Coming to terms with New Ageist contamination: cosmopolitanism in Ben Okri's The Famished Road.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-DEC-07

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ABSTRACT

The paper refutes Douglas McCabe's essay "'Higher Realities': New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road" for its injudicious attack on Okri as a New Ageist and "detraditionalizing perennialist" whose novel The Famished Road purportedly reinforces cultural imperialism and global capitalism. The paper reveals that McCabe's primary intention is to indict Okri for the latter's supposed misappropriation of the traditional abiku narrative and that McCabe's imputation of The Famished Road relies on evidence from without, rather than within, the novel itself. The paper goes on to consider Okri's suffusion of spirituality in the novel as a means of imparting an "enchanted" history. It suggests that notions of cosmopolitanism, in Anthony Kwame Appiah's sense, pervade the text and that characters like Dad and the Photographer can offer insight into individual attempts to manage the various, contesting ontological systems at play in an African culture.

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In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty explores how the narrator of subaltern history is to manage the presence of the divine or supernatural that is knit into subaltern culture. How, he asks, are we to "render this enchanted world into our disenchanted prose-a rendering required [...] in the interest of social justice?" (77). Ben Okri tackles this same question of how to impart an "enchanted" history-the history of his Nigerian home, where the spiritual realm is, by and large, considered as present and as real as is the natural realm; where traditional animist belief systems mingle together with Christianity, Muslim faith, secularism, and other imported ontological systems, as Nigerians grapple with their own sense of being in a "glocal" world. (1) Convinced that "the facts of history alone are not enough to give an account of our consciousness and what we need to do with our age" (Wilkinson 87), Okri eschews disenchanted prose and, instead, liberally infuses his creative writing with enchantment. He imparts his most renowned narrative, The Famished Road, through the consciousness of an abiku spirit-child narrator, whose mystic focalization thoroughly disrupts any strict secular telling of history. (2)

Epitomizing just how sensitive a project this attempt to render the spiritual in the real can be, however, Douglas McCabe denounces Okri's work for its purportedly inappropriate suffusion of spirituality. In "'Higher Realities': New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road," McCabe identifies--or, I will argue, misidentifies--the central force that drives the narrative of The Famished Road as New Age spirituality, a belief system that, he avers, extends from Western modernism and advances a capitalistic and imperialistic ideology. Associating Okri and his writing with New Ageism, McCabe contends that this novel cannot rightly be considered a postcolonial or postmodern text as critics have often asserted. Far more disturbingly, he accuses Okri of cultural imperialism, of poaching on traditional cultural forms to make them amenable for the Western consumer.

While McCabe makes some intriguing observations about rhetoric in Okri that is consistent with New Ageist idiom, his argument is, in the end, untenable. His difficulties originate in his approach: he injudiciously postulates that Okri is a New Ageist and then attempts to fit The Famished Road into that single ontological framework. I will side with the numerous critics, including Anthony Kwame Appiah, who take the more fruitful approach of considering the various, competing ontological systems at play in the novel--an approach that reveals the shortcomings of McCabe's argument. I will suggest that notions of cosmopolitanism pervade the text and offer insights into how the individual might--with formidable effort--approach these contesting ontologies.

Particularly given the degree of respect with which previous critics treat Okri and his work, McCabe's attack seems outlandish. When we recognize that this attack extends from a larger grievance that McCabe carries, however, the motive behind his passionate assault becomes evident. He may genuinely take issue with Okri's apparent embrace of New Ageism, but his larger, umbrella irritation is with African writers' supposed misappropriation of the traditional abiku--and Azaro, Okri's abiku narrator, is a perfect case. In "History of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku and Soyinka's Abiku, " McCabe launches his first strike, against Soyinka, for his "ahistorical" representation of the abiku in the latter's poem "Abiku." McCabe closes the article with a warning against other, similar abuses of the trope:

[W]e might be tempted to appropriate abiku as a trope for postcolonial hybridity and liminality, for the migrant experience, for the defiant nationalism of decolonization, for 'magical realism, or for the globally unjust distributions of wealth and power [...] At worst, such ahistorical, academic representations of abi1tu might come to stand for the indigenous varieties-a problem similar in kind and in urgency to the perennial problem of "metropolitan hybridity" standing for "subalternity." (65)

Regrettably, McCabe refuses to acknowledge that cultural forms can be innovatively and respectfully operated to negotiate the ontologically complex present-day challenges that indigenous peoples face. If Soyinka's representation of the abiku is offensive to McCabe, Okri's is that much more odious. From here, McCabe springboards into his attack on his next perpetrator--Ben Okri.

McCabe finds his arsenal in Anthony Kwame Appiah's 1993 review of Okri's novel, where Appiah distinguishes Famished as a "spiritual realist" text in which the "world of spirits" appears to be "more real than the world of the everyday" (147). McCabe fixes on Appiah's complaint that Okri overdoes spirituality in the novel, that Okri too often writes in an "irritatingly pseudomystical New Age mode" (148), and McCabe takes these remarks as Appiah's evaluation of Okri's personal spiritual beliefs. Whatever appraisal Appiah makes of Okri's own spirituality is not clear, nor is it of any import to his final assessment of the novel. McCabe ignores Appiah's next statement, which praises Okri for not doing what MaCabe accuses Okri of doing--allowing one dimension to overtake his book. But Appiah's approach is antithetical to McCabe's: Appiah examines the "rhetorical complexity" of the text (147), recognizes that the discourse in the "New Age mode" is undercut by other exchanges (148), and so disallows New Ageism as the novel's "predominating force" ("Higher" 2). Considering that Appiah opens his review by labeling The Famished Road postmodern, it is strange that McCabe interprets the article to indicate a departure from, even a contradiction of the major critical view that the novel is postmodern and postcolonial.

It is understandable that McCabe would lend Appiah authority, though. Appiah's ideas are certainly provoking and useful for literary analysis. But Appiah's review resonates better with his ideas of "cosmopolitanism," as he outlines them in his most recent work of philosophy by that same name, than they do with any ideas of neo-imperialism or hegemonic ontology, as McCabe would have it. The "tension" that Appiah emphasizes in this review is characteristic of the tension of the cosmopolitan figure, who tries to negotiate his/her identity at the intersection of various worlds. It is not, I contest, a "tension" over how Okri can "press-gang" his personal spiritual beliefs into "an allegory for the nationalist agenda" (2), as McCabe argues. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Appiah posits a cosmopolitan figure that struggles to negotiate between the spirit and the real world; Appiah is unequivocal when he says that he is discussing human relations only. But ontological beliefs are an aspect of all human world views, and the cosmopolitans negotiation between world views involves a negotiation of those beliefs as well. If Okri presents any "ideal" character in his novel, it is closer to Appiah's cosmopolitan than it is to some New Age guru.

Appiah joins other recent scholars (such as Jessica Schiff Berman, Pheng Cheah, and Amanda Anderson) in reclaiming "cosmopolitanism" of its negative connotations. For Appiah, the term replaces "globalization" and "multiculturalism." Two intertwining strands underlie the notion: one, the individual cosmopolitan has an obligation to others beyond her/his kith, kin, and immediate community--in a word, to the "cosmos", two, he/she must seriously value the lives of particular humans, which involves taking a personal interest in those practices and beliefs that are significant to them (Cosmopolitanism xv). A key point is that these two ideals often clash, and when they do, they produce the kind of tension that Appiah locates in Okri's work--where indigenous and "metropolitan" ideas of spirituality and "reality" meet. And so we come to Appiah's position that there is "a sense in which cosmopolitanism is...

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