SPIRIT CHILD is inspired by Azaro, the main character in Ben Okri’s novel, The Famished Road. Azaro is a spirit child, a restless, cyclical child; a child that keeps being born, keeps dying and keeps coming back. He is a child that doesn’t like reality, because he perceives of reality and existence as very difficult, full of suffering and full of pain, and that human beings don’t have very much of a talent for making life beautiful. More so, spirit children comes from the world of spirits, a land of joy and light and rainbows, of possibilities and freedom, a land of eternities, silence and subliminal music.

If Azaro, therefore, has that possibility of returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companion, if he has a choice to choose between eternity and mortality, why will he want to come here and suffer what we suffer. Strangely, he chose to stay in the world of the living and be born into a poor family, with a great deal of suffering. What we then have in this kind of protagonist, is somebody who have the capacity for a beautiful existence, but has chosen a difficult one, his refusal to renounce the other world, makes him perpetually haunted by the search for essence. “Why am I here, why do I stay?” A question that could turn out to be morbid and lead to suicide, but it could also be a question that is full of light, which can lead towards transcendence and lead to a desire to look at life differently, see what is important and what isn’t and give less value to.