Nigerian Novelist Research Articles

Rape of a Nation: An Eco-critical Reading of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

<p>A number of literary and linguistic researches have been carried out on post-independent Nigerian quagmire. The concerns of some of these studies range from investigating many of the topical issues that have come to define the country, particularly with regard to the issues of bad governance and socio-economic oppression, to the roles played by the masses in aggravating the nation’s predicaments. However, not many critics and scholars have paid the deserved attention to the ecological concerns of Nigerian novelists. This paper, therefore, examines Helon Habila’s Oil on Water as a testament to the environmental mindfulness of Nigerian novelists. The choice of Oil on Water is informed by the fact that there is a dearth of serious scholarly research on the novel. Using the sociological approach and adopting a content analysis method, this study finds out that Habila is not oblivious of the ecological implications of man’s exploitative tendencies on earth’s resources as he makes bare the grim effects of Man’s reckless actions on the environment, the society and other living things, thereby rousing the consciousness of his readers as a way of forcing them to contribute their quota towards making the earth a safe place to live in, free from further gratuitous exploitations by a few to the disadvantage of many. It is, nevertheless, found out that the author fails to suggest pragmatic solutions to the staggering challenges confronting the oil-polluted and violence-ridden nation of Niger Delta.</p>

Individual Voices and the Immigrant Italian Family: Disrupting the Master Narrative With Poetic Inquiry

The Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozie Adiche in her insightful TED talk, expounds on “the danger of the single story.” I have always had a tacit knowing about this, that one story is just that: one story. If a story is told long and often enough, it becomes the truth, going possibly unquestioned through generations. I continue to explore my father’s nuclear family and the narratives of his siblings regarding their lives with their Sicilian father. Disrupting the “Master Narrative” using poetic inquiry and respondents’ own words help to redress the lack of their voice(s) in their own experience(s).

Moral Issues in Recent Nigerian Novels: a Reading of Lola Shoneyin�s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives

Moral Issues in Recent Nigerian Novels: a Reading of Lola Shoneyin�s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives

Empiricist Fictions, Fictions of Empiricism

Empiricist Fictions, Fictions of Empiricism

Reconstructing Female Sex in Emergent Novels

The notions of, which are at once both anti-masculinity and anti-femininity are topmost aspects of Negotiation-feminism. This new feminism emphasizes the fact that we owe feminism the power and honesty in reconciling the sexes in every prejudice against woman. The significant findings are that a very plausible answer, for example, to a previously unanswerable question has been found against domestic subjugation, and necessarily, such discourse as new novels by new writers on new woman is identifiable. The paper, therefore, argues for the need to step forward together between the sexes in the feminist aspects of exemplary Nigerian novels, demonstrating how the emergent feminist wake-up call repositions woman in improving the lives of housewives and, of course, their husbands. With fire and imaginative power, this wake-up call strengthens feminist civilization towards civility of reconciliation between the sexes.

“The Problem of Locomotion”: Infrastructure and Automobility in Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels

This essay analyzes automobility in three postcolonial urban Nigerian novels: the fantasy of self-propulsion that subtends a colonial modernity materialized through the erection of urban infrastructure. Tracing the disjuncture between automobility and infrastructure—the “problem of locomotion” (Achebe)—reveals the inextricability of mobility, modernity, urbanism, and colonial violence even into Nigeria’s formally postcolonial period. By exploring how characters both invest in and move beyond inherited colonial narratives, these novels challenge top-down images of Lagos, instead depicting it as a city “otherwise fashioned” (Abani) from their characters’ perspectives on what it feels like to dwell and sell on the streets.

Slavery, Death, and the Village: Localizing Imperatives of Nigerian Writing

This article explores the ubiquitous citations of the village and the manifestation of villagers in Nigerian fiction published since about 2000. Through a close reading of Chuma Nwokolo's Diaries of a Dead African, I argue that Nwokolo's novel exemplifies the ongoing critical regionalism in Nigerian writing, a practice through which writers expand the geographical imaginaries of Nigerian fiction as well as meditate reflexively upon the circulation of Nigerian fiction within the global book-publishing industry. This critical regionalism responds to the global circulation of the Nigerian novel by drawing upon, revising, and updating the geographical imaginaries of early Nigerian novelists. Elements of the village novel as a genre and ideas of the village as a crucial iteration of African spaces are deployed to signal the interplay between the complex spaces and representational practices of emerging fiction. In sum, this article works toward the legibility of the village within contemporary writing.

