Animism, Capitalism, and the Literary: Questions of Method

Garuba’s 2003 article “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society” argues for the importance of the concept of animism to the study of contemporary African societies and their cultural productions.Footnote ³ Drawing upon Patrick Chabal’s observations about the “re-traditionalisation” of Africa, which is to say, the apparent resurgence of “traditional” cultural practices in contemporary modernity, Garuba argues that the existing accounts of this phenomenon “do not go deep enough.”Footnote ⁴ Casting both social-scientific accounts of this “re-traditionalisation” and Raymond Williams’s “dialectic of ‘residuality’ and ‘emergence’ ” as inadequate to the task of modeling contemporary manifestations of animism, Garuba writes that “[i]t is, at a much deeper level, a manifestation of an animist unconscious, which operates through a process that involves what I describe as continual re-enchantment of the world.”Footnote ⁵ This process of “re-enchantment” is derived from the way that the “animist unconscious” functions in the Yoruba tradition—here Garuba draws heavily on Wole Soyinka’s writings—and is explicitly deployed as an alternative to Max Weber’s account of modernity: “Rather than ‘disenchantment’, a persistent re-enchantment thus occurs, and the rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical.”Footnote ⁶ For Garuba, animist-materialist readings of African culture require a sensitivity to these processes of re-enchantment.

Garuba is careful to frame his argument so as to protect it from charges of essentialism and idealism. Indeed, his stated aim is essentially a materialist one: “[m]y overriding objective is to provide a theoretical and analytical framework for reading the scripts that our societies—and our artists—enact and to locate these texts within the sociocultural arena from which they are generated.”Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, “to allay any fears of covert idealism” he opts “to align the concept [of animist materialism] with Williams’s idea of cultural materialism,” stating that “It is easier to understand animism as a ‘fugitive’ materialist practice, pace Williams, when we see it as a sociocultural phenomenon produced and reproduced by particular institutions, employing specific institutional procedures that carry the imprint of power and authority.”Footnote ⁸

Despite this alignment with a materialist method, however, Garuba’s operating theory of capital does not provide the basis for an understanding of the ways in which the latter may interact with animisms. Significantly, despite emphasizing the fact of animism’s interaction with the features of capitalism, the dynamism of capitalism as a process is considerably underplayed. That capitalism itself might be constantly changing and adapting, behave in unpredictable ways, and operate according to a logic of uneven and combined development is a fact missing from the analysis. Thus Garuba can write:

It is worth paying attention to the nuances of the language here. The “animistic mode of thought” is “embedded within” material and economic processes and thus appears to remain fully contained within them; that capitalism might shape animist processes or be shaped by them—a recurring theme in the anthropological accounts previously cited—might well be assumed by the essay, but is not articulated at this key moment in it. Furthermore, although he writes that animism “reproduces itself within the sphere of culture and social life,” Garuba does not appear to allow for the ways in which that reproduction may itself be dialectically related to capitalism’s own reproduction. Instead, the dynamics of the interaction of precoded as “embedded,” thus presenting severe limitations for critical interventions that aim to consider how different processes—material and otherwise—interact and combine to produce specific iterations of cultural phenomena.

Garuba’s limited appreciation for the myriad ways in which animisms and capitalism might interact can be seen to derive from the theoretical underpinning of his argument and, specifically, from its reliance upon the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty. Citing Chakrabarty’s essay “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,” Garuba appears to subscribe to the notion that the subaltern class exists in a separate realm from a country’s bourgeois elites, rather than in a single but unequal capitalist society.Footnote ¹⁰ Vivek Chibber has recently gone to great lengths to critique this line of argument in Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Capital, where he provides detailed historical evidence to refute the suggestions that capitalism abandoned its universalizing tendency when it reached the colonies and that the history of postcolonial countries must be interpreted outside of the dynamics of capitalism.Footnote ¹¹ Garuba, in his reliance on Chakrabarty as well as on the subaltern studies–derived notion of “alternative modernities,” effectively ghettoizes the operation of animism within a subaltern realm that is separate from capitalist development.Footnote ¹² In Garuba’s case, the isolation of animism as a subaltern practice provides the theoretical basis for the argument that animism’s “re-enchantment” of the world occurs away from capitalism; that is to say, it occurs on a different temporality that he calls “subaltern time.”Footnote ¹³ This argument, which draws heavily upon Chakrabarty’s work on the existence of “antihistorical and antimodern” subaltern elements within Indian society, is leveled in part to counter arguments about “failed states.” But when the analysis of contemporary animism is actually separated from the analysis of capitalism—and, indeed, vice versa—the specific action of animism and its relation to the materiality of capitalist accumulation and production is likely to be obscured.

