Reflections of Postmemory and Trauma in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
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Date
2016-09
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Modern Research Studies: An International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
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.
Description
Staff Publication
Keywords
Postmemory,, Trauma,, Nigerian novels,, postcolonial,, Autobiographical,, Imagine This,, Half of a Yellow Sun