Colonial Mimicry and Postcolonial Re-membering in Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name

In Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004), Isidore Okpewho harnesses the distinctive virtues of the African imagination and worldview to both complement and interrogate Western paradigms of knowledge. Where in his earlier novels The Victims (1970), Last Duty (1976) and Tides (1993) Okpewho conformed to the tradition of European realism, Call Me by My Rightful Name appropriates the techniques of magical realism that the novelist locates in African folk imagination. However, with both the techniques of orality and embodied textuality to excavate common bonds of black experience, Okpewho treads the challenging path between transvaluation and reification of colonial myths about Africa.