Postcolonial Transformations: the Forest in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Abstract

In The Famished Road (1991) Ben Okri deals with the controversial effects of decolonisation in Nigeria and unfolds the devastating consequences of technological innovations on natural landscapes. Through the wanderings and perceptions of the abiku Azaro, Okri focuses on the ruthless enterprise of deforestation pursued by Western companies and exposes his nation’s inability to restore a harmonious relationship with the environment. The Famished Road also underlines the ancestral links of the forest with Yoruba folklore and imagination. In Okri’s novel, the forest acts as a reminder of the gradual disappearance of both natural resources and spiritual life in postcolonial Nigeria.

Full text

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 151
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Postcolonial Transformations: the Forest in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Abstract I:
In The Famished Road (1991) Ben Okri deals with the controversial eects of
decolonisation in Nigeria and unfolds the devastating consequences of tech-
nological innovations on natural landscapes. Through the wanderings and
perceptions of the abiku Azaro, Okri focuses on the ruthless enterprise of de-
forestation pursued by Western companies and exposes his nation’s inability
to restore a harmonious relationship with the environment. The Famished Road
also underlines the ancestral links of the forest with Yoruba folklore and im-
agination. In Okri’s novel, the forest acts as a reminder of the gradual disap-
pearance of both natural resources and spiritual life in postcolonial Nigeria.
Abstract II:
In The Famished Road (1991) Ben Okri rappresenta gli eetti controversi della
decolonizzazione in Nigeria, rivelando le conseguenze devastanti delle inno-
vazioni tecnologiche sui paesaggi naturali del paese. Attraverso i movimenti e
le percezioni di Azaro, uno spirito-bambino, Okri indugia sulla spietata opera
di deforestazione condotta dalle potenze occidentali e mette in evidenza l’in-
capacità della nazione di ristabilire un’armonia sostenibile con l’ambiente. The
Famished Road sottolinea anche i legami ancestrali della foresta con il folklore
e l’immaginario Yoruba. Nel romanzo di Okri la distruzione della foresta co-
stituisce l’emblema dell’impoverimento progressivo delle risorse naturali e
della vita spirituale della Nigeria postcoloniale.
In the Western literary tradition, the African forest is the site of an impenetrable darkness but
it also encompasses valuable resources and riches to be exploited by the European coloniz-
ers (Brazzelli 2015: 129-132). In nineteenth-century colonial discourse, rainforests embody
the otherness of Africa, and, at the same time, they encourage the discovery of unknown
natural and cultural worlds. Joseph Conrad’s and Henry Rider Haggard’s “African” narra-
tives especially combine these conicting approaches, although employing dierent textual
strategies. However, both authors explore the white man’s degeneration in the colonies and
the disorienting, numbing eect of the forest wilderness captivating the European eye and
mind (Mikkonen 2008: 302-303).
After the Second World War, postcolonial perspectives reverse imperial representa-
tions, reinserting the forest into its original, “native” sphere. On the whole, twentieth-cen-
tury African literatures, and especially Nigerian literature, emphasize the role of natural en-
vironment and above all of the rainforest. Thus, in The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and in My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) Amos Tutuola draws on Yoruba myths and folktales based on