The minimization of both the reach and the dynamism of capital leads, in Garuba’s application of “animist materialism” to literary texts, to something close to a replication of the problems that occur in certain deployments of “magical realism” as a heuristic. Seeing “magical realism” itself as “too narrow a concept to describe the multiplicity of representational practices that animism authorizes,” Garuba subordinates it to his own concept of “animist realism,” the literary practice to which “animist materialism” corresponds:

But the manner in which he reads for his alternative “animist realism,” the “predominant cultural practice of according a physical, often animate material aspect to what others may consider an abstract idea,” erases both the specificity of African literary production and that of individual literary forms.Footnote ¹⁵ Although reading texts from across the world through the lens of a conception of animism that has been derived from the Yoruba tradition is plainly problematic, Garuba also tools “animist realism” as a sort of “world genre,” thus erasing the very sociocultural specificities to which the essay claims to be sensitive:Footnote ¹⁶

What is particularly interesting here is that “animist realism” is understood as a mode of “representation.” In response, we might refer to Sylvia Malloy’s insightful critique of the tendency for deployments of “magical realism” to reflect the concerns of the reader rather than the practice of the producer: “[w]ith its exotic connotations, its potential for stereotypical casting, its ‘poetic’ alienation into the realm of the ‘magical,’ that is the very far away, the very other, magic realism has become, for the United States, a mode of Latin American representation, not a mode of Latin American production.”Footnote ¹⁸ What is lost is the process of mediation between context and text. Consequently, the specificities of individual animisms and of individual texts is likely to be obscured.

What emerges from this reading of Garuba’s essay is, I want to suggest, the potential pitfall of a mode of reading that precodes the interactions between animism and capitalism and understands them purely as part of representation. Instead, I want to propose a mode of analysis that seeks to understand the essential qualities of capitalism’s penetration of a particular locale, as these pertain to the production of a particular text. When the precise nature of capitalism’s operation in a specific context is located, the role of animism within a text—not merely as “discourse” but also as ontology—might begin to emerge. For literary works produced over the last few decades, this requires a particular attentiveness to the interactions between “global” capitalism and animist modes of thought, a topic that has been much researched by anthropologists and also provides clues to the political horizons of some animist texts.

During the 1990s, anthropologists of Africa began to pay particular attention to the effects of globalization upon local social, cultural, and economic practices. It appears that the various manifestations of capitalism, which was then not only in its so-called “globalization” phase, but also (and relatedly) undergoing a fundamental crisis, were registered not only in a degradation of living conditions, but also in an increase in a wide variety of acts of resilience—a term I use to describe activities that are unsubsumable under capitalism, yet not legible as resistance as this latter term has generally been used by scholars of postcolonial literature.Footnote ¹⁹ If resistance, at least in Barbara Harlow’s influential application of the concept to literature, is understood as instances where the text operates as an “arena of struggle” and as a means of undermining the power of a specific oppressor, resilience can be seen as designating activities that run counter to the logic of capital yet do not actively attempt to negate it.Footnote ²⁰

One particular genre of resilient activity, I want to suggest, is legible in efforts to generate wealth outside of capitalist processes of production and accumulation that nevertheless exceed attempts to merely survive the adverse effects of devaluation and uneven development. Some of these attempts involved playing capitalism’s own game (albert illicitly) in order to generate monetary wealth through apparently legitimate schemes, perhaps the best known example being the Nigerian 419 scams, which, as Andrew Apter has shown, successfully duped countless unsuspecting citizens and foreigners into giving up their money to fraudsters.Footnote ²¹ Although such schemes are primarily an attempt to generate capitalist wealth by exploiting the system’s own features, anthropologists have also identified numerous examples of reactions to capitalist modernity that deploy what appear to be elements of tradition—namely ritual, the occult, and witchcraft. As the editors of an essay collection on the subject point out, “[a] large body of evidence from Africa suggests that witchcraft and other occult practices are intimately bound up with people’s ideas about production, exchange and consumption.”Footnote ²² Citing a number of respected studies, they go on to note that:

It seems to me likely that noncapitalist understandings of wealth must surely bear, in undoubtedly complex and variegated ways, upon these widely held impressions of capitalist wealth. Although many of these anthropological studies describe turns to ritual, the occult, and witchcraft that have the aim of earning capitalist wealth, I want to propose the hypothesis that some instances of animism in literary texts—whether or not they are occultist or ritualistic—may be legible as attempts to articulate noncapitalist forms of wealth.Footnote ²⁴

