“There Used to be Many of Us”: Encountering Biafra through the Eyes of Wounded Soldiers

Abstract

A remarkable corpus of literary and historical texts has emerged from the ruins of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. These narratives that grapple with the devastating effects of the war and its traumatic afterlife within the Nigerian nation-space have been criticised as accounts authored by men for men. However, these critiques frame “men” as a homogenous category synonymous with a hegemonic position within the wartime society. Thus, in this article, I seek to unsettle this linear conception of masculinity, especially Biafran masculinity, by paying attention to the centrality of the body as an important site in heteropatriarchy’s mapping of inclusion/exclusion from and into maleness. I plumb the forms of violence and erasure that are produced at the intersections of disability and masculinity in Eddie Iroh’s Toads of War. I read wounded soldiers as positioned beyond the binary frames of belonging—Nigeria/Biafra, man/woman, etc.—that are often adopted in reading belonging, agency, and suffering within and outside Biafra. I argue that the in-betweenness of these characters and their transgressive identities are productive in thinking about the slipperiness of “Biafranness” as a neat identity category during the war. My view is that the marginality of wounded bodies produces a profoundly textured and disruptive point of departure from where it is possible to see wartime Biafra beyond a simplistic framing of belligerent positions. The article also examines how these bodies speak and assert their presence as a form of resistance against invisibilisation and historiographic erasure—even from the margins, the zone of abjection to which they have been relegated.