The spirit-child protagonist in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is named Azaro.
Azaro is an abiku, a child believed in some West African traditions to move repeatedly between the spirit world and human life. He narrates the novel from this unstable boundary, seeing both the harsh realities of poverty and politics and the spirits, visions, and supernatural forces surrounding his family.
His name refers to Lazarus from the New Testament, a detail that reinforces the novel’s recurring pattern of death, return, and renewed life. Azaro’s spirit companions want him to leave the human world and come back to them, but he remains because of his love for his mother and father.
A common mix-up is Abiku, which describes what Azaro is rather than serving as his personal name. Okonkwo belongs to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, while Lazarus is the biblical figure who inspires Azaro’s name. Published in 1991, the novel won the Booker Prize that same year.