’Redreaming the World’: Ontological Difference and Abiku Perception in The Famished Road

Abstract

In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai informs the reader that he ‘refuse[s] to take refuge in illness’ (Rushdie, 1995a, p. 200). His experience of the fantastical children of midnight is not to be dismissed as ‘mere delirium’ or ‘the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child’; the children ‘must not become [...] the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind. No,’ Saleem insists, ‘illness is neither here nor there’ (p. 200). Rushdie’s literalization of metaphor means that we have to take Saleem at his word here and resist the possibility that we are accessing an impaired, hallucinating consciousness, even while we are encouraged to question Saleem’s reliability as a narrator. Rushdie’s irreverent magical realism compels us to doubt all truth claims but also to invest in the notion of a rational mind experiencing bizarre occurrences. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), set in decolonizing Nigeria in the 1950s, shares many points of generic and thematic similarity with Midnight’s Children, but as an example of what Christopher Warnes terms ‘faith-based magical realism’, it requires a different relationship with its narrative voice, that of the young boy Azaro. Faith-based magical realism is a culturally situated form of the genre that, in contrast with irreverent modes, articulates ‘particular belief systems or ways of seeing the world’ (Warnes, 2009, p. 6): cultural ontologies in which there is a congruence between spiritual or paranormal phenomena and the events of everyday existence.