Sacred Realism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

In Magical Realism in West African Fiction , Brenda Cooper touts Ben Okri’s The Famished Road as definitive of magic realism of the post-colonial African variety. In the novel, Okri draws on mythical beliefs and ritual, and aesthetic practices of Nigerian society, to create, within the form of the novel, a complex amalgamation, in generic terms, of realism and fantasy. However, his novel is vastly dissimilar from the magic realisms of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie, who both essentially rely on forms of allegory to address historical concerns in most of their novels. Wendy B. Faris argues that one of the defining features of magic realism is an extensive use of detail as a means to highlight the mimetic and referential quality of the writing. This characteristic is more applicable to the work of Okri than to the allegorical quality of Rushdie’s and Gárcia Márquez’s works. This might sound strange when we are presented in The Famished Road with a world populated by spirits, gods, the unborn, the living and the dead, where mutant and hybrid creatures intermingle with ordinary people. Yet, it is my contention that Okri, in contradistinction to Rushdie and Gárcia-Márquez, is writing/re-writing a form of realism, which I shall call sacred realism . This new term is necessary not only to distinguish it from the aesthetics and politics of magic realism(s), but also to point to its historical and geographical specificity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.