On Aesthetics: Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Adopting the novel form, African writers have composed a variety of narratives that have shaped the literary landscape of the “African novel.” In Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, the literary landscape incorporates various... [ view full abstract ]

Adopting the novel form, African writers have composed a variety of narratives that have shaped the literary landscape of the “African novel.” In Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, the literary landscape incorporates various modes of storytelling (from myths, legends, rumors, to dreams, visions and photography) and develops narratives as a vehicle for political and social resistance. Yet, Okri’s mediation of the fabulous and the real has been received as participating in magical realism and simultaneously politically disengaged. This project thus examines the novel’s aesthetic project by exploring the deployment of the non-mimetic narrative styles that and how they operate to reclaim, what Okri calls, the “inviolate” areas of African aesthetic frames. Theories of the novel form and an application of formalist critique provides the foundation to evaluate how the novel’s aesthetic project subverts structural and infrastructural effects of colonialism. From this exegesis of novelistic expectation created by novel form, theories dealing with the oral-literary interface and Kumkum Sangari’s “The Politics of the Possible” guide the methodology of reading that traces how Okri reclaims non-Western identity and cultural aesthetic frames from colonial history and its byproduct, neo-colonialism. Recognizing the potential difficulties of Okri’s optimistic reclamation and movement outside of history, this project also employs Frant Fannon’s Black Skins White Masks to inspect the extent to which Okri’s aesthetic project—his manipulation of novel form, redirection of perception, the deployment of the mythical and the proliferation of stories—realizes the political consequences and reality of post-coloniality through personal-interior politics. In doing so, it hopes to gain more than an explication of how colonial economy and politics have infected the Negro’s psychopathology but rather to expose the ways in which it has not and illuminate the ‘inviolate’: the intimate, individual lives, development, and beliefs of non-Western characters