For a working distinction between capitalist and noncapitalist wealth, I turn to Karl Marx and, specifically, to a much-cited passage in the Grundrisse. Part of a discussion of precapitalist forms of production and labor, the following excerpt illustrates the dynamism and potentiality that Marx saw in a wealth that was not constrained by the law of value:

Whereas the “limited bourgeois form” of wealth—that is, capitalist value—is abstract and quantifiable, legible only in terms of the “predetermined yardstick” of exchange value, noncapitalist wealth has “no presupposition other than the previous historical development.” As a consequence of this, the latter’s form is unpredictable and, at least potentially, unquantifiable. Likewise, while the capitalist mode of production externalizes the product of wealth production—as the value contained in commodities—from the human, resulting in the famous alienation of the laborer, noncapitalist wealth is an “end in itself” that embodies the “creative potentialities” of humanity. Marx therefore offers a flexible concept of noncapitalist wealth that is nevertheless—whatever its specific form—highly distinctive from the abstraction of value in its potentiality. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that the existence of a noncapitalist form of wealth, when it exists within a capitalist society, could be a form of resilience because it exists outside of the value relation and provides well-being. Whereas Marx’s version of noncapitalist wealth is clearly an anthropocentric one insofar as it is concerned with human potentiality, we might consider how animist modes of thought that are cognizant of the agency of objects might point toward nonhuman forms of wealth. Looking closely at the anthropological scholarship on historical forms of wealth in Africa will provide some clues as to the specific forms that it might take in fiction.

Conceptualizing Wealth in African Literary Contexts

Although African literary studies has tended to pass over the notion of wealth, anthropologists of Africa have frequently posed the question of “[h]ow—exactly and in slow motion—have African and European changing systems of wealth acted, and continue to act, upon one another?”Footnote ²⁶ It seems to me that a notion of wealth can be extremely useful in helping us to understand how texts imagine alternatives to capitalism in contexts where the “traditional” political avenues—such as organized socialism and communism—are not available or hold little appeal. Although there is currently a lack of work on how such a notion would be theorized in relation to the literary, anthropological studies—most notably those of equatorial Africa—provide important cues for how literary scholars might conceptualize wealth and mobilize it in their analyses.

As it occurs in the anthropological scholarship, the concept of wealth is partially decoupled from capitalist wealth, much in line with Marx’s formulation in the Grundrisse. Although capitalist value may bring societies its own specific form of wealth once it penetrates them, precapitalist societies had their own systems for generating wealth that, as Paul Clough’s study of accumulation in a Hausaland village has shown, can continue to operate alongside capitalist processes of accumulation.Footnote ²⁷ Notions of wealth are locally specific and relate to what constitutes well-being in a particular environment. So, for the Hausa people among whom Clough conducted his research, the concept of wealth:

Wealth, then, unlike capitalist value, need not be related to competitive market-based practices, even if certain forms of wealth might be interwoven with these. Although each form of wealth was and is specific to individual societies, anthropologists have developed models for understanding it across a range of different contexts. One of the most influential models of how wealth presented in precapitalist societies—itself evident in the previous quotation from Clough—is that of “wealth in people.” The concept has a long history in social anthropology, but began to be more thoroughly elaborated by scholars such as Jane I. Guyer in the 1990s. As Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga summarize it, “wealth in people”

The different ways in which this model has been applied has varied and is influenced by broader theoretical trends in African anthropology. In Guyer and Belinga’s influential application of the concept to equatorial Africa, “wealth in people” is figured as “wealth in knowledge,” according to which people are valued in a society because of their specialized knowledge about, among other things, the local environment. Through this optic, Guyer and Belinga argue, wealth in people is not best understood according to a “quantitative” model of accumulation—as had been the tendency in much preceding scholarship on the topic—but rather in terms of a “qualitative” logic of “composition.”Footnote ³⁰ According to the principle of composition, a diverse range of skills was incorporated into society “in an inclusive way quite different from the models of hierarchical gradations of esoteric knowledge as a social control mechanism.”Footnote ³¹ This version of wealth in people therefore presupposes a different conception of political power than that which predominates in capitalist societies. It also has implications for the status of objects: “It was often physical manifestations of the complex of human knowledge—nkobi boxes, Lemba minkisi—rather than human repositories through which the reach of power was extended.”Footnote ³² The extension of the concept of wealth in people to include wealth in knowledge therefore permits a means of understanding a co-constitutive wealth between people and the material world. This would take on a specifically animist dimension if the objects were themselves understood to be inhabited by spirits or as possessing their own agency.

This line of inquiry into the notion of wealth therefore reveals an exciting range of insights into how diverse societies functioned before the arrival of colonialism and—given that these practices were unlikely to be completely erased—how they continued to develop under, and after, its rule. In the context of the criticism of African literature, moreover, it suggests some exciting ways in which we might begin to theorize an anticapitalist politics that is not easily legible within existing frameworks of resistance or dissent. For if we adopt a sensitivity to the ways in which “compositional” forms of wealth (i.e., those that run counter to the accumulative logic of capital) may occur in texts that draw upon aspects of traditions, we may be better able to understand how such texts are located vis-à-vis capitalism. How, for example, might a text’s construction of a form of wealth, whether diegetic or formal, be legible as a kind of resilience? Just as importantly: How might an operating notion of wealth articulate a gender politics that operates contrarily to capitalism’s own gendering of the human body? These questions suggest ways in which our attention to animism in literary texts might also illuminate new kinds of textual politics.

It is, at this point, necessary to make several clarifications. I am not suggesting that we should anthropologize African texts by reducing their content and form to anthropological models, an undertaking that would—among numerous other theoretical difficulties—quickly obscure the specificity of the literary. Nor is it my suggestion that we read such authors as Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing, or Syl Cheney-Coker—all associated with the apparent boom in West African “magical realist” narratives in the 1980s and 1990s—as operating a simple “return” to precapitalist forms of wealth through their apparent engagement with modes of thinking that predate the arrival of capitalism. As the Comaroffs note in a different context, what is at stake in contemporary turns to apparently “traditional” ways of thinking is not a “retreat into tradition” but the production of “new forms of consciousness.”Footnote ³³ Relatedly (and just as importantly), my intention is not to minimize the identitarian aspects, or the recuperative intentions, of texts that draw upon indigenous traditions by smoothing over the cultural specificities with a concept of wealth. Rather, I am suggesting that part of that cultural specificity may be legible only when we attend to the text’s representation of the dynamics of (crisis) capitalism and to how an alternative form of wealth is articulated within such a representation. What the work of Guyer and others suggests is the importance of wealth to societies, as well as some of the particular articulations that it can take on the African continent—in short, the adaptability of ideas and material practices of wealth, even where capitalist wealth (in the form of value) reigns.

Ben Okri and the Evaluative Potential of the Novel Form

Ben Okri’s trilogy of novels—The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches—have often been read as instances of “magical realism.”Footnote ³⁴ Narrated by Azaro, a “spirit child” who has refused his place in the spirit realm and chosen to stay with his loving parents, the narrative presents the precarity of life in a soon-to-be independent African nation—one that is clearly, but never explicitly named as, Nigeria. Crucially, however, while the political situation clearly references that of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the coming-into-being of the Nigerian nation, the material environment in which Azaro lives—characterized by urban slum-dwelling, a preponderance of informal labor, and environmental degradation—is conspicuously reminiscent of the moment in which Okri was writing; that is, the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although Azaro’s ability to perceive elements of the spirit-world has led the novel to be interpreted as a “hybrid” of animist thought and realist narrative techniques, I want to understand it as part of an attempt to use the novel form to imagine an alternative way of being under crisis-capitalism.

This claim is supported by Okri himself who, in several interviews, has made comments that suggest that his use of the novel form is tied to questions of capital and value. Indeed, in a 2004 interview, Okri makes an uncharacteristically materialist (and extremely suggestive) comment concerning the relation between aesthetics and capitalism: “I’m all for enriching the deep roots of our continuing aesthetic experience. We shouldn’t despair. Capitalism wins but capitalism also loses. Capitalism will always breed its resistance—its anti-capitalism.”Footnote ³⁵ The word capitalism, so often absent from discussion of Okri’s works and from many of the author’s own pronouncements, is located here in opposition to aesthetic experience, this latter term itself associated with “resistance” and “anti-capitalism.” That Okri sees aesthetics as in some way antithetical to capitalism—unfortunately, there is little information on how he actually understands the latter term—is important to bear in mind when considering some of the comments that he made in the period when he was writing The Famished Road trilogy. In an earlier interview, the author makes a clear connection between The Famished Road, that novel’s representation of history, and the question of what is valuable in human life and society:

Okri first identifies the contemporary moment as one in which either total destruction or great creativity are both possible paths for humanity. In this moment, which we might call a moment of crisis, he locates his novel as a work concerned with changing perceptions around “what is valid and valuable, different measures and different values,” suggesting that the fiction itself has an evaluative function.

