is the focus of attention

wherever she is. But she drinks a full glass of illicit gin in one gulp. She fights a mad

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 35

man and throws him out of her bar. She falls like a whirlwind on a gang of rowdies

sending them with her broom into headlong retreat and manages the difficult feat of

being in several places at the same time. She paints her face secretly in ritual black and

white, mumbles passionate prayers in front of a fetish, and indulges in paranoid

dreams of power and glory. There are rumours that she is two hundred years old and

has buried two husbands. Okri manages the character in such a manner that

contemporary insights into its meaning are conveyed to the reader without those

insights passing through the consciousness of the narrator. The handling of first

person narration in this instance is perfect. But the point is that the reader has a

choice of interpretations. Madame Koto's virtues are many. But she is so self-obsessed,

greedy and exploitative that she perverts and poisons every virtue. She is a mother

figure but her motherhood caters only to the lusts of the body. In a harsh competitive

world, she is determined to make her way by living off other people's vices. "Her

dreams [Azaro says] are livid rashes of parties and orgies, of squander and sprees, of

corruption and disintegration, of innocent women and weak men" (Famished Road ,

495). "She became all the things we whispered she was and she became more. At

night, when she slept, she stole the people's energies" (Famished Road , 495). The

interpretation of this character so deeply embedded in folklore tradition places it

outside that tradition.

The Blind Sorcerer of the story shares with Madame Koto the role of opposing the

hero as the barricades against which life spends its force. He of course partakes in the

double tradition of folk fantasy in the vehicle and imaginative truth in the tenor. But

the Old man resists interpretation because he appears only in a few episodes. That

Okri makes him a central character in Songs of Enchantment shows how the dramatis

personae gradually assume independent lives of their own and so lead the novelist

into new thresholds of thought. The Old Man is blind. He has hypnotic powers and

inspires terror. When he plays on his accordion, "music like the awful sound of wild

beasts gnashing and grinding their teeth in the forests, poured from the pleats of his

instrument" (Famished Road , 420) and moods are subverted. The impression is that the

Old Man stands for the nameless traditional inhibitions and terrors which exert their

blind pressure on freedom, initiative and light. He is King Kamsa of the Krishna

legend, Morgana Fay of the Arthurian cycle, and the Giants of Norse tales.

The art of The Famished Road is an art of oblique forms. Nothing is named

unambiguously and the names can deceive. Significance is not pointed out as it

might be in Balzac or George Eliot. It emerges slowly and shyly as the reader questions

the form and the interpenetration of motif, symbol, rhetoric and characters. The slow

awakening of realization removes the film of familiarity from the truth and we see it

new as a revelation and a pleasure.

The final episodes of The Famished Road , with its long speechifications, its comic

inflations of episode and descriptions and its millennial prophecies are the most

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 36

likely parts of the narrative to cause misunderstanding. The latter day storms of

monsoon rain have fallen. The gods and ancestors of the ghetto have processed across

the night sky recalling ancient sanctities and rekindling dying hope. Dad has defeated

the ghost of capitalist tyranny and in the three days of his temporary descent to the

House of the Dead, he has undergone shamanic initiation. Azaro is uttering prophesies

about the coming of the Great Year of Ptolemy and Anaximander. Even Mum has

stories to tell about the transmigration of souls and the unreality of time.

But it should be noted that the annunciations of millennial change are not

announcements of victory. Madam Koto, her party of the rich and their thugs are in

undisputed control of the ghetto. The beggars have been caned and thrown out of the

community banquet. There is political terror in the ghetto and Dad is seriously ill. We

may perhaps consider that W. B. Yeats who also believes passionately in millennial

reversals of the wheels of history does not think that end times are times of victory.

Instead they are times of upheaval and tragedy as he states again and again in his

finest poems,

[…] somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with a lion body and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds

(Yeats 1956: 185).

Hector is dead there's a light in Troy

We that look but laugh in tragic joy

(Yeats 1956: 291).

