Abstract
A metaphor that is insistently used to talk about the connections between the writers and works that make up individual literary movements is that of genealogy. Literary traditions, it seems, are families, and Nigerian fiction is no exception: Chinua Achebe is regularly labelled the ‘father’ of the Nigerian novel (or indeed of African literature as a whole), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is considered by many to be his literary ‘daughter’, and authors born after 1960 are often said to be part of the third ‘generation’ of Nigerian writers. Applying this image of the family tree to the literary works themselves, one might regard Ken Saro-Wiwa’s civil war novel Sozaboy (1994 [1985]) as the ancestor of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005a) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007a). One could even extend the familial metaphor, and describe these two offspring as non-identical twins — siblings that both take after their shared forebear, but in rather different ways.
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