This emphasis on what is valuable is, I want to suggest, particularly significant for the context about which Okri is writing. This is because, in the years following Nigeria’s oil boom of the 1970s, the country underwent a dramatic collapse of economic value. Apter describes the situation vividly:

As the crisis in the capitalist world system was becoming increasingly apparent, in Nigeria, where accumulation had for some time occurred without valorization,Footnote ³⁸ the extent of the crisis was amplified and the effects immediately grievous. The 1986 Structural Adjustment Program—implemented by the military government under the watchful eye of the Bretton Woods institutionsFootnote ³⁹ —functioned to effectively bring the national wealth further under the arm of the state, denying the majority access to what material support it might have offered. Meanwhile, the accompanying devaluation of the naira and the resultant decrease in its buying power meant that “the mysterious ‘substance’ of the money form literally disappeared.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Capitalism in Nigeria had shown itself to be a system of representation first, and one of wealth-production second.

The Famished Road, then, might be seen as an attempt to use the novel form to assess what is valuable in Nigerian postcolonial society; rather than simply a fusion of narrative influences, we may begin to see the trilogy as engaging the questions of what is valuable under capitalism. This, I want to suggest, is one area where attention to the text’s “animism” becomes particularly important. In what follows, I argue that Okri’s trilogy narrates the failure of capitalist valorization to bring wealth to the characters of the novel. I then make the case that his trilogy articulates numerous forms of noncapitalist wealth, a category within which many of the “esoteric” aspects of the novels can be seen to have their importance.Footnote ⁴¹ Although these forms of wealth are consistently frustrated within the events of the narrative, a kind that occurs in spite of capitalist abstraction is nevertheless articulated through the novel’s cyclical structure.

The Cyclical Crisis

The Famished Road trilogy represents the lived experience of a capitalism that is structurally indisposed toward providing well-being for those who live under it. Azaro’s family home appears to be no exception to the common definition of a slum as a settlement that exhibits “overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.”Footnote ⁴² Early in The Famished Road, soon after the family has moved to the settlement that will be their home for the duration of the trilogy, Azaro describes the area thus: “Our surroundings were poor. We didn’t have a bathroom worth speaking of and the toilet was crude.”Footnote ⁴³ Azaro and his parents occupy a single room, share toilet and cooking facilities with other families in the compound, and are frequently threatened with eviction by their landlord. The principal point to make here is that there is an implied—although never explicitly stated—relation and interdependence between the slum (referred to as “the ghetto”) and external processes of development. Indeed, as is typical for slums, the poor and underdeveloped settlement is located near a rapidly developing urban center. Azaro, at one point finding himself some distance from his home, notes how “a new world was being erected amidst the old. Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were being built; flyovers, half-finished, were like passageways into the air.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As capitalism stimulates urban development elsewhere in the city, the slum itself appears to increase in size: “Houses suddenly appeared in previously empty spaces. New tenants rented the rooms. We didn’t know who the new people were.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In the third book, Azaro also notes that “[o]ur area filled up with strangers who came to the city from their villages deep in the country. There were no houses for them and sometimes ten of them lived in one room.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This not only evokes the much-remarked influx of rural populations to cities that occurred in the late twentieth century as opportunities diminished in the countryside (in this regard, it is important to remember that some of Azaro’s family still reside in “the village”) but also reminds us of the dependence of such populations upon urban centers for subsistence. That urban development is dependent upon the exploitation of nature is continually emphasized: there is frequent reference throughout the trilogy to the impact that urban development has upon the surrounding forest. Upon finding himself in a forest clearing early in the first novel, Azaro sees that “[t]he clearing was the beginning of an expressway. Building companies had levelled the trees,”Footnote ⁴⁷ and he later notes that “every day the forest thinned a little.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In addition to this clear articulation of the slum’s connection to capitalist development, there are other registrations of the crisis of value: Dad’s own crisis of masculinity, caused by his failure to find dignified work that will provide for his family; the ambiguity (and ultimate failure) of Madame Koto’s entrepreneurial ambitions; and the reliance of Dad and Mum upon precarious informal labor for survival.

Crucially, however, the narrative strands that contribute to this representation of crisis do not occur in a linear narrative. Okri’s trilogy—and the three individual novels that make up its continuous narrative—is constructed according to a cyclical logic. This does, of course, bring Okri’s appropriation of the Yoruba àbíkú myth to mind. As McCabe reminds us, “Àbíkú literally means ‘one who is born, dies’—though the compact “born to die,” with its implication of a fated or deliberately planned death, has become the standard translation.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Azaro (until he rejects the “spirit world” in favor of the living in the ghetto early in The Famished Road) and Ade (Azaro’s friend) are spirit children who participate in this “cycle of rebirth.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But I want to suggest that the structural instantiation of the cycle, although possibly inspired by the àbíkú myth, has a material valence.

