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IHEK WEME, CHIKERENWA KINGSLEY
PG/M.A/11/61263
WAR AND TERRORISM IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN DRAMA: A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF MADMEN AND SPECIALISTS, WOMEN OF OWU, AND FOR LOVE OF BIAFRA
DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND FILM STUDIES
FACULTY OF ARTS
Digitally Signed by: Content manager’s Name
DN : CN = Webmaster’s name Ameh Joseph Jnr O= University of Nigeria, Nsukka
OU = Innovation Centre
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TITLE PAGE
WAR AND TERRORISM IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN DRAMA: A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF MADMEN AND SPECIALISTS , WOMEN OF OWU , AND FOR LOVE OF BIAFRA
BY IHEKWEME, CHIKERENWA KINGSLEY PG/M.A/11/61263
DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND FILM STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA
JUNE, 2013
CERTIFICATION iii
This is to certify that IHEKWEME, Chikerenwa Kingsley, a postgraduate student of Theatre and Film Studies with registration number PG/M.A/11/61263, has satisfactorily completed the research/project requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Arts
(M.A) in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
This project is original and has not been submitted in part or whole for any other degree of this or any other University.
SUPERVISOR:
Dr Uche- Chinemere Nwaozuzu
Signature ______
Date ______
APPROVAL PAGE iv
This project report by Ihekweme, Chikerenwa Kingsley PG/M.A/11/61263 has been approved by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
BY
______
Dr Uche Chinemere Nwaozuzu Prof. Emeka Nwabueze
Supervisor Head of Department
______
External Examiner
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DEDICATION
To
All victims and casualties of war and terror in Nigeria
Especially those who still suffer mentally from their losses
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I appreciate the kindness and meticulousness of my lecturer and supervisor, Dr Uche- Chinemere Nwaozuzu for accepting to guide me. His efforts and well guided advices have translated positively to the knowledge being derived from this work.
I thank Professor Emeka Nwabueze for making things easier for me. He enabled me to achieve my dreams this far. I must also not forget his distinguished ability at knowledge delivery. My thanks also go to Dr. Felix Egwuda- Ugbeda for his kind acceptance to read my work and the commendable suggestions he made; his inputs helped a lot.
I am severally indebted to Dr Ngozi Udengwu for her motherly encouragement, advice and assistance.
I am particularly grateful to Drs: Ifeanyi Ugwu, Obi Okeke, Chinenye Amaonyeze, Mr John Igbonekwu, Miss Nneka Ibeli, Miss Lien Ogechi, and Mrs Onah. I am grateful to Mr Richard Khan, Ugochukwu Anigbogwu, and Augustina Obah.
Professor (Rev. Fr.) John Iheanyi Obilor, Assoc. Prof Kalu Okpi, Mr Emeka Nwosu (JP) of the Imo State University and Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education Owerri are appreciated for their help and scholarly roles in my educational quest. I will not forget Dr Tobinson Briggs of the University of Port Harcourt for his advice and love. I thank Lolo Victoria Mbalu, Mrs: Magaret Njoku, Theresa Ikeagwu, and Bernadine Opara, my early school teachers, for their encouragement and support.
I am not forgetting the staff of the Biafrana Section of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the National Library Owerri for providing me with research materials that helped me put my work into a cogent whole.
Finally, I remain thankful to my parents, brothers, sister- in- law and her children for their unflinching show of love and support.
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ABSTRACT
The psychology of war and terrorism in Nigeria is insidiously portraying a devastating trend as are the challenges faced in understanding the dimensions of human trauma and suffering that are involved. The costs have been evidenced as war and terrorism are often characterized by large scale displacement, economic loss and death. Apparent in the environment is the disturbing level of psychic bereft and disillusionment which war masters and terrorists inflict on their victims and casualties. No individual is ever counted as sacred, as from the children to the youth, and to aged, the destruction it fraughts lacks identification. In Madmen and Specialists , Women of Owu , and For Love of Biafra ; Soyinka, Osofisan and Adichie unearth the various dimensions of war and terror and the responses of characters to their impact. Articulating these turmoils have been the backdrop of how Nigerians react to issues of war and terrorism. Therefore, this work is a psychoanalytic appraisal of the texts in the light of the topic being discussed. It tacitly submits that, if not checked, since the problems of war and terrorism can hardly ever be solved, the growing examples of this trend in Nigeria today, may well lead to a future challenge in clinical and mental abuse.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title ------i
Certification------ii
Approval------iii
Dedication------iv
Acknowledgement------v
Abstract ------vi
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Statement of the Problem ------3
1.2 Research Questions ------5
1.3 Objectives of the Study ------5
1.4 Significance of the Study ------6
1.5 Delimitation/Scope of the Study ------7
1.6 Methodological Justification ------8
1.7 Theoretical Framework ------9
CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP
2.1 War and Terrorism in Mythic Historification ------12
2.2 War: Conceptual Analysis, History, Motivations, Impact, Dimensions, and Theories ------12
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2.3 Terrorism: Conceptual Analysis, History, Motivations, Impact, Dimensions, and Theories ------18
2.4 War and Communal Conflict in Contemporary Nigeria ------23
2.5 Terrorism in Contemporary Nigeria ------30
2.6 Psychoanalysis ------35
CHAPTER THREE
TEXTUAL SUMMARY AND IMPACT OF WAR AND TERRORISM ON THE CHARACTERS/VICTIMS
3.1 Summary of Selected Text ------42
3.2 Physical Manifestations of War and Terrorism ------47
3.3 Moral Manifestations of War and Terrorism ------54
3.4 Psychological Manifestations of War and Terrorism ------63
CHAPTER FOUR
RESPONSE OF CHARACTERS/VICTIMS TO INVASION OF WAR AND TERRORISM AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE
4.1 War and Terrorism as Politics of Dying, Death and Disillusionment ------74
4.2 Grieving and Suffering under the Actuality of War and Terrorism ------85
4.3 Signification of the Wars and Terrorizations within the Formative of Psychoanalysis ------93
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CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS 5.1 Summary ------102 5.2 Conclusion ------103 5.3 Suggestions ------103 WORK CITED 1
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Nigeria is increasingly being devastated by war and terrorism. The psychological impact and response to its invasion by Nigerians and on the landscape have also been evident. The dictum of no victor no vanquished that had followed the ruins of the 1967-1970 civil war has become a rouse more with the gory tales of recent acts of terror and aggressive wars in many parts of the country, especially in the north. In Nigeria, war and terrorism have become critical factors in the espousing and furthering of certain political, economic and religious ideologies that result in suffering, dying and death. More so, the differences in culture, religion, appeal and appreciation of the segments and various tribes in the country have largely been exposed by these social problems. It has further worsened the internalization of the nation Nigeria as an entity by those who have fallen victims. Blames and counter mental agonies have found laxities in the British colonial role of merging the various tribes. If it is not the Muslims killing the Christians and destroying public infrastructure, then, it is one part of the country or state or community up in arms against another, and vice versa. One of the greatest disasters of contemporary Nigeria is the exiling of citizens from their places of living and businesses due to heavy loss of lives and destruction of properties in the events. General opinions suggest that war and terrorism are among one of the scourge of our society. Clausewitz states that; “war is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,” (75) the World Book Dictionary L-Z opines that; “terrorism is a condition of fear and submission produced by frightening people.” (2167) Their destructive tendencies make man a participant, who, according to Eliade; “will cosmicize and 'transform from chaos into cosmos' in order to make it 'become real.” (9-11) This is because the art of warfare and terrorism employ crude weaponry and ideology from which in the statement of Jones, “fearful deals are reported.” (106) During the Roman period, for example, the Carthaginians were destroyed even as the Assassins, a terrorist group in the Middle East around 1100 and 1200 centuries had murdered their opponents. Alexander notes that; “they have come to be associated with those who kill in order to settle political scores.” (114) Researchers like Ewelike, Obeta and Njoku separately in their works have written on the 2
nature and pitfalls of the Nigerian war by exposing the “moral depravity,” (15) “abuse of the condition of life that men are entitled to,” (32) as well as “the role women in particular play in war,” (28) respectively. Although war and terrorism may be triggered by a number of elements, its primary root lies within us. It is found out that people sometimes resort to aggression when they are oppressed, discriminated, bereaved and economically impoverished or when they feel that they have no control over their lives. More often than not, it is the problem of politics, social and economic interest that have played into the hands of the masterminds and the sufferers. When people are less aware of their moral standard they are more likely to respond to these cues. Such individuals, it would be known, may become nothing than deviants, lacking all the emotions of social responsibility. In Nigeria, people have continued to be killed and many suffer the consequences of war and terror. The ideologies that formed the organizations, groups and communities which rise against another are replete and devastating. Some of these organizations include, the extremist religious group, Boko Haram, in the north that destroy lives and properties, the fighting militants of the Niger Delta creeks, Kidnappers in the South East- South South regions and other parts of the country; the Fulani/Berom communal warlords, the Ezza/Ezillo land feud killers, the Ojantele/Ijegwu warring communities, among many others. The rising suffering and anguish, death and displacement are not only glaring but disturbing. Therefore, it is far too early to celebrate. Though the condition above have been widely condemned, they have continued to linger as victims and the displaced further bewail enslavement, rape and other injustices characteristic of what Madiebo and Ogu variously typify as the “social apartheid’’ (3) and “ghoulish tortures and lingering agonies.”(Viii) This is because the psychology of war and terrorism has mystifying effects. These social evils have been artistically examined in Nigerian literature. The traumas that Nigerians experience have been basically the concern of those works. However, very little has been attempted in marriage of the above and in the studies of the dramatic genre unlike we have with the prose form and the poetry. The implication is that Nigerian texts closely studied especially the drama is very relevant in national orientation and development because they preoccupy themselves with the socio- political and even the historical problems of the nation and go as far as locating an 3
alternative means for a healthy and progressive national life. No nation on earth ever progresses mentally and materially in the midst of strife and contention. Review Madden discloses that; “an ideal war drama makes the event agonizingly alive in the reader by stimulating and engaging the emotions, imaginations, and the intellect.” (2) This means that the critic being alive to his role, states Soyinka, is “a socially-situated producer...and a creature of social conditioning,” (133- 134) and who must engage his art with correcting some of the ills that confront his society. It is therefore pertinent to stress that war and terrorism lead to oppression, social disconnection and high loss of human lives. The multiplier effects could be psychological problems like post traumatic stress disorder, depression, extreme emotional withdrawal, hallucination and schizophrenia and more serious clinical problems. And the capacity of the texts in use to suggest acutely and effectively these concerns on the victims in general rest to a great extent on the various levels of attitudes exhibited by the characters.
