Ben Okri The Quest for an African Utopia

Ben Okri: The Quest for an African Utopia investigates the unethical cornucopia of myth and realism in Okri's prose fiction. Ben Okri's recent works have been excoriated as an excursion into phantasmagoria and a pandering after the exoticism of African literature by the Western academy of letters and general international readers who consume most of the works produced by African writers in the Diaspora. Consequently, his works have been given various contradictory labels: "fantasy," "hallucination," "magical realism," "postcolonial," "unrealism," just to mention a few. This book, however, posits that a pains-taking analysis of the interface of myth and realism in Okri's works would obviate much of the misapprehension and confusion which some of the labels above have generated. By examining the types of myths used in Okri's works and their relationship to the political and socio-economic reality of the society portrayed in these works, this book demonstrates that the unusual marriage of myth and realism in Ben Okri's works is no attempt to gratify the Western taste for the grisly and the exotic, but his honest quest for an African Utopia.