MYTH, ORALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF MAGIC REALISM IN BEN OKRI'S THE FAMISHED ROAD

📄 Abstract

This article argues that the persistent critical labelling of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) as a work of magic realism constitutes not merely an aesthetic misreading but an epistemic imposition, an act of what Walter Mignolo terms “colonial difference” applied within the domain of literary genre. Departing from the well-worn paths of postcolonial allegory and Yoruba oral cosmology that have structured Okri scholarship, from Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997) to Mark Mathuray’s theory of “sacred realism” and Elizabeth Syrkin’s account of “trans-realism,” this paper interrogates the particular conditions under which the “magical” is produced as a critical category for African fiction. By attending to the triple displacement structuring Okri’s authorial position, namely his Urhobo ethnicity, his Yoruba mythological borrowing, and his metropolitan reception, the article proposes that the novel’s orality is not the recovered speech of an indigenous tradition but a literary construction of mythic Africanness shaped by the demands of metropolitan literary culture and the aesthetics expected by the prize-giving apparatus that awarded Okri the Booker Prize in 1991. Drawing on Mignolo’s theory of epistemic disobedience, Walter Ong’s foundational analysis of orality and literacy, and Isidore Okpewho’s scholarship on African oral performance, the article reads the formal properties of The Famished Road not as the “magical” eruption of the supernatural into realism, but as the disciplined transposition of oral poetics into novelistic form. The consequence of this rereading is significant, for what Western criticism has designated “magic” is, in large measure, the formal signature of a non-literate temporal and cosmological consciousness that the novel’s written English medium simultaneously evokes and domesticates. The political stakes of this argument reach beyond Okri to the wider institutional politics of comparative literature and postcolonial prize culture.

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📚 How to Cite:

Clement Oshogwe Mamudu , MYTH, ORALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF MAGIC REALISM IN BEN OKRI'S THE FAMISHED ROAD , Volume 12 , Issue 5, May 2026, EPRA International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (IJMR) ,