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 152
fantastic creatures inhabiting the forests. Tutuola’s narratives reveal the bush as the abode of
spirits, a liminal zone that embodies the chaotic and mysterious forces of nature (Quayson
1997: 44-64).
In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) the Nigerian Igbo respect the sacred value
of the earth and maintain the sustainability of their land, employing wise agricultural prac-
tices. The forest is crucial for the Igbo because it preserves their social and religious order, as
well as the taboos of the community. In particular, the “evil forest” is the place where those
who have committed abominations against the earth are dumped. However, the community
of Umuoa accepts that the “evil forest” is intimately connected to its rituals and beliefs.
After all, Umuoa means “people of the forest” (Gane 2007: 43-44). When the missionaries
build a Christian church in the area, they subvert the physical and metaphysical geography
of the Igbo community. By giving away the wilderness the natives give away the control over
the “evil forest” which keeps dangers at bay; so they become its victims (Garuba 2002: 97-98).
In The Famished Road (1991) Ben Okri perceives the natural world in a dierent light
from Achebe, though both novelists share motifs belonging to Nigerian traditions (Nwosu
2007: 102). Writing in the context of globalisation and neocolonial exploitation, with a new
understanding of the fragility of the environment, Okri shows a sympathetic awareness
of how human agency is a damaging force threatening natural processes. By highlighting
the crucial role of the forest in African culture and economy, Okri especially pinpoints its
ecological value as well as its strong connections with the spirit world. In The Famished Road
the forest acts as a reminder of the gradual disappearance of both natural resources and tra-
ditional beliefs in postcolonial Nigeria. The use of the word “transformation” in the title of
this article comes from Bill Ashcroft’s notion of transformation in postcolonial cultures and
recalls the imperial contradiction between geographical expansion, designed to increase the
economical and political power of the nation, and its purported moral justication, its civ-
ilizing mission. This huge contradiction continues in the present-day practices of global
power (Ashcroft 2002: 1).
Ben Okri is a novelist and poet born in Minna (West Central Nigeria) in 1959 and has
been living in London since the 1970s. In his works the great African tradition (established
by Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe and also Wole Soyinka) and, more specically, the Yoruba
folklore interact with Western mythologies, literatures and cultures. A kind of “anti-real-
ism”, rather than magic realism, informs his narrations; a new worldview emerges, based
on the coexistence of European literary forms and African beliefs (Cooper 1998: 15). The
Famished Road is the rst novel of a trilogy – the second is Songs of Enchantment (1993) and
the third Innite Riches (1998) – which aims at raising awareness about environmental deg-
radation and in particular deforestation, while it traces the long and uneven movement of
Nigerian history towards political independence, and suggests that independence will not
bring the much hoped for freedom.
The spirits in the bush as well as the people living on the land dene Okri’s ctional con-
struction. Azaro, a child originally named Lazaro (alluding to the biblical Lazarus), is both a
“native” and a “nomad”, lives on the earth and also in the spirit world; his wanderings often
lead him into the bush, teeming with spirits. The abiku, or the spirit child, a recurrent gure
of West African cultures, otherwise called ogbanje, struggles to stay among the mortals, thus

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 153
accepting a state of perennial suering, continually swinging between the real world and the
world of fantastic creatures generated by the collective imaginary of Nigerian Yoruba.
Azaro’s double position between the visible and the invisible unfolds the repetitive
pattern of The Famished Road, including the main character’s meandering and his visionary
perception of the world. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth of the abiku is similar to that of
Nigeria, marked by endless repetition and arrested development (Lim 2005: 70). In Okri’s
novel the dominant perspective embraces the spiritual sphere; the alternative world is the
Lagos ghetto, in which Azaro’s Mum and Dad live. The spatial elements that contribute to
model Okri’s ctional world are the ghetto, the forest and Madame Koto’s bar.
The rst two places are the destinations of the abiku’s movements, the bar is the thresh-
old between them, a kind of liminal junction (Costantini 2002: 173). The dirt and violence
which characterize the ghetto are the consequence of colonial and neocolonial policies push-
ing towards a chaotic urbanisation. The forest instead is the site of resistance, the domain of
vegetal power, energy from nature facing human violence. Azaro spends most of his time
wandering around his ghetto, walking into the nearby forest, and sitting in Madame Koto’s
bar, as a witness of the changing scene of the neighborhood: the rivalry between the Party
of the Poor and the Party of the Rich as the debate on independence increases, the pover-
ty of the manual laborers like his parents and the relative wealth of property owners like
Madame Koto, deforestation and the building frenzy that accompanies the destruction of
the trees. Azaro’s small neighborhood, the forest and the road demarcating it as well as the
nearby big city (assumed to be Lagos) remain unnamed in the novel.
Vanessa Guignery (2013) remarks that “The homelands of The Famished Road are cer-
tainly ‘imaginary’ and invisible as the novel is not explicitly bound to a specic geographi-
cal and historical place or nation” (13). This lack of certainty on the location of the narrative
plot encourages a metaphorical reading of this small community, making it any country in
Africa, or any emerging postcolonial nation in the world. On the other hand – and I strongly
support this approach – a “bioregional” reading of The Famished Road suggests the existence
of a specic location for the novel by examining the meteorological events and the animal
and vegetal species. Thus, despite the abundance of fantastic elements in the text, Okri’s
novel retains a sense of local environment we can call “local realism”.
In fact, as Erin James (2012) remarks, the novel features over one hundred and thirty
animal and vegetal species, ranging from those familiar to Western readers such as corn or
tomato to those more rmly associated with a Nigerian setting, such as ame-lily, baobab,
and yam. The ora Azaro nds as he explores the forest that borders his ghetto, such as mis-
tletoe and palm, obeche, iroko, rubber, and mahogany, localize The Famished Road to tropical
Africa. The fauna mentioned in the novel, including the antelope and the duiker, restrict
the text further to the Yorubaland in the southwestern part of Nigeria’s rainforest, which is
particularly known for these two species, both endangered by hunting pressures (269).
The geographical location of the novel is relatively narrow, restricted to the neigh-
borhood where Azaro and his family live, and to the journeys taken by Azaro on ‘endless’
roads. This limitations of the geographical area render the sense of change even more
clearly:

