Mythopoetics as Epistemic Revolt: Decolonial Reading and Fragmented Perception in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Abstract

This article argues that the kind of mythopoetics employed in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is a species of epistemic defiance and resistance against the perceptual and narrative frames by means of which colonial modernity claims to achieve comprehensibility, coherence, linear progression, and political control of its social world. Building on the notions of epistemic disobedience (Walter Mignolo) and critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire), the article shows how abiku focalization, episodic recurrence, causal interruption, and formal incompleteness violate the reader's assumed right to have access to a whole world that is transparent to understanding. Fragmentation is thus posited here as a form of counter-pedagogy: it limits immediate closure, demands inferences across different frames, and habituates the reader to a practice that navigates competing ontological commitments and refuses their untimely resolution. My argument progresses through four operations working in concert: the fragmentation and non-siting, or delegitimating, of sovereign abiku perception; the sabotaging of the developmental and realist teleologies of the social world; the Party of the Rich’s production of political “common sense” through broadcast amplification, spectacle, hunger, coercive vocative and imperative address, and interpellative utterance; and the practice of attritional forgetting as another key agent of te erosion of both historical continuity and causal attributability. In differentiating generative opacity from the coercively induced obscuration produced by political noise, especially state propaganda and state-controlled messaging, the article argues that Okri’s mythopoetics is doing more than registering ontological diversity; indeed, it functions, for one, as critical education, instilling in the reader critical habits of attentiveness and undertaking the work of preserving the contestability of realia within a political domain striving to hegemonize the prerogatives of observation, memory, and knowledge.