Indeed, to read the trilogy is to navigate frequent cycling between periods of well-being and those of violence. Azaro’s recurring references to the end of one “cycle” and the beginning of another draw attention to the repetitiousness of the violence that is experienced in the ghetto.Footnote ⁵¹ To what these cycles correspond, materially speaking, is never explicitly stated. What is evident, however, is that the turning of a new cycle acts to prolong the suffering of the people of the ghetto and to render temporary any relief that may have been achieved; indeed, Azaro at one point notes that “[i]t seemed our lives kept turning on the same axis of anguish,” suggesting the continual renewal of misfortune in the novels.Footnote ⁵² The entire narrative trajectory of the trilogy, one characterized by partial repetitions, stasis, and the continual recurrence of misfortune, can be seen to enact this cyclical logic.

I want to propose that this cyclicality is, in part, a further element of the manner in which Okri’s trilogy encodes the logic of capital itself, the observation that capitalism passes from periods of successful accumulation to periods of crisis being a component of Marx’s critique of capital and of subsequent studies.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, one of the principal observations that Marxist economists have made in relation to capitalism’s tendency toward crisis is that crises often occur and recur according to a cyclical logic. In one particularly memorable formulation, which also betrays something of a teleological perspective, Marx writes that “[c]ontradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labor and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly occurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The explanation for what causes capitalism’s cycles and the debates around what constitutes a cycle are not particularly important here.Footnote ⁵⁵ What is germane to my discussion of Okri, however, is that capitalist accumulation has often been perceived as operating according to a cyclical logic, a perception that is likely to be more pronounced on the periphery of the world system, where capital’s productive basis is generally less established and is consequently likely to be more vulnerable to crises of accumulation. (Indeed, the relatively swift transition from the oil boom of the 1970s to the doldrums of debt and structural adjustment in the 1980s would seem to suggest that this was the case in Nigeria.) Although the trilogy’s cycles might be partly inspired by the àbíkú, the continual reversals of small gains and the rapid ends to periods of relative prosperity suggest that the novels encode the logic of crisis at the structural level.

Wealth in Fiction

This encoding of the structural inescapability of the effects of capitalism does not mean that The Famished Road trilogy is an entirely pessimistic text. Despite the dearth of viable alternatives offered within the narrative itself—and it is important to note that both Dad’s and Mum’s attempts at political action ultimately amount to little in terms of material change—I want to argue that forms of wealth are articulated by the text that appear to be resilient in the face of the systemic oppression that otherwise reigns over the ghetto and its inhabitants. Wealth, it should be remembered, is understood here to mean noncapitalist wealth. Unlike the quantifiable capitalist wealth (usually referred to as value), which is predicated upon the negation of human potential through the latter’s abstraction, noncapitalist forms might allow for the embodiment of such potential. Across the enormous scope of Okri’s trilogy, the issue of wealth is raised in myriad ways, and the prospect of alternative avenues to well-being (i.e., those outside of the capitalist labor market) is frequently posited, continual emphasis being placed upon the importance of perceiving what is valuable and what is not. This is, of course, in keeping with the author’s stated aim “to alter the way in which we perceive what is valid and valuable, different measures and different values.”Footnote ⁵⁶ But within the cyclical logic of the trilogy, the apparent potential of such wealth does not often translate into permanent material gain. What I think is crucial to note about Okri’s trilogy, however, is that it articulates a kind of co-constitutive wealth that, although similarly subject to the changing of the cycles, persists in spite of them.

This can be most clearly seen by focusing on the character of Dad and his increasing ability to perceive a nexus of human and nonhuman potentials. Crucially, this ability is distinct from his failed attempt to organize a political party that is based upon human potential; even after Dad fails to forge a viable practical solution, he nevertheless—albeit inconsistently—exhibits an understanding of a form of wealth. Early on, when talking about the “powers” that were possessed by deceased members of his family, he says that “[w]e are forgetting these powers. Now, all the power that people have is selfishness, money, and politics.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Material concerns have, in Dad’s view, replaced people’s erstwhile concern for harnessing their inner “powers.” Throughout the trilogy, instances of community among the ghetto-dwellers appear to harness some of this potential, with Azaro stating that “[i]t is probably because we have so many things in us that community is so important.”Footnote ⁵⁸ It is notable that in Songs of Enchantment, the strength of communal feeling in the ghetto grows considerably in comparison with The Famished Road; as the violence of the political situation increases, the pronoun “we” increasingly refers to the people of the ghetto (rather than merely to Azaro’s family) and Azaro uses phrases such as “our collective sanity.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This as-yet-unrealized potential appears to be associated with “love,” a force that is seen to reside in the spirit realm from which Azaro and Ade, as àbíkú children, hail.

