On Necropolitics and the Female Refugee in Edna O’Brien’s Girl (2019)

Abstract

Written six decades after the contentious, yet highly influential feminist saga The Country Girls and inspired by the traumatic abduction of several young Nigerian women by local terrorist factions in 2014, Edna O’Brien’s 2019 novel Girl echoes the author’s earlier concerns with Irish parochialism and patriarchalism. Maryam barely survives the ordeals of the terrorist camp. Moreover, her subsequent reinsertion in a society that completely effaces her illustrates the ever-shifting criteria that will determine if she is to be deemed fit for living or dying within globalized structures of governmentality. Focusing on Maryam’s flight from one carceral site to another, this paper inquires whether by building a sense of localized resistance that connects the female refugee to the endangered landscape, O’Brien’s narrative entertains a more widespread possibility for such transversal solidarity frames to counteract the “techno-thanatological” drive of power.