Azaro's lions and jaguars of the spirit are already roaming the land. The beggars,

deformed by the humiliations of the world and yet beautiful with the marks of their

spirit origin, are mobilizing. Dad is on the warpath. Change is promised but not

peace. W. B. Yeats says a great deal in A Vision about gyres and cones and the phases of

the moon in his prophesy of millennial change, but he adds that the new life will not

dawn mysteriously. It will come, as "an intellectual influx neither from beyond mankind

nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history " (Yeats 1962: 262).

Cognizance should also be taken of the element of fantasy characteristic of Azaro's

language in moments of heightened consciousness. His language in these situations

is marked by synesthesia, hyperboles and extravagant tropes of fancy. It does not

dwell on the facts but gestures instead at emotions and atmosphere. It is not denotative

of meaning but it liberates the reader's unconscious to imagine the facts, which should

be appropriate to the emotions. The style may remind some readers of the expressionism

and suggestive imagery of many folk narratives. Consider, for example, how Azaro

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 37

presents what happened on the first night of political terror in the ghetto: "The dead

joined the innocents [Azaro says], mingled with the thugs, merged with the night

and plundered the antagonists with the cries of the wounded. The dead uttered

howls of mortal joy and they found the livid night a shrine glistering with fevers."

(Famished Road, 180).

Azaro does not describe what happened. What he conveys is an experience of

awe, terror and exultation. Similarly the herbalist who treats Azaro during his great

illness is only half-described and half-conjured into life. He has "a face so battered

and eyes so daunting that even mirrors would recoil and crack at his glance"(Famished

Road, 380). Madam Koto in her days of glory "wore clothes that made the beggars ill"

(Famished Road , 495). The capitalist ghost from the land of fighting demons does not

throw punches when he beats up Dad. In the world as it really is, he does not have to

fight: "[…] it seemed he was completely still the whole time, while Dad's head kept

snapping backwards, as if the air, or an invisible hand, was responsible" (Famished

Road, 471). These signifiers affirm nothing. The reader well tuned to the frequency

will not take Azaro's final prophesies literally. But it is in the convention of myths of

transformation that they should end with a vision of change.

Okri's literary affinities, as we find them in The Famished Road, are elective affinities.

He is not bound with an umbilical cord to any heritage or creed. His reading ranges

freely in world literature. He was born of Urhobo ethnic stock in the Gwari country of

Northern Nigeria. He spent his childhood in England, his boyhood among the Urhobo

and Itshekiri of the Niger Delta, worked briefly in Lagos, and served his literary

apprenticeship in London. He loves Yoruba oral traditions and is deeply stirred by

the imaginative truth of the Yoruba god of the road. But his literary appetite is catholic.

It seems likely that Dame Iris Murdoch's ironic and anti-Sartrean first novel Under the

Net (1954) is one of the many texts from many different traditions which were in Okri's

mind as he wrote The Famished Road. Murdoch was a Cambridge classicist who, in the

years immediately after the Second World War, lived in France and moved in Sartrean

circles. She was at first fascinated by existentialism. In particular, she admired the

originality of Le Nausee especially with regard to the novel's analysis of the nature of

consciousness, the lack of harmony between language and reality, and the difficulties

of personal relations. But gradually Murdoch began to have serious reservations,

which she set out in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) and in her brilliant first novel

Under the Net. Murdoch's hero in Under the Net Jake Donahue is an incarnation of

Sartre's Antoine Roquentin. Both see life as a tasteless and obscene affair not pure, nor

logical, nor necessary. Both love art and believe that in music we have an experience

very close to the platonic forms. It is this extraordinary taste for music which Okri's

hero inherits. Like Roquentin and Jake, he is haunted by an enchanting strain of song

which attaches him indissolubly to the source which in his case is the racial

unconscious. It is worthy of note that Azoro's surrender to the superterrestial voice of

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 48 (1) • 2011 38

music goes back, through Iris Murdoch, Sartre and Proust's exploitation of the

wonderful septet in Vinteuil's fictional sonata, to the ancient and continuing debate

about Platonic forms and the nature of art. In Murdoch's hero, the music is the golden

voice of Anna Quentin's renditions of folk songs. Jake, separated from Anna, as Azaro

is separated from his spirit companions, looks for her all over London. Azaro's anguish

is Jake's and Roquentin's anguish. The episode in which Azaro enters Madame Koto's

secret sanctuary is probably based on Jake's experience in Anna's theatre closet where

he finds her clothes and theatrical gear in disarray. Azaro's long search of Mum in the

market is probably based on Jake's search for Anna on the banks of the Seine and in the

Tuileries. But Jake eventually wearies of Anna and her songs. He realizes that the

fascination is an infantile longing. He takes a job and begins an adult life. At the end

of the story, he hears Anna's Circean voice for the last time.