Reassessing Thematic Crossings between South Africa and Nigeria: Postcolonial Leadership and Power in Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel

While Chris Dunton has described Nigeria and South Africa as the two powerhouses of African fiction, their literatures have, for evident historical reasons, followed distinct trajectories. Thus far, little critical attention has been paid to comparing theorisations of contemporary South African and Nigerian novels. This article aims to contribute to re-enlivening the sorely lacking dialogue between the countries’ literatures by providing a comparative reading of Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel . I argue that Langa’s allegorical novel dispenses with the idea of South African exceptionalism by exploring the lust for power in the postcolony. In particular, his representation of the postcolonial ruling class establishes an intertextual dialogue with writing from elsewhere on the continent. Waiting for an Angel , while engaging with postcolonial military dictatorships during the mid-1980s and 1990s in Nigeria, is also noteworthy for invoking a sense of placelessness and, therefore, offers itself for a comparative analysis. Relating the novels to their literary antecedents as well as to recent theorisations of third-generation Nigerian fiction and the post-apartheid novel, I suggest that their reflections on postcolonial leadership unsettle the boundaries of national literatures and invoke a sense of continental connectivity.

Popular Perception Social Reality: The SAP Experience in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction

Nigerian literature, like other literatures, is a product of her history and the social issues which influence it. Colonialism may have come, and can be said to be gone as it was practised in the 1880s to the 1960s, but its effects are great and have lasted especially on the establishment and transformation of the literary culture of the African continent. Contemporary Nigerian writing, especially its prose fiction, addresses two main issues: the negotiation of a contemporary identity, and an expression of a general disillusionment with post-colonial Nigeria. Interwoven in the writings of contemporary Nigerian writers is an engagement with the perception and reality of the effects of the World Bank/IMF sponsored Structural Adjustment Programme of the mid-80s to the late 90s on the populace. This paper explores the SAP phenomenon as reflected in the writings of selected contemporary Nigerian novelists, with a view to identifying these writers’ perception of this experience that has and is still affecting Nigeria’s socio-cultural, political, economic and historical landscape. This investigation, through a general synopsis of selected contemporary Nigerian prose fiction, examines how the implementation of this policy facilitated an increase in the military government’s repressive attitude and the escalation of the economic crisis that was being experienced at the time.

Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend

Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend Elleke Boehmer (bio) When in autumn of that year, 1987, our new Cypriot landlady told us, whispering, that a Nigerian novelist would be moving into the ground-floor Finsbury Park flat, just below ours, I felt that my luck was in. My flatmates and I, all of us students with a SOAS association, had just moved into the square built, yellow-brick house ourselves. I was about to embark on a PhD in African literature, on the Nigerian novel to be precise. Plus I harbored a secret ambition to write a novel. And here was news that a Nigerian novelist was living downstairs. It felt almost too good to be true, as if the stars were coming into propitious alignment. It would have been unbelievable to me then—and yet this is probably the most providential part—that nearly thirty years later, Ben would be one of the people I have known longest in the nearly three decades that I have lived in England, which is over half my life. It would also have been unbelievable that on our scribbled paths around London, the rest of the UK, and wider Europe in the intervening years, we have happily, very often without design, kept reencountering one another; and that, moreover, thanks to Ben and his luminous writing, I have several times encountered actual good luck, what I might call, with apologies to David Shields, real-life “luck effects.” What do I mean by this? What are these luck effects? First of all, Ben’s work has put me in touch with some amazing people, in particular enthused readers of his work, who have rapidly also become friends. For example, one of the fathers in my Oxford book club, an airline pilot, was turned onto reading, he once told me, through his encounter with The Famished Road. He found the story so spellbinding, he said, that forever afterwards he would try to keep on reading in order to rediscover the same magic. Secondly, through talking to Ben I came to a fuller and more dynamic sense of West African writing than I had before, though I was a long-time admirer of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, and others. It was a sense of the writing so vivid and intense that I was ultimately inspired to write my own returning child or abiku story, my 2008 novel Nile Baby. And thirdly, and most concretely, Ben brought me luck because his work once handed me an actual happy windfall of over £100, a huge sum for an early career lecturer at the time. In October 1991, I bet on the then outsider novel The Famished Road to win the Booker Prize. I remember clearly that moment of walking into the bookmaker’s in Leeds, where I now lived, the twinge in my fingers, the tightness in my throat, a sensation of luck-on-the-way. How could this bet not bring me luck, I thought, seeing as I was betting on the work of my neighbor Ben Okri? In fact, all the reflections I am sharing here about knowing Ben trace a story of good fortune and good fellowship—of a longstanding friendship forged on the basis of happy contingency with someone who is, putting it simply, good at being [End Page 1007] friends, despite the business of his life. I do not have a sharp memory of my first proper meeting or conversation with our new neighbor Ben Okri, beyond the initial nods and hellos we exchanged in our shared hallway. Before the first week was out one of my flatmates had bought his most recent book, Incidents at the Shrine, from the Dillons close to SOAS, and we all devoured it in the kitchen, thinking with a thrill of the author writing his next book in the room just below. Generally, though, we lay low at first, perhaps myself most of all. Partly this was because we were in awe. We had seen “the Nigerian writer,” as the landlady called him, coming in sometimes, always crossing the street diagonally, and he looked to us very much as we imagined a writer, with...

