Abstract
In the post-World War II period, magical realism, as a distinctive mode of fiction, has offered cultural hybridity, transformation and intermingling, and has thus been a significant means of communication for the postcolonial world. It has enabled postcolonial authors to get the chance of observing the world from a different perspective and seeing the truth with a ‘third eye’. The Nigerian-British author Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1991, is one of the postcolonial magical realist novels aiming at viewing the world with a third eye. In The Famished Road, Okri attempts to investigate sociopolitical and historical realities, to understand and solve the paradoxes and secrets of history in the language of magic and dreams. In the novel he connects politics directly with the concept of history; his conception of ‘inviolate’ African consciousness becomes the base for his representation of history. The aim of this study is to scrutinize the ways in which Okri encodes African consciousness versus Western epistemology and reevaluates history. The study tries to analyze how Okri redreams postcolonial potentials for his hometown, Nigeria, by extension for the whole African continent, through magical realism functioning as a third eye in The Famished Road.
Highlights
Since the 1950s magical realism, a widely-known postmodern narrative mode, has been utilized as an amazing weapon especially by the postcolonial authors to represent the realities of the postcolonial countries of the world
In his distinct type of magical realism, which serves as a third eye in the novel, Okri observes the realities of neocolonial political struggles and stresses the sociopolitical injustice, corruption and dysfunctionality in his native postcolonial Nigeria
Taking advantage of the subversive power of magical realism, the novel merges the literary traditions of Africa, Europe and Latin America with a philanthropic and universal vision through the local
Summary
Dumlupinar University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Western Languages and Literature Department, Kütahya/ TURKEY
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