Reflections of Postmemory and Trauma in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This essay attempts a critical reading of two third-generation Nigerian novels – Imagine This by Sade Adeniran and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In these texts, the writers weave past and personal traumatic history with fiction. Adichie documents the violence inflicted upon the Igbo people in Nigeria in the 1967-1970 war while Adeniran’s novel is a narration of the trauma of battling with migration from Britain to a village, in Southwestern Nigeria. Using the doctrines of Postcolonial, Psychoanalysis and Trauma theory and with emphasis on the child protagonist in the novels, the essay demonstrates that apparently because of the impact of the lived Nigerian history in its stark and crudest realities on the writers, their painful experiences as child in Nigeria are assumed to commensurate with the portraits of their characters, and to some extent, their works. The essay also argues that the ability of the writers to successfully reincarnate their ‘postmemory’ and traumatic experiences represent a continuous creative struggle by the writers to formalise the search for selfhood, and to demonstrate that writing is an important process of unburdening, healing and dealing with inassimilable forms of history and memory.