Abstract

This research article examines the act of reading literature with a specific focus on postcolonial literature. Elleke Boehmer’s exploratory views about the pragmatic concerns of reading postcolonial literature serve as a theoretical background to the issue being addressed. Her polemical work Postcolonial Poetics reimagines the idea of reading postcolonial literature, in a fresh manner. Boehmer acknowledges the importance of the reader and the act of reading in shaping postcolonial poetics and aesthetics. She asserts that postcolonial literature, like other literary genres, is deeply engaged with matters of aesthetics, encompassing form, structure, perception, and reception. She believes that postcolonial African and Asian writers’ works can reimagine and refresh the postcolonial reality. In this regard, Ben Okri’s selected short fiction has been chosen to explore the utility of reading postcolonial fiction and evaluate its capacity to reimagine and reformulate postcolonial poetics. Okri’s works are representative of imaginary literature that includes myths and imaginative characters to present postcolonial realities in contemporary Nigeria. Boehmer claims that postcolonial writing interacts with the reader’s imaginative understanding of the world and formulates a distinct form of poetics. The study, therefore, focuses on finding a diverse form of postcolonial poetics in Okri’s short story collection The Comic Destiny. The exploration emphasizes the reader’s contribution to it and studies how and to what extent the writing structure shapes the reading process. This study discusses reading as a process in which a reader reads, imagines, interprets, and reformulates the poetics that might differ from a simplistic view of postcolonial poetics. The research concludes that Okri’s imaginative fiction has the potential to reimagine postcolonial reality that reformulates a unique type of postcolonial poetics that varies from the simplistic poetics of the said literature.