BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Before embarking on a discussion of Ben Okri’s famous novel, “The Famished Road” that has won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991, it would be relevant to shed some light on the historical background of Nigeria’s literary history. Sources maintain that, “The history of Nigerian literature starts Western influences began affecting Nigerian literature as early as the eighth century AD when Arabic ideas and culture were introduced to Africa. During the fourteenth century, written and spoken Arabic flourished in northern Nigeria and by the seventeenth century, some Hausa literature had been translated into Arabic.”
Other sources say that, “Pre-literate Nigeria once enjoyed a verbal art civilization which, at its high point, was warmly patronized by traditional rulers and the general public. At a period when writing was unknown, the oral medium served the people as a bank for the preservation of their ancient experiences and beliefs. Much of the evidence that related to the past of Nigeria, therefore, could be found in oral traditions.
According to “African Post-Colonial Literature in English”, written by Laura C. Gardner, Wole Soyinka’s “A Shuttle in the Crypt” contains poems such as “O Roots!” and “When Seasons Change” which obviously hark back to Nigerian ancestry and folklore. The poems’ geographical and generational African references prompt an investigation of the literary traditions of Soyinka’s nation. Nigerian literature has a long history in the oral tradition. More Nigerian authors meant more authors writing in English, including Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s first novel: Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, details the tragic disintegration of Igbo clans upon the arrival of the Europeans. Igbo folklore saturates the novel, preserving the African elements despite the English prose.
Many researchers suggest that Christian missionaries accelerated the importation of Western education during the 19th century and in various parts of the country, novels developed around 1930. “Centered upon fantastic and magical characters of humans and fairies, Hausa novels, called “non-realistic novels” were based on folktales. By the way, it is important to know that modern 20th century Nigerian fiction draws a lot of inspiration from this tradition of folktales, in turn based on popular imagination of spirits and magic as conceived by the Nigerian people in previous centuries.
So, whenever we discus modern Nigerian fiction in the form of novels or short stories, one should bear in mind that the fantastic stories are not figments of the authors’ imagination but are taken from ordinary people’s ancient tales of those fantastic creatures as reflections of the spiritual and mythical human existence. One of the best contemporary novelists is Ben Okri who was born on March 15, 1959, Minna, Nigeria. He is novelist, short-story writer, and poet who used magic realism to convey the social and political chaos in the country of his birth.
Okri’s first novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), employ surrealistic images to depict the corruption and lunacy of a politically scarred country. The short-story collections Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988) portray the essential link in Nigerian culture between the physical world and the world of the spirits.
It is important here to bear in mind that “magical realism” as a literary technique or device was not invented by Ben Okri who rather borrowed it from Latin American novel or literary tradition as expressed by writers like Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez who won the Nobel Prize for “One Hundred Years of Solitude” In 1985. Magical realism is thus “a literary genre or style associated especially with Latin America that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.”
In the case of Ben Okri he used Nigerian tradition of folktales, spirits and magic to blend it with the modern version of Latin American magical realism to produce something that captures Nigerian history and lives in a more intensive and diverse forms as he amply demonstrated in his most celebrated novel known as The Famished Road. According to Wikipedia, “This is a novel by Nigerian author Ben Okri, the first book in a trilogy that continues with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Published in London in 1991 by Jonathan Cape,[1] the story of The Famished Road follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed African, most likely Nigerian, city.
The novel employs a unique narrative style incorporating the spirit world with the “real” world in what some have classified as Animist Realism. Others have labeled it African Traditional Religion realism, while still others choose simply to call the novel fantasy literature. The book exploits the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is a defining aspect of traditional African life.”
The important point here is that The Famished Road not only portrays a combination of modern and traditional Nigerian life as lived by its peoples but also covers African lives everywhere. AS far as my reading of The Famished Road is concerned, what struck me the most is not only the way Ben Okri writes his prose but also the way he portrays African lives whether consciously or unconsciously.
If we try to read he novel with Ethiopian society in mind we realize that it also appeals to us as the folktales, magic and spirits we find in the novel are also present in our imaginary or real lives although Ethiopian writers may not be aware of them or have not so far decided to explore them in their writings. That may be why Okri has not clearly defined the setting of his famous novel. This was because he is definitely aware of the African context and indirectly tells us that it is also an African story. In this sense, The Famished Road is also an Ethiopian, Kenyan, Somali or South African novel.
Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe before him have use their Western education to explore the realities of their societies without forgetting their roots and the myths, spirits and magical thinking of their ancestors. The situation is different in Ethiopia. Ethiopian writers, the so-called modern ones in particular, imitate Western literary techniques and styles to portray Ethiopian society. A novelist in Ethiopia is given high credits and recognition whenever he tries to approach his materials from the Western perspectives and writers like Hemingway, Graham Green or Victor Hugo. Thus from Hddis Alemayehu, considered the best modern Amharic novelist to Be’alu Girma, equally considered by many local critic, one of the most modern writer, Ethiopian authors have not come out of their Western mold or literary cocoons in order to create something authentically Ethiopian in form as well as in substance. Their aim has always been to approach as best as possible Western novelists who inspired them to write like Westerners and not like Ethiopians. Either Chekhov or Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or Dante are at the back of Ethiopian writers whenever they were producing their books as imitations and not as originally Ethiopian creations.
On the contrary, Nigerian writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyoinka or Ben Okri have transcended the bounds of Western imitation to use their education and their readings to create works of art and literature that are basically Nigerian or African in content and form as well as in their conceptions and objectives. They have cast away the colonial and neocolonial literary or artistic shackles in order to emerge as authentically African and mouthpieces of the African World.
Ethiopian writers should therefor give more attention to Nigerian and other African writers in order to liberate themselves from the Western literary burden and rediscover themselves as authentically Ethiopian and African writers. Yes, Ethiopia has a rich literary and artistic tradition including its own written alphabet. All this is good but it has to be used not to glorify the past but to liberate the present. Ethiopian writers still stick to the Western tradition of naturalism or realism, something that is increasingly shunned even by Western writers. Literary progress is not about sticking to the past but about breaking new grounds on the basis of the unexplored and the new.
WE have also to start translating African literature into Ethiopian languages so hat the styles and contents of celebrated novels from Africa would reach Ethiopian writers and readers. Ethiopia’s literary and artistic progress depends on the degree of its integration with African traditions and not by sticking to the so-called exclusively Ethiopian tradition which is largely a direct or indirect imitation of the West that has little relevance to contemporary issues.
It does not really matter whether Ethiopian writers are writing in Amharic, Oromiffa, Tigigna or in any major language of the country. What is important is to use language to write in a way that genuinely reflects Ethiopian and African realities both in form and content and helps the mental and social integration of the African continent by doing away with past illusions of exclusiveness, elitism or superiority. Africa is one and its art and literature is also one although expressed in different languages. Ethiopia should also join the African world in order to emancipate its art and culture as factors of national cohesion rather than tools of neocolonial division.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2022
