The Famished Road after Postmodernism: African Modernism and the Politics of Subalternity

When Ben Okri’s The Famished Road was published in 1991, it was met with great critical acclaim. Winning the Booker Prize for that year and emerging in Nigerian letters when the novel seemed to be on the decline, its arrival on the international literary scene secured its canonization. Its publication coincided with the period (1980s and early 1990s) when two critical projects dominated literary criticism: postmodernism and postcolonialism. Postmodernism, which found its epistemological basis in post-structuralism, marked its distance from modernism by casting it as dogmatic, imperialistic, and worn out, and heralded, or so its proponents claimed, a shift in paradigm and a new historical epoch. The dissolution of the unitary subject, the privileging of multiple subject positions with often competing and contradictory interests, epistemological relativism, which followed the Derridean critique of Western logocenticism, Lyotard’s assertion of “the demise of metanarratives,” and the subversion of traditional hermeneutics, defined the epistemological and ontological field and scope of this new paradigm.

Postcolonialism, as it became codified during this period by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, drew its critical energy from post-structuralism (albeit from different perspectives, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Marxist-inflected deconstruction, respectively) and political fervor from the more left-leaning postmodernist thinkers rather than the older materialist critique which had dominated anti-colonial and early postcolonial criticism. The deconstruction of the “transcendental signified,” the unified subject, and the metanarratives of History opened up a space for postcolonial theorists to explore the radical potential of hybridity, provide a comprehensive critique of Eurocentricism, debunk essentialist notions of the nation, race, ethnicity etc., and address the ongoing neo-colonial domination of the postcolonial world by the West. As postmodernism and postcolonialism shared certain similar interests and concerns, critics worked hard to develop “a strong affiliative network of methodological collaboration” (Slemon 4).

Okri’s The Famished Road is often read as representing that happy coincidence. Indeed, Douglas McCabe quite rightly avers that “[t]he vast majority of critical commentary [on The Famished Road] … views the text as both postmodern and postcolonial” (1). For example, Olatubosun Ogunsanwo suggests: “What makes The Famished Road postcolonial and multicultural both in form and content is precisely what makes it postmodernist” (42). John C. Hawley concurs. Despite acknowledging the possible asymmetrical relationship between the theoretical assumptions of postcolonialism and postmodernism, he applies the label of “postcolonial postmodernity” to Okri’s novel (35). In scholarship of the novel, the overlap of these two literary-critical projects is often allied to a particular genre: magic realism (Faris 101). Thus, with the publication of The Famished Road, Okri joined Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie to form the “holy trinity” of the field, whose urbane cosmopolitanism was made manifest in their choice of a specific form of the novel: magically realist and intractably postmodernist.

Postmodernism vs. Postcolonialism

The label of postmodernism and the generic identification of “magic realism” have not proved an easy fit for Okri’s groundbreaking novel. One of the more vocal critics of the postmodernist identification of the novel is Douglas McCabe. The Dad’s claim that “no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final” (Okri, The Famished Road 559) is often given as evidence of Okri’s privileging of a decidedly postmodern epistemological relativism (e.g. De Bruijn 178). McCabe counters this critical attribution by drawing attention to one of the novel’s central rhetorical strategies, its millenarianist-spiritualist discourse, by using Anthony K. Appiah’s reading of the novel and Okri’s remarks in a radio interview to support his argument. Appiah contends that in the novel, “the world of spirits is not metaphorical or imaginary; rather, it is more real than the world of the everyday” (“Spiritual Realism” 147) and Okri in an interview in 1994 claimed that: “We need ritual, initiation, transcendence of consciousness” (cited in Ogunsanwo, 40).

However, McCabe does not need to look outside the text to find ample evidence for Okri’s non-postmodernist allegiances. In the novel’s utopian and messianic periphrastic strategies, a rather old-fashioned Enlightenment/Romantic couplet, which aims to join politics and...