Exile and postcolonial national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection between exile and postcolonial national redemption has gone unexplored. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of becoming-traitor and on exile as ex salire, the paper argues that contrary to Edward Said’s and Walter Mignolo’s conceptualisation of exile as the idiom for rethinking location and identity beyond the imaginary of the nation as territoriality, Okri and Adichie re-present exile as an ethico-political act of radical refusal and epistemic disobedience to the existing norms of violence and nonbeing, and a precondition for postcolonial redemption. The paper reveals two things: that novelty, in both novels, can be located at the conceptual level wherein the transformation of exile into a strategy of rebellion and subversion becomes the precondition for postcolonial agency and redemption; and that the scandalous event is a site of contestation, epistemic disobedience and futurity.