ABSTRACT
Published in 1980, Okri's first novel Flowers and Shadows presents a conventional narrative structure that was subsequently abandoned in the explicit experimentalism of his later work. His two shortstory collections Incidents at the Shrine (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, and the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction) and Stars oft the New Curfew, published in 1986 and 1989 respectively, as well as his Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road (1991), are exemplary of this kind of experimentation. Blending modernist/postm o d e r n i s t n a r r a t i v e s t ra tegies wi th post - colonial politics, these texts display a diaspora aesthetic (see d ia spora aesthetics) of in-betweenness and hybridity evident elsewhere in contemporary black British writing. Abandoning linear chronology, and borrowing the fluid, cyclical time patterns of Yoruba myth, Okri conjoins worlds, realities and visions within spiritual, stylised dream sequences in a manner not dissimilar to the magic realist techniques of writers like Salman Rushdie . Okri has pursued these techniques in sequels like Astonishing Gods (1995), Dangerous Love (1996) and Infinite Riches (1998). In 1999, he published Mental Fight, an epic poem that is structured around the millennium celebrations of 2000.
