Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
collective memory and trauma composite memories of war
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| 2.5.2 collective memory and trauma composite memories of war When the military coups start in the late s, Ugwu remains a witness, who is critically conscious and also now literate. He is therefore apart of apolitical consciousness critical of the civilian regime. Ugwu‟s daily tasks of cooking, keeping the house in order, availing the newspapers to his master and mistress at specific times have since ceased to be robotic tasks. His literacy has allowed him access to the content of the newspapers, making him part of a community of readers who share attitudes critical of corruption and state mismanagement (126). Ugwu‟s daily tasks therefore, as his masters and his academic interlocutors, takes on apolitical dimension, building up to the events that precipitated the Pogrom in 1966, when thousands of Igbos were murdered in the Northern region of Nigeria. The allusions to collective victimhood begin at this point in Nigerian postcolonial history, as thousands of Igbos travel back to their ancestral homes in the southeast. Witnesses, survivors as well as the dead journey back as visibly embodied scars and markers of an internecine war that has just began. The beginning of a collective Biafran voice, as well as accounts from witnesses and survivors of horrific killings start to shape up 96 They repeated the news of the killings in Maiduguri until Ugwu wanted to throw the radio out of the window, and the next afternoon, after the men had left, a solemn voice on ENBC Radio Enugu recounted eyewitness accounts from the North teachers hacked down in Zaria, a full Catholic church in Sokoto set on fire, a pregnant woman split open in Kano. The newscaster paused. Some of our people are coming back now. The lucky ones are coming back. The railway stations are full of our people. If you have tea and bread to spare, please take it to the stations. Help a brother in need) The collective voice, fostered by a sense of collective trauma is mapped across what in borrowing the words of Shapiro (1997), can be called “cartographies of violence – the North (northern part of the Federal republic of Nigeria) is presented as a landscape of the Pogrom against the Igbo people. The undertones of ethno-religious warfare are implicit in the statement a full Catholic church in Sokoto set on fire It is instructive to remember that before the explosion of violent events, we are presented with a history of Igbo merchant classes in the North, in the form of Olanna‟s relatives, as well as the other dimension of her relationship with Mohammed from the North It is important as well to see within the narrative, the covert hostilities that had already been depicted, like the refusal of the Northerners to enroll Igbos into their schools and the protests by the “Igbo Union and formation of the “Igbo Union Grammar School (38). We also see, within the micro-relationships in the novel, Olanna‟s sensing of Mohammed‟s mothers relief at the end of their relationship as well as of ethno-religious animosity on the part of Mohammed‟s mother (46). The early and late nineteen- sixties are therefore threaded together by these covert animosities across the landscapes that eventually become cartographies of violence. Adichie also employs an independent narrative representation in the form of a book being written within Half of a Yellow Sun by Richard the British writer who has come to do research on “Igbo-ukwu” art. 68 Whether Adichie uses this as a 68 Igbo-Ukwu art is the product of archaeological history in the South Eastern Nigerian state of Anambra, which reveals a complex bronze metalworking culture. Adichie is borrowing from this archaeological 97 postmodern sleight of hand or a dispersal of subjectivities within the novel is something left for another debate. The pieces of this book that are scattered around the narrative, act as refrains of war and connect the thematic framework across the illusion of tranquility in the early sixties and the explosion into war in the late sixties. While the cartographies of violence present a (re)territorialisation of identity-scapes, these also form terrains of collective trauma as moving bodies, carrying visible signs of physical violence, move back to Eastern Nigeria to form a unified victimhood, a collective memory of the Pogrom and therefore a collective voice, as the speaker in the radio says some of our people are coming back now And so when Ugwu comes face to face with tired, dusty, bloody people coming out of the rickety train (145), his reaction is to run back home in an initial state of trauma, as a secondary witness to the traumatic events that started a few days back in the North. Ugwu‟s mistress Olanna, who at this juncture is still in the North, visiting her aunt and extended family, witnesses the killings of Igbos. This was a time when even her uncles neighbour Abdulmalik, who on previous occasions when Olanna visited had been portrayed as a close family friend of Olanna‟s uncle, in Olanna‟s shock leads people in the massacre. He shouts We finished the whole family. It was Allah‟s will while He nudged a body on the ground with his foot (148). Olanna‟s return to Nsukka culminates into Dark Swoops as she lies in a state of psychosomatic trauma, a clear effect of the massacres. She is traumatised by the act of witnessing this brutality. When police action is finally declared by the regime of General Gowon, a full scale war begins to take shape and the Biafran nation-state is declared. Nsukka, as depicted in Half Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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