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The aim of this paper is to give the abiku trilogy -The Famished Road and its sequels Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches- by Nigerian writer Ben Okri as a sophisticated African instance of magical realism. In fact, positioning Okri’s work in terms of existing narrative traditions has been one of the most challenging tasks facing the many serious critics studying his abiku novels. A survey of the criticism about the books reveals three tendencies: reading the novels as filially related to a Nigerian tradition of writing founded by D. O. Fagunwa, Tutuola and Soyinka; as part of a West African postcolonial postmodernism comprising the literary contributions of writers like Syl Cheney-Coker, Kojo Laing, Sony Labou Tansi and Bandele Thomas; or as part of an international literature in which writers like Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie, who engage magical realism in their narratives, occupy outstanding positions. The first two of these tendencies overlap and designate African culture, mythologies and literature as the most convenient context for an appreciation of Okri’s novels. The third tendency opens up Okri’s narrative to more global literary, cultural and geopolitical discourses. A more constructive discussion of the abiku trilogy should take both major currents of Okri criticism into account to navigate through an adequate reading of these highly complex and rich novels. Accordingly, this paper argues that Okri adapts, with refined sophistication, techniques of the magical realism associated with Latin American writers, but by steeping his narrative in Africa’s powerful oral and mythic tradition and in the relatively little-known achievements of the Yoruba novel. He fuses realism and myth, details description of carnevalesque events, and explores liminal zones and continually transforming characters to effect a new way of rethinking postcolonial themes and of retracing the boundaries of African postcolonial fiction.
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