The Road to Hunger, by Ben Okri

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Heir to the rich literary tradition of his country, the Nigerian Ben Okri gives with "The Road to Hunger" one of the most striking and inventive novels of modern African literature. Through the adventures of a spirit child of Yoruba mythology, who renounces his immortality to live the fascinating but tragic reality of the world, this novel depicts the clashes and misfortunes of contemporary Africa where misery wins over the bush.

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The work of a young 32-year-old author, this contemporary tale, with its hallucinating and poetic writing, is often compared to the Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Big bookstore success for Ben Okri's Hunger Route . This book, which is over 600 pages, has sold more than half a million copies and has been translated into around twenty languages. It should also be remembered that this novel, published in 1991, was crowned with the Booker prize, the highest British literary distinction, equivalent in France to the Prix Goncourt.

With its dense narrative which tells the unusual story of a spirit child torn between the land of men and the spirit world, this book is nothing like a station novel. Closer to the philosophical fable than a traditional novel, the Nigerian opus owes its success above all to its poetic writing. Here are the first sentences of the novel: "  In the beginning was a river. The river became a road, the road crossed the whole world. And as the road had once been a river, it was always hungry ... "The story ends with another beautiful proclamation:"  A dream can be the climax of a lifetime.  This phrase resonates in our heads long after we close the volume.

Finally, the fact that the author is Nigerian is perhaps not unrelated to the success of his book. Since the 1980s, with the advent of authors such as the Indians Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, the Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje or the Pakistani Hanif Kureishi, English literature has firmly entered the postcolonial era. New voices, new speeches, new imaginations have revitalized the literary field. With The Hunger Road , Africa enters the scene, rich in its mythologies, its visions, and its paradoxical reality where enchantment and horror confront each other.

The fantastic unbridled

The enchantment and the horror aroused by African reality are articulated in the pages of Ben Okri's novel according to an arrangement of great intelligence. A born storyteller, the author rubs shoulders with the forest and the city, monsters of all kinds and corrupt politicians, beneficent spirits and greedy healers. Ben Okri brilliantly interweaves the most unbridled fantasy and social criticism, to the point that the reader finds it difficult to decide between reality and the marvelous.

Let us recall that the fantastic is a Nigerian specialty: we think of the Yoruba-language writer DO Fagunwa, whose book  In the Forest of Thousand Demons  (“  In the forest of a thousand demons  ”) was translated into English by Wole Soyinka. We also think of Amos Tutuola, author of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts , translated into French by Raymond Queneau. The Hunger Route is part of this tradition. In fact, in this novel it is the main character who is the link between the two universes. The originality of Ben Okri consists in having been able to tell the world and its demonic hustle and bustle in a quirky way through the eyes of a child. A doubly offbeat look, because Azaro, the hero of the novel, is not just any child.

Azaro, the spirit child

Azaro, whose name is a deformation of Lazarus, is one of the spirit children who have the magic power to be born and die according to their wishes. The Yoruba call them abiku . These are unborn children who share with spirits "  the land of beginnings ", a kind of enchanting Eden whose nostalgia prevents certain newborns from staying too long among humans. So they hasten to die early to regain the heavenly and luminous world of spirits. However, Azaro, him, broke the pact and decided to stay on Earth because he was tired of these eternal back and forth, but also because he wanted to "  make happy the bruised face of the woman who was going to become his mother  ".

Azaro is a rebel, but by choosing to lead the lives of men, he submits to the cycle of human suffering, prefigured by the title of the novel The Road to Hunger . In the slum of Lagos where the boy chooses to be reborn and live, one does not eat his fill and dies from the rigors of existence. Azaro's father makes a living carrying bags of cement, while his mother sells odds and ends at the market.

In front of their house at the edge of the marshes extends the deadly road. This road is the metaphor for the unfinished independence of Africa. "  I was still very young, when, amazed, I saw my father swallowed by a hole which opened in the street  ", tells the spirit child. Luckily, the father will survive. What is more, he will be able to take charge of his life thanks to his boxing skills, before founding his own political party to fight the nerves of power who spread terror in poor neighborhoods.

It is within this humanity where destinies are made and remade by force of will and luck, that Azaro learns the secrets of existence, while realizing that he shares with his compatriots his condition of abiku , all destined to be reborn and to become "  the artisans of their own transformation   ".

The Hunger Route , by Ben Okri. Translated from the English by Aline Weill. 1994, Robert Laffont Publishing (coll. Pavillons), 640 pages.

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