Crisis, normatividad y normalidad en el Estado mexicano

After Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is perhaps the postcolonial novel that has most frequently been labelled and read as a magical realist text. While Okri’s novel shares with Rushdie’s a focus on an emerging nation, the use of magic, and indeed the use of a magical child as a national allegory, it is a very different book, both stylistically and thematically.

There is a strong political and historical current in the novel, but the magic of The Famished Road is so pervasive that it has inevitably been seen as problematic.

The narrator is Azaro, an abiku or spirit-child. In the lore of the Yorùbá people of West Africa the abiku is a mischievous spirit child that dies and is reborn repeatedly, bringing grief to its parents. Azaro, however, decides in one of his cycles of rebirth to hang on to life. Nevertheless, his link to the spirit-world, which wants to lure him back, is never broken, and allows, or perhaps forces, Azaro to perceive a magical spiritual realm that coexists with the human world around him. The novel has little in the way of a conventional plot, but traces Azaro’s episodic adventures in the Lagos ghetto where he lives. The majority of these adventures are in some way magical, and the book may give the impres-sion of being set in a quasi-magical world. In fact, however, as Derek Wright puts it, the setting of the Lagos ghetto provides the ‘harrowing social realism used to present the grinding poverty, squalor, disease, and brutality in which the hapless slum dwellers pass their days’.⁵⁵ Azaro furnishes us with detailed descriptions of daily life in the ghetto, centred on his small family and the room they inhabit in a squalid compound. The magic in The Famished Road may be much more prevalent and intense than in One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight’s Children, but the realist elements of family life, domestic settings, and the ‘village’ of the ghetto are unambiguously present, as are the historical and geographic markers that place the novel in Nigeria just before Independence.

It is easy to see how the realism of The Famished Road is structured in a seg-mented way, similar to the novels we have considered previously: through the ordered series of family, the domestic world and the ghetto. However, perhaps more poignantly than in any of these other works, it becomes clear in Okri’s novel that such segmentation is what constitutes the political fi eld. Recall that the State is characterized by a rigid segmentarity. Thus the movement towards independence as a nation-state is inevitably a movement of territorialization.

In Okri’s novel the territoriality of politics is particularly apparent in the efforts by the two political parties to gain power – literally territory – in the ghetto.

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 137

Ghosh implies that both pre-capitalist and capitalist world-views impose arbi-trary rules on a chaotic world. Okri shows that the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor work in the same way: through intimidation and bribes they segment the population of the ghetto according to political allegiance.

The realism of The Famished Road also allows us to read it in Jamesonian terms.

The novel represents the constant struggle for survival by Mum and Dad, a hawker and a day labourer. The everyday repetition of Mum and Dad going out to toil, bringing back barely enough money, of making do with too little food in a rat-infested room, indicates the way they are caught, in Jameson’s terms, in the confl ict between the remnants of a pre-capitalist way of life and the increas-ing hold of capitalism. In Deleuzian terms, Azaro’s family is caught in a rigidly territorial State by the struggle for that territory by various interests: what Deleuze and Guattari would call a ‘molar’ politics. The realism of the novel depicts not only the fi ght for domination between the two opposing parties and their various followers and cronies, but also between the landlord and his tenants, and the rise in social status and change in allegiances of Madame Koto, the bar owner. It deals with the struggle for independence, as well as the clash between the modern and the traditional in the opposition between the build-ing of roads by white men and the ancestral forest on the edge of the ghetto.

Indeed, The Famished Road can be seen as a national allegory, dramatizing the vicissitudes of a Nigeria about to be born on several levels, personal and collective. The constant births and deaths of the abiku can be posited as a meta-phor for this process.

So a Jamesonian Marxist reading of The Famished Road is valid to some extent, but it does not fully incorporate the magic of the novel. Reading the abiku as an allegory is far too simple an interpretation of Azaro’s magical adventures. The magic of the novel is so overwhelming that it is diffi cult to read it merely as a tool to enhance a political message in Jameson’s sense. Numerous critics have noted the impossibility of squaring Azaro’s spiritual encounters with any one reading, in particular with any political agenda. Much has been made of the fact that Okri uses Yorùbá mythology heavily in the novel: fi gures such as the abiku, as well as witches and wizards, demons and grotesquely-shaped spirits, and images such as the road and the forest. These have often been read, in the vein of Carpentier or Jameson, as an ‘African aesthetic’⁵⁶ or expression of pre-capitalist society. However, on closer inspection, Okri’s use of this material is idiosyncratic to say the least. The magic in his novel is by no means restricted merely to Yorùbá mythology. In fact Okri’s magic is not reducible to simple symbolism or allegory, as Jo Dandy notes: ‘Much of the imagery used by Okri in The Famished Road [. . .] defi es easy interpretation by the reader; that is, it delib-erately avoids closure and specifi c meaning’.⁵⁷ It is worth considering a longer passage as an example of the novel’s magic episodes. Here Azaro goes through one of his near-death experiences:

But deep inside that darkness a counterwave, a rebellion of joy, stirred. It was a peaceful wave, breaking on the shores of my spirit. I heard soft voices

singing and a very brilliant light came closer and closer to the centre of my forehead. And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye opened, and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant, but it did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid. Then my fear turned. The light went into the new eye and into my brain and roved around my spirit and moved in my veins and circulated in my blood and lodged itself in my heart. And my heart burned with a searing agony, as if it were being burnt to ashes within me. As I began to scream the pain reached its climax and a cool feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse journey of the brilliant light, cooling its fl aming passages, till it got back to the centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer.⁵⁸ Such esoteric language, with its mix of Yorùbá elements (abiku myth, spirits) as well as other mystical images (third eye, divine light) abounds in the frequent magical passages of The Famished Road. It not surprising then that Wright fi nds that the result is ‘such a confusing superabundance of features that they are, paradoxically, rendered featureless [. . .] links between the book’s disparate images – rivers and highways, dreams and hunger, nation and road-building, political stasis and abikus – become too tenuous to be meaningful in any inter-pretative way’,⁵⁹ and Maggi Phillips complains of a ‘confusing excess of data which is at times counter-productive in effect’.⁶⁰ Counter-productive, that is, to a traditionally conceived political reading of the novel. Wright concludes that,

‘for Okri, redemptive energy is fi nally not a political but a purely visionary, imaginative quality, and the reader can be forgiven for seeing Azaro as an image of literary self-absorption, a fi gure for the romantic artist’s solipsistic immersion in a world of his own making’.⁶¹

There is a clear difference in The Famished Road between ‘old’ myths and magic. The fact that the abiku can be seen as a national allegory indicates that the act of thinking the nation in traditional, mythical terms is also an act of territorialization by the State, a way of creating a territorial national identity, as it was in Midnight’s Children. Like in Rushdie’s novel, in The Famished Road myths are not opposed to the nation-state, although magic is. Myths are a way of reigning in the purely different and divergent element of magic by giving it meaning. In fact, in one sense the elements of Yorùbá myth that Okri uses in his novel are reterritorialized magic: the road, the forest, the spirit world, the abiku – all have specifi c symbolic meaning in Yorùbá cosmology. This is what makes possible a Marxist materialist political reading of the abiku myth: pre-cisely because the abiku myth is territorial, can it stand as a national allegory, exposing the stasis of the politics of the existing State. In contrast to these ‘old’

myths, the missing people heralded by the entirely new myths of magic exist only in the future, and the future is always uncertain.

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 139

Some critics, however, attempt to redeem Okri’s aporetic magic either as a postcolonial aesthetic or as a kind of spiritual hope. Edna Aizenberg sees the magic as an ‘enactment of the deliriums of a colonized world [. . .] the fore-grounding of such deliriums emphasizes the text’s constant engagement with sociopolitical and economic issues’.⁶² Phillips feels that through the multiplicity of images in his novels, ‘Okri advocates a deepened, more inclusive perceptual sense as the means by which the underprivileged peoples of the world may effect a regenerative future’.⁶³ Neither of those alternatives is particularly convincing, echoing Bhabha’s insistence that an uncanny hybrid moment can somehow become a ‘subversive strategy of subaltern agency’. In the same way that Bhabha’s thought, as singular in Hallward’s terms, precluded such a sub-versive strategy, so Okri’s magic, as a virtual sign of art, precludes the sociopo-litical engagement and inclusion that Aizenberg and Phillips want to attribute to it. The delirium of the colonized world is indeed present in the novel, but is described quite adequately by Azaro’s realist observations. Compare the above passage with this one:

As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pump-ing on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feelpump-ing that there was no escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rustic zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, the little girls naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-cans, the little boys jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the fi lthy gutters. (FR 189)

As an abiku, Azaro may be an allegory for a nation about to be born before its time, but it is the realism of Azaro’s surroundings that allows us to perceive the material conditions of its situation. It is diffi cult to see how the delirium of Azaro’s spiritual episodes can be linked to such ‘sociopolitical or economic issues’. In both Aizenberg’s and Phillips’s statements we can detect the theoreti-cal double bind of magitheoreti-cal realism: the idea that magic realism, as multivalent and hybrid, can somehow not only enact but also provide a solution to the postcolonial situation.

This double bind, as well as its origins, is clearly apparent in Brenda Cooper’s book Magical Realism in West African Fiction, which delivers perhaps the most extensive reading of The Famished Road as magical realism. As discussed in the Introduction, Cooper’s work is indicative of the way magical realism has been approached in a postcolonial context, in particular with reference to Jameson.

Interestingly, Cooper also uses Bhabha’s theory. In fact, she notes the contradic-tion between the politics of nacontradic-tional struggle and the concept of hybridity, and makes it her explicit aim to unite the two, to reintegrate ‘liminality, diversity,

multivalency’ with the explanatory historical force of Marxism (WAF 1–2).

However, Okri’s The Famished Road thwarts Cooper’s ambitions insofar as she fi nds a surfeit of ambiguity in the novel that seems irreducible to any social real-ity. On the one hand, she sees Okri as dramatizing cultural encounters, both the opposition of Western ideas to the pre-colonial past and the celebration of the transformation and interaction of cultures (WAF 74). On the other hand, she realizes that ‘Okri resolutely refuses to reinforce the most obvious polarities such as that between technological progress in opposition to the past’ (WAF 80).