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 154
Steadily, over days and months, the paths had been widening. Bushes were being
burnt, tall grasses cleared, tree stumps uprooted. The area was changing. Places that
were thick with bush and low trees were now becoming open spaces of soft river-sand
(Okri 1992: 104).
Okri’s novel opens with a cosmological image: “In the beginning there was a river. The
river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road
was once a river it was always hungry” (3). The opening lines suggest a cyclical transfor-
mation questioning the chronological sequence of history; the origin of the “famished road”
lies in myth, not in history. This narrative of beginning also deconstructs images of pastoral
origins, while the road’s perpetual hunger testies to the earth’s predatory violence (Ogun-
folabi 2012: 277). Employing a (biblical) formulaic opening, Okri seems to put the events
that follow beyond any recognizable time and suggests the mythic possibilities of the narra-
tive, characterized by a mix of Christian and Yoruba mythopoeia. Moreover, the mention of
hunger also explicitly alludes to the colonial and postcolonial exploitation of the land.
Not only cultural transformations have caused the ecological degradation of a whole
country, swallowed by “the stomach of the road”, but such an ecological degradation actual-
ly contributes to the indigenous Yoruba people’s alienation from their traditional beliefs. In
fact, local communities are endangered by the woodcutting activities, their forestry-related
activities are reduced and their access to food is limited. The transition from the forest as
lived-in space to alien territory implies its inhabitants’ abandonment of traditional religious
taboos relating to logging and farming practices and the loss of a long-established way of
seeing the forest as life giving.
The terrifying destruction of the environment is reinforced by the fantastic imagina-
tion of the spirit child:
I had emerged into another world. All around, in the future present, a mirage of hous-
es was being built, paths and roads crossed and surrounded the forest in tighten-
ing circles, unpainted churches and the whitewashed walls of mosques sprang up
where the forest was thickest. I heard the ghostly wood-cutters axing down the titanic
irokos, the giant baobabs, the rubber trees and obeches. There were birds’ nests on
the earth and the eggs half-formed and dried up, dying as they were emerging into a
hard, miraculous world (Okri 1992: 242).
Both the road and the river embody the motif of the metamorphosis: cycles of life and
death are connected with the nation and also the abiku. If Okri’s major point focuses on the ob-
sessive colonisation of nature, also the trauma of the Nigerian civil war or Biafran war (1967-
1970) is transposed into a disgured landscape, imbued with disorder, deformity, disease.
Okri’s main character is born in one of the most precarious and chaotic times in the
history of the African territory on the verge of becoming the modern, independent nation
of Nigeria. The many events of the novel are indeed seen through the eyes of a child who
straddles two worlds. The fate of the country on the eve of independence is constantly
compared to that of Azaro, who has not yet decided whether he will go on living on earth.