Yet Dad also suggests that the untapped potential in humans is co-constituted with their environment:

Although humans are themselves “precious”—an idea that also suggests the concept of “wealth in people”—they appear to be not only related, but also implicated in their environment. Although some things are liable to “burn” Dad, he states that they react to his happy emotions and “turn golden,” suggesting a close connection between human and nonhuman life. The wealth that resides in humans, then, is complexly and enigmatically related to the environment in which they live.

These connections take on a particular valence in Dad’s discussion of “RE-DREAMING THE WORLD,” a process that appears to require a knowledge of its physical environment, the people who dwell in it, and its multiple realms of existence, including the spirit world.Footnote ⁶¹ There is an important distinction to make here between the process of “re-dreaming” and Garuba’s use of “re-enchantment” to describe animism’s understanding of the agency of nonhuman beings. Although “re-enchantment” is a potentially problematic term because it seems to assume that the “disenchantment” caused by capitalism in some way obviated animist dynamics, “re-dreaming” refers entirely to the process of perception, the emphasis placed upon looking for and recognizing a wealth that already exists, rather than on its new emergence. This wealth—elaborated most obviously, but not uniquely, through Dad’s speeches—bears important structural similarities with the “wealth in knowledge” described by Guyer and Belinga and seems to rely partly upon the cultivation of a knowledge of the world in which the characters live. This is most clear in Dad’s long speech in a chapter entitled “Deliverance” at the end of Songs of Enchantment, where, now “seeing the world with terrible new eyes,” he names everything that he is now able to see, apparently in an attempt to reveal to the community their path to freedom:Footnote ⁶²

Azaro’s description of Dad’s naming continues for several pages, the length of the episode emphasizing the father’s attempt at an exhaustive inventory of the world in which he lives, one that demonstrates a specialized knowledge of the environment. He knows the different kinds of trees, the uses for banana trees and the dongoyaro root, and the names of “spirits from higher realms”—all knowledge that is valuable within that particular environment insofar as it unlocks the uses of its individual components, whether they be for malaria cures or as umbrellas. That he carries out this naming “as if everything were nothing but a quivering incantation” hints at the fact that the objects that he names exceed their own material status. Crucially, he also names “the spirits from higher realms that restore balances,” demonstrating the role of nonhuman agency in maintaining this state of affairs. The following quotation shows further the importance that Dad places upon knowledge of the land and of its history:

Again, each of the things that Dad names has a clear use-value and has the potential to help the community in their lives, but these objects are never reduced solely to their materialist use-value. Indeed, the “ants and woodworms” are shown to be connected to the creation of new gods. Dad’s naming therefore points to a particular kind of use-value—one that is simultaneously material and extramaterial, or spiritual. At the end of the cited passage, creativity with the objects in the surrounding environment is shown to be a necessity for the survival of African peoples. This emphasis on knowledge of the environment can be understood alongside the trilogy’s preoccupation with the forest (with which the ghetto borders) and its gradual destruction to make way for capitalist development. This “dwelling place of mysteries and innumerable old stories”—a description that clearly draws on the established cultural and literary trope of the African “bush”—is, it would appear, the source of much of the knowledge that Dad prescribes and its destruction prevents this wealth from being accessed.Footnote ⁶⁵

Dad’s speech makes a clear connection between this knowledge process, this “re-dreaming” of the world, and a form of resilience under capitalism, as I have already defined the term. He turns his attention to “the secret names of those that dwelled within the sundry abodes” and begins listing the ordinary people whose names indicate alternatives to the drudgery of their existence. In addition to the baker “whose name meant REVEAL TO US OUR GLORIES” and the sign-writer “whose name meant OUR DESTINY IS IN OUR HANDS,” Dad names (among other examples) “the carrier of monstrous loads, three streets away . . . whose name meant WHATEVER HAPPENS TO US WILL MAKE US STRONGER.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Those laboring in the informal sector, then, exceed their status as workers. Even though they are shut out of the system of value-extraction, these individuals embody an alternative kind of wealth and exceed their status as subjects under capitalism.

Dad’s speech in Songs of Enchantment is, I want to suggest, only one instance of the perception of co-constitutive wealth in the novels. Indeed, different characters demonstrate such insight at different points in the narrative. Azaro, the spirit child and the focalizer of the narrative, appears able to discern wealth behind the material appearance of things in the many dreamlike sequences that occur throughout the trilogy. This is, of course, attributable to his status as an àbíkú who has experience of the spirit world and the “love” that is contained in it. In this sense Okri’s use of the àbíkú myth, with its facilitation of moves between the spirit realm and the real world, allows for an enormous number of permutations of noncapitalist wealth.

