Nigerian War - Caruth - Adichie's experience
During the 21st century, fictions have come out of Nigeria marking the attempts of dealing with displacement and identity by the childhood ideas. The attempts are not successful because it is a fact that Nigeria has transformed itself during the nineteen sixties to the nineties from the military governance periods that helped shaped the lives. The history has been marked with turbulent and oppressive politics that saw quite a number of constructions of different narratives. From the narratives, the writers represented the experiences lived from the turbulent history. It is crucial to point out that, as the constructions of these narratives were going on; the nations' narrative was dominant, and as the dominance continued, the global current related issues were emerging that became intense due to the Nigerians migration as a result of military governance turmoil and oil-related gains in economy.
In the 21st century, the narratives from Nigeria are widely represented through the novel genre. The issues of the Anglo-American Nigerian Diaspora are grappling with in accessing the publishing of these writers are informed by their Diaspora living conditions, just as children who grow up after the independence of Nigeria and thereafter experienced the military dictatorship period. Just as the words of Waberi (1998; 8) from his "children of the postcolonial" work that placed the notion of childhood phrase of the postcolonial dispensation context as the product of post-colonialist conditions.
[...] It is instructive to underscore the idea of authorial subjectivities here. Adichie's experience of the war in Biafra is genealogical. Adichie lost both her elderly grandfathers in the traumatic war, and writing Half of a Yellow Sun is a symbolic act of retrieval, of a genealogical heritage. For Adichie, Biafra is, therefore, partly a memory carried down from the oral archive of her surviving grandparents. While it directly connects with the figures that experienced it, there are specific sites of memory like the place Nsukka that are residual and of monumental value to the memory of Biafra. [...]
[...] The military regime that was led by General Yakubu Gowon after declaring a blockade on Biafra turned to the police action that resulted into a four-year full-scale civil war. The civil war in Biafra becomes the subject in Half of a Yellow Sun novel by Adichie. It is of great significance to delineate the memories and their theoretical dimensions that are expressed here. In the first place, the Biafra memories are influenced by the ethno-geographic political nature that preceded and succeeded the independence of Nigeria, represented by the notion of the trio-partitioning of Nigeria into ethnoreligious politics during colonial occupation. [...]
[...] This vast work on Biafra is an array of memory gives a textual background for collective memory of the Biafra war. Hence, the literatures of the wars in Biafra become sites of memory in the dimensions of both cultural and traumatic. In their bibliographic form, the memories function as a monument fixing the events of the Biafra war within the pages of the texts they inhabit. In this material existence of the books, articles, journals and magazines on the Biafra war there is an ongoing tension with history, making the printed work on the Biafra war pitting the historical assumptions as a problem by its ontological latency and peculiar temporal structure. [...]
[...] Regarding the amount of literature on the war at Biafra, one cannot reflect upon and insist on the residual consequence of the war on the consciousness of nationals of Nigerian (Amuta, 1982; McLuckie, 1987; 510). As in the history of the formation of the state, its problematical traumatic nature the temporal axis from which the Nigerian state wants to project itself in relation to the present. The vast work body about the war complicates the normal idea of the Nigerian socio-economic and political history, thus regarded as an alternative archive. This political or military trauma has a historical dimension that prefigures the normal perceptions of history. [...]
[...] In the 21st century, the narratives from Nigeria are widely represented through the novel genre. The issues of the Anglo-American Nigerian Diaspora are grappling with in accessing the publishing of these writers are informed by their Diaspora living conditions, just as children who grow up after the independence of Nigeria and thereafter experienced the military dictatorship period. Just as the words of Waberi (1998; from his “children of the postcolonial” work that placed the notion of childhood phrase of the postcolonial dispensation context as the product of post- colonialist conditions. [...]
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