Sickness as a metaphor in Tony Marinho’s the epidemic

Abstract

Literature mirrors the complexities that attend life and living. Literary artists over time bend literature into a tool for education and entertainment, advocacy and activism. Tony Marinho’s The Epidemic, an adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Plague, belongs to a field generally regarded as Literature and Medicine, a burgeoning field dedicated to critical engagements with the works of physician-writers. The narrative essentially reconstructs bioethics in a questionably ethical space like Nigeria, and the wanton destruction suffered by the masses because of the insensitivity of the rulers to the plight of the ruled. This paper examines Marinho’s The Epidemic, using aspects of the Postcolonial theory that account for the causes and consequences of colonialism and post-colonialism, and aspects of Freudian Psychoanalysis which account for post-traumatic stress disorders and psychosocial conflicts that result from traumatic experiences. The paper highlights the hellish conditions faced by more than half of the nation’s population: epidemics, maternal and child mortality, malnutrition, inaccessible healthcare services, and many others. The world displayed in the text is one infected and infested with pain and poverty, abuse and misery, denial and denigration. It underlines the fact that the pangs of poverty affect the health institutions much more than accounts portray. Marinho’s art in The Epidemic inverts roles such that victors become victims and even the healthy dine with sickness; sickness thus becomes a metaphor for economic, mental, spiritual, social and cultural poverty. The paper advocates collaborative strategies, interdisciplinary approaches and resourceful researches as the ultimate remedy that would usher in life and wholeness in Nigeria, and in Africa at large.