ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a work that uses food as an offering of remembrance for departed ancestors and also as a testimony to the impact of the global capitalist economy on the food production and eating habits of those people benefitting the least from postcolonial development. The two main intersection points between the spirit and human worlds are the road and the forest. Azaro's spirit companions often lure him to one of these two places, and the cycle suggests there is an important dichotomy between them. Forests, and the loss of them, are a central theme in the Famished Road cycle, not in small part because their loss signals a significant shift in the economy and culture of the region. While the Famished Road trilogy looks at the corruption and impoverishment in Nigeria on the eve of independence, GraceLand explores the crumbling world of the middle class and dispossessed in 1980s Nigeria.