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 155
Suering is one of the main themes of the novel, as the wretched poverty that plagues Azaro
and his family points out.
According to Olusegun Areola (1991), slums are not part of the traditional urban set-
tlements in Yorubaland but rather are products of the colonial promotion of Nigerian ur-
banisation. The rapid development of urban areas under colonialism actually leads to the
“disintegration of the family compounds and the rise of slum housing conditions” (202). In
this sense, Okri’s representation of an urban slum in Yorubaland aims to criticize the way
in which the colonial policy of Nigerian urbanisation weakens family and kinship ties that
originally sustain traditional urban settlements.
In leading Azaro into the forest and showing him what “the new world” (post-inde-
pendence Nigeria) will be like, Dad warns Azaro of how forests surrounding the city will
be gone soon, due to the endless expansion of urban slums. Azaro’s father says to his child:
“Sooner than you think there won’t be one tree standing. There will be no forest left at all.
And there will be wretched houses all over the place. This is where the poor people will
leave […] This is where you will live” (Okri 1992: 34).
This prophecy suggests that Nigeria in the postcolonial era will suer a cultural crisis
as well as an ecological one. In other words, in the case of postcolonial Nigeria, the crisis
of cultural hybridisation goes hand in hand with that of ecological degradation. If the ex-
pansion of urban slums is one cause of the disappearance of the forest in Nigeria, then the
endless construction of roads in the name of unlimited development is another feature of
the environmental deterioration (Wu 2012: 102).
The forest is identied as the boundary between the visible world and the spirit world.
What Okri oers in The Famished Road is a redenition of the notion of space and a rep-
resentation that challenges the frontier between the visible and the invisible, between land-
scapes “within” and landscapes “without” (Guignery 2014). The inner spaces of the imag-
ination are a kaleidoscopic world, uid and shifting, in contrast with the conned area in
which Azaro and his family live.
The division between inner and outer landscapes is destabilised in a novel in which
the same space can be submitted to both a realistic and a fantastic treatment; in The Fam-
ished Road this ambivalent approach implies the author’s positioning between the European
literary tradition of realism and the West African narratives based on mythology and the
supernatural (Ogunsanwo 1995: 43). Being a multidimensional space, Okri’s forest is the
best example of such a blurring of boundaries between inside and outside. Its edge marks
the frontier between known and unknown:
The forest swarmed with unearthly beings. It was like an overcrowded marketplace.
Many of them had red lights in their eyes, wisps of saron smoke came out of their
ears, and gentle green res burned on their heads. Some were tall, others were short;
some were wide, others were thin. They moved slowly. They were so numerous that
they interpenetrated one another (Okri 1992: 12).
The forest is a magical “nowhere land”, where things change form, as in dreams. Also
the instability of beings and the transformation from one state to another is constantly por-

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 156
trayed by Okri. Azaro nds refuge in the forest, where he collects a great variety of objects:
“Sometimes I played in the forest. My favourite place was the clearing. In the afternoons
the forest wasn’t frightening […] I wandered through the forest, collecting rusted padlocks,
green bird-eggs, abandoned necklaces, and ritual dolls” (143). But the bush is teeming with
fantastic beasts and other odd creatures, that represent Azaro’s nightmares and hallucina-
tions. He is both frightened and enchanted by these visions:
I saw a tiger with silver wings and the teeth of a bull. I saw dogs with tails of snakes
and bronze paws. I saw cats with the legs of a woman, midgets with bright red bumps
on their heads. […] There was music everywhere, and dancing and celebration rose
from the earth. And then birds with bright yellow and blue feathers, eyes that were
like diamonds and with ugly scavenging faces, ew at me […] (245).
Animals are ever-present in The Famished Road: insects, lizards, snakes as well as birds,
cats and dogs, lions and jaguars; monsters and hybrids embody the motif of the metamor-
phosis and reveal the richness of the abiku’s fantasy. The destruction of the forest clearly
implies the collapse of the imagination, while a sense of wonder opens new possibilities of
spiritual growth in the forest. Azaro’s duality of vision mirrors Okri’s double perspective:
states of hallucination and alienation conveyed by Okri’s impressionist prose reinforce the
sense of physical transformation of the landscape. The narrator’s voice establishes his par-
ticipation in the collective consciousness of his society (Cezair-Thompson 1996: 39). The
contemporary predicament of Nigeria is a critical preoccupation in Okri’s narrative: it is a
matter of survival and renewal, of replacing the unstable existence of the abiku with a more
stable status. The apparently contradictory yet uid discourse of The Famished Road explores
conictual relationships between colonial and postcolonial representations.
Okri draws on ancestral traditions and points to the ecological and also economical
issues of the shrinking forest. His language belongs also to the technological present as the
annihilation of the biodiversity is the outcome of machines cutting down titanic irokos:
In the distance I could hear the sounds of dredging, of engines, of road builders, for-
est clearers, and workmen chanting as they strained their muscles. Each day the area
seemed dierent. Houses appeared where parts of the forest had been. Places where
children used to play and hide were now full of sand piles and rutted with house
foundations. There were signboards on trees. The world was changing and I went on
wandering as if everything would always be the same (104).
This passage clearly focuses on the change that is happening in the nearby area, so im-
mediately aecting Azaro’s life. The forest and the trees are replaced by roads and houses;
the children’s playground is taken from them. Deforestation is represented in anthropo-
morc terms: the trees scream and cry out, while their branches drip blood. Azaro reaches
the edge of the forest:
I heard trees groaning as they crashed down on their neighbours. I listened to trees be-
ing felled deep in the forest and heard the steady rhythms of axes on hard, living wood.

