The Famished Road

Madame Koto’s presence looms large—physically and otherwise—throughout Book 6. Her growing stomach (349) suggests pregnancy (or perhaps the bloat of corruption), but what will be born of her efforts is ambivalent at best. After allying herself with the Party of the Rich, she has “changed”:

Her face had become big and a little ugly. Her foot had swollen and was wrapped in filthy bandages. There was a patch of rough darkened skin on her face which made her expressions sinister. She had become more severe, more remote, more powerful (360).

Her physical transformation mirrors the philosophical and psychological shifts she has made—the ethical compromises she has allowed—to become one of the rich and powerful. In the world of the book, the rich are ethically suspect and morally malevolent (“sinister”). The swollen foot suggests gout, famously nicknamed “the disease of kings,” owing to its association with a decadent and fatty diet. Later, she has grown even larger, “bigger and fatter” (373) than ever before. The reader remains in suspense over what fruit she will bear.

Dad undergoes two significant transformations, as well. First, he styles himself a great boxer and spoils for ever more brutal fights, resplendent with lush spectacle. It is clear from the start of his journey as a boxer that what he is fighting resides in the psyche, not in the body: “Poverty,” Mum says, “is driving him mad” (353). Dad himself acknowledges, “To be a man is no small thing” (354), which refers to his increasingly desperate attempts to reclaim his dignity in the face of constant deprivation. Ironically, the consequence of Dad’s training—which demands that he eat copious amounts of food—is to plunge his family more deeply into hunger and poverty: “We became very poor because of his obsession,” Azaro relates. “We ate very little and he ate a lot, because his increased powers needed it” (366). People in the village notice, as well, commenting that, while Azaro “starves” and Mum grows very “lean,” Dad’s “power increases” (367). The family is again the object of condemnation and suspicion because of Dad’s behavior. When Madame Koto gives Azaro some money—he lies about the source, knowing the conflict between her and Dad—it plunges the household into “discord” (372). The habits of poverty, and the self-centered survivalism it fosters, are deeply ingrained.

Dad’s second transformation into a political hopeful is taken up with equal passion and abandon as his boxing career. He parlays the money he won in the fight with the Green Leopard into a crash course education in “philosophy, politics, anatomy, science, astrology, Chinese medicine. He bought the Greek and Roman classics. He became fascinated with the Bible” (409). Again, he misuses the money that his schemes afford him, indulging his interests at the expense of his family. Azaro describes his collection disparagingly:

The room became cluttered with books of all sizes, ugly books with pictureless covers and tiny letters as if intended for only the ants to read, large books that broke your back to carry them, books with such sloped lettering that they strained the neck, books which smelt like cobwebs and barks of medicinal trees and old sawdust after rain (409-10).

The books, to Azaro at least, are obstacles crowding the room—useless to everyday life, a burden to carry—filled with difficult and dead material. They serve no purpose; they will not ease his hunger. Yet Dad sees them as instrumental to his new calling as a politician, which he overtly links to financial stability: “Where there’s politics, there’s money” (411), he says to Mum. One cannot help but think he is eliding the other, undeniable truth: Indeed, politics and money collide but in collusion with corruption. Madame Koto’s example is only one of many to expose this relationship.

The fight with the Green Leopard can be seen as a metaphor for politics itself. Dad is determined to best this thug from the political campaign van, not because Dad wants the money (from the bets that fly during the fight) or even the fame (this time). He fights the Green Leopard because, as he puts it, “I will beat you and disgrace your philosophy” (396). The Green Leopard is enormous—overinflated, like Madame Koto, by his allegiance to wealth and power—compared to Dad’s impoverished, “puny” self (396). In the backdrop to the fight are the faces of the neighbors, which are “[h]ungry faces,” as usual, though “now they were hungry for spectacle” (396). Dad rises to the challenge, though at great cost to his physical well-being, and unexpectedly beats the Green Leopard, causing him and his henchmen to scatter: “They left with their philosophy in disgrace” (401). In his mania for boxing, Dad sees an opportunity to humiliate the rich and powerful with superior physicality; when he switches to politics, he sees an opportunity to best them with superior ideas—or, failing that, to join them (politics equals money).

The other thematic concern of Book 6, and the novel as a whole, is the steady march of change—whether or not it brings “progress.” The religious protestors outside Madame Koto’s newly electrified establishment indicate a distinct unease with this modernization. The head priest calls this development an “ABOMINATION” (376) in all-caps outrage. He works himself into a frenzy of anti-modern vitriol: “And as he chanted, railing against prostitutes, science, theories of evolution, the enshrinement of reason against God, and evil women of Babylon, a procession of cars drove down the street” (377). The priest becomes a “ridiculous sight” to the residents because he rails against what appears to be inevitable (377). The “procession of cars” gestures toward the future, while he represents an irrelevant past. Madame Koto’s purchase of her own personal car cements this inevitability.

The section ends with another disastrous party. Dad had wanted to thank the people who had helped him recover from the fight, but rumor has it that he wants to celebrate his victory over the Green Leopard—thus, everyone feels entitled to attend. To that end, the party is “overrun by tramps whose hair was the breeding ground of lice and sprouting rubbish, and who stank; by the wretched and the hungry and the homeless,” not to mention “the deformed” and “weary ghetto-dwellers” (415). While Madame Koto attracts her wealthy patrons, Dad is a magnet for the poor and downtrodden. His fame as a boxer who defeated one of the wealthy political party’s thugs has spread far and wide. Dad tries to give an impassioned speech about the power of the impoverished—they are quite literally hungry for change and for food—but he is drowned out by the calls for food and drink. Sensory desires overwhelm political or philosophical concerns in the end.