The Text as Riddle and Death's Many Ways: Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Refuting the term of magic realism, this article explores “trans-realism” at work in The Famished Road that Ben Okri defines as the source of African aesthetics present in his novel. The “I” narrator, the abiku, the spirit child, allows access to different levels of consciousness and different territories; he also helps to think of time as the co-existence of past and future lives. Transformations and metamorphoses are the modalities of a mutable world where death is never what one thinks. Writing is placed under the sign of the love of the mother, less colorful a character than the father, closer to everyday life. Boundaries are erased, the two worlds (of phenomenal reality and the supernatural) become one, stories are embedded, interspaces are both spaces in-between and access to the otherworld. Reading with protagonist Azaro means reading the riddle (of life, of death, of incompletion), the form and the aesthetic model of a text that displays its conception of the unknown in paradoxes and contradictions. The unresolved and the infinite make do with the remainder; silence can be heard among the chaos of celebrations, battles, and fights; dream, a modality of writing and being, dares to invent another world.