벤 오크리의 『굶주린 길』: 아비쿠 모티브의 탈근대적 함의

Abstract

Non-African readers have been used to sense what Africa is like mostly through Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Published about 30 years later from Achebe's work, Ben Okri's The Famished Road makes it possible to see a totally different world of Africa in that it focuses on Africa's own aesthetic and spiritual structures while quite on purpose excluding the paradigm of (post)colonialism. The Famished Road is a story about Azaro, a spirit child who constantly crosses over the real and the spirit world, and his parents living in a urban ghetto of Nigeria. The overlapping and coexistence of the real and the spirit world is sustained by the transformation of the traditional Abiku motif where a spirit child has to choose either living in the real world or returning to the spirit world. Through this nontraditionally refashioned abiku, Azaro, who can cross over any boundary between life and death, self and other, past and future, this novel suggests an alternative world transcending all artificial boundaries constructed and reinforced by the Western modernity. With the birth of the modern thinking subject, the godly world has gradually disappeared from the human consciousness, and consequently humans has begun to be obsessed with the material world, what they can see and prove physically, under the siege of the modern science and the human reason. On the contrary, the Abiku world presented in The Famished Road is the one that some sense of wholeness between beings and the universe still exists. This paper examines the postmodern implication of the Abiku world suspending in between the human world and the spirit world, which I think can be achieved by the nontraditional transformation of the Abiku myth of Nigeria. The second section focuses on how the expanded understanding of human being embodied in this Abiku world, compared to the idea of the modern self, becomes possible. The third section examines how the expansion of relationships between beings becomes possible in the Abiku world, and why the invisible world, whatever it might be called as infinity or the spirit world, should be included in the mode of being. In doing so, this paper aims to reveal that The Famished Road is a text which makes possible some reflections of the fundamental issues of Western modernity.