The Best American Essays 2018 by Hilton Als

Author:Hilton Als
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards.

Ben Okri’s memorable, singular, highly original novel The Famished Road is narrated by a character named Azaro—or at least that is the name he goes by, though his parents originally named him Lazarus. Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, and the long, wonderful opening of The Famished Road concerns the many times the spirit world refuses to allow Azaro to be completely born. Thereafter, in the years of his childhood, he continually fends off spirit manifestations around the compound where he lives, and especially in the bar of his neighbor Madame Koto.

Okri’s novel is often compared to Latin American magical realism, but in no way does this work feel reducible to this well-traveled subgeneric distinction. On the contrary, The Famished Road teems with its African spirits, even as, as Ben Okri has noted, it has some Western forbears as well. Azaro himself has Lazarus hovering albatross-like over his head, Lazarus’s time in the underworld, and when Azaro goes walking, impulsively, in the Nigerian bush, as he does to his parents’ chagrin, unfailingly mixing it up with the menace of the spirit realm, we can feel the incarnation of Lazarus in him, the Pan-African Lazarus.

Of course, there are many other improvisations upon the story and person of Lazarus. I haven’t mentioned Van Gogh, or Chagall, or the episode of Dr. Who that alludes to Lazarus, or some software program named after him, or the prog-rock anthem by Porcupine Tree. I haven’t mentioned Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Project, a novel that means to treat of a Jewish immigrant (Lazarus Averbuch) killed in Chicago in 1908, but which then goes further back to speak of the Lazarus of Bethany we are discussing here. I haven’t mentioned a really astonishing sculpture of him by Sir Jacob Epstein, at New College, Oxford. There are more profane examples of our inability to stop talking about him. This is not an exhaustive list.

Yet I cannot stop adding to the list about Lazarus, which I have been keeping for over a year now, as though the intention to write about Lazarus is an analogy of his rebirth, and whenever I say I’m not going to write about a certain author or artist or filmmaker who has alluded to Lazarus I find myself going back and doing exactly that, and somehow adding this previously suppressed citation to the list. Lazarus calls to me and I answer his call.

And, so: David Bowie’s “Lazarus,” from Blackstar, his last album, combines different strata of meaning about Lazarus, and fuses them together. The song “Lazarus” is stately and slow-moving, it is the development of change, with fragments of melody on sax and guitar emerging out of a dirge of bass and drums. The first verse is narrated by a Lazarus-like figure from heaven and indicates some of the contradictions of a heavenly repose (“Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”).13 But the second verse seems to frame “up here” more as

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