25 years after Okri’s Man Booker-winning novel was first published,the Nigerian author reflects on what motivated the magicThe Famished Road is fed by the dreams of literature. I devoured the world, through art, or politics,literature, films and music, and in order to find the elixir of its tone. Then it became a perpetual story into which flowed the great seas of African dreams,myths and fables of the world, known and unknown. I made up stories in the matrix of the ancestral mode. Many people read these stories and assume they belong to the verbal tradition, or but I had always believed that it is an artist’s function to enrich the verbal tradition with stories of our own,inventions of our own, inspired by the tales we heard in the moonlight, or sitting in a circle. But even in that the tone is the thing.
But it was as a child that I began the book,with innocence and simplicity of heart. With the wealthy history of literature turning in my intellect, I would disappear into the writing of the novel as into a dream. It was as if I sensed there was a book there, or in the archetypal margins of the numinous world that existed already in the spirit realm; my task was to bring it here,as one lowering intact a perfect vision.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com