Browsing by Author "Ajibola, O."

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And trauma became flesh: terrorism, violence and trauma in Elnathan John’s born on a Tuesday and Helon Habila’s the Chibok girls
(2018) Ajibola, O.
Literature and terrorism presents an interesting burgeoning field of discourse, especially in the literary and critical enterprise of the post- 9/11 years. This study explores the intersection of terrorism, violence and trauma in Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday and Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls. It applies theoretical and critical insights from the trauma theory to the reading of the two purposively selected texts- John’s Born on a Tuesday and Habila’s The Chibok Girls. The writers’ depiction of the complex nuances of pain, terror, conflict and survival pangs experienced by Dantata, Banda, the Chibok Girls, and the entire northern region in Nigeria, bear witness to the physical, psychological, sociocultural, spiritual, environmental and insidious traumas inflicted upon individuals as well as the community. On the personal and collective levels, trauma has become flesh, and made its dwelling among the populace. Through the employment of such tropes and motifs as repetition compulsion, the trauma trope, the shattering trope, escapism, and the death drive, John and Habila unearth the structures that allow for the perpetuation of trauma and the mechanisms that entrench trauma across the northern Nigeria. John’s Born on a Tuesday and Habila’s The Chibok Girls attest to how violent conflicts and religious extremism interweave in a complex traumatizing network that continues to sear the Nigerian sociocultural and political space.
Double wounds: ecologies of trauma in Kivoshi Shigematsu’s “to next spring- Obon” and Osahon Ize- lyamu’s “more sea than tar”
(2021) Ajibola, O.
Literature across cultures and nationalities has often taken a significant stance with ecoadvocacy. This study examines two short stories’ representation of cultural trauma exacerbated by the despoliation of the environment. Japanese Kivoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring-Obon” and Nigerian Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, are chosen for their thematic convergence and topicality. Both stories are comparatively engaged through the trauma theory and ecocriticism, to investigate the stories’ recreation of personal as well as collective suffering tangled up with the larger tragedies occasioned by industrialization, modernity and most of all, environmental crises. The texts depict the environment and man as subjects that occupy oscillating positions between perpetrator and victim. The activities of man wound the environment and the environment responds by afflicting man, thereby causing traumatic disruptions that affect not just the present but the past and the future. In both texts, nature is a tower and a threat and man, a culprit cum casualty. In the aftermath of ecological catastrophes - the 3/11 in Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and a fictional tsunami in Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, man suffers spiritual and social degeneration, whose scars both stories serve to bear witness to.