Re-thinking beginning : Okri’s The Famished Road and the crisis of the postcolonial nation

Abstract

This essay explores the centrality of beginning in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Beginning is explored not as a narratological category but a dominant trope in anticolonial nationalists’ discourses of nation formation and the transition to liberation. I argue that Okri’s exploration of beginning can be read in critical dialogue with Fanon, and can be framed by David Scott’s idea of tragic consciousness. This essay demonstrates how Okri redefines time as a complex process of disorder and order; within this scheme of things, beginning is presented in The Famished Road not a singular event but as a recurrent potential for national reinvention and generational responsibility constituted by radical betrayal. In other words, beginning is a moment plucked out of the paradoxical flux of time. This essay concludes that Okri’s reconceptualisation of beginning has implications for Scott’s notion of crisis of temporality and tragic consciousness.