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 157
The silence magnied the rhythm. I found a branch which seemed perfect. I broke o the
long wood of the forked ends, lacerating myself on the splinter and bled (137).
The plants’ groans are coupled with the pain Azaro feels when he is wounded by a
branch. By acting as an unwilling torturer of a tree and suering its pain, Azaro becomes a
double of the vegetable beings that are being murdered in the woodland. The damaged na-
ture is embodied by the trees of the forest, whose fragility questions their ancient existence.
They seem great and strong but they are very easily destroyed. The bloodiness of the act of
deforestation is emphasized when Azaro envisions the clearings: “In places the earth was
red. We passed a tree that had been felled. Red liquid dripped from its stump as if the tree
had been a murdered giant whose blood wouldn’t stop owing” (16).
Trees are personied and sap becomes blood. By identifying the various trees of Nige-
ria’s rainforest and suggesting their diversity and density, Okri pays homage to the richness
of his earth’s vegetation, while at the same time denouncing its apocalyptical downfall.
Okri’s aesthetics is clearly rooted in the Yoruba homeland of Southwest Nigeria. This scen-
ery, set in the 1960s (the time period of the novel), has proven true: Nigeria has the world’s
highest rate of deforestation, losing 55% of its primary forests between 2000 and 2005, and
in Southern Nigeria, nowadays, only 4.9% of land is still covered by rainforest (Butler 2006).
The spreading deforestation exposes the national inability to restore a sustainable harmo-
ny with its environment. Jonathan Higheld (2012) notes that there is a strong connection
between deforestation and the lack of food portrayed in the novel: although deforestation
usually means more spaces for agriculture, the situation has been dierent for West Africa
because “a great deal of agriculture in West Africa was agroforestry, in which cultivated
crops were grown alongside a variety of tree species” (144).
Okri’s insistent images of deforestation spread through the novel exemplify Rob Nix-
on’s “slow violence” and reveal a real problem of contemporary Nigeria which faces many
big environmental problems due to colonialism and global capitalism (2011: 257). In addition,
according to Okri’s novel, the crisis is not only ecological but also cultural: the wood-cutters
ignore the spiritual and magical dimensions of the forest, and the animist beliefs of indige-
nous people. Like their mythical counterparts, modern roads demand immense sacrices.
While the modernisation of the country is supposed to enhance progress, Okri insists on the
endless repetition of a historical injustice: “I recognized the new incarnations of their recur-
rent clashes, the recurrence of ancient antagonisms, secret histories, festering dreams” (Okri
1002: 194). Conicts remain unsolved. The famished road of the title of the novel does not
lead to a new world but repeats colonial ways of destroying the native soil:
I heard the axes and drills in the distances. And every day the forest thinned a little.
The trees I got to know so well were cut down and only their stumps, dripping sap,
remained […] Sometimes I watched the men felling trees and sometimes the compa-
nies building roads (143).
At a certain point, Azaro envisions how the world will be in a modern, urbanised fu
ture:

