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Research in African Literatures 32.1 (2001) 66-82



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The Way of the Spirit

Bill Hemminger


Ben Okri's 1991 novel The Famished Road opens with an announcement of the birth of an abiku, a spirit-child. This abiku child, Azaro, becomes the narrator of the novel; he announces immediately that he is reluctant to remain in the "world of the Living" because of "the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world [and] the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe" (3). Yet he persists and the novel becomes the story of his persistence and accommodation--making a place for himself in the ghetto community of an unnamed tropical town while fighting off spirit forces that lure him back to the relative safety of the spirit world apart from human suffering.

The story of the abiku child is continued in Okri's succeeding novel, Songs of Enchantment. Azaro has made a commitment to stay with parents he loves but finds that life in the physical world can be painful and fearsome. In the course of the novel the child becomes "ill for lack of dreams" (157). Like a spiritual elixir, representatives of the spirit world appear to the child as part of a vision that temporarily restores a balance between the spiritual world and the physical world--and cures the child of his acedia. The spiritual procession informs Azaro of

the undiscovered secrets and mysteries of The African Way--The Way of compassion and fire and serenity; The Way of freedom and power and imaginative life; The Way that keeps the mind open to the existences beyond our earthly sphere, that keeps the spirit pure and primed to all the rich possibilities of living, that makes of their minds gateways through which all the thought-forms of primal creation can wander and take root and flower; The Way through which forgotten experiments in living can re-surface with fuller results even in insulated and innocent communities; The Way that makes it possible for them to understand the language of angels and gods, birds and trees, animals and spirits; The Way that makes them greet phenomena forever as a brother and a sister in mysterious reality; The Way that develops and keeps its secrets of transformations--hate into love, beast into man, man into illustrious ancestor, ancestor into god; The Way whose centre grows from divine love, whose roads are always open for messages from all the spheres to keep coming through; The Way that preaches attunement with all the higher worlds, that believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always receptive, always listening, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world. (159-60) [End Page 66]

Azaro learns once again that, despite the economic and spiritual privation of the ghetto he lives in, a life in "the African way" offers "rich possibilities." He also learns that "the language of angels and gods" is available to all people--all those who are "receptive [. . .] always kindling the understanding of signs."

This particularly evocative passage well describes the world-view that Okri establishes in The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment. These two works (in particular The Famished Road) become Okri's highly suggestive and constructive portrait of being-in-the-world. This portrait is far from the nightmarish episodes of Stars of the New Curfew--where one critic notes that, consistently, "life is described as loss" (Thomas 3)--and even from the rancor that characterizes much of the poetry in An African Elegy. To my way of thinking, the novels redefine the world human beings inhabit and argue for increased interplay between physical and spiritual in a modern technologized world.

In the quoted passage (and at many other moments throughout the two novels), the word way appears, which in turn recalls another Way, the Tao te ching. Comparisons between Okri's spirit-world and the...

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