'Between Worlds': Magical Realism in Easterine Kire's Spirit Nights

Easterine Kire’s ‘Spirit Nights’, is a compelling contribution to the genre of Magic Realism, intricately interweaving Naga oral traditions, myth, and cultural memory. The novel functions not merely as a work of fiction but as a literary space in which Indigenous cosmologies are affirmed and enacted. This paper argues that Kire employs magical realism as a decolonial literary strategy, one, that reclaims indigenous knowledge systems, reasserts cultural sovereignty, and challenges dominant Western paradigms of realism and rationality. Through an analysis of narrative structure, thematic development, and cosmological symbolism, this study reveals how Spirit Nights constructs a world where the spiritual and the material are inseparably intertwined, and where storytelling becomes an act of both survival and resistance.