Magic, Reality, and African Cosmology in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits

The integration of spiritual cosmology into the texture of everyday fictional reality is a shared feature of African women's fiction and Latin American magical realism, and a comparison of Flora Nwapa's Efuru and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits reveals how both writers construct female protagonists whose lives are shaped by supernatural forces that operate within, rather than against, the logic of their worlds. This study examined how the water goddess Uhamiri in Efuru and the clairvoyant Clara in Allende's novel function as narrative and spiritual centres of their communities, conferring on both protagonists a form of spiritual authority that transcends domestic limitation. A comparative feminist mythology methodology drawing on African women's literary criticism and postcolonial gender theory was applied. Nwapa's novel, the first major novel published by a Nigerian woman, constructs the Igbo waterside town and its spiritual geography as a space where women's relationships, both human and divine, are primary. Allende's multigenerational Chilean saga uses the paranormal as a feminist narrative strategy to reclaim women's history from official patriarchal record. The analysis showed that both texts use the supernatural to articulate dimensions of female experience that realist narrative conventions would tend to marginalise. The study recommends this pairing for courses on African and Latin American women's literature at Nigerian universities, particularly those in the South East geopolitical zone where Nwapa's Igbo cultural context is most immediately accessible to students.

Keywords: magical realism, African cosmology, Nwapa, Allende, women's fiction