1As that which keeps returning yet always with a difference, the ghost is a highly suitable figure for thinking the postcolonial, which signifies both a beyond to the colonial and the persistence of colonial structures in this beyond. The ghost also aptly expresses the spectral status of most ex-colonies on the world’s stage: although growing rapidly in importance in terms of natural resources and transnational labor, from the West these countries are still very much perceived as another world, barely defined and easily ignored. The ghost can thus be used to conceptualize the postcolonial subject’s position as oscillating between visibility and invisibility and materiality and immateriality. Although this signifies a degree of disempowerment it also denotes how the postcolonial subject haunts the contemporary with specific indictments and concrete demands for justice.

2These connections remain largely overlooked in the seminal theoretical text of contemporary ghost studies, Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida dutifully lists the victims of colonialism among the ghosts who are due justice and responsibility: ‘no justice... seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.’1 However, he is clearly speaking from the point of view of the haunted one who is supposed to give justice, rather than as the ghost who is demanding it. When Derrida does invoke the perspective of the ghost, in his discussion of the visor effect, the emphasis again is not on the action of the ghost but on its effect on the ones it sees: ‘we feel ourselves observed’ (Derrida 1994: 101). Moreover, the perspective in question is that of the ghost as law—of Hamlet’s father as ‘the one who sees us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction’ (Derrida 1994: 7)—rather than that of the ghostly subjects exploited by the law. The postcolonial subject, therefore, appears at most as an object of spectrality, but does not partake of the spectral economy as a subject with agency.

3A related difficulty is Derrida’s disregard for the ghost’s cultural difference. Clearly, ghosts are not defined, perceived, received and interpreted in the same way everywhere. Many rich traditions exist across the world, yet Derrida confines the specter to a distinctly western framework.2 His notion of hauntology remains closely tied to Judeo-Christian traditions of inheritance and mourning, while the texts he chooses to analyze—Hamlet, Marx and Stirner—render the ghost not only as a predominantly patriarchal figure (as both Gayatri Spivak3 and Nancy Holland4 have noted), but also exclude non-western cultural conceptions of the ghost that may produce a different ethics of intersubjectivity than the one tied to the rather abstract and a-historical notions of absolute hospitality and the messianic, which both entail an unconditional awaiting and welcoming of the specter that appears to preclude any truly reciprocal dealings or responsive agency.

4I will use Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road5 to argue for the need to explore the ghost as a culturally specific concept whose workings cannot be generalized. Although Derrida’s western notion of the ghost as a figure of temporal disturbance and disjointing is pertinent to Okri’s text (which, after all, was written in London), its African setting prompts a supplementary theorization of the ghost through the work of the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe. In On the Postcolony, Mbembe invokes an autochthonous system of representation from southern Cameroon based on the decidedly spectral notion of simultaneous multiplicities:

By summoning up the world of shade in a context where there was no forced correspondence between what was seen, heard, and said—or between what was and what was not, what was apparent and what partook of the spectre and the phantom—one was appealing to a particular ontology of violence and the marvellous.6

5From the intersection of this type of ontology7 with the dehumanizing system of colonialism Mbembe sees sprouting the African postcolony as a realm of carnivorous power in which

to think about the end of being and existence... is to be interested in what lies this side of the lifeless material thing—not necessarily to establish the status of the dead person or even the survivor, but to see how, in Africa after colonization, it is possible to delegate one’s death while simultaneously and already experiencing death at the very heart of one’s own existence. In other words, how is it possible to live while going to death, while being somehow already dead? And how can one live in death, be already dead, while being-there—while having not necessarily left the world or being part of the spectre—and when the shadow that overhangs existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary weighs ever more heavily?
(Mbembe Postcolony: 201-202)