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 158
Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable besides huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were
being built; yovers, half-nished, were like passageways into the air, or like future
visions of a time when cars would be able to y (113).
This passage reveals much about the process of development in the construction sec-
tor in an urban environment, showing us the progress of the road through its many stages
and variations as well as contrasting the new and the old, the skyscrapers and the huts. It is
noteworthy that Okri describes these developments as half-nished and half-constructed,
which emphasizes a transitional period for his country.
The forest loses its war against progress: it seems that the trees, feeling that they are
losing their battle with human beings, simply walk deeper into the forest:
I heard the great spirits of the land and forest talking of a temporary exile. They trav-
elled deeper into secret spaces, weaving spells of madness round their arcane abodes
to prevent humans from ever despoiling their transformative retreats from the howl-
ing feets of invaders. I saw the rising of new houses. I saw new bridges span the air
(457).
The real damage is made by the contemporary modernisation much more than the
previous colonial exploitation. Although Okri sets the action of the novel in the period lead-
ing to the independence of Nigeria, he reads that past from the vantage point of postcolonial
disillusionment.
The new political class is clearly considered as responsible for the ongoing environ-
mental disaster. African politicians are ruthless in their violation and abuse of the environ-
ment; the fact that they are extremely deceptive is also revealed when some of them distrib-
ute milk that cause food poisoning. It is not a case that food is involved in this process of
degradation. Food is scarce and the new nation is always hungry. The replacement of the
forest by infrastructures causes the decline of agroforestry and robs local people of vital re-
sources. Food and medicine practices disappear.
The road represents the unequal balance of trade that denes African economies. It
is through the character of Madame Koto that the transition from the forest to the road is
captured and the allure of the global capital is represented. Her bar becomes the preferred
hangout of politicians and then the food she oers changes, from peppersoup to Coca Cola;
she also sells beer rather than palm wine (Costantini 2013: 97). Showing the replacement of
traditional food with consumerism, Okri denounces Nigerian submission to the imperatives
of the marketplace. Throughout the novel, food products originated from the forest have a
positive connotation, such as dongayoro to treat illness (Higheld 2012: 150). References to
alimentary practices abound in The Famished Road, whose plot is informed by the dynamics
of feasting and fasting, nutrition and malnutrition.
The topos of the road which changes while crossing natural places is a symbol of the
myth of progress viewed from a Yoruba perspective (Mahmutovic 2010: 5). The road embod-
ies the obsession for modernity, technology, greed and the consequent destruction of nature.
But, at the same time, it is the path into the wilderness built by Western invaders, so that it

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 159
exposes the environmental, economic and cultural damages produced by the previous col-
onists’ penetration into Africa. Also the narrative of the “King of the Road” is included into
Okri’s text: it is the story of a fabulous giant that develops a monstrous appetite as a con-
sequence of deforestation. He devours human beings and then people oer him poisoned
food in order to kill him. He eats himself up until only his stomach remains, then this organ
is washed away by a torrential rain (Okri 1992: 258-261). This hunger embodies colonial vo-
racity but also the Africans’ responsibility in starving their countrymen after decolonisation.
At the end of the novel, Azaro reiterates the problem of deforestation: “the forest was
sleeping badly, the trees were wondering which one of them would become ghosts tomor-
row” (297). Thus, the novel denitively demysties the human history of progress that is a
history of dominating nature. Through deforestation “the world became darker” (264).
In conclusion, Okri exposes the political aspect of environmentalism, and his novel not
only acknowledges nature’s overwhelming power but also shows a connection between envi-
ronmental degradation (deforestation, oods, hurricanes, poverty, violence) and the reckless-
ness of Nigerian and African leadership. Against such a darkening background, Okri suggests
that a new awareness is needed, that seeing the world anew is indispensable. This is the last
sentence of The Famished Road: “A dream can be the highest point of a life” (Okri 1992: 500).
History is nurtured by dreams, and dreams construct reality. Azaro’s artist-like vision shows
that the forest in postcolonial Nigeria is disappearing, and this disappearance is not only con-
nected with the destruction of local ecology but also with the forgetfulness of tradition, and,
most of all, the loss of human imagination. Finally, what is at stake is human imagination.
And the mythopoetic and visionary quality of Okri’s main character is crucial. In this way,
The Famished Road is a metaphorical act of reforestation, the reinvention of a forest of the mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achebe, Chinua. 2001 [1958]. Things Fall Apart. London: Penguin.
Areola, Olusegun. 1991. Ecology of Natural Resources in Nigeria. Brookeld: Gower Publish-
ing Company.
Ashcroft, Bill. 2002. Postcolonial Transformation. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
Brazzelli, Nicoletta. 2015. La foresta africana nell’immaginario inglese dell’Ottocento (e ol-
tre). Anna Maria Salvadè (a cura di). Selve. Tra geograa e letteratura. Milano: Mimesis, 129-146.
Butler, Rhett A. 2005. Nigeria has worst deforestation rate, FAO revises gures. Mongab-
ay, https://news.mongabay.com/2005/11/nigeria-has-worst-deforestation-rate-fao-revis-
es-gures/ (consulted on 10-6-2017).
Cezair-Thompson, Margaret. 1996. Beyond the Postcolonial Novel: Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road and its “Abiku” Traveller. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 31, 2: 33-45.
Cooper, Brenda. 1998. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Costantini, Mariaconcetta. 2002. Behind the Mask. A Study of Ben Okri’s Fiction. Roma: Carocci.
Costantini, Mariaconcetta. 2013. Hunger and Food Metaphors in Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road. Vanessa Guignery ed. The Famished Road: Ben Okri’s Imaginary Homelands. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Press, 92-108.