1.1 Statement of the Problem War can hardly ever be used in any ordinary sense; indeed, it obviously as a myth does not operate simply as conflict but as matrices of shedless activities including those of terror, brutality and genocide. Observers and analysts argue that Nigerians appear not to have learned anything from the ugly experience of the Nigerian civil war. Research further reveals that the masterminds of war and terrorism have rarely considered the consequences before embarking on them. The clinical maladjustments and behavioural changes that follow victims, casualties and veterans of war and terrorism, more often than not, have been devastating. There are also physical and moral hazards that are involved such as, injury, disease, loss of property, slavery, low self esteem, rape and prostitution, including other human rights violations. These have resulted in the way Nigerians reflect about themselves and their culture, values and religious systems. The preparedness to kill and plunder at the slight of provocation has risen to an all time high casualty for Nigeria as her citizens suffer identity bastardization and insecurity. This has offered outlets for victims and casualties to express levels of tension that reveal their animosity, frustrations, pains and grief at the turn of things. According to Gabriel: In every war in which… soldiers [civilians] have fought in, the chance of becoming a psychiatric casualty- of being debilitated for some period of time as a 4
consequence of the stresses of military life-were greater than the chance of being killed by enemy fire… Rarely do military establishments [governments, communities or individuals] attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms. (http:///www.ralphmag.org/CG/world-war-one2.html , no page indicated). Evidence suggests above that victims and casualties of war and terrorism go through a lot immediately after the events and it is this problem that feeds this present work as attempts made at repudiating the oddities in criticisms and other works have resulted in the analysis of conflict Nigeria based on causes and effects. Thus dramatic criticism and essays have ‘sufficiently’ leaped in the exploration of the impact of war crimes on the victims. Therefore, losses incurred during the problems are known to affect seriously the victims. They adopt varying kinds of interpretations and attitudes that remain unhealthy to them and the society. And given the way these social problems are handled in Nigeria, that government hardly know what constitutes acts of war and terror, and its failure to properly handle cases of the affected, those brutalized fail to get social justice and compensation. The compensated sometimes do not adjust well because they need more psychotherapy treatments. Among other factors that generate war and terrorism in the country is prejudice. It is a condition in which people and situations are judged unfairly and discriminatively. This has led researchers to comment dispassionately on how they have given vent to wide injustices of ethnic cleansing, displacement and genocide. The factors feeding this problem are religion, poverty and politics. More so, Nigerians who have fallen victims to acts of communal wars and more recently to terrorism in newspaper reports and electronic media messages recount their sufferings and their mental attitude always have been reflected as a result. This is to say the least disturbing. The alarming state of insecurity in recent times, the suicide bombings and explosions, assassinations, religious uprisings and the local wars have had an obtuse effect. The psychic reception of these has accounted for the broken ties and hate that plague our polity. There is really a reason or reasons again that make masterminds of warfare and terrorization to engage in it and undertake various levels of attitudes in the plays of investigation. 5
When the drama has the role to diagnose society, it concerns the need for change than the wish that it could be brought about in another way. Thus there is no better time to effectively checkmate the serious problem of psychological costs of war and terrorism in the nation, other than now.
1.2 Research Questions Based on the problems above and their application to the texts of investigation, the research work adduces these questions: • Will a human interaction to issues be tailored in an environment sprawled with the likes of Dr. Bero, the Old Women and the Mendicants in Madmen and Specialists ? • In the midst of an external imposition, will the rationality laid claim by Lawumi and her invading forces or the Owus complicity stand the test of time as seen in Women of Owu ? • Will psychedelism in the Adaobi character in For Love of Biafra , or Orisaye n Women , bring the needed sanity in society? • What does it mean to be mentally ill in war or driven to a cause, yet delusioned? • What is the implication of losing a loved one or object of desire in war and terror? • Will war and terror ever end? • Does even war and terror, such as we have now, end without the pursuit of justice? • Where has humanity fled? All these worries and others become needful against the background of the role of Nigerian dramaturgy in policing good human psychological health for the citizens who daily remain victims of war and terror. While injustice can likewise crush one’s spirit and situate emotional pain, Nigerian drama is increasingly determined to hold those who commit these crimes accountable for their actions as well as posit ways in which the psychically harangued will begin to look out for fresh air.
1.3 Objectives of the Study
The dramatic discourse, is about something. Accordingly this work avails an evaluative study of 6
the texts based on the problems of war and terrorism on the cultural, political, social, religious and economic space of the men, women, youth and children including, the sacred and other forces that join in inflicting hopelessness and anguish on victims. By the end of the research, the following objectives would have been achieved: • An evaluation of the extent and nature of trauma and suffering, moral depravity and how and why characters respond to war and terrorism in the texts. • Why there have continued to be a shift in the Nigerian population and panic by the people as a result of these problems. • That there are no likely gains of war and terrorism as wrongly believed by some scholars and researchers when valued in terms of the impact of loss of human life, property and health problems that are associated. • That Nigeria, being a pluralistic and multi ethnic culturalist society cannot afford to expend her people for these benefits or remain silent in the face of victims’ suffering psychiatric breakdown as a result of war and terrorism. • How the texts’ characters conditions are representative of the larger Nigerian victims experience. • That poor attention by government and authorities concerned to the critical needs of victims and casualties could lead to societal breakdown and values, with a call on them to entrench social justice in order to address the challenges. • That the killings, displacement and other crimes and injustices of war and terrorism committed are misdirected while peace should be followed. • And the psychological well- being of Nigerians caught in the conflict of communal wars and terrorism should be protected and preserved.
1.4 Significance of the Study
When we reflect on war and terrorism, none is ever interesting. The devastation the problems fraught on the victims justify the fear. Like tragedy, acute but painful share in the experience of reading a war text- where terrorism manifests intensify the significance of the suffering. It reminds us that there can never be perfect justice or effective world order as they 7
serve as a lesson on man’s conflicting identity, his inability to understand the myth of life and the inability to satisfy his increasing social want. However, this work has a lot of contributions to make. They are: • A wake up call on the leaders and Nigerians to fully address the problems of the past and how present factors that remind of the experience could adversely affect the future. • The need for the government to handle matters of security, unity and national development as priorities than as being presently handled with kid-gloves. • It offers a guide to Psycho- therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, and the academia, especially those who research in mental health and clinical therapy in interpreting the response mechanism of victims and casualties of war and terrorism and their impacts and how best they can be treated or assisted. • To admonish the rights of Nigerians and others, the freedom they espouse to live wherever they choose. • That women and children are vital segments of the Nigerian society and should be safeguarded against torture and violations. • The plight of victims when viewed in light of the consequences will make masterminds adjust their ideologies by realizing the futility of their reckless destruction and follow peace. • An evaluation of the psychological costs of the problems on the victims and casualties will enable government proffer more workable solutions in order to enshrine a justice system that thrives on equity, fairness, and peace. It will further make Nigerians to know that abnormal behaviours are treatable but could be severe when neglected. • That for a country to progress it needs her populace and people that are healthy since individuals suffering from emotional related factors of war and terrorism can hardly form its work-force. • The investigation of the chosen texts by Soyinka, Osofisan and Adichie being stories of the Nigerian condition will ignite further research in the academic field.
1.5 Delimitation/Scope of the Study 8
The research topic is “War and Terrorism in Contemporary Nigerian Drama: A Psychoanalytic Study of Madmen and Specialists, Women of Owu, and For Love of Biafra.” The texts bear the periods of war and terror. While Madmen and Specialists published in 1971 after the civil war recreates war and terror premised on the psychological decomposition of a soldier who has gone to war and returned, Osofisan in his play mirrors the aftermath psychedelic results of the genocide in Owu kingdom: this was written during the Iraqi invasion by America but for the Nigerian readers; Adichie’s For Love of Biafra recreates the agonies and psychic alienation that follow the Nigerian pogrom of 1966 and the surrendering of the Biafran side as experienced by an Igbo extended family.
The work is a follow-up on Angya's treatise on Madmen and Specialists given the environment of war and brutality. Whereas her own is universal in scope, the present restricts the topic within Nigeria, and in including Women of Owu and For Love of Biafra by advocating the need for peace and healthy polity. The concern of this work remains the target of broader evaluation of the psychic dimension of wars in Nigeria, now enclosed in Boko Haram terrorism and other spate of terror acts. Issues like death and dying, disillusionment, grief and suffering will be emphasized; even as a psycho-analytic review of the characters is explored.
1.6 Methodological Justification
The investigation was carried out using the Historical, Sociological and Literary Methods of information gathering for research work. The Historical Method is the technique by which information is gathered from books and documented; journals, periodicals, reports, and others. According to Ukala, the Historical Method is needed “to establish facts and occurrences in specific places and periods.” (12) The researcher made use of published books and materials, including relying on relevant newspaper sources and magazines. This was because an issue like war and terrorism often are historically based and need proper referencing. Furthermore, this was needed to give an effective background to the analysis of the texts in use, which are historical works in themselves.
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The Sociological Methodology reveals how well or conversant the researcher is with the studied society. The author above states that it is used, “to describe, expose or establish what is, its causes and effects and point to requirements for its maintenance, improvement or discouragement.” (13) Therefore, the researcher utilized the social observation technique in order to make factual what was collected as the historical data. He personally observed and made physical contact with the environment of war and terror in order to have a visual effect and imaginative objectivity of what the above could inflict on the victims. The Literary Method is the analytical technique which focuses on printed materials. The tool was the three selected plays and others that were used to backup some arguments and conclusions reached. The method was reflected by the language pattern and style of explaining and analyzing the problem of discourse, research questions and objectives as found in the texts of study. This was further because characterization of war and terrorism in them illustrate verisimilitude the context of situation of Nigeria. However, this will not relegate the use of other psychological theories such as psychoanalysis, existentialism and humanism. The documentation style is the Modern Languages Association (MLA).
1.7 Theoretical Framework
The researcher adopts three psychological theories in studying the work. They are Psycho-analysis, Existentialism and Humanism. However, the first will superintend the analysis and review.
Psychoanalysis or Psycho-analytic Theory is among one of the psychodynamic theories of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud, (1856- 1939) an Austrian physician in order to reveal or investigate why certain patients confined in hospital beds exhibit some troubling behaviours which often are described as neuroses and psychoses. Freud articulated that early childhood experiences could affect later behaviours and attitude in life. The theory had been 10
sexist but latter works by other psychoanalysts claimed that other factors aside biological could influence personality and how human beings relate with others. The actions are particularly said to be unconscious.
According to Smith, psychoanalysis has “a considerable impact on the child’s development of a sense of self and identity, as well as feelings of psychological security and sex role. A bonding by the child is initiated in early growth but an early destructive one can lead to psychopathology.” (504)
This means that psychoanalysis is a method of understanding mental life, or the psychological theory that shows how mental life functions on both conscious and unconscious levels and that psychological life starts from childhood and could be powerful in its impact. This contemporary definition illustrates that psychoanalysis investigates behaviour to better understand such things as what we think and feel; how we cope and adapt; and why we behave the way we do.
In agreement, Smith admits again that; “the unconscious is a powerful source of emotion and motivation. It can cause you to experience emotions with no awareness of where they come from and to engage in behaviour that serves no consciously obvious purpose.” (482- 483)
Psychoanalysis is really central to discussion on war and terrorism as they have been observed to decrease levels of psychological well-being and mental health. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and withdrawal, including compensatory attitudes have been identified by scholars and psychologists as consisting of severe negative emotional reactions that could incapacitate self-esteem in the individual. Accordingly, the Dutch psychoanalyst Meerloo asserts that; “war is of the means by which man’s own frustration at his inability to understand his own self is expressed in fist of destructive behaviour upon others.” These “others”, he reasons, “are made to serve as the scapegoat of man’s own unspoken and subconscious frustrations and fears.” 11
(134) The psychoanalytic approach is a kind of mourning denial, suffering and sacrifice. It is this denial and sacrifice which Nietzsche interprets to be the symbolic or significant track of all ‘suffering’ (822). Therefore, knowledge of this problem cannot be studied without an analysis into the unconscious functioning of personality, since in a literature text, psychoanalysis deals with characterization.
Existentialism is an off-shoot of the devastations which The World War II left behind. The existentialists feel that, human beings being free people, should choose their own living standards and they are responsible for the values they have chosen.
Dostoyevsky, quoted in Nwaozuzu, states that; “existential characters often see life as unpredictable and perversely destructive.” (118) This means that the dramatic text, for example, is weighed in light of society and its contradictions and this is why people try to put up resistance against what they perceive as intruding into their life. And in doing this they become responsible for whatever restrictions and laws, even actions undertaken to preserve these values.
