passionate reincarnation

"As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pumping on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling that there was no escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, the little girls naked on sand playing with crushed tin cans, the little boys jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the filthy gutters. The sun bared the reality of our lives and everything was so harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one another or for anything at all."

--Ben Okri, The Famished Road

The book is (at least till about halfway through which is where I am) brilliant. It can be tiring to read; however most of the time this is forgivable as such books deserve all the energy given to them. In crafting his masterpiece of magical realism, Okri merges fantasy and descriptions of the crudest realities without completely revealing the dividing line. Despite this seamless blend, we are left with little doubt as to what is happening in the boy's life as his country struggles through the violent politics of the post-independence era. At the same time we wander through the whirl of hideous spirits and speaking trees, sensing a power transcending the daily troubles gripping the Nigerian villages.

The power surrounds the idea that lives connect and swirl into each other. Someone I met recently firmly believed in reincarnation and said he can remember his past lives. In contrast to his more zenlike conception of reincarnation, the cycle of lives that appears in Okri's book gives spirits strong emotions and passions. True enlightenment does not seem to be available for the likes of us.

About those who returned from the world of the living to the land of beginnings: "They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn't redeemed, all that they hadn't understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins."

"When I was very young I had a clear memory of my life stretching to other lives. There were no dinstinctions. Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives all at once."

One of my favourite lines: "Being born was a shock from which I never recovered."

I like the idea of a metaconsciousness that feels pain and regret, hope and love. It really contrasts with a more balanced feeling of nirvana. Now maybe the latter is a wiser, 'better' state; however, there is something about imagining the humanity of a person being preserved. The continuation of ignorance, attachment, and curiosity seems rather more beautiful and fragile.