REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE INTHE NORTHERN NIGERIAN NOVEL

Abstract

Inter-ethnic relationships have generally been central to Nigerian literature and the Civil War in particular has boosted the tradition of looking at how communities interact; but some areas in Nigeria have been out of contention in the Nigerian novel. In recent times, however, areas such as the Middle Belt that were never anticipated by the earlier literatures have become central to the discussion of Nigerian literature. This paper examines recent efforts by writers of the Middle Belt extraction to produce books that deal with implications of the interaction between unequal power blocs in terms of ethnic and religious movements in Nigeria. It uses Emmanuel Egya Sule’s Sterile Sky (2012) and Edify Yakusak’s After They Left (2016) to show the explosive nature of the differences between various factions of religious and ethnic groups in the country. The paper uses Homi Bhabha’s notion of Unhomeliness to foreground the manner in which the new novels give explicit descriptions of the violence that has become a norm in the Middle Belt and provides a broad picture of the frontiers that are opening up in Nigerian literature. It discovers that it was the mismanagement of ethnic differences that has led to antagonisms among groups. As leading scholars like Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee have posited, these novels present a motivation for greater interest in the implications of ethnicity in African literature because they show ethnic undertones which were either disregarded or integrated into other groups in earlier literatures.