Sexuality in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms

Abstract

Sexuality is a topical preoccupation in literature whether queer, perverse or conventional. In some societies, sexuality is a pious topic that hardly receives literary and critical attention. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms narrativises sexuality in a strict Islamic society and focalises the sexual interplay between Binta and Reza. This article examines the sexuality in the novel through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud proposes that suppressed desires, an unresolved Oedipus complex, and past traumas impact people’s current behaviour. I contend that repressed wishes and the traumas of lingering parent-child conflicts stimulate the eros between Binta and Reza in the narrative and that Ibrahim’s subtle patriarchal ideology underlies the outcome of their sexuality. The memory and trauma of parent-child schisms experienced by Binta and Reza transmute to fetishism that leads to psychic transference, which collapses desired filial personalities into symbolic sexual figures. I conceive this conflation as symbolically incestuous and interrogate the novel’s conscious and unconscious layers by appropriating Freud’s topographical taxonomy of the psyche as a metaphor. The unconscious symptomises the patriarchal ideology that undercuts the conscious female sexual desires depicted, and this latently sustains established cultural precepts that repress emancipatory sexuality.