The words came slowly, gilded by her utterance. They turned in the air slowly and

then fell; and the splendor of the husky gold filled the shop turning the cats into

leopards and Mrs Tinckham into an aged Circe. I sat quite still and held Mrs Tinck's

eye as she leaned there with her hand frozen upon the knob of the wireless […]

"Turn it off" I said, for I could bear no more. (Murdoch 1954: 283–84).

Azaro recalls the voices of his spirit companions during his last conversation with

Ade. He is unmoved. He too is awake to the challenges and delights of adult life. One

of the great merits of The Famished Road is that Okri takes possession of, re-creates and

transfigures the materials, which he uses so completely that the novel does not remind

us in any way of his various sources. But his themes are serious late twentieth century

concerns. He is new and astonishing only on account of the audacity, humour and

poetic vitality which he brings to bear as he tests the creative limits of what we might

perhaps describe as African spiritist discourse.

Works cited

Barnes, Sandra T. (ed.). 1989. Africa's Ogun: Old World and New. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Frith, Nigel. 1976. The Legend of Krishna . London: Sphere Books.

Kafka, Franz. 1957. The Castle. Trans. J. Underwood. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Mason, John. 1989. Ogun: Builder of the Lukumi's House. In Sandra T. Barnes (ed.). Africa's Ogun: Old

World and New. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 353–58.

McCabe, Douglas. 2005. Higher Realities: New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road . Research

in African Literatures, 36(4): 1–21.

Murdoch, Iris. 1954. Under the Net. London: Chatto & Windus.

Okri, Ben, 1992. The Famished Road . Ibadan: Spectrum Books.

Quayson, Ato. 1997. Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Oxford: James Currey.

Sidney, Sir Philip. 1957. Apology for Poetry. In Charles Holmes, Edwin Fussell, & Ray Frazer (eds.). The

Major Critics: The Development of English Literary Criticism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 46–70.

Wilkinson, Jane. 1992. Talking with African Writers. London: James Currey.

Yeats, W. B. 1956. The Collected Poems . London: Macmillan.

_____. A Vision . 1962. London: Macmillan.

Nelson Shokane Ratau

Covid-19 has infected approximately 160 million people globally since its first occurrence in China in 2019. Consequently, the whole world has been negatively impacted, with numerous people losing their lives, jobs and loved ones, including breadwinners in families. With the prevalence of the pandemic also came various views on the challenges that came with it. Literature cannot be left out of the modes that are providing an understanding of the negative impact of Covid-19 on the world. Therefore, this paper explores the poetry of the Nigerian poet, novelist and essayist, Ben Okri, in light of his thematisation of spirituality. By spirituality, it is meant the 'recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than myself', the times and situation(s) in which one exists'. In this paper, Okri's poetry is considered as an essential index into how 'the spiritual' is conceived and articulated, even in times of pandemics. The paper adopts the Hermeneutical Approach as a theoretical lens through which Okri's poetry may be best viewed and understood. The Hermeneutical Approach essentially entails the analysis of texts in order to develop insight or thoughtful wisdom. Furthermore, the paper proffers that Okri's poetry is invested with a spiritual temper that makes it relevant as it encourages and makes and keeps 'awake' a spiritual sensibility in the people during the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis is undergirded by a predetermined set of themes, namely; race, identity, healing, spirituality, thought and consciousness that Okri poeticises about and subsequently interrogates in his poetry. In the process, Okri's poetry also encourages spiritual renaissance and the awakening of consciousness, by tempering in a reader the inalienable fact that to change or shape reality, people ought to do it themselves. Okri's poetry challenges people to define themselves and defy all false definitions of themselves made by others. Ultimately, the paper explicates that Okri's poetry is charged with pointed rebuke of people's apparent apathy towards issues such as freedom, equality and transformation (all of which belong to the great stream of 'the spiritual'), of which he submits that people ought to take charge of how these three important entities come about and exist in society.