It is, however, important to remember that within the economy of the trilogy, this wealth is grasped only fleetingly by the characters and is vulnerable to the same logic of cyclicality as they are themselves; apparent gains are swiftly reversed. Indeed, after Dad’s important speeches in Songs of Enchantment, he is imprisoned early in Infinite Riches and further oppressions come to the ghetto. But—and this is a crucial point—although new cycles repeatedly bring negative forces, they also—by the same logic—bring co-constitutive wealth. We might refer here to capital’s need for “living labor” in order to produce value. With capitalism’s need to ensure the reproduction of labor, we might hazard that in Okri’s trilogy, it also ensures the reproduction of co-constitutive wealth. This is not, however, to minimize the importance of individual or collective agency. Dad’s emphasis on the necessity of “RE-DREAMING THE WORLD,”Footnote ⁶⁷ stresses the necessity of the inhabitants of the ghetto actively pursuing wealth through perception. The point is that this is complexly related to and implicated in capitalist accumulation itself. This is why the concept of wealth appears somewhat nebulous within the narrative: it occurs differently in each cycle. Although wealth is never fully realized by the characters of The Famished Road trilogy, it is never fully negated.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, the last stanza of the short poem that composes the final chapter of Infinite Riches stresses the continuation of the process:

“Living” here does not designate mere “survival,” but rather refers to the constant negotiation of the “enigma of reality,” a negotiation that continues against all odds. Okri’s trilogy, in its continued articulation and rearticulation of wealth, demonstrates a formal resilience to capitalism. Both at the level of content and at the level of form, there is something that is simultaneously within and beyond the human that persists in spite of capital. In this sense, the trilogy can be seen to simultaneously encode the logic of capital and to run counter to “capitalist” or developmentalist ideas of linear history and unfettered growth. This aspect of Okri’s poetics hints at the complexity contained in his statement that “Capitalism will always breed its resistance—its anti-capitalism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The latter can be understood not merely to entail human “resistance,” but also a complex of human and nonhuman, material and nonmaterial processes that interpenetrate capitalism and persist in spite of it.

This suggests a sense in which wealth runs counter to, or at least parallel to, certain genres of representation. Dad’s speech, with its lengthy and apparently exhaustive naming and listing, one that allows him to articulate the complex relation between the material and the spiritual, is a genre that is able to allude to the existence of wealth and demonstrate its connections with the visible world. Wealth is therefore not beyond representation per se, but rather might be seen to operate outside of the kind of system of representation that capital constitutes. Whereas money is a representation of capitalist wealth (value), wealth, which relies on its social use-values and also exceeds the material constraints of them, cannot be represented in this way. The Famished Road trilogy, with its cycles and inclusion of long passages such as Dad’s speech, allows for this process to become clear to the reader.

Conclusion: Cosmopolitan Concerns

Attention to both capitalist wealth (or its lack, in conditions of crisis) and noncapitalist forms of wealth (as they relate to animist modes of thought) provides, I have tried to show, the basis for a materialist analysis that attends to how literary forms actually stage different conceptions of materiality and agency. In terms of the question of method that I discussed at the beginning of this essay, this suggests the utility of a mode of inquiry that is at once interdisciplinary—at least insofar as it attempts to locate texts within a developed and detailed understanding of their contexts of production—and attentive to the specificity of the literary.

As potentially exciting as Okri’s articulation of wealth may seem, it also raises key questions around animism, literary forms, and cosmopolitan privilege. Okri’s status as a cosmopolitan author—one writing about the Nigerian crisis, for the most part, from England—might cause us to ask whether the capacity to discern and articulate noncapitalist wealth is itself a somewhat cosmopolitanized iteration of animism. Furthermore, it might be argued that the kind of literary form available to cosmopolitan writers in the late 1980s and 1990s and generally sanctioned by the dictates of the literary marketplace—the long, almost encyclopedic iteration of the novel—allows the writer to explore the existence of wealth within capital’s cyclical logic in a way that may not be possible in other kinds of forms. It might also be possible to understand such texts as the cosmopolitan writer’s attempt to re-create a form of wealth that, in the center of the capitalist world system from which they write, is not so readily visible as it may be on the periphery. These are questions that only further investigation into a broader range of African and postcolonial texts can answer. Nevertheless, Okri’s trilogy suggests the utility of a broadly conceived concept of wealth in understanding the political stakes of texts written in the context of the crisis of capitalism.