Featured Reading Guide
Ben Okri
Azaro is a spirit child who is born only to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. This is his story.
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Ben Okri’s books have won several awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the prestigious International Literary Prize Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore 1993. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. He was born in Minna, Nigeria.
topAbout the Book
Azaro is a spirit child who is born only to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. This is his story.
topBen Okri interview/review
Newsday, July 1992
Sitting at ease in a New York City hotel room, far from the central Nigerian town where he was born, the novelist Ben Okri remembers how he began writing at the age of 14.
“On this particular day, it rained,” he says, “and this day changed my life. Everybody was out and I was in, alone. I was sitting in the living room and I took out a piece of paper and drew what was on the mantelpiece. That took me about an hour. Then I took another piece of paper and wrote a poem. That must have taken me ten minutes. I looked at the drawing and I looked at the poem. The drawing was dreadful and the poem was … tolerable, bearable. And it became clear to me that this was more my natural area.”
Stories have always been at the heart of his writing. The Famished Road, a novel, is a nearly encyclopaedic collection of tales about its boy-hero, Azaro, as he moves easily between the world of the flesh and the world of spirits. This generous storytelling comes naturally to Okri.
“You see,” he says, “I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
And it never occurred to us that those stories actually contained a unique worldview. It’s very much like the river that runs through your backyard. It’s always there. It never occurs to you to take a photograph or to seek its mythology. It’s just there; it runs in your veins, it runs in your spirit.
And for me, it was only after I had made too deep a journey into modernism, after I had begun to feel that my ambition was better than my craft, after a period of loneliness and homesickness away from Nigeria, that slowly all those old stories came back to me with new faces and new voices. And I saw that all human beings have their signatures stamped in the stories they tell themselves in dreams, the stories that are embedded in their childhood.”
Also embedded in Okri’s childhood are memories of civil war in Nigeria, of the constant high-life music of his youth, of his secondary education 400 miles away from his family in Lagos (the sheer travelling involved was a good experience because, he says, “it earthed me among my people”) and of his later move to England, where he studied at the University of Essex.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- The Famished Road does not deal in conventional narrative sequence, and yet Okri is able to give the book a structure that allows the story to develop dynamically and purposefully. How does he create a balance between Azaro’s visions and the naturalistic description of the settlement, between action set pieces and scenes of more quiet contemplation?
- The spirit-child is a central myth in Nigerian folklore, why does Okri choose to have a spirit-child as the narrator of his novel? What freedom does this afford him?
- Madame Koto undergoes a dramatic change in the course of the novel. Plot the development of that change. How far are the shifts in fortune that affect her and her bar a metaphor for the wider changes affecting the country as a whole?
- There are many instances in the book where Azaro’s descriptions of his father blur the line between myth and reality. How does this affect our understanding of the character of Azaro’s father? What does Okri wish us to see in him?
- How well does Azaro’s father’s description of the clash of old customers and the new politics of modernity fit with Okri’s own opinion of the changes taking place? How important to Okri is ritual and tradition?
- Animals are ever-present in Azaro’s narrative, particularly in his visions. What purpose do they fulfil?
- The Famished Road is an ever-present image in the novel. What do you understand the famished road to mean?
Other Books by Ben Okri
An African Elegy
‘Dreams are the currency of Okri’s writing, particularly in this first book of…
Incidents At The Shrine
Infinite Riches
In the chaotic world of his African village, the spirit-child Azaro still w…
More Great Railway Journeys…
Songs Of Enchantment
One great thought can change the dreams of the world. One great action, lived…
Starbook
Starbook tells the tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a…
Stars Of The New Curfew
To enter the world of Ben Okri’s stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set…
Tales of Freedom
As one of Britain’s foremost poets, Ben Okri is rightly acclaimed for his use…
Suggested Further Reading
- One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Anthills of the Savannah ~ Chinua Achebe
- Sunset at Dawn ~ Vincent Chukwuemeka
- The Iliad ~ Homer
- Our Mutual Friend ~ Charles Dickens