Coming to Terms with New Ageist Contamination: Cosmopolitanism in Ben Okri's The Famished Road

The paper refutes Douglas McCabe’s essay “ ‘Higher Realities’: New Age
Spirituality in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road” for its injudicious attack on
Okri as a New Ageist and “detraditionalizing perennialist” whose novel
The Famished Road purportedly reinforces cultural imperialism and global
capitalism. The paper reveals that McCabe’s primary intention is to indict
Okri for the latter’s supposed misappropriation of the traditional abiku narrative
and that McCabe’s imputation of The Famished Road relies on evidence
from without, rather than within, the novel itself. The paper goes on to
consider Okri’s suffusion of spirituality in the novel as a means of imparting
an “enchanted” history. It suggests that notions of cosmopolitanism, in
Anthony Kwame Appiah’s sense, pervade the text and that characters like
Dad and the Photographer can offer insight into individual attempts to
manage the various, contesting ontological systems at play in an African
culture.