English

The option offered by the modern polarity feminist is not with the intent of sounding like magic, but it largely guarantees the disheartened opposite sex to get pretty impressive results with minimal intervention, resulting in relationship satisfaction, intimacy, love, passion, commitment, and trust. In fact, it can boast of decline in marital dissatisfaction as entirely eliminated, although there could be exceptions. This nego-feminist framework is heard throughout the paper interrogating primordialism on womanhood in Nigerian novels into those with opposition motifs to modern streaks which guarantee lively-partnership. The evaluation shows that women generally can reap maximally from the nego-feminist frame.

BETWEEN LAW AND LITERATURE: THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE IN POST-INDEPENDENCE NIGERIAN FICTION

Post-independence African societies are victims of challenges of poor quality political leadership. Indeed, the experience of the individual in terms of access to justice and the empowerment of the self are abysmal. Against the above backdrop, critical and interdisciplinary inquiries have been focused on the challenge of restoring the dignity of the citizenry and enforcement of the rights enshrined on various legal provisions and international conventions. One of such attempts is the literature and law interdisciplinary approach at promoting justice. This paper underscores the paradigm of quest for justice in postcolonial Nigerian fiction. The study draws textual references from selected third-generation Nigerian novels represented by Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Bina Ilagha’s Condolences . The paper demonstrates that, the post-independence fiction corpus is dedicated to enthronement of justice in both stylistic and thematic outlooks. Keywords : Quest for justice, Nigerian fiction, third-generation, interdisciplinary commitment, law and literature

Underlining religious sidelining: Islamic Feminism and Marxism in Mohammed Umar's Amina

Synopsis Having received scant critical attention, primarily due to the tendency to be read as an ideological manifesto rather than as a well developed piece of literature, Nigerian novelist Mohammed Umar's novel Amina (2005) is considered by critics to be representative of Marxist overtones, comprising references to literary and political works also closely associated with Marxist thought on the conception of an equitable society. Nevertheless, as this study shows, it is possible to delineate an ostensibly Islamic framework within which the novel and its characters emphatically operate, prompting the novel's main protagonist Amina to take up the cause of women's rights, social justice and economic welfare in her society. As this analysis will demonstrate, the obvious Islamic influence on Amina's mission for women's socio-economic justice and equity are evident in the explicit references to and reproductions of Islamic texts in the narrative—the Qur'an, the hadith and more particularly the Prophet Muhammad's farewell sermon. Read within an Islamic feminist framework of feminist political action as found in the Qur'an and Islamic literature, proposed by notable feminist thinkers Margot Badran, Miriam Cooke and Hiba Rauf, among others, this paper will posit Umar's re-examination of concepts that are typically associated with Marx's ideology, and that are eagerly labeled as Socialist, resulting in a conceptual and theoretical imbalance that accounts for the marginalization of religion in postcolonial literatures.

Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

Making Sense of the “Freedom Scapes” in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia

There is no doubt that one of the unresolved contradictions of representation in postcolonial fiction is that of the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. This issue generates a wide spectrum of critical hues, exploring how present circumstances shape a postcolonial narrative technique. The present paper explores Ben Okri’s In Arcadia (2002), attempts to display this innovative disturbing representation by investigating the narrative experimentation in the novel of Ben Okri. Okri’s novel reflects the dilemma of individual freedom and libration, and the contemporary situation of fragmentation, rootlessness, dehumanization, displacement, and disorientation in a world where man finds himself suspended in a void of meanings. Okri’s response to this dilemma is given by those scapes which become the new responsible creators of their own world by shaping fresh values, lives, and realities, which is reflected in the reshaping of the narrative mode of a postcolonial and postmodern Nigerian novelist, tempered with the narrative form and its representation of the experience of reality. His fiction has subverted the narrative modes of representation thereby dislocating the structure of narrative technique through the juxtaposition of spatial fragments from different situations. Thus, the hypothesis was that it would be valuable to analyze and examine Okri’s narrative experimentation as a contemporary writer, in order to see the extent of innovative progression.

