When the Home is not Homely: Postcolonial Realities and Emergence of Human Trafficking in Tina Okpara’s <i>My Life Has a Price and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House</i>

Abstract

Human trafficking has been investigated in different fields of scholarship, including psychology, sociology, history and economics. However, its depiction in twentyfirst-century Nigerian novels has not been given critical attention. Hence, this paper examines postcolonial indices fuelling the emergence and continuance of this challenge, as narrated in Tina Okpara’s My Life Has a Price and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House, to investigate push-and-pull factors responsible for the growth of modern-day slavery. Deploying postcolonial theory, with emphasis on postcolonialist concepts like alterity, othering/ordering, unhomeliness, subalternisation and dislocation to examine power relations between human traffickers and trafficked victims in the selected narratives, it is revealed that the push-and-pull factors amplifying the proliferation of human trafficking in Okpara’s My Life has a Price and Ajaegbo’s Sarah House include poverty, connivance of security personnel with human traffickers, unemployment, family disintegration, leniency of the judiciary, death of the breadwinner, corruption and trafficked victims’ materialistic inclinations. In Sarah House and My Life Has a Price, the factors aid the dispossession, subalternisation, inbetweeness, othering/ ordering and ‘exotopy’ or ‘outsideness’ of victims. Among other narrative strategies, homodiegetic narrative focalisation and preponderant multiple settings are employed to foreground the objectivity of the narratives and the migritudinal temper and restless lifestyle of the victims.