Ben Okri - The Famished Road

I never knew how different we both were till that morning when his father began his long tirade, his complaints, all designed to make his son feel guilty. Ade, his head held lightly, with his eyes fixed on ghosts, simply left the window and went out of the room as if he were sleepwalking. His father followed him, caught between anger and despair. I followed his father. The world was old that morning. Out in the street his father caught him and lifted him up and Ade began to cry unbearably as all the murky lights from the ghetto and the filthy untarred road and the broken-down houses and the ulcerous poverty converged on him. His father tried to console him, threw him up towards the sky and caught him again. But Ade only cried more and in that sound I knew he wasn’t crying because of his father’s love, or his own guilt, or his mother’s illness, but becausethepressureof timewas tighteninground his neck.

THE SPIRIT-CHILD IS an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into thedreams of thelivingand thedead.Thingsthatarenotready,notwillingtobe born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.

There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, and to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry intobeing,scorchedby thestrangeecstasy ofthewillascendingtosay yesto destiny and illumination.

I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth’s boundaries than to be free in infinity.

Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason why I wanted to be born – these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the challenge of giving birth to one’s true self, to one’s new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one’s universe to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master one’s self; the possibilities of a new pact with one’s spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.

Anything is possible, one way or another. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.

DURING THE THREE days that Dad stayed in recuperating, the road had the first of its wave of nightmares. The road’s sleep was disturbed first by the prostitute who had been electrocuted on the night of Madame Koto’s initiation into higher powers. They held a small funeral for her. They carried her coffin up the road and at night we heard the wailing of some of the prostitutes. The next day it rained and three men who were laying out cables for the big political rally also died of electrocution. The rains were crazy in those days. The beggars suffered the onslaught, sleepingunder theeavesofourcompound-front.Every morningHelenwouldcometo our door. Mum left her food which she didn’t touch. Every morning Mum went out with her basin of provisions and the rain drenched everything and she came home in theafternoons soakingwet, no profits made, her provisions rendered useless.

Dad slept like a giant through the new season. He missed the big trucks of the political parties as they went round the city, making announcements over their loudspeakers. He missed their violent confrontations, the eruptions, when they met on the same street. He missed the beggars who stayed on our road, begging alms round the broken vehicle. In the evenings I watched them conferring energetically amongst themselves. They seemed to be waiting for a sign, so palpable was their expectancy. No one gave them alms. The inhabitants of the area never missed an opportunity to tell them to move on. They themselves seemed anxious to move on, to travel the roads to a new destination. It was only Helen who held them back. She never spoke, but around her was concentrated the initiative to set off for new places. It was odd to see themtryingtocontinuewithDad’sattemptstomakethemuseful.Every nowandthen they would try to clear up the accumulated garbage on the road. They tried in their clumsy way to be of help. No one appreciated it. I passed them on the second day of Dad’s sleep and I heard them arguing in harsh voices about the endlessly postponed forthcoming rally, about the school Dad was going to build for them, and about money. When they saw me they would brighten up, and their faces would lift with hope. They would come towards me, stop, and watch my movements with hungry eyes. I took to stealing food from the house for them. Dad’s sleep made us very hungry. Mum made no money. Our meals got smaller. We would eat quietly, watching Dad snoring on the bed as he devoured the air in the room, his spirit growing larger all the time, feeding on our hunger. He grew in his sleep. I watched as his feet began to dangle over the edge of the bed. I saw his chest expanding, bursting his shirt. He gained weight; and when he tossed, as if riding mythical horses in his dreams, the bed would groan. He slept deeply, darkening the room. The candles burned low while he slept. The door was kept open. Visitors would come in, talk in whispers over his sleepingform, and depart on tiptoes.

Dad was redreaming the world as he slept. He saw the scheme of things and didn’t like it. He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence. He saw the rich of our country, he saw the array of our politicians, how corruptible they were, how blind to our future, how greedy they became, how deaf to the cries of the people, how stony their hearts were, how short-sighted their dreams of power. He saw the divisions in our society, the lack of unity, hesaw thewideningpit between thosewho haveand thosewho don’t, hesawit all very clearly. He saw the women of the country, of the markets and villages, always dogged by incubi and butterflies; he saw all the women, inheritors of the miracle of forbearance. He saw the hungry eating toads. He saw the wars in advance. He saw the economic boom in advance, saw its orgiastic squander, the suffering to follow, the exile to strange lands, the depleting of the people’s will for transformation. He saw the emergence of tyrants who always seem to be born from the extremities of crisis.