Things of Poverty and War: Ben Okri and Thing Theory

Cameras, transistor radios, gramophones—objects introduced as technologies of modernity appear ordinary in Okri’s fiction, which is otherwise replete with highly symbolic actions and spaces. Furthermore, these technologies frequently carry on functions that belong more conventionally to the symbolic realm of the traditional, passing seamlessly into that realm. Thus writing on the role of the photographer in The Famished Road, Philip Whyte notes that he functions as “a bridge between the traditional and the modern” becoming “indispensable” at occasions such as weddings, funerals, homecomings, where he performs in the role of the traditional “praise-singer” or “griot” (22).

Although assimilated into existing cultural practices with ease, the photographer and the images he produces in Okri’s novel do surprise all the same. They provide compelling “new ways of seeing the world,” both Azaro’s immediate world and places farther afield like the United States South, or South Africa (Whyte 23).¹ And, more importantly, the photographer is politically significant, exposing corruption and thus becoming a target, along with the people, of an oppressive regime. The photograph itself passes into the ordinary of Okri’s spiritually charged universe and forces a confrontation between that universe and the “real” and historical. Okri has called the photographer “the concretizer,” the “visualizer,” and the “maker-realer.” The photographer is, furthermore, in Okri’s words: “representative of the changing consciousness of the people” and hence a powerful marker of the historical (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). He and Azaro occupy different temporalities: “he gives the present where Azaro gives timelessness” (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). The photograph as truth-telling challenges Azaro’s sense of his own visions and throws him off balance (Whyte 24). Okri, however, is engaged by the tension between the two forms of the visual and what they reveal about each other rather than being interested in making commentary on the obsolescence of one, or danger of the other. Thus he also describes the photographer as the “counterpart to Azaro’s consciousness,” the one who facilitates a “dialogue between technology and tradition” (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25).

In The Famished Road, we find a matter of fact acceptance of the camera and an engagement with what it does, rather than a fetishizing of the object. Michael Taussig argues that it is the “scienticity” assumed of the medium (its function primarily to record reality, to be in Okri’s world the “concretizer”) that enables the camera to be easily assimilated and become almost transparent (199). By contrast, Taussig’s close reading of the colonial archive for accounts of early encounters between Europeans and primitive cultures shows that phonographic equipment (the Victrola) and the music it played retained a much greater fascination. Phonographic equipment drew attention to itself as object instead of passing transparently into practice (Taussig 194–95). Importantly, Taussig specifies that he is not interested so much in “the ‘sociology’ of the phonograph or camera or their effects on ‘the natives,’” but rather in the colonial explorers’ own fascination with the attitudes towards these machines of the people they encountered (198). And with this question in mind, he notes the “camera barely rates a mention in comparison with the reproduction of sound by the Victrola” (Taussig 198). Thus the attitudes that need examining relate to the dialogue or exchange that takes place in encounters of tradition and modernity. It is in that shared space that the camera slips in without drawing attention to itself.

Taussig’s discussion provides an opening for examining how and why the camera can pass convincingly into Okri’s syncretic world. The cumulative logic operating in Okri’s fiction and the vacillation between recording and reflection that propels his child protagonists into action give the camera a privileged status.² Okri insists that contiguity and contingency govern the logic of his fictional world (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 27), which critics have noted is highly visual even as it problematizes vision (Guignery 5–6). It also provocatively alerts us to the difference of sound technologies from the camera that pertains to Okri’s imaginative world.

This essay uses the representation of...