Building an African Identity Through Magical Realism: Cyclicality in Ben Okri’S the Famished Road

Building an African Identity through Magical Realism: Cyclicality in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Connor Powers Dr. Bryan Conn (Mentor and Co-editor) The independence movements that what it became after colonialism and had secured the autonomy of African nations imparted identities based in the given or resulted in the need for African writers and directly perceivable social relations. Achebe artists to create important new voices for is clear in showing the changes of a society Africa. Thus, beginning in the 1940s and 50s, through the introduction of Christianity and African authors sought to rewrite the forms of European commerce like the trading common perceptions of Africa and African store. He contrasts those phenomena and culture, as well as establish a wholly their legacies with explanations of traditional independent African identity. In an interview religious values and customs, as well as with in 1985, Chinua Achebe, the Nobel Prize the way the overall society functioned before winning Nigerian author, described the colonialism. In other words, authors like atmosphere of the time as one of rediscovery: Achebe are limited by realism to talking “We had a story to tell, we were a different about identity in a nationalistic sense, as the people, we must tell this story, and we insist cultural critic K. Anthony Appiah notes: on being listened to” (Jefiyo 141). Colonialism and European authors had long “These early novels seem to belong to the created an image and identity of Africa, one world of eighteenth- and nineteenth- of a “dark continent” and one that was century literary nationalism; they are entirely devoid of cultural identity and a theorized as the imaginative recreation of meaningful heritage. With reference to such a common cultural past that is crafted into contexts, this study seeks to illustrate the a shared tradition by the writer…. The place of “Magical Realism” in Nigerian novels of this first stage are thus realist writer, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road legitimations of nationalism.” (Appiah 15) (1991). We shall observe that its assumptions To form a new identity in a realist context stand in stark political and aesthetic contrast thus requires Achebe to adopt a nationalistic to the more conventional Literary Realism of attitude to express how colonialism has Chinua Achebe. changed his culture. Achebe is caught up in In creating a new identity, spiritual or exposing the differences between the otherwise, one must make decisions about Europeans and the Africans in order to cultural representation. In realist works like present the new way of life that Nigerians Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), underwent due to colonialism. the ways of representing a culture can be, in Nevertheless, it is not fair to reduce many ways, limited to presenting readers Achebe to a purely nationalistic writer or to with descriptions of how life once was and claim that his only intention is to make a political statement; there are certainly deeper world and it is something that he deems themes in Things Fall Apart. Speaking on the necessary or, at the very least, inevitable. subject of Nigeria, Achebe mentions that he is highly critical of the country but that “it’s my country and since, as I said, providence Why Magical Realism put me here, my role is to make this place more habitable than I met it” (Jefiyo 147). In using Magical Realism to depart But it is important to point out that due to the from earlier literary realist traditions, Okri is then-popular issue of creating an independent not only creating his own, unique view of nation, the idea on many people’s minds Nigerian identity but he is tapping into a would have been that of national identity. literary tradition that has long been used in With regard to such concern, the mimetic colonialized cultures. He thereby distances nature of realist novels lends itself to a himself from European influence. Though discussion about topics of the time and how Magical Realism as a concept carries those influenced then-contemporary culture European roots (Guenther 34) and early, and beliefs. From this vantage point, we are European Magical Realist novels do exist, the able to discern that Achebe is just as much genre was completely transformed in post commenting on nationalism as he is making colonized Latin America. In explaining why, a nationalistic statement himself. However, one scholar argues that “The indigenous all of this shows the issues that can arise with resources from which magic was derived attempting to establish an identity in only were frequently utilized as a tool for the realist terms. Much more goes into a culture region’s self-definition. The autochthonous and identity than just the political status of a was a means through which to recuperate a group or their autonomy. buried identity and culture” (Sasser 7). Magical Realism became a tool for colonized In The Famished Road Okri further authors to reestablish their cultures and explores the idea of what African identity identities; and in becoming that, Magical means in a postcolonial world by eschewing Realism has gained its own identity as a mode real-world politics at times, and in other cases that is strongly influenced by cultures that by tying politics to a larger, more spiritual have often been pitted against more dominant world beyond national borders. He is just as ones of the West. interested in establishing a new identity for newly independent African nations but does Via Magical Realism, Okri is able not so with the use of Magical Realism and an only to recuperate his buried Nigerian exploration of how spiritual and political identity but also to evoke his culture and identities intersect. By Magical Realism, I traditions. By contrast Achebe’s Literary refer to the capacity to see spiritual Realism, must approach the recuperation of phenomena in everyday occurrence. In many his culture and identity in terms that sooner ways, Okri departs from Achebe’s numerous evoke European and the West. Unlike Okri, distinctions of life before and after Achebe is not pitting his culture against colonization to view colonization as one of Western ideas but is placing culture within many spiritual iterations and lives through those ideals and declaring it to be equal. One which Nigeria has lived. As opposed to commentator argues that “Achebe must viewing change as something that can forever reinscribe what, by imperial contingency, has make a culture or country disappear, as become the language of literary modernity in Achebe does, change is constant in Okri’s order that his reclamation of African humanity will have conventional authority who, to Achebe’s mind, perpetuated Western and legitimacy” (Korang 7). ideas about Africa and its cultures. As a result, much of the reason that the Achebe’s novel Magical Realism allows Okri to assert uses literary realism is as a rebuke of Nigeria’s identity on his own terms and push Conrad’s and other European’s views. back against Western ideas of what Nigerian Achebe is making a statement by offering an culture is, while Achebe coopts Western unvarnished and accurate view of Africa, as literary norms in order to make the case for Korang notes: “In another orientation, Nigeria’s equality in terms of culture. Achebe is a post-Eurocentric writer who revokes and reworks the aesthetic models that his Eurocentric predecessors have Establishing Identity in The Famished otherwise confined to the fixing and Road reaffirmation of the West as sole or exclusive possessor of humanistic common sense” From the very opening lines of The (Korang 2). Achebe utilizes realism as it Famished Road it is very clear that allows him to be equal to European authors similarities and stark differences exist in and it allows him to take the very same what both Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe are aesthetic modes that created the idea of the attempting to do with their respective novels. “dark continent” and contradict those beliefs. The novel starts with the lines, “In the beginning there was a river. The river became If Achebe’s use of literary realism is a road and the road branched out to the whole a reaction against European writers’ creation world. And because the road was once a river of a narrative of Africa that is inaccurate, then it was always hungry” (Okri 3). The term “In such backdrop serves to illustrate why Okri the beginning” thus mimics the famous chose to use magical realism in response to opening lines of the Bible. Already we can many of the same issues. Because magical see a difference in the style and worldview realism attempts “to capture the paradox of between Okri and Achebe. By evoking the unity of opposites” (Cooper, 1), Okri is European outlook in his allusion to the most better able to approach the upheaval that influential text in western literature, Okri colonization caused in Nigeria. In other suggests the influence colonialism has had on words, colonization has created a tension in African art and thought. He nonetheless African literature and culture between creates a new African identity that is not only heritage and the modern world. Instances of political or national but also spiritual or old beliefs and cultural practices that the religious. We also get a bit of Okri’s view on Europeans attempted to stamp out are always how the past is always affecting the present; coming to the surface and often clash with the for, as the river evolved or changed into a demands of modernity. This tension may road, it did not lose its principal explain why The Famished Road so quickly characteristics, instead the “hunger” of the alternates between depictions of extreme river persisted.

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