Child Narrators, Conceptions of Reality, and Minority Identity in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

Abstract

This paper comparatively studies the representation of Niger Delta and Haisla minority identity through child narrators and their conceptions of reality in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach. Beginning with the assumption that these novels are postcolonial bildungsroman narratives, I read the child narrator as symptomatic of Abdul R. JanMohammed and David Lloyd’s position of the minority figure as a child-like character. Using Ojaide’s theorization of the resistance in minority discourse, the liminality of the child narrator is engaged in the context of resistance to dominance.