A Voice Without a Name: Choruses and Storytellers in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Abstract

This paper proposes to explore the poetics of voice in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, a novel in which a myriad of individual and collective voices resonate without always being clearly identified. The study examines more specifically the duality of Azaro’s voice, but also the novel’s indebtedness to the indigenous tradition of oral folktales and its paradoxical celebration of orature in a text that is, by definition, silent.