‘The Famished Road’ and my quest for the imaginative richness of Africa

When Ben Okri won the 1991 Booker prize, it was the culmination of a writing journey defined by literary experimentation — and upheaval.

While living through my own childhood — listening to stories the elders told, having herbalists treat my glaucoma — I was aware that it would make a magnificent book. I began reading early and always had a sense of life as something that would be read. This does not mean that The Famished Road, my third novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1991, was autobiographical; only that the strange realities of life seemed already to belong to the magical world of reading. The novel was begun before I realised it.

At the University of Essex, in 1981, I wrote a long short story set in London. It later grew into a novel. A good friend said there was something unusual about the early passages set in Africa. This comment set me on the path to The Famished Road, a novel about a spirit child in Lagos around the time of independence. In the years before working on the novel, I had been dissatisfied with the way I was writing. I was applying the realistic narrative tradition to Africa — but the techniques used to describe western life were inadequate for depicting the multidimensional world of my childhood. This led to a crisis. I needed to find a new way to convey the imaginative richness of Africa. The existing techniques simply would not do anymore. My father’s belief in the enduring presence of the ancestors, things I saw that could not be rationally explained, the reality of ogbanjes or abikus, the enigmatic way my mother told stories, the flamboyant way people narrated their experiences, all made it clear to me that I had to reconfigure my language and my storytelling. I had to invent a tone that could accommodate the ordinary and the mythical, the poetic and the uncanny.

Read the full article at The Financial Times