Themes of Exile and Belonging in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Exile, whether physical or spiritual, is a recurring preoccupation of modernist and postcolonial literature, and the artistic coming-of-age narratives of Ben Okri and James Joyce provide a productive comparative framework for examining how writers from colonised societies negotiate identity and belonging. This study compared the treatment of exile and self-discovery in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focusing on how each protagonist negotiates belonging within culturally coercive environments. A thematic and psychoanalytic reading methodology was applied, drawing on diaspora theory and theories of the Bildungsroman. Azaro's liminal existence between the spirit world and the material world in Okri's Yoruba-inflected Nigerian narrative was read alongside Stephen Dedalus's rejection of Irish Catholic orthodoxy as parallel narratives of the artist-hero's alienation from inherited cultural scripts. Both texts were produced in politically charged colonial and post-independence contexts, and the study examined how each narrative uses spiritual or intellectual departure as a form of resistance. The analysis revealed that both Okri and Joyce construct exile not as defeat but as a necessary condition for artistic consciousness. However, while Joyce's exile is primarily intellectual and European, Okri's is cosmological and rooted in West African spiritual philosophy. The study recommends the pairing for teaching in Comparative Literature departments at universities in the South West geopolitical zone, where Yoruba cultural contexts enrich Okri's mythological framework.

Keywords: exile, belonging, Ben Okri, James Joyce, Bildungsroman