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Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye, by Brenda Cooper.
The premise of Brenda Cooper's book, reiterated throughout the book in different ways, is that "[m]agical realism arises out of particular societies -- postcolonial, unevenly developed places where old and new, modern and ancient, the scientific and the magical views of the world co-exist" (216). For her, this socioeconomic condition characterizes the Third World, constitutes the basic material for South American magical realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, and puts her West African writers, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, and B. Kojo Laing, alongside them with only the difference of "local color." She sees all three West African writers occupying "ambiguous fictional spaces, suspended between Bhabha's cosmopolitan celebration of border traffic, on the one hand, and Soyinka's or Achebe's decolonizing boundaries, as natural fortifications, on the other" (216).
Strikingly, Cooper is throughout her book very defensive of her looking at these writers with a "third eye" from the outside, as "[n]egative depictions of white women abound in African writing" (4) from Ngugi wa Thiong'o to Achebe. But she seems to fear more seriously that her application of the term "magical realism" to these West African writers can be easily interpreted as a facile extension from Latin American writers and as part of the characteristic denial of African writers' originality in any form. Surely, Cheney-Coker unequivocally objects to the label, pointing to the inner differences between his own fiction and García Márquez's (138). Indeed, the book hardly comes to grips with the intrinsic and distinguishing features of their fictional art that can clearly establish their own unique form of magical realism. In Cooper's conclusion, she enunciates once again her overriding, critical parameter in the book: "The magical can be a device for exposing reality, but only if there is a degree of critical, ironic distance from it which prevents supernatural explanation being proffered to elucidate historical processes" (222). In the very next sentence, she makes her final evaluation of her three writers: "The fervour of cultural nationalism ultimately mutes the irony of Laing, Cheney-Coker and Okri" (222). This is a finding that has run through the...