Magical Realism and African Identity in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

This study analyses Ben Okri's deployment of magical realism in The Famished Road as a narrative strategy for articulating African spiritual cosmology, postcolonial political experience, and the instability of national identity in late-twentieth-century Nigeria. Magical realism, a mode in which supernatural events are presented with the matter-of-fact realism of everyday experience, has been widely theorised in the Latin American literary tradition, but its distinct forms and cultural logics in African fiction require separate and contextually grounded analysis. The study applies a postcolonial and Yoruba cosmological framework to a close reading of Okri's novel, focusing on the abiku figure of Azaro, the liminal spirit-child who inhabits both the spirit world and the material world of a Nigerian slum. Analysis attends to the novel's narrative temporality, its blurring of social and supernatural causation, and its use of the road as a polysemic symbol linking Yoruba spiritual geography with Nigerian national political experience in the independence era. Findings demonstrate that Okri's magical realism is not merely a formal borrowing but is grounded in Yoruba metaphysical thought, particularly the concept of the spirit world as a simultaneously present and interpenetrating dimension of reality. The study argues that The Famished Road uses its magical narrative register to perform the unfinished and contested quality of Nigerian nationhood. The research has implications for undergraduate syllabi that address West African fiction's engagement with local cosmologies. Keywords: magical realism, Ben Okri, abiku, postcolonial fiction, Nigerian identity.