Abstract
ABSTRACT Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) by British-Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa is part travelogue and part memoir. The book chronicles Saro-Wiwa’s return to Nigeria, the country in which her father, the activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed in 1995 and which she had not visited for more than ten years, except for two brief visits. Saro-Wiwa deploys trauma as a narrative strategy to show her grappling with her painful memories in relation to her family history and socio-political conditions in Nigeria. The effect of the deployment of the thematic motif of trauma in the structure of the narration is that the return, which explicitly sets out to resolve the past traumas, seemingly comes to re-enact those traumas instead. The paradoxical dramatic effect of being traumatised and being healed reveals the complexity of her diasporic identity and the ambivalence in both her travelling and her writing.
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