Affective Inheritance: Traumatic Memory in Nigeria-Biafra War Novels (Critical Introduction) and Circumtrauma (Poetry Collection)

Abstract

This dissertation represents the culmination of five years of study on the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970). Circumtrauma is a creative dissertation that explores, through poetry, how narratives of the war are held together by an underlying emotional valence which characterizes and transforms how we relate with others. My dissertation employs the cut-up poetry technique and a structure influenced by the binary arrangement of the Ifá divination system. I study the War not only in terms of the three years of protracted violence that consumed the country, but also as an ongoing process that fractured Nigeria’s social, political, and cultural life. This doctoral project is broken into two sections, a proem on the basic structural technique employed in the writing process, and Circumtrauma, the book-length collection of poems developed from cut-ups of four Nigeria-Biafra War novels: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Flora Nwapa’s Never Again, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Kole Omotoso’s The Combat. This doctoral project draws on Indigenous African aesthetics, conceptual poetry and critical theories that grow from both my research and my experience as a creative writer. The disciplines and the conceptual, creative and critical approaches that characterize my poetics include African literary studies, trauma theory, memory studies, affect studies, postcolonial literature and literary studies, and Indigenous African ways of thinking about violence and community. These disciplines also allow me to develop a methodology that complements my artistic practice. I mobilize this disciplinary scope to ultimately propose a more attentive investigation of post-war negative emotions. My dissertation draws on select war novels to develop a singular argument for attention to the war’s emotional legacy in contemporary social relations among Nigerians. Circumtrauma is framed by an introductory essay that examines the material context of the war and relates it to the production of Nigerian-Biafra War literature and its ongoing capacity to affect social relations. This dissertation concludes with a Coda that reflects on my project as research creation and a brief biographical sketch. Overall, my doctoral project makes a compelling case, through conceptual poetry, for focusing on the affective dimensions of the war and the potential that invigorates the social relations of ordinary lives in its aftermath.