The Famished Road has become an epitome in postcolonial fiction as an allegory of the birth of a nation-state embodied in the mis/adventures of an individual. The paper aims to discuss the right to the construction of a national identity and to relate it to individual and collective trauma, using a critical approach drawn from the field of trauma studies and an aesthetic view that modulates the experience of war.
K. A. Appiah has used the term “spiritual realism” to refer to Okri’s representation of a world more real than the “real” one. It does not belong therefore to the realm of metaphor and imagination. This view allows a reading of Azaro’s hauntings as effects of the actual experience of a child through a vicious war, as emotional and intellectual traumas. In Cathy Caruth’s words, trauma “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality otherwise unavailable.” Among other meanings, the spirits harassing Azaro embody both the lost values the nation had to reconstruct itself from and the horrors Nigerians witnessed. The demand for our witnessing is also a factor as a memory that defies our understanding. War literature in postcolonial contexts offers therefore an aesthetic of resistance which is political and psycho-sociological: the expression of the trauma of having survived and of the dehumanizing survival that follows. It deals therefore with the right to life and its consequences.