MAGIC REALISM AS A POSTMODERN DEVICE FOR POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM: A STUDY OF BEN OKRI’S THE FAMISHED ROAD

Abstract

In Literature, magical realism is a narrative strategy that combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that the marvelous grows organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them. Unfortunately, in the domain of literary studies magical realism has become a debased narrative strategy. Thus we find critics and researchers portraying magical realism as shallow, dangerous, primitive, the literary language of the emergent postcolonial countries, a term underpinned by racist ideologies and at worst a suggestion that magical realism ought to be done away with. This is because most critics and researchers of magical realism have endeavoured to look at it as a postcolonial narrative strategy that serve the yearnings of the peripherized, colonized and marginalized regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, India, Eastern Europe and Africa, thus making it primitive; these critics and researchers have failed to take magical realism beyond the confines of postcolonialism. There has been very few researches on magical realism incorporating postmodern devices and techniques, thus making it a contemporary trend. In response to this problem this study unveils the fact magical realisms’ usefulness exceeds the confines of postcolonialism, importantly, it incorporates postmodern devices which helps in the realization of the postcolonial themes in the work. In this light this study critically examines Ben Okri’s use of magical realism to portray the cultural and political oddities in Nigeria. This study unveils the fact that these writers use of magical realism set them in the genre of postmodernism making their works contemporary. This study becomes a reminder that magical realism is innovative, productive, a contemporary trend, a mode of expression worldwide and an aesthetics of necessity. The research work utilizes the theories of postcolonialism and postmodernism.