Magical Realism In The Famished Road

On the African continent magical realism and postcolonialism have gone hand-in-hand particularly in West and South Africa. In West Africa, the Yoruba mythologies and beliefs in particular have provided material for other African writer such as Ben Okri and Amos Tutula (1920-97). In addition to drawing on the western novel form and upon themes such as colonialism, religion and internationalism, West African magical realism often incorporates local influences to produce a cross cultural literature that emulates the situation of many West Africans today. As the critic Brenda Cooper notes : ‘African writers very often adhere to this animism, incorporate spirits, ancestors and talking animals, in stories, both adapted folktales and newly invented

In what might otherwise seem paradoxical, then, supernatural has been employed to elevate in excellence the natural domain in The Famished Road, the code of magic elevates the code of realism. Whereas magical realist texts cannot be restricted to single modus operandi of subversion which has been a historically and aesthetically crucial deployment of the mode. For this particularist hermeneutic, Famished Road offers its restriction of the mode to particular aesthetic ordainments of sociopolitical issues, would not be able to make sense of, first, this narrative’s crucial adoption of its protagonists with the reality and domain of human being, and thus the code of realism, and, second, its employing realism to confirm humanism, a framework closely affiliated with the colonization and

While Okri convey a supernatural African worldview through the magical components. We can clearly see that Okri has interwoven the threads of magic and realism together in numerous ways in this narrative, so that one might view their interactions of the narrative web. In The Famished Road, Okri by depicting the nation as Abiku imagined community interwoven with some traditional ideas about modern nation-state. In The Famished Road, Okri constructs strategy of belonging through using magical realism.
Madame Koto’s bar is a single space within The Famished Road’s narrative cartography in which the worlds of supernatural, political and natural most pronouncedly overlap. Hence, it is the center where the merging of spiritual and political metaphysical is revealed. This location of Madame Koto’s bar becomes an exclusive meeting place for party members, as Madame Koto’s renowned palm wine and pepper soup as Dad. In addition to it, Madame Koto’s powerful mysticism makes her bar a site heavily trafficked by bizarre