Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: War in African Literature: Literary Harvests, Human Tragedies
- ARTICLES
- The Muted Index of War in African Literature & Society
- ‘Life in the Camp of the Enemy’: Alemseged Tesfai's Theatre of War
- Sacrifice & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn
- Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Select Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria
- Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra
- Politics & Human Rights in Non-Fiction Prison Literature
- Problems of Representing the Zimbabwean War of Liberation in Mutasa's The Contact, Samupindi's Pawns & Vera's The Stone Virgins
- The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni
- History, Memoir & a Soldier's Conscience: Philip Efiong's Nigeria & Biafra: My Story
- Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry
- REVIEWS
- Index
Summary
The Nigerian civil war (aka the Biafra War), which was fought between Biafra, located in southeastern Nigeria, and the rest of the nation from 1967 to 1970, has provided a fertile ground for African writers to dramatize the problem of the African nation-state. As expressed by Eldred Jones (1983), committed writers have taken it as their responsibility to confront ‘this traumatic conflict’, and consequently, have produced ‘a whole corps of new novels’ (p. viii). Central to the present discussion is that most of these ‘new novels’ have been written by men, and that studies of Biafra war literature have been male-focused. Craig McLuckie, for example, does not mention even a single woman writer in his (1990) book-length study except in two brief notes. Another book-length study by T. Akachi Ezeigbo is even more disappointing, since the critic is a wellknown feminist, and still she provides only a diffuse survey on war literature without any clear feminist perspective. This critical neglect can be partly ascribed to the women writers themselves, for most of their texts are no more than autobiographical sketches. The reason why few ‘authentic’ works about war are written by women is that instead of describing terrible battlefields or the dirty politics behind them, they tend to delineate the home front and familiar everyday life in a plain, down-toearth style using their own experiences, as exemplified in Never Again by Flora Nwapa.
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- Information
- War in African Literature Today , pp. 60 - 70Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008