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
Traumatic Experiences of Asian Child Labour Victims in Boys without Names (Published)
Child labour though an age long social phenomenon, has claimed the lives of many Asian children and continues to exist in various forms even in contemporary times. As such, that phenomenon needs continuous interrogation. This paper therefore examines the traumatic experiences of child labour victims in Kashmira Sheth’s Boys without Names (2010). Using psychoanalytic theory, the study examined the travails, pains, trauma and emotional struggles of six child labour victims in the selected text. Findings revealed that poverty is the major cause of child labour and until poverty is curbed, child labour will continue to persist. The study also discovered that education is imperative as it is a great tool that can help to combat child labour, hence, every child deserves good and quality education. The study therefore recommended that children and parents should be sensitized on the advantages of education.
Keywords: Asia, Child Labour, Poverty, Victims, emotional struggles
Class Discrimination under the Impact of Transgression in ‘The White Tiger’ By Aravind Adiga (Published)
This further study on Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” pivots round the class discrimination that hints the transgression of the protagonist, Balram Halwai, as well as his corrupted masters. It robustly delineates on the protagonist who was brought up in a remote village of Bihar that is often called as the ‘Darkness’ -a place without the light of educations and modern privileges. Balram narrates the ‘ins and outs’ of his adventurous life through a letter to a foreign luminary- Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime-Minister, on his stopover to Bangalore as an official task that upholds the facts of poverty, the evil of the feudal landlords and the miseries of the subaltern people of India. Adiga’s approach to picture the 20th Century India, has successfully been put into practice by the paroxysms of social injuries in several corners.
Keywords: Cast, Discrimination, Entrepreneurship, Poverty, Transgression, Vicissitude
Contemporary Social, Political and Religious Satire under the Silent Penetration of Poverty and Class Discrimination: An Exploration on Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ (Published)
“The White Tiger” is a Man Booker Prize (2008) winning book is written by the great Indian-Australian writer, Aravind Adiga. This article lets us know how the class discrimination is engulfing the Post-Colonial Indian Society under the silent penetration of poverty and corruption and how the human morality is decaying under the religious and political unrests. Here, the narrator and protagonist, Balram Halwai, struggles against his lower class society from the very initial time of his life. His life undergoes with serious sufferings from economical solvency because of being in the lower Hindu cast. He senses the tortures of the elite class people towards the deprived poor. He witnessed the deaths of many dreams in a poor family. He observes it as a “Rooster Coop” that stands for the extreme poverty where the people below the social margin remain in a great danger and never rebel against the society as they have no wealth and power. He scrutinizes the huge corruptions in politics and in every class he went through. As a driver, he has had a great chance to discover the great Indian corruptions on the root levels of cities and towns. His mind always rebels against those terminations but he is to go on as to be alive in his ways of being an enlightened person. Nevertheless, he takes in a great loss of pain but what he has gained at last is nothing but dishonesty and rampancy of corruption because all his perceptions are only for earthly happiness of money. What he got after killing Mr. Ashok and stealing his money (700,000 Rs.) is really a mystery to the readers. Significantly, Aravind Adiga has tried to rectify the human society by upholding the above facts that are running on ahead.
Keywords: Corruption, Discrimination and Nihilism, Economics, Politics, Poverty, Satire, Sufferings