Love-Rape in Contemporary Northern Nigerian Literature: A Feminist/Reader-Response Critique of Audee T. Giwa’s I’d Rather Die (Published)
If Audee T. Giwa isn’t amongst the first generation of male African writers: Chinua Achebe, Cypran Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiang’o, Sembene Ousemene for instance, who have cast women stereotypes as principal characters or heroines in their novels, he has indubitably joined the arty queue. Be that as it may, only Ngugi and Ousemene of the five have been textually hailed by Flora Nwapa in “Women and Creative Writing in Africa” for mirroring the ebullient “faces” of women in their novels and plays and the other three have been palpably indicted for being misogynist and sextially–biased in their portrayal of women in their early literary master pieces. Women Without Boarders (2012), a novel, in which Professor Aliyu Kamal underscores the intersection between patriarchy, culture, religion and the rights of women in Northern Nigerian Muslim world has brought the Kano-born novelist into the queue. In the latest queue to which he has joined, Giwa seems to have picked a distinctive literary path. This is the thrust of this paper. It explores another patriarchal mode in I’d Rather Die, as the opulent Alhaji Maikudi becomes a rapist, smoke-screening with poverty to rape love. This inimical and baleful attitude inflicts an incomparable misery and trepidation in the green and morally-raised Fatimah, whose heart has truly Muhammad’s embraced. The psychological gore caused in Fatimah’s heart when her love is raped by Alhaji Maikudi is tantamount to patriarchal subjugation and insubordination. The paper employs feminism and the reader-response paradigms for its analytical stands.
Keywords: Audee t. Giwa’s i’d rather die, Literature, a feminist/reader-response, contemporary Northern Nigerian, love-rape
Contemporary Northern Nigerian Literature and the Poverty Discourse: A Critique of Aliyu Kamal’s Hausa Boy (Published)
Literature plays numerous roles in the society: the cultural, the political, the religious, the economical, the social and the scientific (therapeutic). From the classical epochs to 21st century, writers have written and have been writing plays, poetry, novels, as well as short stories to educate, enlighten, persuade, warn and entertain their community, and sometimes the world at large. However, owing to the incessant changes in times, writers have to explore emerging themes such as migration, regional disputes, Aids, tribalism, terrorism, ethnic and religious violence, gender politics, institutionalized corruption and poverty for example. The aim of this paper is to explore the theme of poverty, as one of the contemporary thematic preoccupations in African literature in the 2I century, as portrayed in one of Aliyu Kamal‘s latest novellas, Hausa Boy. Set in the Northern part of Nigeria, Kamal ‘s prime concern is to demonstrate how some families in the country feel the deep and painful bite of abject poverty, which not only forces them to live from hand to mouth, but also makes it thorny for them to send their children to school. The end result is the children; particularly the young girls become street hawkers, a trade which endangers their life in the long run. The paper also wants to unveil that of the handful of the under-privileged children that have been to school, a significant number of them shamelessly drop out, owing to their parents’ inability to pay for their school fees. This further leads to the rising wave of the unemployment rate in the country. The paper reveals how poverty profoundly affects young men-women courtship, as it deters the former from fulfilling their cultural obligation of giving out some money token to their girl-friends and fiancées in each visit they pay to them as a sign of love. Yet, it is also a cultural practice, which causes the young men to suffer in Northern Nigeria’s contemporary reality.
Keywords: Discourse, Literature, Northern Nigeria, Poverty
The Significance of Time in Colleen Hoover’s November 9: A Temporal Perspective (Published)
This paper aims to examine Colleen Hoover’s November 9 from a temporal perspective, showing how the element of time reveals a specific implication in the novel. The paper’s theoretical framework presents an overview of the significance of time in literature in general and the novel genre in particular. By choosing ‘November 9’ as a title for her book, Hoover implies that time is given special prominence that reflects itself in the whole narrative. Throughout the course of events, it is noted that time has a clear influence on the various aspects of the novel, such as theme, plot, structure, and characterization. The paper explores how each of these elements reflects the importance of temporality in the novel.
Keywords: : time significance, Literature, November 9, colleen hoover, temporality
Romantic Ecologism: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the False Eco-criticism Tributes (Published)
Colonial and postcolonial environmental criticisms of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA) have attributed to the novel eco-critical consciousness of significance, apparently ignoring the concern for environmental sustainability that is the foundation of current arts and humanities endeavour into the environmental discourses. On the strength of representations of human and non-human nature in the novel, critics have adjudged the novel to be a quintessence of the ecocritical ideal. Against some of the conceptual underpinnings of foremost ecocriticism postulations, ecological consciousness attributed to TFA are contested in this present study as false and misleading. The utilitarian values of ecocriticism and the remediating goal of literature in environmental studies, which are absent in the primary text and many of its secondary readings, are recommended as the basis for attributing ecocritical consciousness to texts. Natural entities and practices in the novel are contested as contextualization devices, employed by the author, for situating characters and events in their organic, pre-colonial African setting, and are described in this paper as the lost ecological values of Africa that are decried by contemporary critics of the global impacts of the science and technological cultures on the environment. This study employs ecocriticism as its theoretical basis.
Keywords: African literature, Chinua Achebe, Ecocriticism, Environment, Literature, postcolonial literature
The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Families as Presented in Hard Times (Published)
This paper investigates the Industrial Revolution’s impact on families as presented in Hard Times novel. The researcher will discuss the main components and features of the families in Britain at that time, in which Charles Dickens represented them in different types as Gradgrind’s family, Bounderby’s family, Stephan’s family, and Cecelia’s family. These families represent the typical sort of family at that time with its features and their problems they face such as getting a divorce, getting drunk, and family disintegration in general. In addition to the reoccurrence of money motif being a capitalist at the expense of the family bonding as represented between Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter Louisa.
Keywords: Charles Dickens, Literature, hard times novel, industrial revolution, novel
EFL Teaching-Learning Utilizing English Literature: A Source of Exploring the World of English (Published)
The universal truth is that language whatever is meant for communication either written or spoken and each language has its own niceties and subtleties loaded with social and cultural norms. The present study specifically focuses on the teaching and the learning of not only English language skills but also the importance of English literature, i.e. prose, poetry, peculiarities, weird, quirks, and bizarre of English language have also been encompassed. Now the question arises, how all this can be utilized in EFL classroom. The best possible answer is the use of different forms of literature in the target language. Another important point is that the selection of different literary texts, poems and other helping material have been suggested as a model according to the level of ESL learner, i.e. under graduate students. Some model texts and couplets have been given in Table-1 and Table-2. It would be appropriate to provide a suitable modern literary text to improve the language skills and competency, critical thinking, stylish and effective communication either written or spoken as closer to native speakers as possible. All this is possible through well- thought, well-planned, well-presented pieces of literary work and S-S and T-S interaction. The most important are motivation and the roles of teachers and students toward an overall success.
Keywords: EFL, Literature, Poetry, Teaching-Learning, peculiarities, prose, quirks and bizarre aspects., weird
THE INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIA AND INTELLIGENCE ON LITERATURE (Published)
The influence of the media and intelligence on world literature has been immense. There is a close relationship between the media, intelligence and literature. Although the media helps the writer to make his work reach a wider audience quickly, the intelligence officer who is more of an adversary reports his activities to the state that uses it for a higher goal. The media watches everyone including the writer, but who watches the activities of the media during agenda-setting, sensationalism and yellow journalism? This is the thrust of this paper.
Keywords: Intelligence, Literature, Media