6This living in death is a central theme in Okri’s novel and a particularly apt description of the status of its narrator, a young boy who within the first ten pages is given up for dead, only to come back to life during his own funeral, thus earning the name Lazaro (later shortened to Azaro). Azaro, however, is no ordinary boy. He answers Mbembe’s question by being both alive and part of the specter in a very specific manner. For Azaro is an abiku, which means ‘one born to die’8 and, according to Wole Soyinka’s definition in the subtitle of his poem ‘Abiku, ’ designates a ‘Wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again to plague the mother— Yoruba belief.’9 In their short periods on earth, abiku remain tied to the spirit world that is their true home and to which they have pledged to return. Azaro’s miraculous resurrection, however, marks his decision to break the cycle and stay with his earthly mother (and father). Henceforth, he chooses to ignore his spirit companions, who nevertheless keep trying to lure him back to their world. The novel— and its sequels Songs of Enchantment10 and Infinite Riches11— tell the story of the difficult life Azaro and his parents lead in the face of the hunger, squalor, political corruption and violence of Nigeria around Independence and of the way spirits (not just Azaro’s companions but a multitude of different ghosts) form an integral part of this life, sometimes with positive and sometimes with negative effect.

7Although ghosts pervade Okri’s novels, we do not find here the surprise, fear and drive to exorcism that Derrida discerns in Hamlet’s, Stirner’s and Marx’s reactions to the ghost: ‘one speaks of nothing else but in order to chase it away, to exclude it, to exorcise it’ (Derrida 1994: 100). In the Yoruba tradition on which Okri draws, ghosts are not figures of an inassimilable alterity but identifiable, almost familiar presences that pervade the world of the living and with whom the living interact much in the manner of a game, with trickery taking place on both sides. The aim is not so much to make the ghost disappear as to outwit him or her. Moreover, it is not the ghost’s appearance in itself that disturbs, but the specific intentions (good or evil) that each apparition has and it is these intentions that have to be figured out and dealt with. The reaction to an abiku, for example, is not to reject the child as an aberration but to attempt to keep the child in the earthly realm by marking it so it can be recognized, seducing it with gifts or interfering with the ritual that will return it to the spirit world.12 The abiku tradition further indicates that the separation between the world of the living and that of the spirits (which are not necessarily only the dead) is not conceived as impermeable. There is constant contact between the two worlds. Thus, in Okri’s novel there are multiple ways to enter the spirit world (dreams, specific places in the forest, jujus, etc.) and for Azaro, who has heightened powers of perception as a result of his inherently spectral status, it even appears possible to be in both worlds at once.

8Derrida’s theory of spectrality is based on the need to displace an ontology that does not exist in Okri’s novel; there, the multiplicity of the ghost—the way it is always ‘plus d’un’ (Derrida 1994: xx) in the double sense of being more than one and no longer unitary—is not a controversial notion (Madame Koto’s bar alone hosts a multitude of spirits, some sporting several heads and most capable of baffling, seemingly infinite transformations). And the necessity of communicating with the ghost, which Derrida has to impress upon western readers predisposed to exorcism and laying the ghost to rest, is self-evident: speaking with ghosts is not the exception but the rule. With the ontology and ideology of self-presence and self-possession that Derrida seeks to displace not in evidence here (even the powerful Madame Koto cannot control her own body, which is taken over by three malevolent abiku-children), the function of the ghost has to lie elsewhere.

9While the ghosts in Okri’s novel could be explained as part of an animistic worldview, such an explanation would not touch on the postcolonial thematic that pervades The Famished Road and its poignant critique not just of colonialism but also of the corrupt, deadly politics of post-Independence Nigeria. Significantly, Mbembe uses the figure of the ghost to conceptualize the oppressive form of sovereignty that he sees characterizing the autocratic regimes of the African postcolony. Sovereignty, in Mbembe’s Foucault-inspired definition, is predicated on full control over mortality—the ability to decide who lives and who dies: ‘My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.’13 For Mbembe it is the State or autocrat that employs ghostly terror and violence to subjugate the population. Thus, he employs ‘ghostly’ in the sense of ungraspable and incontestable and sees ghostly terror and violence visited upon a passive, even complicit—or as he calls it, ‘convivial’ (Mbembe 2001: 110)—subject.

10Through the pervasive workings of ghostly power, its subjects are reduced to specular experiences, defined (in Mbembe’s reading of the fiction of Amos Tutuola) as ‘extreme forms of human life, death-worlds, forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of living dead (ghosts).’14 Those subject to ghostly sovereignty are thus themselves turned into ghosts, but here the ghost is a figure of impotence and insubstantiality. Paradoxically, for Mbembe the ghost is all-powerful when it stands for the State, but becomes weak and inconsequential when it indicates its subjects. As Jeremy Weate has argued, this results in a vision of an ‘economy of death’15 that privileges power as limitation and imposition over power as capacity and agency. The fact that the metaphor for both power and lack of power is the same, however, already indicates the fuzziness of the distinction. The ghost in fact indicates the entanglement of power and disempowerment, oppression and opposition, agency and subjection, as becomes clear when we read The Famished Road.