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 160
Gane, Gillian. 2007. The Forest and the Road in Novels by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri.
Alternation, 14, 2: 40-52.
Garuba, Harry. 2002. Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geogra-
phies in African Narrative. Alternation, 9, 1: 87-116.
Guignery, Vanessa ed. 2013. The Famished Road: Ben Okri’s Imaginary Homelands. Newcas-
tle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Guignery, Vanessa. 2014. Landscapes Within, Landscapes Without: the Forest and Other
Places in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Études britanniques contemporaines, 47, https://ebc.
revues.org/1974.
Higheld, Jonathan. 2012. No Longer Praying on Borrowed Wine: Agroforestry and Food
Sovereignty in Ben Okri’s Famished Road Trilogy. Byron Caminero-Santangelo & Garth My-
ers eds. Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. Athens: Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 263-277.
James, Erin. 2012. Bioregionalism, Postcolonial Literatures, and Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty & Karla Armbruster eds. The Bioregional Imagination:
Literary, Ecology and Place. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 263-277.
Lim, David C. L. 2005. The Innite Longing for Home. Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings
of Ben Okri and K.S. Maniam. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi.
Mahmutovic, Adnan. 2010. History as the Road of Existential Struggle in Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road (1993). Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 1, 3-4, http://www. jpcs.in.
Mathuray, Mark. 2015. The Famished Road after Postmodernism. African Modernism and the
Politics of Subalternity. Callaloo, 28, 5: 1100-1117.
Mikkonen, Kai. 2008. ‘It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in pref-
erence to Switzerland’: the rhetoric of the mad African forest in Conrad, Céline and Greene.
Comparative Critical Studies, 5, 2-3: 301-315.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Byron
Caminero-Santangelo & Garth Myers eds. Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environ-
mental Studies in Africa. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 257-285.
Nwosu, Maik. 2007. The River, the Earth, and the Spirit World. Joseph Conrad, Chinua
Achebe, Ben Okri, and the Novel in Africa. Matatu, 35, 1: 93-109.
Ogunfolabi, Kayode O. 2012. Fictionalizing the Crisis of the Environment in Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment. Toyin Falola & Emily Brownell eds. Landscape, En-
vironment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. London-New York: Routledge,
273-290.
Ogunsanwo, Olatubosun. 1995. Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s
The Famished Road. Research in African Literatures, 26, 1: 41-52.
Okri, Ben. 1992 [1991]. The Famished Road. London: Vintage.
Okri, Ben. 1994 [1993]. Songs of Enchantment. London: Vintage.
Okri, Ben. 1998. Innite Riches. London: Phoenix House
Quayson, Ato. 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Orality & History in the
Works of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Tutuola, Amos. 1990 [1952]. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber & Faber.

Le Simplegadi
Vol. XV-No. 17 November 2017
ISSN 1824-5226
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-63
Brazzelli. Postcolonial Transformations 161
Tutuola, Amos. 1990 [1954]. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. London: Faber & Faber.
Wu, Coral. 2012. From Cultural Hybridization to Ecological Degradation: The Forest in Chi-
nua Achebe’s Things Falls Apart and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Journal of the African Lit-
erature Association, 6, 2: 93-113.
Nicoletta Brazzelli is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Milan.
Her research interests focus on the representation of spaces between geography and litera-
ture. She published on travel writing, exploration narratives, nineteenth-century romances
and contemporary novels. Her latest books are Lands of Desire and Loss. British Colonial and
Postcolonial Spaces (2012), L’Antartide nell’immaginario inglese. Spazio geograco e testo letterario
(2015) and Topograe letterarie. Paradigmi dell’immaginario da Shakespeare a Naipaul (2017).
nicoletta.brazzelli@unimi.it