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After a contextualizing introduction, the following interview with the Nigerian writer Elnathan John explores the relation of his work to some key themes of this essay cluster: religious belief, social life, and the literary representation thereof. It begins by discussing the reception of John’s novel "Born on a Tuesday" in light of the differences between Boko Haram as an international phenomenon and the novel’s more regional focus. John then explains the significance of northern Nigerian almajirai, in particular, to his imagining of both Muslim education and the Nigerian state. The interview concludes with reflections on literary multilingualism and translation.
Nile Journal of English Studies
Ending Religious Extremism in Northern Nigeria: A Study of Elnathan John’s Born on a TuesdayFundamentalism has been defined as an unwavering faith to a religious system. Although it could be applied to adherents of any religion, today it is mostly associated with Islam. Islam is said to have arrived Nigeria in the 11th century through the activities of mostly traders but it eventually took root and spread through the Fulani jihad of Usman Dan Fodio and the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate. From the late 1970s several reform movements have taken place but the most violent have been that of Maitatsine and currently the Boko Haram insurgency. Born on a Tuesday is a story about religious fundamentalism told by Dantala an almajiri. In telling the story we see the various issues that create an atmosphere in which fundamentalism thrives. Gladly in stating the issues we also note the solutions. This paper therefore discusses the problem of fundamentalism and highlights the solutions as evident in the book.
IBADAN Journal of English Studies
And Trauma Became Flesh: Terrorism, Violence and Trauma in Elnathan John's Born On A Tuesday And Helon Habila's The Chibok Girls2018 •
iterature and terrorism presents an interesting burgeoning field of discourse, especially in the literary and critical enterprise of the post-9/11 years. This study explores the intersection of terrorism, violence and trauma in Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday and Helon Habila's The Chibok Girls. It applies theoretical and critical insights from the trauma theory to the reading of the two purposively selected texts-John's Born on a Tuesday and Habila's The Chibok Girls. The writers' depiction of the complex nuances of pain, terror, conflict and survival pangs experienced by Dantata, Banda, the Chibok Girls, and the entire northern region in Nigeria, bear witness to the physical, psychological, sociocultural, spiritual, environmental and insidious traumas inflicted upon individuals as well as the community. On the personal and collective levels, trauma has become flesh, and made its dwelling among the populace. Through the employment of such tropes and motifs as repetition compulsion, the trauma trope, the shattering trope, escapism, and the death drive, John and Habila unearth the structures that allow for the perpetuation of trauma and the mechanisms that entrench trauma across the northern Nigeria. John's Born on a Tuesday and Habila's The Chibok Girls attest to how violent conflicts and religious extremism interweave in a complex traumatizing network that continues to sear the Nigerian sociocultural and political space.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing and World Literatures
Postcolonial anarchy and minority discourse in Elnathan’s Born on a Tuesday, Sule’s Sterile Sky, and Yakusak’s After They Left2021 •
Underrepresented areas in earlier Nigerian literature have become central to discourses on Nigerian literature through the works of contemporary writers. Using postcolonial theory as its premise, we examine recent efforts by writers of northern extraction to produce novels that deal with implications of the interaction between ethnic groups and religious movements in Nigeria. Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2015), E. E. Sule’s Sterile Sky (2012) and Edify Yakusak’s After They Left (2016) depict the explosive nature of the differences between various fractions of religious and ethnic groups in the country. We foreground how the new novels give explicit descriptions of the violence that have become norm in the north. We provide a broad picture of frontiers that are opening in Nigerian literature. We further argue that the activities of jihadists and ethnic jingoists constitute post-colonial anarchy consequent upon the minorisation of people on grounds of ethnicity, religion, or education. We contend that discriminatory post-colonial policies that ascribe privileges only to those with western education exacerbated internal divisions, and that mismanaged ethnic and religious differences led to antagonisms among groups. These new novels “serve as a provocation for further reflections on the meanings of ethnicity in African literature” because they show “the specifically ethnic coloration of cultural referents” that were either “taken for granted as fixed or subsumed within other categories” in the earlier literature, (Adejunmobi and Coetzee, 2019: 5-6).
Utuenikang: Ibom Journal of Language and Literary Review
Representations of Sectarian Extremism in Selected Nigerian Novels2023 •
Sectarian terrorism has become one of the dominant thematic areas in contemporary literature and public discourse. Existing studies in literary criticism have interrogated western novels on the phenomenon more than Nigerian novels while those available in Nigerian novels concentrate mostly on trauma, neglecting the postcolonial comparative perspective of representing Islamist sectarianism and terrorism. Edward Said and Elleke Boehmer’s aspects of Postcolonial theory are deployed to interrogate how the binary construction of self/other, good/evil is interrogated and deconstructed in relation to religious fundamentalism in connection with power relation between the terrorist and the terrorised. Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (Tuesday) and Adaobi Nwaubani’s Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (Baobab Tree) are purposively selected for this study because of their in-depth, prosaic representations of terrorism and they are subjected to interpretive analyses. Terrorism or extremism is depicted as perpetrated by extremist Muslims in Tuesday, while, in Baobab Tree, the perpetrators are portrayed as non-Muslims, despite appropriating Islam as their ideology. Similarly, Tuesday focalises the perpetrators while Baobab Tree narrativises the female victims’ experience of terrorism. The postcolonial condition that stimulates sectarian terrorism is also portrayed in Tuesday. Significantly, the authors’ gender influences their plotting of terrorism. This paper concludes that the two Nigerian writers narrativise sectarian terrorism in the Nigerian state differently, to suit their visions based on given points and contend that Islamic sectarian terrorism may be a more appropriate term than the generic Islamic terrorism.
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