Cajetan Iheka

Cambridge Core - African History - Naturalizing Africa - by Cajetan Iheka

Douglas McCabe

Research in African Literatures 36.4 (2005) 1-21 The vast majority of critical commentary on Ben Okri's The Famished Road views the text as both postmodern and postcolonial. For instance, it is common to read that "[i]n Okri, the Western [postmodern] dilemma of the dissolution of the subject is celebrated" (Hawley 36), and that the abiku boy Azaro's puzzling ontological status signifies "the postcolonial nation state in its chaotic passage from colonialism to independence" (Wright 16). One critic, however, suggests a different point of view. In an early review of the book, Kwame Anthony Appiah emphasizes The Famished Road's "spiritual" terms of reference, and he distinguishes Okri's "spiritual realism" from the more postmodern and postcolonial "magical realism" of Latin American authors: Appiah goes on to note that Okri's own spiritual views are often too transparently communicated, modulating the novel's exuberant "spiritual realism [. . .] into an irritatingly pseudomystical New Age mode" of discourse (148). Appiah's brief commentary challenges the widespread critical consensus on Okri's text. First, Appiah's sense that the world of spirits is more real to Okri than the everyday world runs athwart of the widely held idea that Okri's novel is postmodern. For the kernel of postmodernity is an "incredulity towards metanarratives" (Lyotard 6), a belief that "there is no order beyond time and change establishing a hierarchy of responsibilities or helping us choose between truth-statements" (Rorty 8). If, as Appiah thinks, Okri believes that there is such an order beyond time and change—a spiritual world "more real" than the one we normally perceive—then it follows that Okri's allegiances are not postmodern: he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on some, and not other, truth-claims and courses of action. Those pondering the apparently postmodernist features of Okri's fiction surely must take account of this decidedly non-postmodernist aspect of the book. Second, Appiah's passing suggestion that the novel's "spiritual realism" often resonates with "New Age" spiritual discourse runs against the widely held view that Okri's text is an example of either "magical" or "animist" realism. By magical or animist realism, critics mean a narrative form that draws either upon the generically fantastic ("magical") or upon indigenous traditional religious beliefs ("animist") in a way that contests Western protocols of realist representation and the neocolonialist economic, political, and cultural apparatuses they carry with them. Though animist and magical realisms are (according to the critics) formally different, they both appear to be "postcolonial" in the normative sense of resisting Western global dominance and aiding the causes of decolonization and tradition-affirming nationalism. By contrast, Appiah notes that there is "tension" between Okri's "spiritual realism" and "his exile's passion for the project of Nigerian national politics" (147). This is because the former is delighted in and offered up to us as its own justification, but then is awkwardly press-ganged to serve as an allegory for the nationalist agenda enunciated at the novel's end ("ours [. . .] is an abiku nation" [Famished 494]). But this press-ganging, as Appiah indicates, is never quite successful: Okri's "irritatingly pseudomystical New Age" side has a life of its own, a life not entirely compatible with the postcolonial politics to which Okri is also committed. In what follows, I would like to develop Appiah's insights about the novel's "New Age" dimension by arguing that New Age spirituality—not postmodernism or postcolonialism—is the most important cultural vector shaping The Famished Road. Indeed, because New Ageism is of a piece with Western modernity, the novel is anti-postmodern and anti-postcolonial in some important ways. But this is not to say that...

The Major Critics: The Development of English Literary Criticism

Sir Sidney
Philip

Sidney, Sir Philip. 1957. Apology for Poetry. In Charles Holmes, Edwin Fussell, & Ray Frazer (eds.). The Major Critics: The Development of English Literary Criticism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 46-70.

Ogun: Builder of the Lukumi's House

John Mason

Mason, John. 1989. Ogun: Builder of the Lukumi's House. In Sandra T. Barnes (ed.). Africa's Ogun: Old World and New. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 353-58.

The Collected Poems. London: Macmillan. _____. A Vision