Hybridity and simultaneous in the novel \'The famished road\', by Ben Okri

Author(s)

Divanize Carbonieri

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2006-05-15

Examining board members

Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra; Thomas Bonnici; Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Souza

• Advisor: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra

Abstract

In the novel The Famished Road (1991) Nigerian author Ben Okri gives a new dimension to the spirit child or abiku\'s image, which is a recurrent motif among the Yoruba and many other cultures from West Africa. The abiku is a characteristic subject of the African oral narrative and is also present in some African literature in English as the abiku is part of the belief of those cultures. However, Okri undertakes an innovation, turning the abiku into the narrator of his novel. Since this creature is an in between, living permanently in the intersection between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the structure of the literary work is altered by the reality as it is seen through his eyes. His vision is made up by the simultaneous images of those two worlds. In the construction of his novel, Okri tries to translate this vision to a Western reading audience, using paradigms from both the African orality and Western literature. Thus, the novel is placed in a transitional space between African and Western cultures. Narrative methods and strategies from both traditions are used and the abiku phenomenon itself is invested by other more Western conceptions about the soul\'s resurrection. This dissertation aims to reveal from a postcolonial theoretical perspective how this novel is constructed as a hybrid work between the modes of perceiving and depicting reality characteristic of each one of these cultures. (AU)