BEN OKRI’S ABIKU TRILOGY: A POST-COLONIAL PROPOSITION

Abstract

Ben Okri is indisputably the most innovative, progressive and post-colonial writer of modern age. He is intrinsically touched by the stark realities of Nigeria, and writes instinctively about- poverty, myths, traditions, customs, rituals, political corruption and the socio-cultural diversity with adroitness. His extant works exudes post-colonial leaning and spirit invariably. Okri’s most famous Abiku’s trilogy in which a child named Azaro or Abiku navigates between two ostensibly opposed worlds, one is of earthly people and another is a spiritual world. Like Azaro or Abiku entering into a vicious circle, the country was ensnared in its own history never accomplishing to be a self-sufficient, self-governing state. This Abiku trilogy set at the point of independence and reveals the failure of Nigeria as an independent nation state, in which Okri showed that the current political gimmicks, shenanigans, thuggery, dictatorship and domestic neo-colonialism. Throughout the whole trilogy, Okri discussed how the educated elites ride on the back of the poor, uneducated and ordinary people of Nigeria. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to make a postcolonial reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy.