Winner of the Booker Prize (known then as the Booker-McConnell Prize) in 1991, this novel of magic realism is set in the African nation of Nigeria and serves as an allegory of Nigeria’s transformation from a British colony to an independent country. As such, it is an example of postcolonialism and is sometimes compared with works by writers such as Salman Rushdie; like Rushdie, Okri was influenced by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Okri draws on the mythic traditions of the Yoruba people (not his own tribal group) to create his protagonist and first-person narrator, Azaro, who is a “spirit child.” In Yoruba myth, the spirit child, or abiku, is a figure of reincarnation, being repeatedly reborn into the world. The multiple journeys through many kinds of reality make the abiku both wise and terrifying. In Azaro’s case, he chooses to remain in the human world, resisting the tempting appeals of his fellow abiku to return to the spirit world.
Okri telescopes time and condenses space so that Azaro’s story unfolds in a human world that is both the primitive past and the modern present, both the insular village and the urban ghetto. This device enables him to capture the reinvention of Nigeria as an independent nation in a single character’s lifetime.
Other characters in the novel include Azaro’s life-affirming parents, including his long-suffering mother and a father who is in turn a laborer, a boxer, and a politician defending the marginalized poor; his fellow abiku Madame Koto, a barkeeper whose changing establishment helps suggest the movement into the modern world, both for good and for ill; and Jeremiah, a photographer who unintentionally garners the enmity of the new political powers.
Okri uses Azaro’s travels between the spirit world and the human world to illustrate the permanence of change and the cyclical alternation of drought and torrential rain, and he relies on dreams and visions to suggest the mysteriousness of life and our knowledge of the world that contains it. The oral storytelling tradition acquires a written incarnation as Azaro’s father tells him myths, folktales, and fables, recorded in Okri’s text, to explain the mysteries and threats the world contains, and to help his son to mature with the strength to bear the crushing burdens of existence such as love and death.
Okri also published a sequel to The Famished Road in 1993, Songs of Enchantment.
Bibliography
Hawley, John C. “Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity.” Research in African Literatures 26 (Spring 1995): 30–39.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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