Interpreting Post colonialism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Abstract

Postcolonial theory and criticism started to gain prominence from the last two decades. It consists of the study of literature which has been formerly colonised by the imperial masters. It includes the new literatures which got affected by the colonial process. The new literatures named as “Commonwealth literature” covers the literature from the Latin America, South Asia and Africa respectively. The African Literature had the most adverse effects of the colonisation process. As a result, the natives cannot forget their painful historical past. The writers of the African literature have embedded the painful histories with the rich oral tradition. Postcolonial African Literature discusses African oral traditions, gender identities, nationalism. This paper analyses the characteristic features which Ben Okri employs in his literary text, The Famished Road. The paper aims at determining the extent to which these features reflect the postcolonial literary ideal. This paper investigates the attributes of postcolonialism like hybridity, nationalism etc.  Apart from these, Okri also reflects on the themes of corruption, dispossession, colonial and neo-colonial domination, and identity crisis.