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The Power of Hunger
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20391 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
2,182 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
THE FAMISHED ROAD
Ben Okri
London: Jonathan Cape, 1991
500 pp., £13.99
The international recognition of African writing during the past half dozen years has been nothing less than extraordinary. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986: two years later the Nobel committee conferred similar recognition upon Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfourz. In October of 1991, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer was the third writer on the continent to be granted the prestigious award. Later in the same month, Ben Okri, also a Nigerian, was awarded the Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary accolade for his latest novel, The Famished Road. For those who follow the continent's writing, these are heady times.
Okri's earlier work has been widely praised in England, where he has spent much of his adult life. Two novels (Flowers and Shadows, 1980, and The Landscapes, Within, 1982) were followed by two collections of short stories (incidents at the Shrine, 1987, and Stars of the New Curfew, 1988). Only the last of these titles has appeared in an American edition. Okri, who was born in 1959, has worked for the BBC World Service and served as the poetry editor for West Africa magazine. A volume of his own poems. An African Elegy, has just been released by his British published.
Okri's phantasmagoria
What immediately strikes the reader of The Famished Road is the difficulty of categorization. Yes, there are superficial connections that Okri, who is Orhobo, shares with his fellow Nigerian (and Yoruba) writers, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka. On one level, The Famished Road suggests a confluence of Tutuola's magical fantasy in The Palm-Wine Drunkard (1952) and Soyinka's cerebral obscurity in The Road (1965) a stylistic and narrative fusion that would be intellectually challenging to the most demanding reader. Yet to imply that similarity to Yoruba writers is to deny Okri's own uniquely gifted imagination. More accurately, The Famished Road stands-by itself, unlike anything else that has appeared on the continent, though some readers who are familiar with a number of Latin American works may feel a tug of recognition (one thinks immediately of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits).
Azaro, the central character of Okri's phantasmagoria, is an abiku child; born of the
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