THE FAMISHED ROAD by Ben Okri (Vintage Books, 1991)
In the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of this mind-expanding Booker-prize winning novel, Ben Okri explains his creative purpose: “All things to do with spirit compel art beyond the rim of possibilities. The visible must be used to invoke the invisible. This compels our art to go beyond itself and find a new language for impossibility.”
In interviews, Okri speaks of telling secret stories that help adjust our “mental land” and shift the consciousness of readers in subtle ways. In the story itself, the Nigerian-born author writes: “When you can see everything from an unimaginable point of view, you might begin to understand”.
His is a fiction based of dreams rooted in realism. It deals with imagined futures and half-forgotten pasts. The setting is an unnamed African village where poverty and suffering are the norms. Politicians promise solutions but the parties of the rich and poor are equally corrupt and both full of violent thugs.
Ben Okri
Villagers are also at the mercy of the elements. Winds blow and, above all, hard rains fall. Change comes slowly or not at all. This is a world in transition but any progress is barely visible. The road is a metaphor for the struggle. It is always hungry and feeds on change. To build these roads, forests have to be conquered. The boy narrator, Azaro, a spirit child, is witness to the process: “I saw forests die. I saw the death of many roads.”
The boy’s father quotes one time from The Koran (“nothing is ever finished”) but the religious dimension is never specific to a creed or a single belief. The constant life in death imagery and the recurrence of things unresolved leads to thoughts of reincarnation. The observation that “many people reside in us”, confirms this as does the repeated refrain that “life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer”.
The struggling humans in the world the author creates is shared with a myriad of creatures great and small including flies, moths, butterflies, rats and lizards.
The father is frequently described as being like a sleeping giant in a fable but he is also a fierce boxer. Under the pseudonym Black Tyger he literallly does battle with spirits and ghosts. He is effectively fighting the shifting world personified by the menacing figure of the bar owner Madame Koto. Her bar is, at first, a “strange fairyland” but then takes on more sinister aspects when the darkness outside slowly spreads indoors: “The bar seemed to keep expanding. The density of bodies got worse”
The boy, Avaro, is constantly mocked and tormented by his spirit companions who tempt him to embrace death. Yet although life is full of sorrow and suffering but there is also a sense of celebration. This is eloquently summed up in the affirmation that “So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use”.
On Ben Okri’s road we meet famished ghosts, fierce monsters and crazed witches, but the abiding message is one of hope and optimism. In confronting these demons we remain awake to life’s infinite possibilities and thus can draw solace from the fact that “a road that is open is never hungry”.
