The Famished Road by Ben Okri is a book that must always be discussed by referring to its title because the road serves as the book's primary symbol. There was a waterway at the start. The waterway turned into a road, and the road split off to reach the entire globe. Additionally, the road was always hungry because it was once a waterway. (Okri, 3). In this opening section, Okri's "road" becomes a trope that can be broken down into three different ways: first, it results from a natural phenomenon (a river or body of water); second, it is an artificial structure (the road) that replaces its natural antecedent and connects it to the outside world; and third, it is a famished monster (unsatisfied, starved, growing) ominously set to devour its victims.
It may also be added that these tropes of the "road" also link up with the literary motif of the road as a journey-a representation of discovery, of creating meanings and of ultimate identity. As a novel that takes place in a setting whose analogue is obviously Nigeria, a "young" African nation in postcolonial terms, the quest for definitions becomes a significant problematic.
Many African states are named after their natural landscapes. For instance, Kenya is named for Mount Kenya, both DRC Congo and the Republic of Congo are named for the Congo River and Chad is named for Lake Chad. Both Niger and Nigeria are named for the River Niger. In other words, Ben Okri's intention was to write the story of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general in a way analogous to the actual history of colonial exploitation of her nature and people. It can be said that with the colonial invasion comes the draining away (destruction of) Africa's natural resources and socio-cultural essences symbolized by the water and the river, and the launch on to the new indeterminate space (the road) where she has to grope for new meanings and reposition herself in the new world.
The "groping" and "repositioning" has a lot of evidence in the novel, but the foremost is that of the protagonist, an "abiku", "ogbanje" or spirit child, who according to Yoruba or Igbo (Nigerian) mythology is destined to die, but can also rise up and lead the human life. The story The Famished Road is about one such spirit child, Azaro (short form for the resurrected Lazarus in the Bible) who decides on a longer life than his spiritual companions would allow, in sympathy with his grieving mum: "…somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the living, I chose to stay… I wanted to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother" (Okri, 5-6).
The protagonist, Azaro, transports the reader to the multifaceted realisms in the novel and in Africa at large. Simply put he is an occupant of "the interspace between the spirit world and the Living", but he is actually more than that. The Famished Road has been variously characterized as "fabulist", "magical realist", "surrealist" and so on.
The above characterizations are formulated with a view to link up Okri's writing with those in Latin America and others that are experimentalist and modernist; in short, those writings that frustrate our conventional expectations of form, meaning and closure. For instance, "magical realism", to which school of writing Okri is ascribed is a literary mode that involves hybridity or a fusion, in this case, a fusion of the real and the fantastic. It usually involves two conflicting notions, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Isn't that fantasy?
Not quite. Fantasy involves the author going outside the physical world, so to speak, and inventing strange beings interacting with themselves or with man. The results are the stories peopled with animals, ghosts and extraterrestrial beings, such as the animal, ghost, ogre and monster stories and science fiction that are found in African mythology, and which Okri makes good use of in The Famished Road. But Okri goes beyond these, and this is what should be looked at below, with respect to Azaro.
In creating Azaro, Okri has created a character living in the in normal, modern African world with its real, authentic description of humans and society. Fantasy is taken as granted reality; fantasy is real. Abikuism reduced to stark reality is infant mortality. But the road that Azaro, the abiku child, follows is multi-faceted reality. It is magical, modernist, surrealistic, futuristic, philosophical as well as historical. It is, to use an African expression, a bird that perches on every tree. One may not pigeon-hole it as it defies constrictive definitions.
In a nutshell, it can be said that Ben Okri has constructed a reality that aims to rewrite the current stories of Africa in a mode that is relevant to the contemporary African reality.
The story of the lead character, Azaro, is the story of the "young" African nation, fragile and embarking on a journey into the past, present and future in order to define herself. It is a journey involving living in the marginalised urban areas, the slums, but also making sorties into the primordial forests, African villages and into nature as a whole. The road, initiated by the colonial conquest, is unstable, full of mistakes and dangerous, but must needs be trodden: "Each generation has to reconnect the origins for themselves. They tend to become a little wiser, but don't go very far. It is possible that they now travel slower, and will make bigger, better mistakes. That is how they are as a people. They have an infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles. Nothing can destroy them except themselves and they will never finish the road that is their soul and they do not know it" (Okri, 330).
The story of Madame Koto is analogous to the African story of colonialism through independence and a fumbling with ideologies that only divide rather than forge an African identity. She starts as a simple entrepreneur depending on cultural beliefs to boost her trade. By and by, she boosts her trade by employing prostitutes, gets involved in the warring parties, The Party of the Rich and The Party of the Poor. As a budding capitalist, she becomes a member of the Party of the Rich, a party defined by its arrogance and exploitation of the poor. It represents capitalism, its insensitivity and its dehumanizing effects on the society, here seen in its offer of milk that leads to massive diarrhea of the populace. But despite being a member of such a cynical society, Madame is successful in the end, at least materially. She has electricity at her bar and proudly possesses a car.
The antagonist to such an aggressive Madame Koto's approach to the economic life is none other than Azaro's Dad. He is a metaphor for the laboring poor whose hard work is alienated and doesn't really count in the new dispensation. He belongs to the Party of the Poor, but is no match for Madame Koto's rich camp. He becomes a boxer who fights and wins in matches organized by the locals, but he is no Floyd Mayweather. He is as poor at the end as he was at the beginning.
