The Famished Road

Dad’s long sleep symbolizes his exhaustion with an unjust world, struggling against the futility of his attempts to remake it. His dream visions are bleak: “He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war” (492). Again, the presence of the past—colonialism is never quite “post”—pervades the current struggles for independence and personal dignity. Dad also sees “the rich of our country, he saw the array of our politicians, how corruptible they were, how blind to our future, how greedy they became, how deaf to the cries of the people, how stony their hearts were, how short-sighted their dreams of power” (492). The legacy of colonialism—divisiveness, corruption, greed, and short-term gratification—permeates the current political system. Mum, too, is exhausted by all of these troubles. As Dad sleeps on, and she and Azaro grow hungrier and leaner, she stares off into space, her mind occupied with all that seems insurmountable: “Always the strained smile of the hunger beneath the brave pride. Always the rats and cockroaches eating away at our dreams. Always the world seems to find a method to prevent her working her way out from the corners” (493). She feels trapped in an endless cycle of poverty and hunger.

Yet Dad dreams on, and he begins to conjure a better future as he “travelled the spheres, seeking the restoration of our race, and the restoration of all oppressed peoples” (494). Despite it all, there is potential in the future and dignity in the effort—despite the odds. Azaro knows that change will be slow in coming, even though Dad is impatient. He seeks “world balance now” (494). Azaro follows Dad through his dreams and asks a symbolic question: “Was I being reborn in my father?” (494). This Christ-like reference is reinforced when Azaro notes that the beggars who have followed his father carried an “air of people awaiting the word of a Messiah’s birth” (497). In the previous Book, Dad is compared to Lazarus (484), which is the origin of Azaro’s given name, Lazaro. They will both rise from the dead to become leaders in this new inscription of history.

Dad awakens full of hope, brimming with ideas: “We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven’t begun to live yet” (498). He seeks balance between the natural and human-made worlds; he seeks balance between fear and love; he seeks justice for those who have been denied it. He tells Azaro to treat all living things with respect, to “[i]nvite only good things” (499). He dreams of a utopian future and gives his only son the most uplifting advice. Then, when Azaro awakes the next day, his parents have disappeared, and there is the suggestion that the entire thing—the novel itself—has been but a dream, though what a fantastic one. Indeed, it may be that the dream of balance, justice, freedom, and dignity is but a dream, but it is also “the highest point of a life” (500). The author does not discount a dream as something that cannot be made real; it can actually be the pinnacle of human achievement itself.