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At
the social level, Okri focuses on a child growing up in
a family who lives among a village community on the
outskirts of a jungle in pre-Independence Nigeria. Their
lives are full of poverty, hunger, labour, injustice, and
suffering; but they are also full of family loyalty, pride,
dignity, and love. The novel is neither sentimental in
evoking the world of the famished, naïve, superstitious but
trusting and hopeful villagers, nor strident in its
condemnation of the factors that contribute to their abject
condition of life.
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At
the level of the family, the novel focuses on the
growing awareness of the boy Azaro, as he narrates his
experiences along with those of his father (an aggressive
and disgruntled manual labourer who later turns into a local
boxer and a confused but sincere idealist), his patiently
suffering mother (who adds to the meager family income by
working as a hawker who sometimes rents a stall selling
cheap items of common village use), and an assorted cast of
villagers which includes a bullying landlord, an eccentric
but subversive photographer, miscellaneous quarrelsome
neighbours, and Madame Koto (who runs a bar, patronizes
Azaro, and whose rise in power and prosperity through the
course of the novel is accompanied by her moral decline and
dealings in witchcraft).
Ø Life
in the village
189: I was
frightened by the feeling that there was no escape from the hard
things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of
wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, the rubbish in
the streets, children in rags… The sun bared the reality of our
lives and everything was so harsh it was a mystery that we could
understand and care for one another or for anything at all.
Ø The
Father
41: That
evening dad became the guardian giant who led me into the
discoveries of our new world.
510: He had
the smell of a great animal, a lean elephant, the smell of too
much energy, too much hope, too much contradiction.
564: Dad was
redreaming the world as he slept.
Ø The
Mother
110: Her
sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the
depoth of her breath’s expulsion, there was also hope, waiting
like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.
508: ‘… My
mouth is full of bad living. I was the most beautiful girl in my
village and I married this madman and I feel as if I have given
birth to this same child five times... I must have done someone
a great wrong to suffer like this. .. My husband is mad but he
is a good man. We are too poor to be wicked and even as we
suffer our hearts are full of goodness…
Ø The
Photographer
214: We
feared that the photographer had been murdered. His glass
cabinet remained permanently shattered. It became a small
representation of what powerful forces can do if anyone speaks
out against their corruptions.
Ø Madame
Koto
568: While
Dad ranged the spheres crying for justice, Madame Koto sucked in
the powers of our area.
569: ‘I am
two hundred years old and unless I get your young blood I will
die soon.’
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At
the political level, the novel illustrates the problems
caused to ordinary people in an African country just before
it moves from colonial rule to independence, by
underdevelopment, corruption, and factionalism. The novel
provides a satirical commentary on the problems attending
upon incipient and new nationhood in postcolonial societies.
Ø 145:
election promises: food, good roads, electricity, schools.
Ø 246-7:
They are all corrupt. They are all thieves. With the Party of
the Rich everyone knows they are thieves.
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