The notion of expenditure in postcolonial context: an analysis of a short story by Ben Okri

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the short-story ‘The dream-vendor's August’, authored by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, based on critical approaches that relate that specific African postcolonial writing to the notions of expenditure and the gift advanced, respectively, by Georges Bataille (1997) and Jacques Derrida (1992). It is a critical examination in which the idea of loss is taken as an important feature of that Nigerian fictional text, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, a period portrayed by Okri in his narrative. Among the questions raised in this study is the possibility that the context of a large postcolonial African city, such as Lagos, implies specific processes of expenditure and exchanging gifts, different from those experienced in metropolis of developed countries. Cultural issues transform or even subvert in some way such experiences. Therefore, the investigation focuses on the discursive displacement of Okri's postcolonial narrative in order to discuss the political, economic, and mainly cultural reality of Nigeria at that time. In such a configuration, expenditure seems to reach virtually every sphere in the existence of the postcolonial subject portrayed in the story. However, at the same time, there are mechanisms that interrupt the experience of excessive or unproductive loss in terms possibly different from those present in other societies. In this sense, the reading of postcolonial narratives poses new problems for Western literary criticism.