WALKING BETWEEN WORLDS: MAGICAL REALISM AS POSTCOLONIAL RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN FICTION

Abstract

This article examines hybridity and magical realism in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon from postmodernist and postcolonial perspectives. Developed from a thesis-based qualitative study, the article focuses on how the two Nigerian novels use extraordinary modes of narration to represent liminal identity, cultural negotiation, postcolonial resistance and African futurity. The theoretical framework is primarily based on Homi K. Bhabha's concepts of hybridity, liminality and the Third Space, Stephen Slemon's idea of magical realism as postcolonial discourse, and selected concepts from Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. The article uses close textual analysis and comparative interpretation. Its central claim is that hybridity is not merely a theme in the two novels; it structures character, space, time, language, community and narrative form. In The Famished Road, Azaro's abiku identity, the hungry road, family poverty and corrupt political parties create a magical-realist world in which the visible and invisible coexist. In Lagoon, Ayodele's alien identity, the living ocean, Bar Beach, Lagos media culture and ecological transformation extend hybridity toward Afrofuturist and interspecies futurity. The textual evidence shows that Okri transforms Yoruba cosmology into a discourse of postcolonial survival, while Okorafor transforms alien contact into a discourse of ecological and planetary change. The article concludes that both novels challenge Eurocentric binaries of real/unreal, human/non-human, rational/irrational and past/future by affirming African epistemologies as active sources of literary renewal.