While living through my own childhood — listening to stories the elders told, having herbalists treat my glaucoma — I was aware that it would make a magnificent book. I began reading early and always had a sense of life as something that would be read. This does not mean that The Famished Road, my third novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1991, was autobiographical; only that the strange realities of life seemed already to belong to the magical world of reading.
The novel was begun before I realised it. At the University of Essex, in 1981, I wrote a long short story set in London. It later grew into a novel. A good friend said there was something unusual about the early passages set in Africa. This comment set me on the path to The Famished Road, a novel about a spirit child in Lagos around the time of independence.
In the years before working on the novel, I had been dissatisfied with the way I was writing. I was applying the realistic narrative tradition to Africa — but the techniques used to describe western life were inadequate for depicting the multidimensional world of my childhood. This led to a crisis. I needed to find a new way to convey the imaginative richness of Africa. The existing techniques simply would not do anymore.
My father’s belief in the enduring presence of the ancestors, things I saw that could not be rationally explained, the reality of ogbanjes or abikus, the enigmatic way my mother told stories, the flamboyant way people narrated their experiences, all made it clear to me that I had to reconfigure my language and my storytelling. I had to invent a tone that could accommodate the ordinary and the mythical, the poetic and the uncanny.
In Africa, for over a century, we have described our reality through the language and perception of others. But to observe our reality through our own eyes requires a purification of mind and a reinvention of language.
The solution was to find a way of telling stories that was truer to our realities. It meant going back to the beginning of language itself, the way a child learns to speak and write, then putting it all back together again in a fresh way. The realistic technique is sequential, but the realities of which I speak are often spiral, sometimes tangential, possibly simultaneous. By the time I started to write The Famished Road, in the spring of 1986, I was ready.
I was living then in Lorraine Road in north London, in a maisonette belonging to a BBC executive who had split up with his wife. I had a big sunlit room in which to write and a large desk. It was my first real accommodation after my brief homeless period in London, in the early 1980s.
Then, that year, I had to go to Nigeria to write about forthcoming elections for a newspaper. I was there for a few weeks, during which time I published essays critical of the political situation, before suddenly being advised to leave immediately as my name was on a wanted list.
Venice. That was where The Famished Road was finally completed. It was while I lived there that the novel was accepted and published by Jonathan Cape.
And it was there, one afternoon, that I saw a van going past my window. It had “Booker” written on the side of it. An hour later, I had a call telling me that The Famished Road had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I remember that my mood was particularly fine at that time. I felt some magic condition of life, as if I had reached a sort of beatitude.
That fine mood might have had something to do with being 31 and having taken control of my life, after an epic struggle, through the power of writing alone. I had pushed the rock of Sisyphus to the top of the hill and gone back down to do it again. (source: thecrestnews). NNL.