The Idea of “Third Generation Nigerian Literature”: Conceptualizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel

Recent critical discourse on Nigerian fiction employs historicizing tech niques that categorize texts according to generations, each of which is presumed to share formal and political qualities and represent a distinct stage in national literary development. This essay critiques the prevalent “Third Generation Nigerian Literature” concept by highlighting its reliance on spatio-temporal constructs that fail to account for the complexity of the texts it classifies. Through a close reading of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), I show that recent Nigerian novels are shaped around ambivalent spatio-temporal imaginaries that exceed the national-generational framework. Nwaubani’s novel explores characters’ attempts to establish clear boundaries of ethical affiliation, while Cole’s dramatizes imaginative border crossing and cos mopolitan de-centeredness. I show that both are traversed by alternative temporalities and spatialities that deconstruct their dominant frameworks. I therefore suggest that this ambivalence should prompt us to reflect on how our analyses of “Third Generation Nigerian Literature” could be enriched by exploring more multilayered methods of historicization beyond the nation-generational approach.

Situational Variables in Chimamanda Adichie's and Chinua Achebe's

The use of the English language for literary creation has been the bane of Nigerian literature. Nigeria has a very complex linguistic system; as a result, its citizens communicate either in their indigenous languages or in English, depending on the situation in which they find themselves. The use of English in Nigerian literature in general and prose fiction in particular is influenced by both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. In their attempt to offer solutions to the problems of language in literary expression, Nigerian novelists adapt English to varying linguistic and socio-cultural contexts. This has resulted in experimentation and the employment of various creative-stylistic strategies and devices in prose fiction. Our focus in this essay is on the conditioning influences of situational variables on the language and styles of Nigerian novelists, with Chimamanda Adichie and Chinua Achebe as a case study. We shall examine and explicate how situational variables influence and impose constraints on the language and styles of novelists, and how they adapt English, which is in contact with the various indigenous languages, to the varying local Nigerian situations and experiences.

Prophetic Myth in Selected Fiction of Ben Okri

Summary Africa's intelligentsia, whether creative or critical, have always been yoked with the task of finding a framework that would provide some tranquillity to this troubled region. Since the narcissism of negritude to the aestheticism of postcolonialism, the perennial issues about identity, the brain drain, political impasse, war and starvation still loom large. This article contends that, whilst debates continue to rage, it is pertinent to point out that with myth-making certain ideals and contradictions about the future of Africa can be foreseen. Economic failure, terrorism, kidnapping and religious crises are on the increase because leaders and followers are not taking cognisance of certain recurring patterns which forewarn of forthcoming events. Ben Okri, a renowned Nigerian novelist, is adept in using myths suggestively to foretell the future because he sees certain repetitive trends that are common to Africa's corporate existence. When viewed in mythical terms, these patterns could be predictive of crises, could serve as warnings, or could be suggestive of possible antidotes. Okri's Astonishing the Gods and In Arcadia, using the Journey Archetype, foreground the use of myth as prophecy because they present symbolic plots which offer imaginative insights into the things to come.

Superwoman : Enhanced Femininity in Contemporary Nigerian Women’s Fiction

This paper examines the ways in which two contemporary female Nigerian novelists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sefi Atta, portray enhanced female characters who are designated as superwomen. It focuses on four texts: Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Swallow. It argues that such characters represent a growing realisation that Nigerian women are less prepared to bemoan gender injustice than to make conscious efforts to improve their own lives. The notion of superwomanhood is discussed, and the various elements that comprise it are described, including the attainment and maintenance of personal autonomy, the ability to reverse the dynamic of patriarchy, and the development of insight and foresight. The paper also argues that female characters in the texts undergo a “trajectory of becoming” on their way to attaining the status of superwomen.

Commentary

In her TED Talk entitled "The danger of a single story," Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie shares stories about her life that illustrate the natural human tendency to interpret the lives of others in the context of what she describes as narrowly constructed and often stereotypical "single stories." These single-story views often portray others as wholly different from those constructing the stories, thereby diminishing the possibilities for genuine human connection. Referencing Adichie's talk, the author describes the narrative dissonance that so often distances patients from their physicians. He illustrates the dangers to patients that can result from single-story caregiving by physicians, sharing an example from his own experience in which unnecessary harm came to his patient because of his own single-story thinking. The author argues that these single-story dangers must be openly and consciously addressed in the training of doctors to counteract the tendency for their clinical and educational experiences to inculcate single stories by which physicians come to interpret their patients. He offers suggestions as to why single-story thinking arises in clinical practice and how to mitigate these forces in medical education. The author concludes by contending that the education of physicians, and caring for the sick, should be aimed at preserving the dignity of those being served, and he argues for an "equal humanity" model of the patient-physician relationship that engages patients in all dimensions of their multiple stories.