Exploring the natural and the supernatural in literature

The question of what the supernatural means historically is a fascinating one, but one that is quite difficult to answer. What we mean by supernatural now may not correspond to what people in the past thought of as supernatural. Indeed, in many parts of the world today, the term supernatural may not have much meaning. Supernatural implies something beyond or above the natural. So, to know what supernatural means, you have to have a sense of the concept of the natural. This is, in fact, quite an unnatural concept, from a certain point of view.

The idea of the natural arises in the early 17th century, and becomes formalised in the 18th century, in the Enlightenment, as people start to focus on the senses and start to think about empirical measures for what they then come to call “reality”. So, the notion of reality itself arises and is a part of a particular time and place: Europe, in the 18th and 19th centuries. These ideas then come to be exported around the world and, in fact, imposed upon lots of people who then have to accommodate their existing modes of thought to these imported ideas. In many cases, this goes smoothly; but in others, we have evidence of it causing a great deal of violence and distress.

In Evans-Pritchard’s research amongst the Azande people in Sudan, an accident occurred: a granary collapsed. This, of course, was a great tragedy, because that’s where the grain was kept and it could precipitate great hunger and suffering.

In the 20th century, writers made extensive use of the supernatural in a whole variety of forms. The genre known as fantasy, for example, very often draws on supernatural happenings in different contexts. The genre that I’m particularly interested in is magical realism, which overlaps with the fantastic but takes elements of the fantastic and incorporates them into a realistic narrative frame. Those elements could come from myth or language itself. For example, taking a metaphor and literalising it can lead to a representation of the supernatural which hasn’t actually arisen from myth but from language.

A good example of the way in which an African writer has used the supernatural and myth in a magical realist fashion is the Anglo-Nigerian writer Ben Okri. In his most famous novel, The Famished Road, published in 1991, Okri uses the idea of the Abiku as the central motif. The Abiku are spirit children. They are understood to be half-real, half-mythological creatures who come to Earth for a short time and then die in order to be reunited with their friends in the spirit world. This is a very common myth in West Africa; it’s shared by many different people and, of course, has its roots in high infant mortality in the region. There’s a tragic sense in this, as people try to understand why and how they’ve lost their children.

Okri takes the idea of the Abiku and literalises it: he imagines a real Abiku – that is to say, a seven year old, who is half-spirit, half-child – and he sustains his explorations of what it must be like to be an Abiku throughout the course of 500 pages of impressionistic, experimental and original prose. The consequence is that you find magical realism being used effectively, where the magical elements correspond to the spiritual or cosmological sides of the Abiku persona, and the realistic elements correspond to the actual experience of living in an unnamed city, which is probably Lagos, in Nigeria, in the 1950s and 1960s.

This engagement with the supernatural gives us a new perspective of the world in which we live. Most obviously, it questions the ways in which we go about our ordinary daily lives: the ways in which we see objects, the ways in which we see one another, the ways in which we think about ourselves in time and space. They provide an element of defamiliarisation, which is to say they take common things and make them unfamiliar so you can experience them as if for the first time.

This is, of course, an essential function of art, as it’s been theorised from the early 20th century. Magical realism of this kind is particularly effective in asking us questions about reality: at the heart of magical realism is the question of what is real and what is not, and that turns out to be a really difficult question to answer. Behind that question is another question: who gets to decide what is real and what is not? And on what terms do they get to make those kinds of decisions?

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, you find an atrocity taking place. A group of people working for a banana company go on strike. They’re being very badly treated by their employers and they withhold their labour to get better working and living conditions. The company, in cahoots with the local police force, massacres a group of strikers and swiftly does away with all the evidence. They then go about broadcasting on the radio and on various other news channels the idea that this strike and this massacre never happened; that, in fact, people who say that this happened are lying.

You know that it’s not true, but the operations of the police and the banana company make clear that the question of what is true and what is not true are profoundly bound up with the question of who has power in a particular given situation. In this case, multinational corporate vested interests – the banana company – working together with local militia and local police are almost the ones who get to set the narrative, who get to determine what is true. Magical realism engages with that sense of reality and that sense of truth by then counterpoising against that element of the supernatural. For example, it then rains an implausibly long time, as a response to this untruth that’s being perpetrated by the banana company and the local police.

The question of the relationship between this kind of writing that engages with the supernatural and inherited religious sensibilities is a very big one. Some people would argue that magical realism makes more space for religious thought by calling into question the lines between magic and real, between natural and supernatural. There is an element of space-clearing for people to say, ‘I have faith. I do not need to prove that what I believe is true because my faith entitles me to do that.’

The exact opposite could also be argued about magical realism, in the sense that, if one of the lines of thinking that arises out of magical realism calls into question all notions of what’s real and what’s true, then there’s no more special space for the religious – or for the spiritual, even – because, potentially, everything around us is opened to those types of expanded perceptions that would allow us to experience a numinous aspect to the everyday.

The kinds of techniques that one needs to develop as a writer engaged with the supernatural will depend on one’s interests as a writer, which, of course, will depend on what you want to convey, what kinds of stories you want to tell, and where you are coming from, your own time and your own place.

The key technique that magical realists use is called the naturalisation of the supernatural. They typically create a very realistic description. Let’s say a room with a table, some chairs and two people having a conversation. Then, all of a sudden, there’ll be a knock at the door. These are very ordinary, realistic kinds of events. But you will go to the door and you’ll open it, and instead of there being a person, there might be a ghost. Instead of being surprised, the key technique of magical realism is to treat that supernatural apparition as if it were a perfectly ordinary aspect of everyday life. You invite them in, offer them a cup of tea, perhaps watch some television together.

This causes you to think about how you treat the other, and about the ways in which “otherness” isn’t always other. It may turn out to be the external frames, the inherited ways of seeing cultural conventions, political designations, gendered assumptions and racial assumptions. All of these factors may be how you think about yourself and how you think about the other. Magical realism typically asks those types of questions, and that’s what makes it a profoundly interesting, useful mode of reading and thinking.