The ‘Paradise Paradox’ in Migration: A Counterfactual Reading of Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale and Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red

The ‘paradise’ is a trope representing imagination(s) of an ideal elsewhere, contrasting with the lived dystopian experiences. Most postcolonial literature paradoxically narrates the ‘paradise,’ depicting its postcolonial constituted desires while rejecting the existence of the ideal to critique the complexities of the postcolonial condition. Here, I assume a similar paradoxical interpretation of the ‘paradise’ in a renewed reading and analysis of Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000) and Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red (2013) as postcolonial African texts portraying African migration to Western metropolises, inspired by paradisiacal or ‘Edenic’ perceptions of mobility. Using counterfactual theory, ‘push and pull' theory of migration and postcolonial criticism, I interpret the ‘paradise paradox' into two possible meanings. First, the aspiring postcolonial migrant counterfactually perceives the cosmopolitan West as a ‘paradise,’ a place of comfort, triggered by the limiting postcolonial experience at home. Secondly, the novel(ist), through an ironic representation of the ‘paradise,’ employs the text to counterfactually reject the concept as characters encounter precarity and disillusionment in the ‘paradise.’ Overall, I argue that the paradisiacal images of the West in postcolonial African migration hatch from the postcolonial limitations that it imagines to respond to, but is refuted by intersectional postcolonial forces in the aspired ideal.