11In Okri’s novel we find Mbembe’s specular experience expressed not so much in the character of Azaro—who, as an abiku, partakes of ghostly power and is therefore never completely subjected to it— but rather in his parents, who are at the mercy of the ghostly power that is exercised not just by various spirits but also by oppressive political, economic and social structures. Azaro’s mother and father are what Mbembe calls subjects au travail, subjects in the making but also working subjects—working for life—where work becomes ‘a permanent activity’ and the body ‘signifies nothing in itself’ (Mbembe ‘Life’: 16) except something that can be hired out. The father and the mother literalize the load-bearing that Mbembe sees as characteristic of ghostly terror’s effect on the subject: the mother walks all day trying to sell her wares and the father’s casual jobs include hauling bags of salt and, at one point, the humiliating task of removing excrement from the compound.

12Azaro’s parents, therefore, are wandering subjects in Mbembe’s sense, which does not refer to the fluid identity and subversive spirit of a poststructuralist subjectivity in the vein of the nomad, the migrant or Derrida’s specter, but rather to a subject forced into constant flight and desperation by ghostly violence and terror—a violence and terror that produce murder, capture, noise, caprice, dismemberment, subterfuge and ‘the negation of all essential singularity’ (Mbembe ‘Life’: 14). The disjointing of time and space, the merging of past, present and future, and the disruption of identity are read negatively by Mbembe, and not positively as they mostly are in Derrida, notwithstanding the latter’s acknowledgement that disjointure risks ‘the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no insurance’ (Derrida 1994: 27). For Mbembe, transformation does not hold out performative promise but the threat of violence and death, while abandoning the notion of a stable center does not lead to a more just way of life, but to the potential eradication of life in death. Although there is in this a valid criticism of Derrida and other theorists who value indeterminacy as a departure from ontological certainty without acknowledging that in some contexts indeterminacy was the only certainty and also a certain means of oppression, it does not dictate the somewhat overly pessimistic vision of power—and especially of the possibility for agency and resistance on the part of the oppressed—that Mbembe presents.

13In fact, The Famished Road illustrates in several ways how ghostly power is not invincible, but can be interrupted, precisely because of its ungraspable, shimmering status. As Derrida insists, even when the ghost lays down the law this injunction does not have to be followed to the letter; because the ghost is never one with itself, there is always a selection or choice involved and thus a possibility to read the injunction against itself, to turn risk into an advantage. In Okri’s novel ghostly violence turned against itself appears in the character of the photographer, whose photographs turn the inconsequential living-dead of the compound into actors—‘For the first time in our lives we as people had appeared in the newspapers. We were heroes in our own drama, heroes of our own protest’ (Okri 2003: 184)—and whose status as a wandering subject (violent repercussions cause him to lead a fugitive life characterized by sudden appearances and disappearances from Azaro’s home) is thus not only a sign of subjection but also of resistance.

14Another example of this occurs when Azaro’s father—referred to in the novel only as ‘Dad’—becomes a boxer. This takes Mbembe’s notion of the subject au travail and inverts its meaning. Dad’s body is still a working body, but now it works for itself and this transforms its entire appearance:

He got up suddenly, ducking his head, throwing combination punches... His chest was bare and he was sweating already and his body glistened. Dad looked very powerful. His shoulders were big and moulded like rock-shapes. His neck was thick. I had never noticed that his jaws were so square and his forehead so large. His nose was bigger than I remembered and he had a bristle growth of beard. His muscles rippled impressively. His transformation surprised me. (Okri 2003: 112)

15The transformation is not permanent—no transformation in Okri’s novel is—for when Azaro later accidentally observes his father at work as a load-carrier, he notes:

Dad was still staggering, like a boxer under the onslaught of too many blows, when the loaders dumped the second bag on his head for the second time. For a moment Dad stood perfectly still. Then he wobbled. His muscles twitched erratically. The bags were very huge and compact, like boulders of rock, and salt poured out of one of them on to Dad’s shoulder... And as the salt poured on his shoulder, tears streamed from his eyes, and there was shame on his face as he staggered right past me... As he was turning a corner he tripped, regained his balance, wobbled, and then slid on the mud and rubbish on the road, and fell... Dad stayed on the ground, covered in mud, not moving, as if dead, while his blood trickled from his back and mixed with the rubbish of the earth.
(Okri 2003: 175-176)

16Here we have Mbembe’s living-dead exemplified; a human being turned by the ghostly violence of oppressive labor relations into a piece of rubbish. Note, however, the way the two passages haunt each other: the powerful boxer of the first passage becomes a boxer on the verge of defeat (yet still a boxer, a fighter); the boulders of rock that are the bags Dad carries can be read back to the first passage as the ‘rock-shapes’ of his shoulders, strengthening him rather than defeating him. And the salt from the bags turns into tears but also recalls the glistening and impressive sweat of the first extract. The two passages therefore do not contradict each other but form a palimpsest; they can be read through each other as emphasizing the interdependence of Dad’s roles as worker and boxer, of ghostly power and ghostly agency, the way each haunts and disturbs the other. It is not a case of identifying a purely oppressive text and an underlying layer of untainted subversion, but of pinpointing the moments of agency and resistance that emerge from the interplay between the layers of signification created by the body’s work.16 The palimpsest—itself a decidedly spectral figure of simultaneous transparency/opacity—not only indicates the presence of multiple meanings, but intimates that these meanings cannot always be fully distinguished from each other: on the body of Azaro’s father, for example, they literally bleed into each other.

17That the father is not just turned into a powerless ghost by a spectral sovereign power, but is also able to use his ghostly status to fight this power becomes clear when the Black Tyger (Dad’s fighting name) enters the spirit world and defeats Yellow Jaguar, a famous boxer from the compound who died three years before. However, what is also revealed is that, precisely because his fighting body is dependent on his working body, Dad’s spectral agency remains ambivalent. After he wins the fight, Dad experiences a ‘rebirth’ (Okri 2003: 409), but one accompanied by a curious regressive illness that, for a time, renders him completely dependent, literally like a baby. There are other negative aspects to his boxing career as well, not least the fact that he starts eating so much that Azaro and his mother almost starve. Dad’s boxing therefore never signifies a wholly positive, affirming agency but always a highly ambiguous, risky practice that repeatedly puts his life on the line. As K. Anthony Appiah notes, ‘his triumphs over human and spirit adversaries leave him richer (from his bets) but always near to death.’17 Something similar can be said of the photographer, who may have given the compound people visibility, but pays for it by having to flee. Therefore, a reading like Brenda Cooper’s, in which the photographer becomes a ‘mythical hero’ with a ‘messianic function’ or even ‘a larger-than-life Scarlet Pimpernel’18 glosses over the fact that in Okri there is no definitive victory over ghostly terror, only an ongoing oscillation between oppression and agency.

18Thus, after Dad recovers from his illness, he finds a ferocious energy, ‘as if a jaguar had somehow got trapped in his brain’ (Okri 2003: 416). Clearly, in yet another palimpsestic act, Dad has assimilated some of the Yellow Jaguar’s powers, taking from the spirit world (the realm of ghostly power and violence) and using what he has taken to survive. His final fight is with a mysterious man in a white suit who is ghostly terror (as law) personified, at first able to thrash Dad without being seen by him. Again, however, Dad turns the situation around by drawing strength from the very power that is abusing him. According to Azaro, ‘he had become more rock-like, like one who was thoroughly resigned to taking punishment as the condition of survival’ (Okri 2003: 540). Punishment is no longer just an instrument of subjection but becomes a form of resistance as well—a means of exposing ghostly power and making its mechanisms visible. Thus, after Dad succeeds in ripping apart the man’s white suit to reveal ‘how inhuman he looked’, it is Dad who suddenly becomes able to duck the man’s punches:

The man began to cower... He had long thin legs, the legs of a spiderous animal. His eyes filled with fear and shame at being unmasked. People backed away, gasping in horror... The man got up, enraged. He had on the weirdest underpants. He rushed Dad and couldn’t find him. (Okri 2003: 541)

19Dad finally knocks him unconscious and the man disappears. Again, however, there is a price to pay: Dad collapses to awaken only after days of near-death.

