Fictionalizing the Crisis of the Environment in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment

Ben Okri, within the corpus of Nigerian literature, African literature and the broader corpus of postcolonial literature, is known for what some critics have called “the famished road trilogy.” ¹ The novels that constitute this trilogy, The Famished Road, ² Songs of Enchantment ³ and Infinite Riches, ⁴ follow the travails of a spirit-child narrator in pre-independence Nigeria as the country becomes immersed in political and fiscal decadence. In postcolonial jargon, the narrator epitomizes transculturalism and multiculturalism, straddling and blurring the borders between supposedly dialectical ontologies. As the “hegemony” of nationalism, transnationalism and transculturalism as dominant critical models looms over Okri’s trilogy, it is not surprising that environmentalism becomes relatively obscured. This apparent obscuring of environmentalism in Okri’s trilogy is not particularly unique to Okri’s works; as a subject of literature and criticism, environmentalism, to some extent, is more or less new and independent field within African literary and critical practices. More importantly, the relative silence on environmentalism reflects the hesitation that haunts ecocriticism among African literary practitioners. ⁵ In a sense, the lukewarm critical attention that environmentalism has received in African literature reflects “ecoenthusiasm” at its incipient stage. In other words, the indifference to Okri’s environmental discourse in his trilogy, particularly The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment, affects most African writers and, in fact, African literature in general.