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

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: