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The Trials of a Nation
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10999 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
4,995 Words |
| Author
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Vinay Dharwadker
Vinay Dharwadker teaches modern literature at the University
of Oklahoma. His forthcoming books include a collection of
poems, Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (New Delhi: Viking/Penguin,
1994), and The Oxford India Anthology of Contemporary Poetry,
edited with the late A.K. Ramanujan (Madras: Oxford
University
Press, 1994). He is currently completing work on The Columbia
Book of Indian Poetry, to be published by Columbia University
Press. |
SONGS OF ENCHANTMENT
Ben Okri Nan
A. Talese / Doubleday, 1993
One of the remarkable figures in the mythology of the Yoruba people of Nigeria is the abiku, or spirit-child, who is born on earth only to die in infancy. The infant spirit returns to the happy playful world of its fellow spirit-children, but, before long, it is born into the human world again. As it passes through the tragic cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth, and redeath many times, the abiku becomes a "wanderer" child. According to a Yoruba proverb quoted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "It is the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the mother."
In traditional Yoruba culture, this myth probably helps explain recurrent infant mortality and console bereaved parents, but it also goes beyond such functions. The Yoruba conceive of the abiku as a paranormal child, who has the capacity to communicate with the spirits of the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. It experiences everything in the world intensely, because everything, whether wind, rock, tree, insect, animal, or human being, has a spirit and is alive. As a consequence a spirit-child has visions and epiphanies and achieves an extraordinary understanding of life and the universe, out of proportion with its infancy. Put differently, an abiku's powers on earth are directly proportional to the tragedy of its fate.
Azaro the spirit-child
Ben Okri comes from the Urhobo people of the delta region in southern Nigeria, but he speaks Yoruba fluently and knows its literary and cultural traditions intimately. Although he has lived for a long time in England and writes in English, he has chosen to use the Yoruba conception of the abiku as the shaping principle of his recent fiction. In both The Famished Road, which won England's Booker Prize in 1991, and Songs of Enchantment, its sequel, the first-person narrator and protagonist is an abiku named Azaro. Okri, of course, adapts the traditional Yoruba conception to the conventions of contemporary magic realism and to a postmodernist readership's expectations. (Viewed from a different angle, he fascinatingly bends postmodernism and magic realism to fit old Nigerian myths and storytelling styles.) In the process of adaptation, he introduces at least three inventive twists into Azaro's life history as a spirit-child.
The first twist appears in The Famished
...
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