20Mbembe reads survival in a negative manner by making it dependent on the death of the other:

The survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and managed not only to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers. This is why, to a large extent, the lowest form of survival is killing... in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. It is the death of the other, his or her physical presence as corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique. And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure. (Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’: 36)

21Okri, in contrast, shows Dad’s actions resulting not only or even principally in the other’s death (significantly, none of his vanquished opponents leave behind a corpse) but also almost in his own. Survival here comes at a cost to the self as well as the other so that the self never reaches the state of security that Mbembe associates with the killer-survivor. In fact, throughout The Famished Road, Dad’s material status never really improves or changes significantly, yet he keeps using the strategies of ghostly power against its domination, mobilizing imagination and transformation for the purpose of survival, in order not to be eaten by the famished road (the famished road that represents the killing power of ghostly violence, but also the idea that there is always somewhere to go, to escape to). At the end of his article on necropolitics Mbembe concludes that ‘under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’: 40). This may be true, but a blurred line is not the same as an absent one and in specific circumstances valid and meaningful distinctions can still be made. Besides, blurred distinctions do not necessarily play into the hand of ghostly power; they can also work to destabilize it, as Derrida would argue.

22Although On the Postcolony imparts a ‘negativist and thanatographic’ theory of power (Weate 2003: 36) that appears to present Africans as ‘either dupes of the state episteme or strategic actors seeking to get what they can from the state’19, in his later work Mbembe does envision some avenues of subversion. In his article on Tutuola he notes, for instance, that the dissociation from the body that is required by work for life can also be used to protect life by feigning existence (Mbembe ‘Life’: 17). Whereas Azaro’s father’s boxing career works to re-associate the self with the body, to reclaim the body for himself, his creation in Songs of Enchantment of an ‘enchanted kingdom of which he was sole ruler and defencer’ (Okri 1994: 292) is an instance of self-preservation that works by mimicking the structures of sovereignty that threaten this life. Elsewhere, Mbembe refers to a practice of self-styling as an African mode of self-definition that avoids the pitfalls of both Marxist-nationalist paradigms and Nativism or Afrocentrism.20 Stylization consists of gathering together ‘disparate signs’ not to create a social utopia but a series of ‘paradoxes and lines of escape’.21 In other words, it refers to ambivalent and avowedly poststructuralist avenues of resistance in the mode of Foucault’s ‘techniques of the self’22 and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’23; never guaranteed to succeed but also difficult to police. Yet another form of agency appears in ‘On the Power of the False, ’ where Mbembe approvingly analyzes the way Christianity has become an oppositional force in Africa through its selective, stylized adaptation, through being turned inside out and combined with native traditions.24 Mbembe calls this the ‘heretical spirit’ (Mbembe ‘Power’: 639) and here we finally find the ghost—as spirit— in a position of subversive agency, although Mbembe does warn that if this spirit is taken too far it will result in a disabling lack of stability.

23Feigning, stylizing and the power of the false are perceived by Mbembe as aesthetic projects, which may be why they do not occupy a central place in the political discussions that dominate On the Postcolony. However, I propose that Azaro’s father’s boxing can be seen as a form of self-styling or feigning that makes these practices material and political as well as aesthetic: Dad’s fights inspire his political will to educate the beggars and improve life for the people of the compound. Although these attempts are widely ridiculed and do not yield concrete results, they do enable Dad to continue living without giving himself over to ghostly power and they fix the idea of a fairer, more just way of living in Azaro’s mind.

24In conclusion it can be said that neither Derrida’s nor Mbembe’s perspective on the ghost is fully vindicated by The Famished Road. Rather, the novel brings the two together in a syncretic move that preserves Mbembe’s idea that the ghost can be an oppressive, deadening force aligned with the State, as well as Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a resistive force and possible figure of justice. In the end, the death-world produced by oppressive ghostly power and the subversive spectral agency embodied by Dad and the photographer are not presented as mutually exclusive options, but as interrelated products of the inherent ambiguity of the ghost.