Exploring the "edge of reality": The international in Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1993) follows Azaro, an abiku child, and his family through life in an impoverished neighborhood in what can be assumed to Lagos, Nigeria, just before the advent of Nigerian independence. Okri says "[A] true invasion takes place not when a society has been taken over by another society in terms of its infrastructure, but in terms of its mind and its dreams and its myths, and its perception of reality" (qtd. in Hawley 32). Okri, like many magical realists, ultimately uses his novel as a means of resistance to Western epistemologies. Okri's novel is exemplary of a localized mode of magical realism, and Okri uses the license of magical realism to explore the interpenetration of the national and, especially, the international within the local. This thesis examines the ways in which centrifugal and centripetal movements within the text suggest the potential for neocolonialism, while at the same time speculating a liberated future. The thesis concludes with an acknowledgement of the paradoxes extent within The Famished Road