Thus Cooper asserts that although ‘The Famished Road’s critique of the deca-dence of Nigerian society is trenchant and brave’ (WAF 99), the national alle-gory of the abiku carries no political hope: ‘The purpose of Azaro’s heroic escape [from the spirit world] is not to be found in the awakening of the poor.

They are depicted in the novel as misguided or downtrodden’ (WAF 93).

Certainly, if one wishes to read the magic of The Famished Road as constitutive of a plain political message, one will be disappointed. In contrast to the territo-rial fi eld of politics, the magic appears as distinctly different because of its inherent deterritorialization. In the magical episodes, Okri’s language is eso-teric and impressionistic; close, in fact, to that ‘pure and intense sonorous material’ (KM 6) of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: ‘In the bright white smoke I saw spirits turning into air, spirits of plants and herbs and things I didn’t yet know about; I saw their brightness of blues and yellows, shapes and sad faces, legs brilliant with oil becoming soot, golden eyes melting into vibrant space’ (FR 283).

Rather than presenting a particular magic event as an object = x, the novel at times becomes a kind of narration = x. The spirit world in itself is a site without territory, present everywhere. It is a realm of the proliferation of series of images, where ‘all things are linked’ (FR 553) – very much a Deleuzian virtual realm, or Bhabha’s moment of undecidability. As Deleuze says, ‘lines of fl ight have no territory. Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation of fl uxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies and reigns’ (DII 38). Thus Azaro’s adventures appear as lines of fl ight not only from the grim reality of his life but also from the ruthless territorial politics that shape this reality. Okri’s magic has been criticized precisely as excessive, idiosyncratic and devoid of specifi c messages, but if we consider it in Deleuzian terms, it is neither a solipsistic vision nor an ‘enactment of the deliriums of a colonized world’, but experimental and revolutionary in Deleuze’s ahistorical sense: what Okri is doing is contributing to the invention of a ‘missing people’.

Many have noted Azaro’s lack of agency in the spiritual adventures he narrates, and it is clear that while the magic in The Famished Road is hybrid in Bhabha’s sense: ‘an anxious contradictory place between the human and the not-human, between sense and non-sense’ (LC 178), it certainly does not imply the return of subjective agency that Bhabha associates with this hybrid moment. Rather, as a magical abiku, Azaro can become Deleuze’s collective agent or leaven, an element through which a new people can be thought, precisely because, like

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 141

Alu in The Circle of Reason, he never gains the coherent human identity of a proper subject.

In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari state that his ‘literature is not a voyage through the past but one through our future’ (KM 83). The road that appears to Azaro time and again in the spiritual world is a kind of virtual double of the real road, leading him to numerous, different, often contradictory visions of a future, new people. It is a road that is continually destroyed and then rebuilt, sometimes appearing as a kind of paradise, esoterically beautiful, some-times as a force for the destruction of nature and life itself. Like many of Azaro’s other uncountable visions, the road is where the magic becomes a crystalline sign, where, as we saw in What the Crow Said, the writing of myths without origin takes place. Azaro’s visions have a strong element of Yorùbá myth, but crucially, Okri also deviates from these myths, inventing entirely new legends. It is a matter, as Perrault said, not of returning people to their old myths, but allowing them to create their myths, and thus themselves, anew. The magic – as opposed to the realism – of magical realism is not a national allegory, then, not a political fi ction; for the opposition is not between the atrocities of the real and the liberation of fi ction, but between a writing that refers to the territoriality of the real, and a writing that ‘makes up legends’ and thus allows us to think a new people. One of Azaro’s vivid visions is of the market place populated by spirits.

Here he is able to hear the voices of the spirits speaking about him:

I felt myself being lifted up by the darkness, pushed on by invisible hands.

And the voices followed me, voices without bodies [. . .].

‘Strange things are happening.’

‘The world is turning upside down.’

‘And madness is coming.’

‘And hunger is coming, like a dog with twelve heads.’

‘And confusion is coming.’

‘And war.’

‘And blood will grow in the eyes of men.’

‘And a whole generation will squander the richness of this earth.’

‘Let us go.’

‘Look at him.’

‘Maybe what is to come is already driving him mad.’ (FR 196–197)

Indeed, Azaro’s visions of a new people, both in the sense of a spiritual people, and a Deleuzian ‘missing people’, appears as a kind of hallucinatory madness – that is, a crisis or a trance, like Alu’s speech in The Circle of Reason. In The Famished Road it is this new people that is the true opposite of the exploitation of the land: the actual building of a road and the destruction of the forest without any consideration for the inhabitants of the area. Again, as in the Ras al-Maqtu’,

Indeed, Azaro’s visions of a new people, both in the sense of a spiritual people, and a Deleuzian ‘missing people’, appears as a kind of hallucinatory madness – that is, a crisis or a trance, like Alu’s speech in The Circle of Reason. In The Famished Road it is this new people that is the true opposite of the exploitation of the land: the actual building of a road and the destruction of the forest without any consideration for the inhabitants of the area. Again, as in the Ras al-Maqtu’,