Of trauma, home and wars in Rasaq Malik’s No Home in This Land

Authors

Abstract

In Nigerian poetry, there is the employment of emphatic and riling expressions that move the readers to feelings of sensitivity, disillusionment, consciousness, dissatisfaction and sympathy. These feelings are designed to motion in and enforce the country’s betterment and development. Nigerian writers have had to contend with the social and political tribulations beleaguering Nigeria’s landscape by using poetry as a channel to end its wars and propel the country towards improved and better home and state. The discussion in this paper will focus on how Rasaq Malik, in his poem, perceives the notion of trauma, home and wars in Nigeria. The conceptual framework employed is derived from both the trauma theory and content analysis methods of reading literature. By explicating the trauma theory and content analysis perspective in Malik’s poetry, the goal is to show and examine the waves of the poet’s exposition of traumatic experiences and depression regarding Nigeria as a home besieged by wars and, also, those displaced by the wars, and the internal exiles that ensued. The goal extends to what we know of his hopes for a great home and peace that is an important facet of his poetry and the basis for his resistance of the Nigerian social and political instabilities.

Dimensions

Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments. Heinemann.

Amuta, C. (1988). Literature of the Nigeria Civil War. In Yemi Ogunbiyi (Eds.), In Perspectives on Nigerian Literature (pp. 85 – 92), Guardian Books Ltd.

Carrol, D. (1980). Chinua Achebe. Macmillian.

Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The John Hopkins University Press.

Darwish, M. (2000). Dewan Mahmoud Darwish. Dar Al-eHuraih for Publishing.

Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge.

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In J. Strachey and A. Freud (Eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (pp. 243-258), The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In J. Strachey and A. Freud (Eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (pp. 4-23), The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1962). The Aetiology of Hysteria. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. (pp. 187-221), Vintage Classics.

Isaksen, A. T., & Thomas, V. (2018). A study on Refugee Displacement and Trauma in Contemporary Literature [Master’s Thesis, Aalborg University].

Malik, R. (2018). No Home in This Land. Akashic Books.

Mitchell, K. R., & Anderson, H (1983.). All our losses, all our grieves: Resources for pastoral care. Westminster.

Hashim, R. S., & Manaf, N. F. A. (2009). Notions of Home for Diasporic Muslim Women Writers. European Journal of Social Sciences, 9(4), 545-556.

Smith, B. H. (1968). Poetic closure: A study of how poems end. University of Chicago.

Soyinka, W. (1999). The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford University Press.

Yusof, R. S. H., & Raihanah, M. M. (2012). Remembering Home: Palestine from a Distance. The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 18(2), 95-103.

Published

2021-02-27

How to Cite

Ezenwa, C. (2021). Of trauma, home and wars in Rasaq Malik’s No Home in This Land. Journal of Postcolonial Writing and World Literatures, 2(1). Retrieved from https://royalliteglobal.com/world-literatures/article/view/32-38

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2021)

Section

Articles
Copyright & Licensing

Copyright (c) 2021 Chinua Ezenwa

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.

You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. 

Under the following terms: 

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. 

No additional restrictions You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.