Doug McCabe's response to Esther de Bruijn's essay.(FORUM)(Critical essay)

My essay on New Age spirituality in The Famished Road derives from my doctoral dissertation, "'Born-To-Die. The History and Politics of Abiku and Ogbanje in Nigerian Literature," where it appears as one of two chapters focused on the novel. The other chapter explores additional discourses of spirituality that Okri's text is shaped by and in dialogue with, from social Darwinist accounts of abiku offered by colonial anthropologists, to present-day spiritual beliefs and practices pertaining to abiku in Nigeria, in London, and on the World Wide Web. The two chapters together try to demonstrate that Okri's representation of abiku (decisively shaped, I argue, by New Age spirituality) is not only in conflict with the postcolonial and postmodern discourses that clearly also influence his text, but also in tension with alternate representations of abiku (shaped by forms of spirituality at variance with Okri's New Age views) circulating before and during The Famished Road's composition. My essay on Okri is therefore part of the larger, historicist argument of my doctoral dissertation, namely, that representations of abiku are historically embedded, shaped by and in dialogue with multiple, competing discourses circulating at the particular place and time of their composition. Such representations are therefore polyvocal and often internally contradictory, embodying heterogeneous discursive forces jockeying for position at different historical moments.

Given the larger context from which my essay on Okri derives, readers will quickly recognize that de Bruijri's critique erroneously and misleadingly characterizes it. On the whole, she is right to attack the positions she attacks--but those positions are not mine. De Bruijn incorrectly asserts, for example, that for me New Ageism is the only ideology promulgated in The Famished Road, and that the novel is to my eyes univocally anti-postmodern and anti-postcolonial. In actual fact, I repeatedly assert that Okri's text is polyvocal, and that Okri's New Ageism sits in tension with the postmodern and postcolonial influences also influencing his text. Astonishingly, de Bruijn speculates that my hidden agenda is to attack African writers who deviate from traditional depictions of abiku, whereas in fact the aim in all of my work has been to caution critics (not writers) to historicize representations of abiku. Not only is De Bruijri's distortion of my positions itself unscholarly, but the language of her critique is unscholarly as well. She often employs extreme, martial diction, mocks my ideas with inflammatory rhetoric, and explicitly questions my intellectual competence. Where she does address my actual claims, de Bruijri's provides some invigorating critique, and her proffering of cosmopolitanism as an alternative source for many of the qualities I call "New Age" is interesting and fruitful, but the straw man "McCabe" taken to task in her essay is stuffed with many ideas not my own. The irony of all this is that I am sympathetic to many of the concerns animating de Bruijri's argument, particularly her interest is reclaiming a degree of local agency in discursive reproduction. I…