The theory above is necessary for the research as some of the actions adopted by most of the characters in the selected plays of study thrive on the need for one to create his own values as there are no confined ways by which one can grow his being except through what have been imposed by society. It is also a critical tool in the study of war and terrorism.
Humanism, a psychological theory that flourished during the renaissance, has in recent times been used to describe any set of values that express confidence in human reason.
In the words of Sternberg, “Humanistic psychologists emphasize mental well-being and believe that people can take control of their lives and reach their full potential if only they set their minds to it.” (511) This shows that humanistic people are often concerned with human life and the best way in which one can express his feelings. They are known to preserve values and are peaceful. They relegate whatever will deny them the flowing of their humanity to the background. They protect what belongs to them but when it contradicts their pattern of life they let go.
Thus the theory is pertinent in the studies of the subject of war and terrorism and in further extricating its place in the drama texts. The theories discussed above are relevant to this 12
work being critical in the mental visualization of the characterization of trauma, agony, and other attitudes adopted by victims and casualties to reflect impact and their response to war and terrorism.
CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP
2.1 War and Terrorism in Mythic Historification
This chapter attempts an overview of war and terrorism in order to unearth its scope, dynamism and function. Extensive references are consulted on the Nigerian civil- war in order to lay a background for what is happening now. Many scholars believe that the wars witnessed in the country and recent acts of terror lend credence to attitudes of the past. One such writers’ is Soyinka, who, according to The Guardian of January 24, 2012 argued that; “nothing really has changed but the mode of inflicting death.” (80) The last segment of the chapter discusses the psychoanalytic patterns of behaviour that are traceable in victims of war and terrorism.
2.2 War: Conceptual Analysis, History, Motivations, Impact, Dimensions, and Theories. War is among one of the evils in the mythic nature of man and orchestrated in his grouse for power, authority, and economic improvement. This can be observed when man deploys war as a means to attain whatever sundry goals he may have. According to Smalley, “war is the sixth among ten biggest problems of humanity in the next fifty years.” (246) Smalley’s claim is very disturbing as the implication of man and his society in this social problem. War is often typified by extreme aggression, high date rate and social disconnection being an organized, armed and prolonged violence involving individuals, nations and states. The New Webster’s International Dictionary states that; “war may even suggest a state of hostility without resort to arms,” (1109) while The World Book Dictionary L- Z opines that; “it occurs when there is fighting carried on by armed force between nations or parts of a nation.” (2356) In 13
other words, war exists where there are disparities, the solution which is idealized in intentioned and organized warfare. While some scholars believe that war generally is part of human nature and as a mechanism for reducing populations, others say that socio-cultural and environmental exigencies could bring about the need for war. According to Keegan; “each society embraces the form and scope which outlines its ideology of war.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/war) Keegan’s claim indicates that war transcends history, time and place as with the vastness of the technology cutting across age and race, the problem has come to adopt more systemic method that can eliminate humanity. Etymologically, the concept war derives from the Old English (c.1050) words wyrre and werre, the Sanskrit varvar and barbara by the Indians, or from the Old Saxon werran . Old High German werran and the German verwirren are used especially of the latter to identify situations that suggest “to confuse, to perplex,” and “to bring into confusion.” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=war) Also in another German translation, werra means “fight” or “tumult,” (1071) states the Diccionario de la Lengua Espanola . Austrian Zoologist Konrad Lorenz states, according to Weiss, Lt. Col. Egon A; Clark, Jeffrey J; and Miller, Nathan, that it was “innate aggressive drives” that constitute “human beings” frequent recourse to arms. (Encarta 2009) But this has much been disputed. The authors above state that; “wars were often based on the desire to subjugate other peoples and to increase wealth by exacting taxes and tributes from them.” Some scholars however have pointed out that the need for security often had advanced the belief that an initial strike would stall an enemy from launching attacks. According to Rubinstein, war before civilization, had “consisted of small-scale and large raids, and massacres more severe than any recounted in ethnography,” (22- 50) noting, how in South Dakota, a mass grave of “more than 500 men, women, and children who had been slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on their village a century before Columbus’s arrival [ca. AD 1325]” were discovered by archeologists. Wars’ as observed above are fought without considering the loss in human population and health of mind. According to Weiss, Clark, and Miller; “about 3500 BC, the Middle East from Mesopotamia to Egypt was in constant turmoil as empires rose and fell… The people of ‘the Fertile Crescent between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea…were nomadic until the discovery of grass seeds that could be cultivated”, (Encarta 2009) and others which led to the 14
establishment of settled communities; from where intense hatred and acrimony were to be launched in wars. They would inform that some of the weapons used included terror and spears as by the 9 th century, Persia and Assyria had engaged their armies and citizens in heavy bloodshed, sacking cities and killing all prisoners. During these periods and after the other tragedies such as, the Hundred Years’ War in Medieval Europe, the Black Death, War of the Roses, and other forms of long agonies, people died suddenly, and many families developed a sense of life as grief. Again, the serious damages war wrecks on the human psyche can better be imagined. Accordingly, Eneh posits that; “people employ war to achieve their political ambitions feasted by men’s penchant for power, greediness, economic gains, prestige, pride and some other temporary vices.” (89) He maintained that; “these ambitions are under the disguise of defending democratic principles and freedoms.” (115) Making reference to Erasmus whose Complaint of Peace and Antipolemus unearths the brutish nature of war, he adds that; “in war, the victor weeps over his triumphs because of the lavished lives of the dead…war is caused by man’s ambition for power, glory, gain, anger and malice.” (115) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy declares that; “the onset of war requires a conscious commitment, and a significant mobilization, on the part of the belligerents in question” as “there is no real war, so to speak, until the fighters intend to go to war and until they do so with a heavy quantum of force”, while to Clausewitz, also quoted in the book, “war is about governance, using violence instead of peaceful measures to resolve policy.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/) War elicits death and suffering, says Clausewitz, and this is shared by Hewitt, Joseph, J. Wilkenfield and T. Gurr in their book Peace and Conflict with the statement that; “the concept of war is more than just a word but a signification to the meaning death.” (http://www.cdcm.umd.edu/pc/) While Clausewitz would admit that war is “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to do our will”, Gelven notes that; “war is an actual, widespread and deliberate armed conflict between political communities, motivated by a sharp disagreement over governance.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/) The Encyclopedia notes however that while Clausewitz may be right in his definition, he is not, as war is “about the very thing which creates policy-i.e., governance itself’, than ‘the continuation of policy by other 15
means.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/) The Awake! Magazine of January 2011 states that most individuals who rout for war “have relied on religion to provide political identities and give license to vengeful ideologies.” (3-4) However, many wars, in terms of loss of life have been fought in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, and still continuing in the 21 st century. According to the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia, “about 20,000,000 people died in World War 1,” “72,000,000 in world War 11”, and “20,000,000 during the 2 nd Sino- Japanese War of 1937-1945”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nuclear_01.shtml) as quoted by Wallinsky, Michael respectively. In Yemen, according to a report by Daily Independent of August 24, 2009 , “no fewer than 100,000 people many of them children, were displaced in a war between the government and the Houthi rebels in mostly Sunni Muslim (Shi’ite Muslim rebels) that since 2004 have tried to expand their influence as well as defend their villages against what they interpret to be government oppression.” (A10) In South Sudan, Cote D’Ivoire, and Libya, it was politically motivated strife that upturned governments and installed territorial protection, of recent. The disturbances in these mentioned countries succeeded through coalition forces and because of pecuniary imperialists’ interests. We admit that in every land where war occurs there is the devastation of the human population. When America in 2003 went to war, with her allies, in Iraq and in search of weapons of mass destruction, as President George Bush maintained, hardly did it occur to them that the war for ‘oil’ will leave gash of human deaths, destruction, and psychiatric disturbances. According to a team of researchers at the World Health Organization and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, “about 151,000 Iraqi’s were killed by military or paramilitary forces”, as contained in the Encarta 2009 dictionaries; though The Lancet , a British medical journal reported “about 655,000 deaths of noncombatants as compiled by a group of U.S. epidemiologists and Iraqi Physicians based at Johns Hopkins University.” According to Cole, who reviewed the above information, “U.S. and her allies of United kingdom, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Slovakia, El Savador, the Netherlands, Thailand, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Kazarkstan, Latvia, and Australian military also suffered in the war.” Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve admits that; “was a political inconvenience to take Iraqi’s oil, instead of taking out Saddam.” 16
(Encarta 2009) America had between 2003 when the war started and 2008, lost about 5,032 soldiers to death and an estimated 30,000 wounded. Researchers argue that men fight wars because of stupidity, selfishness, and misdirected aggressive impulses. The Awake! Publication, "Is The Nuclear Threat Over" states that; “the causes of war lie in the structure of international politics since each sovereign state pursues its own national interests from which conflicts inevitably occur.” (10) To solve the problem of war, it must come through uplifting and enlightening men because among one of the consequences of engaging in war is that both combatants and civilian suffer psychological, physical and often moral casualties. According to a research carried out by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Iraq, and reviewed by Cole, an estimated 2.3 million Iraqi’s had fled their country and another 2.3 million displaced from their homes within Iraq. Delusion, emotional withdrawal or depression, schizophrenia, disease, injury, and death were some of the encumbrances encountered in this war. Accordingly: In every war in which…soldiers [civilians] have fought in, the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty- of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life- were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire…Rarely do military establishments [governments, communities or individuals] attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms…Psychiatric casualties manifest themselves in fatigue cases, confusional states, conversion hysteria, anxiety, obsessional and compulsive states, and character disorders.(http://www.ralphmag.org/CG/world-war-one2.html; On Killing , no page indicated)
Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker in their book, Understanding the Great War, reveals that; “one- tenth of mobilized American men were hospitalized for mental disturbances between 1942 and 1945, and after thirty-five days of uninterrupted combat, 98% of them manifested psychiatric disturbances in varying degrees.” (14-18) Grossman points out that; “it has been estimated that 17
anywhere from 18% to 54% of Vietnam war veterans suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders.” (56) It has also been observed that civilians suffer more in war. This is because the event of war follows significant depopulations along with the destruction of economic livelihoods which lead to widespread hunger, famine, disease, and death. Therefore civilians are subjected to such war crimes as terrorism, genocide, brutality, and other human rights violations. Those who survive the atrocities suffer the psychological and often alienated aftereffects of the devastations of war. An example was the dissident war in Algeria. Stora in his article, “Women’s Writing between Two Algerian Wars” reflects on the physical, psychological, and sexual abuses suffered by women and teenagers during the malaise. Horra, according to him, a mother of 8, was abducted by three men and held hostage for three weeks. She endured beatings, psychological and sexual indignity. Stora narrates that she was caught as one hunts down a beast of prey, broken by terror and human lunacy. Horra, as he added, “confessed that she preferred to die from a bullet rather than yield to the torture of those savages.” (78) Horra is not alone in this suffering. Djamila is another woman who recounted at a “Right to Life Algerian Television Programme how she faced both physical and psychological indignations. Stora states: Djamila recounts that after the massacre of the men in her village, people claiming to be fighting under the banner of Islam ordered all the women to come out and then took them away by force. They were to carry the supplies and match with the stolen flocks. (78)
In her own words, Djamila reports that; “we matched for two hours all the way to the center of Mellaha, then for five hours more before reaching the transit point where we spent the night.” (78) Stora, however, notes that Djamila, after the long hours of excruciating road walk, was raped by eight men even as two teenagers, Amal and Meriem suffered the same terror. This shows that wartime event projects images of abductions, rapes, suffering, and imprisonment. The suffering of individuals in war depicts painfully what Yacine, describes as “techniques of torture and espionage.” (25) And what Marton, quoted by Angya in a bulletin he wrote on “Children and War: Targeting Evil, Striking Innocents,” argued to be the principal challenge of war which “is that it always results in the death and suffering of innocent civilians.” (137) “There is no scholarly agreement on the most common motivations for war,” (1-295) says Jack. According to Walzer, contemporary just war theorist in Stanford Encyclopedia of 18
Philosophy ; “people resort to war being the resistance of aggression.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/) He sees aggression as the use of armed force in violation of someone else’s basic rights. Aggression is so serious because it involves the unleashing of “physical force in violation of the most elemental entitlements people and their communities have; to survive; to be physically secured; to have enough resources to subsist at all; to live in peace; and to choose for themselves their own lives and societies.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/) While the Marxists argue that for war to disappear, “there is to be a world revolution, overthrowing of the free markets and class systems introduced by imperialism,” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/imp-crit.html) the rationalists, according to James, assume that both sides to a potential war are rational, which is to say that; “each side wants to get the best possible outcome for itself for the least possible loss of life and property to its own side.” (379-414) He notes, however, that three reasons are often offered for war which are issue indivisibility, information asymmetry with incentive to deceive, and the inability to make credible commitments. Neier states that Darwin’s theory of evolution has also, “been misused to promote beliefs about racial or ethnic superiority. Nationalist and racist arguments, such as those used by the Nazi’s, continue to be used in attempts to justify war.” (96) The economic theory of war says that it begins as a pursuit of markets for natural resources and for wealth. Ogbudinkpa in his work on the economic gains of war, maintains that; “for a society to be always healthy, there should be occasional pruning; that is, war which shocks and induces an economy into technological innovation and progress.”(3) It is pertinent, therefore, to stress that a war is that particular moment of hatreds and sufferings where gunpowder and other weapons are ferreted in the air and where both the combatants’ weaknesses and noncombatants’ frailty are underscored. The practice of humility and love of one another should be followed, in response to abuse, hatred and evil since war by its very nature ushers in a state of utter hopelessness and surreal. According to Eneh again; “We have a great need to establish peace and cultivate the spirit of peaceful co-existence among people and nations. It is extremely pertinent in our era of war and destruction.” (105)
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2.3 Terrorism: Conceptual Analysis, History, Motivations, Impact, Dimensions and Theories. Terrorism is one of the crimes perpetrated before, during war, or after it. It means any social chaos mechanism directed at foisting economic, socio-political, religious and psychological tensions. It is often a weapon lethal to war. Terrorism works hand in hand with conflict and violence. Its ulterior drive has been the tactful use of emotions to gain structural space. This crime is evident in frustration-aggression tendencies. According to Alexander, terrorism is the “unlawful use of fear, or force to achieve certain political, economic, religious, or social goals” (114) The methods, he states, include “threats, bombing and other destruction of property, kidnappings, taking hostages, spreading harmful chemicals or diseases, executions, and assassinations.” (114) The problem with the articulate and responsive definition of the term terrorism has been its pejorative use. This is due to the nature of the involvement and ideologies. According to Miriam Ikejiani-Clark, “before the state of Israel was established in1948, Zionists carried out devastating terrorist campaigns to induce the Arabs of Palestine to leave. Once the state of Israel had been created, it was the displaced Arabs who became the terrorists as they undertook grotesque actions against Israeli nationals and Israel.” (2-3) Yacine shares Alexander’s statement above that; “the techniques employed by terrorists on peoples and captives specifically are impalements, jets of boiling oil, hanging by the ribs while letting the victims slowly burn to death.” (25) Many scholars believe that terrorism is politically and emotionally goal-driven. Ikejiani- Clark reveals that the controversy surrounding it is for the “contradictory opinion of terrorist units, conflicting interests of states and attempts to define who is a terrorist, and specific, political context relating to violence.” (3) According to The New Encyclopedia Britannica , terrorism is: “the systematic use of terror, [such as bombings, killings and kidnaps] such means of forcing some political objective. When used by a government it may signal effort to strife, dissent; used by insurrections or guerrillas, it may be part of an overall effort to effect desired political change.” (904) The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English sees it as “the use of violence or the threat of violence to obtain political change,” (1094) while Dr. Ray Cline, a former Deputy 20
Director at the Central Intelligence Agency cited in International Terrorism defined it as “the deliberate employment of violence or threat of the use of violence to commit acts in violation of law for the purpose of creating overwhelming fear in a target population larger than the number of victims attacked or threatened.” (7) In the above book by Lynch, we find another definition credited Nathan Adams, a Senior Editor of Readers Digest, about terrorism being “a tool beyond the accepted norms of warfare, where there is no general convention, where it is violence without a declared state of war, where there are no innocents, where foreign policies are advanced or goals achieved by what appears to be the indiscriminate use of violence.” (7) This definition suggests that some terror acts do not operate within the ambit of the law and when this becomes the norm it is anarchy and strife. This allows the operation of lawlessness where the objective may be or not to get a reward but for destructive purposes. Many also believe that terrorism operates because of the need to derive political needs. According to Onuoha, terrorism is “conducted to achieve political goals’ and whose ‘perpetrators believe that it will help them obtain their goals even though they may be wrong in that belief.” (61) The International Police Review argue that; “the threat of terrorism today also comes from those with personal agendas which are not motivated by political goals but whose intentions and agendas include mass destruction.” (18) According to Onuoha again, terrorism is designed by the weak to confront the strong; but this is not without a refutation of the Marxist’s exigencies in “acquiring, grabbing, and accumulating wealth” (77) In the statement of Alexander: Some countries may use terrorism as a substitute for fighting a traditional war, providing money, training, and weapons to terrorists whose activities serve their national aims. Governments may also plan and carry out terrorist operations themselves, although they usually deny responsibility for them. (114)
Jensen agrees with Onuoha that; “violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims’ as the ‘violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed.” (IX) However, the perpetrators of acts of terror cut across human 21
and social strata. They can be “individuals, groups or states,” (166-’67) notes Mark. Terrorists he says are mostly from influential homes who as a result of their psychology and social circumstances have conditioned themselves for the task. Their education and social awareness has furnished them with how to look, dress, and behave normally until executing the assigned mission. In the bid to induce psychological fear their actions always do harm innocent people. According to Hoffman and Juergensmeyer, “terrorism is meant to produce psychological effects that reach far beyond the immediate victims of the attack” (167) as well as negatively affecting a government, “while increasing the prestige of the given terrorist organization and/or ideology behind a terrorist act,” (125-135) respectively. Terrorism and religion have a close affinity. According to Awake ! publication of January 2011, “Religion is more likely to be a cause of war when religion and the state authorities become closely allied or intertwined…Religion seems to influence nearly every aspect of secular life…This results in dividing people rather than uniting them.” (6) “Many suicide bombers”, Alexander would state, “think of themselves as martyrs fighting for a religious cause.” (115) More often than not, victims of terrorism are targeted not for constituting threats, but because they idealize symbols, tools, animals or corrupt beings that are to be repressed by the terrorist. Their suffering and alienation satiate the terrorists’ objective of locating fear by using weapons that communicate their message. However, it is not surprising that in the event, the terrorist dies along with his victims. Right from the onset of the modern period, terrorism has advanced in technology, style and objective. From Europe to America, Asia to Middle East, and Australia to Africa, it is a global problem and has continued to rise astronomically. For example, Thisday report of April 18, 2012, reveals how a Norwegian killer gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, who admits to killing over 77 people in order to foil a civil war, deployed bombs and firearms to riddle iconic political symbols- the massacre which he described as a “spectacular’ political war in Europe after World War 11.” (38) Max informs that; “individual terrorists are motivated more by a desire for social solidarity with other members of their organization than by political platforms or strategic objectives, which are often murky and undefined.” 86-89) This could translate into attacks on collaborators such as were used in Ireland, Kenya, Algeria and in Cyprus during their independence struggles. 22
The Economist of March 22, 2008 reports that during the preparations toward Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, “ethnic Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa’s old Tibetan quarter, prejudiced to ethnic Han Chinese population, descended on their economic life, burning and killing.’ It was an ideology for the demanding of ‘self determination in a nation where the Tibetan Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader and image of territorial defense, is on asylum in India.’ By the time the terror acts settled in three days, Lhasa had been devastated. Lives were lost as ‘the Hans Chinese fled from being killed.” (28-30) Yacine accordingly states that; “terrorism is implicated with the violence of the past and reveals cultural gaps between two groups, on the one hand, but also and above all violations of traditional law and ethics, on the other hand, recalling previously experienced situations of domination.” (25) It is pertinent to state here that terrorists are not only rebels or oppositions who fight against the state but when the state becomes the terrorist, duty to the terrorized is lost. A reappraisal of the concept of terrorism is needful. According to an objective definition by Jenkins: All terrorist acts are crimes- murders, kidnapping, and arson. Many would be violations of the rules of war, if a state of war existed. All involve violence or the threat of violence, often coupled with specific demands. The violence is directed mainly against civilian targets. The motives are political. The actions generally are carried out in a way that will achieve maximum publicity. The perpetrators are usually members of an organized group, and unlike other criminals, they do often claim credit for the act. And finally, the act is intended to produce effects beyond the immediate physical damage. (2-3)
The definition we have suggests that governments, groups and individuals can be classified as terrorists. Their untoward actions often go with negotiations and their techniques of demands elicit unfavorable conditions that may not be within the grasp of human psyche. How does one earn the appendage? The Economist of March 2, 1996 says:
‘In practice when a person earns the label depends on who wants to apply it…If the concept is not to vanish into all embracing fudge, two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are not. Terrorism is indeed about terror, not just 23
violence, but its use to spread terror. And the violence is aimed specifically at civilians. (19) s
The terrorist thus is one who aggravates panic and undermines confidence in the government and civilian population. Terrorism is therefore designed to instill psychological apprehension that extends beyond the immediacy of the set objective. The weapons that are often at the disposal of terrorists include bombs, assassination, kidnapping, hostage taking, and hijacking, firearms [rifles, machine guns, grenades, and bazookas] and chemical and biological weapons such as anthrax, yellow fever, small pox, salmonella, and tularemia.
The future of terrorism is therefore believed to be sad. For example, “Israel has upgraded its Arrow 11 ballistic missile in a United States backed race against Iran, Syria, and other perceived regional enemies, thus aiding a terror convenience environment,” (14) reports the Daily Sun of August 7, 2012. Terrorism is targeted at destroying the very fabric of society as it hazards business and cultural life and the mutual trust that members of the community have developed overtime. It creates uncertainty about where and when and how the next terrorist attack will be launched. The uncertainty further leads to fear, confusion and restriction within the environment and object the victim may feel is safe. Terrorism has potential to render appeal by evoking fear and alarm, pain and suffering and when it becomes the ideal, then all excesses, all cruelties, all diversions are entrenched as constitution thereby destroying all cultural ethics and sentiments.
2.4 War and Communal Conflict in Nigeria The rate of inter and intra communal conflicts that achieve the constitution of war have grown in increasing numbers as are their rippling effects which are fast undermining the nation’s sovereignty. Research indicates that more than a million Nigerians may have died as a result of these intractable wars. According to Chizea and Iyare, as at 2001, “the number of Nigerians who have died from internecine wars were estimated at 500,000.” (71) When in 1967 Nigeria began on the war path, it had been a separatist plot oriented at relative deprivation cum just cause of the Igbo nation whose Christian masses in the north were massacred by Islamic Hausa and Fulani peoples, who then dominated the Nigerian led 24
government. The authors above argued that; “people become frustrated when they start experiencing a gap between what their life “is” and what their life ‘should be.” When this frustration and the gap, called “relative deprivation,” are experienced by a number of people, a violent breakdown of the society tends to occur.” (76) Thus the Nigerian civil war had been fueled by the fear of sectional repression with the Eastern Region, then led by Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, announcing its secession from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra. Ogu states that; “five weeks after the sovereign state of Biafra was declared by Ojukwu in obedience to the will of the masses, war came.” (10) The first phase of the war was a tremendous rush of federal troops upon the border districts. At the University of Nigeria, the Nigerian troops made a bonfire of several thousands of copies of books in the University Library among which were some of the great works of nineteenth and twentieth century thought and literature. (10)
The destruction of the items by the federal soldiers was horrifying as the people interpreted their social deference by the federal government. Government’s response, as has been in most cases, bearing examples from Europe and Asia, to the assault was that of “a police action”. (10) Madiebo states that British rule in Nigeria were the cause of the war. According to him, “the former colonial master had to keep the country one, in order to effectively control his vital economic interest concentrated mainly in the more advanced and ‘politically unreliable’ South.” (3) The ‘‘amalgamation’’ (3) of people of different cultures and backgrounds created an identity and social interaction problem that the prevailing circumstances thus were far from normal as the colonial occupant saw a major threat by ‘‘ties’’ (3) to his vast economic opportunities. Not a few authors believe that the policy of economic opportunism motivated the imperialist master in locating power in a part of country where they hoped their interests will be protected. The struggle provided by oppression and marginalization was a contention that degenerated into ‘‘coups and a bloody civil war,’’ (4) as noted the above author. According to Stremlau, “The interests of profederal Western governments and the majority of African states, over how Nigeria should conduct the war,’’ (255) was largely to blame for the protracted event and its devastation. Nwankwo however argues that the killing, in 1966, of a segment of northern military officers, in the coup that installed Major General Aguiyi Ironsi led to the massacres of the Igbo. He 25
maintains that the fear in the northerners that the coup and the killings were part of grand plans by the Igbo “to dominate and colonize them,” (13) how the Sardauna was killed to achieve this agenda, as well as fear of more orchestrated killings took center stage. Hence, the prejudice so cultivated in what Nwankwo again describes as ‘‘thoughtless utterance and irresponsible actions’’ (13) by them manifested in the massacres. Then, the theory of ‘vicarious victimization’ played out as easterners began to leave the city of north in droves. Nwankwo posits:
Wives had seen their husbands killed, mothers had seen their daughters slaughtered, and children had seen their parents mown down. The survivors naturally believed anything. Very few people would do otherwise under similar circumstances. (14)
Madiebo sadly informs: “A story was told of a whole family that was locked up inside their house and the house set ablaze.” (39) According to him, there was an incident where at the Railway Station in Kano, a large group of Southerners fleeing north were attacked, killed and maimed by a mob. Their properties were looted. The social apartheid already created became the relative deprivation of the concept of control of life. It was to be gathered that Biafrans, then, had articulated a myth guiding their philosophy of war and emancipation. Nwankwo posits further that; “Biafra had the myth of the inevitability of Biafra- the belief that Biafra was the Christ of the black world, conceived by God to change the lot of the Negro race. It was a myth that was expressed, though belatedly and incoherently, in the Ahiara declaration.’’ (84) The new nation thought of revolutionizing “the black African from his stupor of psychological bondage and his pathological feeling of inferiority”, (80-81) by dovetailing on propaganda. For example, “the propaganda machinery was erected to provide the war-wearied public with colourful stories of heroism and glory so as to sustain morale and enthusiasm for the war and to cover any mistakes the high command might make,” (11) added Ogu. The consequence was that the leadership of the warring Biafra handled its administrative and military duties, to some extent, dismally because they had believed they would be victorious. Again, by the time the Nigerian government was through with their new foreign policy begun by General Yakubu Gowon a lot of devastation had been done to the people of Biafra. Accordingly, ‘‘a blockade was mounted against Biafra by Nigeria. Diplomatic offensive against 26
the separatists were also mounted’’, (21) says Ogu. This resulted in poor information, famine, hunger, disease, and death. Many still believe that the so- called assistance by some world powers to Nigeria to exterminate the Igbo people were as a result of the ‘oil’ on the Biafran soil. There are claims that the foreign collaborators kept funding the genocide being committed on Biafran soil, hoping that soon the Igbo will all die. The above author notes that; “while the war lasted, the Nigerian government in Lagos depended on…their creditors, the British, the Soviets and the Egyptians’ who ‘dictated the pace of the war and the terms for peace.’’ (15) Stemlau, a white writer, however, claims that; “pressure from Europe and America encouraged the federal government…to show restraint in the conduct of military operations’ while cooperating ‘fully with all peace initiatives.” (255) Ogu strongly notes that: They would be very vocal in condemnation of the brutal act but would turn around to vote more money the next hour to escalate the genocidal operations and then pace on as though their conscience were clear…the conflicts would have been minimal had it not been for the arms so readily available from these merchants of death. (22-23)
The foreign factor for the war was that Europe saw the Third World which Nigeria and Biafra were members as a place where they could market their arms, earn hard currency, assert political and economic influence and acquire military bases overseas. Of course, when their wishful desires were far from coming because of the resilience of the Igbo even in the midst of lack, hunger and death, then the outcry of some world bodies against the killings and injustices, these powers began withdrawing their support. Ogu would inform that; “hypocrisy and perfidy were to blame for the role played by foreign powers in the bloody conflict.” (27) Among some of the tactics utilized by the federal government and these outside powers included firearms, bombs, shelling, hunger, and deafening air-raids. Many eastern villages and communities were sacked in the event as victims moved from one area and the other as their villages and houses fell to the strong hands of these weapons. The result was hunger, famine, disease, malnutrition [kwashiorkor] which affected children and teenagers. The Nigerian military, Ogu reveals, also suffered heavy losses and casualties that “about a million Nigerian troops who believed that their advance on Biafra would be over in a matter of time stumbled in great columns to their deaths. …And the question as to whether or not the 27
tragedy was avoidable did not seem to bother the Nigerian leadership…and…those who advised, financed and directed the war- the British and the Russians.” (15) Thus casualties recorded during wars have been observed to include both combatants and noncombatants. And the aftermath effects are always not considered, especially the trauma victims and their relations face. Whichever way conflict Nigeria is looked at, what remains is that man, according to Nwankwo, “has a right to peace and security” (9) But the problem also remain that the causes of the 1967- 1970 war are still here with us: nepotism, tribalism, insecurity and corruption. If the people of Berom in Plateau state are not warring with their Fulani settlers, then, it is the rival communities in Benue and Taraba, or the Ezza and Ezillo communal feud in Ebonyi States. Political leaders and their pecuniary interests are other factors for the many conflicts that turn into wars in the country. There have been cases of inter and intra states ethnic clashes and gang wars among the Hausas’ and the Yoruba, in both Lagos and northern states. The tale-tale suffering arising from these wars and the nature of deaths really have not been comforting though. Explaining conflicts is also crucial to this research. This is because there can never be war without conflict. Therefore, conflict according to Folger as quoted by Chizea and Iyare is “the interaction of interdependent people, who perceive incompatible goals and interference from each other in achieving these goals,” (74-75) while Otite states that; “conflict emanates out of the pursuement of divergent interests, goals and aspirations by individuals and, or groups in defined social and physical environment.” (1) Changes in the social environment, such as contestable access to new political positions, or perceptions of new resources arising from development in the physical environment, are fertile grounds for conflicts involving individuals, and groups who are interested in using these new resources to achieve their goals. (1)
Coser also cited by Chizea and Iyare maintains that conflict is “a struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponent are to neutralize, injure, or eliminate their rivals.” (75) A case in point is the war in recent times between Hausa/ Fulani Muslims and Christian indigenes of Jos North Local Government Area. In the violent conflict that ensued after a political council election on November 28, 2008, over 500 people were killed. 28
Lawan Danjuma who reported for National Review believes that the theory of ‘territorial imperative’ formulated by Robert Ardrey had motivated the internecine war. He posits that; “the indigenes can be seen to feel denied of an opportunity to “grow and develop” in the context of a general competition for scarce resources.’’ (19-20) National Review comments that given the problem of ethnicity and scarce resources especially in employments, ‘‘a public servant was regarded first as an ethnic servant and as an ethnic breadwinner before he was regarded as a public servant.’’ (19) This is the case almost anywhere there is communal war in the country, whether they occur in Sabon Gari in Kano or Gariki in Enugu. The conflict thus has been at the ‘indigene’ rejecting the ‘settler’ in most cases. In the 2008 devastation that engulfed Jos North, Tell of December 15 reveals that; “youths, armed with guns and machetes, invaded their neighbours’ houses, maiming and killing their victims.’’ (21) In the end ‘‘more than 500 people were reported dead, while thousands had been displaced.’’ (21) Tell's report is not different from what Danjuma informs us in National Review , that the election was hotly contested between the ‘settlers’ and ‘indigenes’ who are of ethnic Muslims and ethnic Christians. A woman whose husband was killed in the war, narrates Tell reporter Tajudeen Suleiman, gave an account of her ordeal. It was our neighbour’s cry that woke us up. My husband quickly woke our children up so that we could run away before they entered our house. But as we left the house running, I heard gunshots. I looked back and I saw my husband falling down. They shot him and I didn’t know what to do. (23)
Muslim victims of the carnage, as published by Tell , claimed that police men killed most of the dead, as more residents stated that; “about 16 students were killed in AL-Bayan Islamic Secondary School, one of the schools which is a boarding school.” (23, 26) However, many of the people who argued that the ethnic war was used to whip up ‘religious sentiments,’ among who was the governor Jonah Jang said: “mercenaries were brought in to perpetrate the crime.” (28) Three youth corps members were also killed in the mayhem. (29) In another account of communal disturbances at Sho village in Barakin Ladi, between the Fulani/Berom, Gyang Dantong, a senator, was killed among others, as a reprisal for the killing of three Fulani men. According to Daily Independent report of August 24, 2009, many people lost their lives in inter ethnic war in Ukele and Ezzi communities in Cross River and Ebonyi states over 29
territorial boundary. The paper notes that; “between 2005 and 2009, number of death casualty rose to over one hundred, aside human displacements.” (VI) The causes are not far from what we have discussed above and from what Chizea and Iyare would inform us of the problem of ‘‘those who own the means of production’’ (75) and where ‘‘identity, security, development, and meaning of life, as human needs’’, (77) become battered or made meaningless to the warring parties. According to the The Guardian January 1, 2012, ‘‘over 52 persons’’ were killed in Ebonyi in a communal war involving Ezza and Ezillo. It is the same story with the people of Ojantele and Ijegwu of Benue state. Many of them were old women, children within the age brackets of two and three, middle aged persons, including a Divisional Crime Officer attached to the Ezillo police station in Ishielu. One Jacob Okoro, a victim of the communal war who expressed his loss and apprehension to the newspaper asked: ‘Look at me, I don’t know what to do; just look at me. I have lost my entire family, including my certificates. Just look at me; where do I go from here?’ (15) In the Ojantele/ Ijegwu case in Oturkpo and Obi local government areas, 12 persons were reported killed in a communal war over land. The Daily Sun report of August 9, 2012 says that; “about 120 persons were displaced, as the crisis had been on for ten years.” (13) Between the Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) and Hausa/Fulani, it is not cheery, in Lagos. The death toll from their clashes in 2002 were put at “100 and 120; 460 injured and countless refugees,” (30) according to Newswatch of February 18, 2002. The cause of the wanton destruction was nothing other than that an Hausa man eased himself close to the OPC secretariat and was subsequently manhandled after failing to pay an illegal fine. According to the report by Eno Reuben and Solomon Ibharuneafe in the magazine above, “there have been several clashes between OPC and the Hausa and other ethnic groups in Lagos since the return of democracy in 1999. These clashes have resulted in the death of several hundred persons.” (34) We are to note that some of these gang organizations are often times set up by political leaders to undermine the true essence of peace and governance and to implement their pecuniary interests. This is given impetus by the failure of the police in the discharge of their duties. Among the groups that are used to cause wanton destruction, mayhem and suffering, revealed Chizea and Iyare include; “O’dua Peoples’ Congress OPC, Arewa Peoples’ Congress APC, 30
Movement for the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), the Ijaw militia, Egbesu, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer force (NDPVF) and other ethnic based groups dotting the different parts of the country…”(83) Some of the wars have been fought using mercenaries. It is pertinent to point out that these countless Nigerian wars by her citizens have left them sicker and their personality ever challenged. With a changed mindset one is at risk of performing certain social obligations more again battered identity. The time things are done proper and the victims of these problems assisted to begin to live with society the better.
2.5 Terrorism in Nigeria Terrorism has had a long history in Nigeria. According to a data released recently by the Institute for Economics and Peace, Nigeria is on the ladder of 7 th most terrorized nation in the world, from a position of 16 in 2008. The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) says the nation went down from 16 th in 2008 to 11 in 2009, 12 in 2010; and now with a GTI of 7. 24. Nigeria recorded 168 incidents of terrorism in 2011 out of which 437 people lost their lives; 614 persons’ sustained injuries and 33 properties were destroyed. Sudan is even better than Nigeria, the former which is ranked 11 th and Mali 34th. The above statistics is within a four year period. The evil caused by terrorists and all terror acts have reached an alarming rate. Some of the options of terrorism in Nigeria are domestic violence, armed robbery, assassination, kidnapping and hostage- taking, religious fundamentalism, political riots and cultism. But this work will be looking at a few of them which include assassination, kidnapping and hostage taking, execution, religious fundamentalism and political riots for their peculiar relationship with the texts of study. Assassination and execution as terror acts started becoming the order of the day with the coming into power by the military. It was used as a tool to eliminate and or silence the opposition, critics and social activists whose statements and actions were antithetical to the policies of the time. During the military regimes of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, Nigerians witnessed the worst ever period of assassinations via letter bombs. It was at this time that Nigerians, according to Ikejiani- Clark, “became aware of the use of state personnel and apparatus to terrorize the citizenry.” (5) A statistical data of some of the assassinations in the country documented by The Nigeria Police Record and The Guardian between 1994 and ’96, and found in Ikejiani- Clark’s work reveal that about 15 persons were murdered. Some of them include: “Mrs Irene Obodo, Manager, Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria Ikeja; Augustine 31
Nwokeukwu, Senior Sales Representative, Lufthansa, Lagos; Hajiya Kudirat Abiola and Vice Admiral Babatunde Elegbede [rtd].” (5) Also between February to July, 2001, The News published in September 10, 2011 also revealed that; “about twenty nine (29) Nigerians were brutally murdered. While some of the assassinations were for occult rituals, others were perpetrated by ethnic military gangs.” (42) Most of these terror acts have been carried out to instill fear in the people. This has made Nigerians to express worrisome fears about their security and safety in a land that governance seems not to be working at all. Ikejiani- Clark notes that the ethnic militias and vigilante groups that carry out most of the dastard acts of murder and assassination sprang up as the answer to government’s perceived inactivity. Their national spread makes it even more believable that political leaders, especially state governors are using them to destabilize their opponents as well as perceived enemies. In the same story covered by Ademola Adegbamigbe of The News, extra-judicial killings by the security agencies and ethnic militias during Obasanjo’s first year of administration were surveyed by a non-governmental organization. The report indicates that “over 252 Nigerians were killed and the police and military officials are responsible for 61% while the rest goes to the ethnic warlords.” (43) In Nigeria, the image of the police, in particular, is waning as the people see them as legitimized killers and terrorists, than as law enforcement agents. Assassinations like its sister terrorists acts create panic in the people with its future cumulative toll on their psychology. Those who engage in it are as well known to act from past terror impulses. The terrorisms of hostage taking and kidnapping are no longer news in Nigeria. It has fully become a political weapon more an economic policy. It is right to point out that kidnapping, with the intent to inflict psychological trauma, has become a family form of terrorism. Through the act of hostage taking and kidnapping, terrorists enter into negotiations to protect themselves or achieve specific demands. In a report by Sunday Vanguard of May 31, 2008 titled, “Anti- Terrorist Cops hunt for seized oil company executives,” some community leaders from Ilaje in Ondo State made their grievances known after the abduction of 200 oil workers and expatriates by their youths: We are aggrieved because our communities have been neglected in the midst of plenty. Out of over $250 billion dollars earned from oil between 32
1970 and 1990, the areas are deficient in basic amenities such as electricity, roads, water, telecommunications, housing, and schools. (2)
The failure of the government to explain what constitutes natural resources and what gets to the owners of these resources as entitlements have largely been the problem. Federal revenue comes from oil resources which are domiciled in the nine states of the oil producing areas of Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers, and more recently Anambra. These states do not get appreciable allocation from the federal government and the injustice accounts for the general restiveness in the areas. Victims are often held for ransoms which run into millions of naira or dollars. Many have fallen casualties to death. A record of hostage taking reveals that about 938 persons were in the period between 2008 and August 2012 kidnapped. According to a statistical report in Saturday Sun of August 18, 2012; “Anambra accounts for 273 victims, Imo 265; 215 for Abia, and 95 and 90 allotted to Enugu and Ebonyi, respectively.” (30) Arrested kidnapper, Rowel [24], according to Thisday report of April 6, 2012 discloses that; “In kidnapping, all you need to do is intimidate the victim and they will simply obey you.’’ (40) Decades of unpurposeful leadership and wicked exploitation of the means of survival of the people by oil workers, expatriates and their colluding partners have produced organizations of terrorists of various ideologies. They seize oil workers, family people and children and are easy means of contracting mercenaries for communal bloodletting. These problems as we say have destroyed the psyche of many a family in the country as people no longer trust each other. According to Yacine, therefore, “shifts in the law can clearly be seen once it is not purely and simply a matter of deviations or in a bloody and smoky battle that no longer obeys any logic for lack of points of reference.” (27) Ethno-religious attacks have been part of the country’s problem and given Nigeria’s inertia at curtailing killings, it has formed a reprehensible method of hitting up the polity and inciting religious murders. Tell in its December 15, 2008 report informs that; “from the Maitatsine riots to the Kaduna Sharia riots of 2000 and now, more than 10,000 Nigerians have been dispatched to untimely graves.” (30) Ikejiani- Clark states that in 1994, in Kano, “an Igbo trader, Gideon Akaluka was beheaded while he was in prison custody over trumped up charges of burning the Koran.” (9) Between the period 1991 and 1997, she would inform that not 33
less than 452 Nigerians were slaughtered in states of Bauchi, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna and Lagos. Thousands of shops, hotels and houses were either destroyed or set ablaze. Remarks by some personalities from the north have destroyed whatever good relationship that existed between the Moslems and Christians, even ethnic races. Among them is Major-General Muhammadu Buhari who was military ruler of Nigeria from 1983 to 1985. He has often advanced the need for the operation of Sharia in all states of the federation. According to the Tell publication of September 24 , 2001, “he urged Muslims not to be afraid to ensure the realization of this agenda.’’ (27) In 2011 when he contested and lost at the presidency, Buhari urged Islamic northerners not to vote for a Christian and promised Nigeria violence if [their votes] did not count. Boko Haram , an extremist terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda, and which have been known to carry terror attacks in parts of the north began in 2002 as an Islamic splinter group. The politicians began deploying their violence toward elections. According to Jonah Jang, in Daily Independent August 24, 2009 report; ‘‘when we [politicians] cannot win election, we start using religion to achieve our ends,’’ (1) Soyinka, in The Guardian publication of January 24, 2012, states that; “this horde has remained available to political opportunists and criminal leaders desperate to stave off the day of reckoning.” (80) However, the group in order to avenge the death of Mohammed Yusuf believed to have been killed by the police in 2009 for his alleged leadership of the terror group started targeting the police, military posts, local politicians and churches, killing and maiming Nigerians, including Muslims. The Guardian , Wednesday, April 11, and January 29, 2012 indicate that Boko Haram aside operating three groups that launch three different agendas, “the group is against the very structure of the Nigerian State, which it deems antithetical to its Islamic beliefs, and wants a strict Sharia code, such that its members would be able to practice their religion.” (1-6) This is also contained in Thisday publication of Monday, April 9, 2012. (1) The former National Security Adviser General Owoye Azazi in The Guardian editorial of January 15, 2012 and in an article published by same paper on January 13, 2012 states that, Boko Haram “ sees itself as fulfilling part of a global mission’ [and] ‘is striving to spark a religious war,’’ (20, 51) respectively. The kid-glove handling of this menace is not consoling. According to Osolease in his article published by Daily Sun of Wednesday May 16, 2012 maintain that Boko Haram is “a sustained mechanism to oust the government in power” (20) by 34
exposing, quotes the Saturday Sun publication of August 18, 2012, the ‘‘incompetence of government and the cluelessness of security agencies.’’ (13) Also according to Okafor, in Daily Sun’s opinion report of Monday June 4, 2012, “ever since the terrorist group declared war on Southern leadership and against the Christian faith, more than one thousand six hundred Nigerians, especially Christians, have lost their lives.” (20) He further says that; “the attacks, instead of abating, have kept on spreading like wildfire… the recent pronouncement by the sect to bring down the present administration to its knee cannot be taken lying low considering the current spate of attacks in Abuja, Potiskum, Jos, Adamawa, Borno, etc.” (20) In January [2012], “over 250 Nigerians, in Kano, lost their lives after a bomb explosion. Casualties included Enenche Akogwu, correspondent and cameraman for the Channels Television,” (24, 52) as published by The Guardian , January 29, 2012 and January 18, 2012 respectively. All these acts of terrorisms and ethnic skirmishes have cost the nation an unquantifiable loss in human capital and property, while spreading untold grief and emotional trauma across the landscape. Series of bombings and exiling of humans have become the bane of states like Kaduna, Borno, Yobe, Kano, Bauchi, Gombe, Plateau, Niger and even Abuja. This systemic plan to eliminate humanity totally negates all social ties. For as Yacine points out; “the limits of the ethical have been reached” (27) as these evil acts are also directed against public institutions, villages, holy places of worship where neither women nor children are spared. Furthermore, figures and locations bombed between January 2010 and January 20, 2012, including victims and casualties as variously provided by The Guardian of Sunday, January 22, 2012 and Thisday published on April 30, 2012 on their separate newspaper pages, (2, 8) indicate that not less than 293 Nigerians were murdered and bombed, including the injured and many institutions destroyed. The nation's inability to describe what entails terrorism, indeed, is surprising, “as the U.S. government has gone ahead and signed into law a $662 billion defense spending plan, though Obama has serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” (48) says The Guardian , Monday, January 2, 2012. The bloody event of the Christmas day at Madalla and others challenge us to adopt a humanist perception to religion. The orientation that religion is godly when it incites hatred, killings and death is stale. 35
A few psychological and mental and physical impacts of the new wave of terrorism in Nigeria are tenable. The Nation Sunday , May 1, 2011 reports that after the post-election crisis in 2011, in which “nine corps members were killed,” (8) the wife of slain Elliot Adowei, Tessy, described her grief and that of her children thus: “My children are also bitter, and say things that give me concern for children of their age. They keep asking why those people would take away their father…tell me, how would I survive without him?” (5) The priest in charge at St. Theresa, Isaac Achi, notes Thisday report of Friday April 13, 2012, would tell us that: “Families who lost their loved ones are so emotionally affected and bruised that many are even afraid of coming to the church or pass by the church.” (19) He noted that one of the women from Adazi Nnukwu in Anambra who lost her husband and three children in the bomb explosion confided in him how ‘difficult’ it is for her to sleep at night. On the bombing of Thisday office in Abuja, an intern Grace Chimezie gives a graphical portrayal of its impact on her and a ten year old. According to her statement in Thisday of April 30, 2012; “My thought pattern was disorganized. I was dazed out of this world…I was deeply touched by the sight of a child between the age of 10-12 years, who was sorely affected by the blast…it would take me a long time to overcome the shock…the chattering sounds of metal sank my heart. They keep flashing back in my mind…” (7) Terrorism has had unpleasant consequences on Nigerians. Aside its goal of inflicting death it also aggravates displacement by alienating victims from society. According to The Guardian of January 29, 2012 "Killings In The North Special Report: How Southerners Flee North", one of the displaced persons Adams Abdul discloses: We were leaving [sic] in Hotoro during the post-election crisis last year (2011). We escaped death by the whiskers and relocated to Kawu; and this time, just last Friday, [January 20 th bomb blast, 2012] we witness [sic] the attack on State Security Services. How do you think we are safe again? We just have to leave and live to hear the story of what happens next. (13)
In January 2012, about 1,041 Youth Service members fled Adamawa State because of killings by the terrorists even as two other displaced persons, Romanus Obiwuru and Edith Okwolisa note in the above newspapers that: “We do not know what will happen any moment now’ (1) as ‘her family [Okwolisa] had no other option but to flee Kano for good.” (2) The sufferings as gleaned above are all too glaring as Nigerians expose how they endure the costs of 36
terrorism.
2.6 Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy is among the streams of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud, psychiatrist and neurosurgeon in 1909. According to David Sue; Derald Sue, and Stanley Sue., psychoanalysis “seeks to help patients achieve insight into their own inner motivations and desires.” (56) Smith in his statement says that; “psychoanalysis emphasizes helping the patient to understand problems he is not aware of, problems that are deeply rooted in the unconscious mind,” (500) maintaining how Freud demonstrated the importance of such concepts as “the unconscious, anxiety, defense mechanisms, and dream analysis,” (507) respectively. Psychoanalysis is a method of understanding mental life, or the psychological theory or process that details how mental life functions on both conscious and unconscious levels and that psychological influence through life starts from childhood and could be powerful in its impact. Freud is not the only psychoanalyst as there are others like Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, to mention a few. Smith states that whereas Adler spoke of “innate social interest” and Horney emphasized “the role of culture and family in personality functioning,” Harry Stack Sullivan and Jung stressed “the importance of interpersonal interaction” and how “the ego consists of all conscious aspects of the personality which develops as a result of social pressure.” (504, 506) In welcoming the Freudian postulation, however, the theorists distanced themselves from what they claimed to be his “too much emphasis on the biological underpinnings of behaviour,” (507) though this argument has abated in recent years, even as Jung “hypothesized a personal unconscious that consists of personal experiences that were once conscious and have been repressed.” (505) Psychoanalytic theory to be precise as propounded by Freud contained a scientific theory of personality, psychopathology [abnormal behavior], and psychotherapy. He states, according to Smith that; “emotional experiences are largely a result of unconscious processes.” (482) This contains emotions, motives, and memories of previous experiences of which we are in the dark, but which obviously influence dimensions of behaviour, the therapy being the recollection of, most often, childhood experiences, which are shrouded in sexual imagery. Beland H. comments 37
that these unconscious interplays “are often in the negative, particularly anxiety and anger,’ unearthing conflicting emotions ‘at unconscious levels of functioning.” (63-91) They often are powerful, unpleasant and disturbing. Smith argues that Freud would describe it as an unconscious conflict being the result of early childhood experience. His theoretical analysis, the author notes, served as a springboard for elaborating on psychodynamic theories that relate with emotion ‘‘and their implications for abnormal behavior,’’ (482) because they more often than not, ‘‘serves no consciously obvious purpose’ nor instill an ‘awareness of where they came from.’’ (484) Citing Magnarita, the author above states that; “unconscious factors are those of which we are not aware but have far greater influence on our behavior than do conscious ones.” (501) Hence, Freud articulated an expansion of consciousness, including those that we lack awareness and the deeply unconscious which further he explained in three segments of the conscious, the unconscious and the preconscious. The conscious is like, as he said, “the tip of an iceberg,” but enclosing all that we are to know and has this quality of change in time. Whereas the unconscious is in scope larger and more penetrative with most aspects of human behavior; the preconscious makes use of the first two in that it is the store-house of memories, thoughts and perceptions that can quite spring up like an emotional recall work. “If a child is asked to produce the house number in which they live and also the names of the parents, and he does that, we have the preconscious achieved” (501) in Freud’s analysis. Freud speculated on dream as the most inspiring aspect of psychological treasure. On the theory, ‘‘the dream is a disguised version of a dangerous unconscious wish or impulse’’, (501) says Aron as quoted by Smith. This instrument is significant in explaining or revealing self-understanding as research shows that anxiety, one of the theories of the unconscious, is the emotion most frequently experienced in dreams, thereby supporting Freudian contention that the dream is a pent-up house of negative emotions. Okpewho admits that Freudian dreams were given more sexual readings than ought to have been, thus making a sense in what social psychoanalysts traded as one of their criticisms of shortcomings by Freud. He highlights that; ‘‘erotic wishes dominate the fantasies almost exclusively’ in young women ‘for their ambition is generally comprised in their erotic longings.’’ (9) The author is in agreement with Smith’s Freudian unconscious emotions that the “desire or distaste for our parents’ was ‘part of the stock of psychic impulses which arise in early 38
childhood.’’ (9) Freud’s psychotherapy is highly Oedipal, having been convinced that king Oedipus whose story of psychic behavior in which Oedipus “who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood.’’ (9) Or in that reluctance to carry out the revenge of his father’s killing by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . According to Nwabueze, “he is unable to avenge his father’s death because he clandestinely associates himself with his father’s assassin’ because it is ‘his wish to kill his mother who, to him, is the more dangerous offender, and this suppresses his attempts to kill his uncle.” (140) Freud also formulated the three activities of hypothetical personality structure that are used in reading or determining psychological behaviour. They are distributed into the id, ego and superego. According to Smith, “the id thrives on the pleasure principle’ which Freud postulates is ‘the ultimate source of all psychic energy operating as codes of fantasy, irrational and impulsive behaviour.” (501) An example of id experience would be the decision by someone to involve himself in full time religious evangelism knowing the time for that had been set down for higher studies, or live in fantasy that he is an artiste or has achieved fame as a broadcaster. The ego and superego, Smith would, each, tell us operate, “on the reality principle” (501) and as a “conscience.” (502) Through the ego, the individual learns to differentiate between fantasy and reality, to plan ahead and to gain some control over the external environment, while the superego works as a check on human behaviour. This third psychic structure provides internal social controls which may serve as punishment or constitute regret in the individual’s exhibited emotion. It operates on the level of protecting social mores and norms and punishing acts that try to subvert it. It does this by creating feelings of guilt for considering an act to be immoral; with the individual, if the emotion expressed is intense, working toward the “ego ideal’ in which ‘the person strives to achieve” (502) positive set of goals. In the theory and practice of modern psychoanalysis, anxiety is significant in guarding against certain dangers as mechanisms of defense. Freud describes these dangers to be the fear of abandonment by or the loss of the loved one, according to Smith. It further intensifies a fight against losing the object and represents a sort of clash among the psychic structures; this, which the author above notes as an “unpleasant emotional state characterized by nervousness and apprehension.” (502) It leads again to repression in which the ego utilizes its energy to produce 39
impulse that reduces threat or prevents its expression entirely. According to Agulanna and Onukogu, repression manifests in a clinging fight “against some experience of disappointment, failure, or pain etc.” (154) We are to maintain, as noted by Okpewho that, Freud’s psychoanalysis was “uniformly of a sexual character.” (9) His concentration or choice of libido [desire] which he was to change to sexuality, was one major weakness which theorists like Jung and Adler saw, and pounced upon to develop their own processes of social concerns and family needs more outside the cling of sexuality rooted in childhood experiences. Agulanna and Onukogu also say that the Freudian basic instincts are aligned toward the eros or life instincts, and thanatos, or death or destructive instincts. “The most important being the ‘libido’ which is responsible for most of our overt actions, like love, reproduction, altruism, whereas the death instinct involves the wish to die.” (151) Among the defense mechanisms propagated by Freud are the reaction formation, projection, and rationalization. The last tries to justify reasons of which we are aware are wrong. For example, a woman who has illicit sex with her gardener, and argues that her husband does not love her but loves keeping her. According to David Sue, Derald and Stanley Sue., this could happen when “a person gives well- thought out and socially acceptable reasons for certain behavior- but these reasons do not happen to be the real ones.” (55) Others are “regression, denial, compensation and conversion,” (155) according to Agulanna and Onukogu. Jung also speculates that the ego consists of all conscious aspects of the personality. In his work "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" (1922) , Jung said that; “neuroses are by no means exclusively caused by sexual repression, and the same holds for psychoses.” (837) Maintaining this position, though Freud had in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) “castigated him for his defection”, (10) as contained in Okpewho, Jung argued that; “the claim that dreams merely contain repressed wishes whose moral compatibility required an analyst lacked basic foundation’ and opposes Freud’s ‘rigid dogmatism,” (774) adding that it is insensible to talk of the dramatist’s relationship with his parents. This he says is reductive; it fails to help us understand his poetry, for a work of art, which is not a disease, does not subscribe to medical analysis. This is his opinion as characterization in drama is unearthed by using tools that explore human behaviour, cross boundarily. 40
Smith would also inform of how Freud hypothesized the collective unconscious of personality theory in which “the personality contains experiences accumulated over generations of humanity and transmits genetically to the individual as a set of universal tendencies.” (504) Whatever is produced has the tendency to appeal in behaviour a response toward individuals or situations which could represent the archetype. In his espousing the personal unconscious, Jung states that this could be achieved through a process of ‘complexes’, each complex being a collective experience of the individual through thoughts, perceptions, values and emotions that are related to the object of love. In their general psychological studies they both accepted that, “for any idea to find a home in the mind of an individual, that mind has to be basically predisposed to receive it. But when Freud stressed the mind and the circumstances that gave it that predisposition, Jung concentrated instead on the idea and its tendency to be a universal guest,” (11) says Okpewho. However, Jung proposes four major psychological functions of personality in which substrates of behavioral influence are explored. They are sensation and intuition, and thinking versus feeling. According to Smith, “the individual deploys sensation as monitor- observing his environment and taking it in, while intuition interprets these in subjective readings; with thinking and feeling classifying experiences as well as information in their distinct orders of ‘ logical, discrete’ tensions and ‘pleasantness and unpleasantness’ into a value arrangement.” (506) And like Freudian theory, Jung also attracted remarks, some which were not favourable; his being racist in his theorizing, and in Northrop Frye’s remark that his “collective unconscious” theory was ‘an unnecessary hypothesis,’ (12) as quoted in Okpewho. Adler in his own psychoanalytic tradition contends that personality behaviour takes order in a social context and are fed by thoughts [feelings] of inadequacy [inferiority] that develop in childhood. Inadequacy in this context becomes critical in dominating the individual’s behaviour toward compensatory attitudes. Adler also projected the role of birth order in forming behavioral patterns. Smith opines that, “the first child may later feel inadequate or threatened when other children are produced by the parents; with the second dominating the family and becoming an ambitious and striving individual.’ There could also be the possibility of ‘an only child dominating the parents in formative years only to gain rewards for this behaviour as part of habits cultivated over a long period of time.” (506) 41
The other social analysts or post-Freudian psychodynamic theorists in their works emphasized the place of social factors on human behaviour. This later idea negates the dominant strain of sexuality in defining unconscious character. For example, Karen Horney, a female psychoanalyst noted, according to Smith, “the impact of innate capacity for human growth as influencing drives in the individual who constantly strives for, but never quite achieves, the fullest realization of all potentialities.” Horney claimed that; “lack of parental love could result in a web of general hostility in which a child has an obstruct feeling of hopelessness and isolations; such anxiety,’ Smith would maintain, ‘could aggravate neuroses- a class of disorders lodged in high level apprehension that results in disordered patterns of behaviour.” (506) According to the authors of the book, Understanding Abnormal Behavior, they include schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal and bizarre behavior. They can further be described as indicating the presence of psychoses in which affected individuals lose contact with reality and have difficulty recognizing how unstable they are. Sullivan worked on the premise that satisfaction needs and security needs are basic biological requirement for survival as well as anxiety that arises from social interactions. For example, “the social expectations [interactions] which Sullivan named ‘personifications’ guide the child in his hope to find characteristics similitude with the mother’s attitudes in other women. This bears a powerful influence on the child’s factor of relationship he develops with such women.” (507) This accounts for why individuals introduce behaviour characteristics that lead to war and terror. However, contemporary psychoanalytic approach takes the process of ‘object relations’ and focuses on each person’s relationship with variegated number of objects. The social relationships theory, Smith opines; “have a considerable impact on the child’s development of a sense of self and identity, as well as feelings of psychological security and sex role. A bonding by the child is initiated in early growth but an early destructive one can lead to psychopathology.” (504) Again, whereas Freud’s postulation was on the biological and irrational appendages of the id, contemporary psychoanalysis concentrates on the rational influences of the ego. This later theory, Nwabueze claims, “extol the individualistic and idiosyncratic forces of the unconscious which emasculate the hazardous solidity of self,” (140) while Erikson, declared Agulanna and Onukogu, was of the opinion that; “development is an ongoing process that spans throughout life.” (157) 42
When behaviour deviates from acceptable social norms, and does not furnish the well being of the individual and society, there is abnormal behaviour. An instance will be the schizophrenic individual who experiences severe disturbances [psychoses] that could involve disruption of thought processes, as the affected, outside losing contact with reality, still suffers developing false beliefs about themselves or others and keep on following life in the dramatic state.
CHAPTER THREE TEXTUAL SUMMARY AND IMPACT OF WAR AND TERRORISM ON THE CHARACTERS/VICTIMS
3.1 Summary of Selected Texts
Madmen and Specialists dramatizes the consequences of war and terrorism on the general psyche of victims and casualties in the play. When the play begins, the Mendicants, casualties of war, are seen demonstrating the impact of the war on their lives. These are evidenced in the various scars, wounds and diseases on their bodies. While some have been rendered blind, like Blindman, others manifest different levels of psychological and bodily imbalance. Aafaa’s attitude and language toward Si Bero underscore this. While they are out to seek for arms, they situate in them this tactic of monitoring someone aside causing trouble. We understand that Si Bero’s brother, Dr. Bero has been out on the warfront treating casualties of war and restoring hopes. Back home, the sister looks after his clinic and is being tutored on the art of herbs by the Old Women who are the earth mothers. In turn, these women have to be paid for the work they do to keep Bero’s business alive. When Dr. Bero returns, he quickly hushes his sister who expresses happiness that he is back. A kind of ominous tension pervades from which we uncover his aloofness to reality. His language is subsequently couched in elemental and schizophrenic symbolism. The Priest who enquires after his father and his sojourn at war does not observe Bero’s ‘cold attitude’, but suspecting his involvement with human body rituals, takes flight. Even the Women (Iya Mate and Iya Agba) are not sure of Dr. Bero, from whom they expect this payment. His discussion with the Mendicants and altercation and fight with the loquacious Aafaa prove one thing: The Mendicants are not what they appear to be. Their language of discussion is further laced with images of death, dying and disillusionment as the issue being argued seems far from human understanding. Further interactions between Si Bero 43
and the Old Women, like the Mendicants, reveal that these earth mothers are not what they appear to be. Their demand of payment means the payment of a human life. Si Bero is in constant plea with these women for understanding and with her brother about the whereabouts of their father, the Old Man. Bero’s response is not reassuring as we are to discover that the Old Man, a humanist, according to Cripple, is held hostage by his son and the Mendicants. Blindman is not, more so Cripple and Aafaa and Goyi in their different metaphorization of suffering and wars’ adversities. They are indeed mercenaries, to say the least kidnappers. Bero’s gestapo style sees him demanding like a terrorist, from his father, the key to the As. The As, though a word metaphor, represents a spiritual or religious essence of being, which Bero wants to know its meaning and to be at the headship. Bero’s further demand that the Old Women leave the premises without being paid meets brick wall. They are ready to give a fight to ensure their objective is achieved. These earth mothers express some hideous knowledge of future danger in which they describe Bero as evil. While some of the Mendicants draw our sympathy in their clear description of life’s servitude by war and terrorism, others intensify the terror ideology. It is in this that the Old Man is assassinated by Bero with his firearm, as the Old Women set on fire the whole house of herbs which stands beyond Si Bero’s life toils. Unable to comprehend the present, she leaps psychedelically seeking answers, confused. Madmen, makes a powerful statement on the psychological impact of war and terrorism. It posits that the future of terrorism is tense. Some of the weapons employed and what the characters suffer suggest that both chemical and biological tactics are being used. The Old Women and Dr. Bero represent two political, economic and religious organizations that in their Marxian tenets, each, fighting to take over control of governance. This necessitates the killing and dying that are revealed in their actions and speech. The Old Man and Si Bero, however, come as the victims and casualties of the terror acts while the Mendicants, to some extent and by their exhibitions of deformations through symbolic imagery, double as casualties of war and terror. Dr. Bero is not even free from this tag having been to war and experienced psychological awkwardness. Women of Owu is an individual and collective account (s) of woe and sorrow that follow the events of war and terror unleashed on the people of Owu by the Allied Forces of Ijebu, Ife and Oyo. The oracle has proclaimed the baby Adejumo ill-fated and so must be sacrificed to 44
avert an impending calamity in the land. But Erelu, the queen mother hides him- as to be found out- the love that a mother has for the child. The Owu, by nature, are proud and arrogant and have sold their neighbours into slavery aside engaging them in endless political superiority and economic contention. This is exampled in the forceful seizure of the Apomu market, a center of commerce, owned by the Ijebu, their ancestral kingdom. Adejumo grows into a man of comeliness and valour and takes to kidnapping. His victim is Iyunloye, the beautiful wife of the Ijebu artist, Okunade; who soon becomes his wife. The Owu has forgotten their history and in their rampaging battle for political control and killing and dying, they further sack the Ife army. These and others are to be the remote and immediate causes for which Lawumi, their ancestral goddess is to clandestinely empower the Ijebu and the allied forces to destroy the once glorious city. In the invasion, the Owu are promised liberation from their tyranic Oba. With their gates locked within the fortified city the Allied Forces encamped round it waiting for the time to strike. There comes a devastating draught in the third year of the siege and in the seventh year the Owu troops out. The invaders mow down the males, women and children, leaving a group of royal women and their lower class counterparts as booties of war. As the play opens, we see these women victims out to fetch water. The city as they discuss with Anlugbua, their ancestral deity lies ‘smouldering,’ and in devastating ruins. It is in enquiring about the destruction and acute level of human wastage that it is found out that Owu did not summon this deity, who appears to be understanding and sympathetic, during the period of the siege. But Anlugbua cannot help them in their frustration having realized his own hopelessness. The absurdity of the law in place establishes these gods as playing politics with human life. They are there to foist misunderstanding between the people and to exercise punishment. As we encounter Erelu- Afin, the queen mother and the other women, she lies ‘floundering’ on the ground, objectifying her sorrow, grief, and life’s meaninglessness. From her attitude and speech and those of the other women, we interpret fear, terror, delusion, schizophrenia and social withdrawal. The experience they have and Gesinde’s continued unannounced visits remind them of the situation they are in, how their rights and privacy are constantly being trampled upon. His own helplessness as a combatant is also exposed. The women relive their experiences of agony and terrorism as they are exploited sexually and lack awareness of what awaits them. They lose hope and can only express themselves in songs of 45
woe. In the meeting between Lawumi and Anlugbua, mother and son, agree that the invading forces have to be punished. They have spilled blood on the sacred groves of Lawumi and other deities, unsparing those who ran to the shrines for protection. Orisaye, the priestess at Obatala is brutally dragged out and now manifests’ delusion, psychedelism and neurotic withdrawal as well as the soldiers setting the shrines ablaze. The gods and goddesses have no place now to stay more so the worshippers. The Allied Forces, they curse, will never make it home. They will be decimated on their way, with stomach of beasts their return home. The women are shared between the soldiers, some as servants and others as wives. The efforts of the lower class women to know their lot is quickly and terroricly rebuffed by Gesinde: ‘What else do you think will happen to riff-raff?’ The agreement of these deities illustrate that mortals are the plaything of gods. At every turn of the war and terror it is seen that the gods are the initiators of the acrimony that leads to renewed displacement, fight for political and economic control, including killing and dying. The sharing of the women particularly the allotment of the queen mother to Balogun Derin; Orisaye to Balogun Kusa, and Adumadaan to Otunba Lekki; or the murder and execution of Adeoti and Aderogun, last male of the kingdom, do not go down well with the women who express their loss, grief and melancholy. Their viewpoint of the war, of actions of the human actors and the gods, and how they are terrorized through the past and new developments reflect in their behaviour and sense of perception to these incidents. The deities, on the other hand, far from their rationalist tandem, show an extremist sort of ideology in solving social and religious issues. The plot of the play proves them to be in hot competition with mortals whose government they must topple. Orisaye prophesies the doom of the invaders while her mother Erelu in a ritual suffering of death proclaims the end of Owu and its rebirth. Thus, as mortals’ suffer and witness the politics surrounding their death and alienation, it becomes truesome that the deities, external forces, who mastermind these barbaric acts, suffer too, the wages of war and terrorism. No character escapes it, either as victim or casualty, no matter the level of politics played. For Love of Biafra by Adichie presents an Igbo extended family whose daughter Adaobi, is torn between love and patriotism as a result of the cruel massacre of her people and the death of her loved ones in the Nigerian- Biafran civil war. The action opens in Sabon Gari in Kano, northern Nigeria where the Udemezues live. Early discussions in the play by Adaobi’s parents’ 46
suggest an air of racial tension. Mama Nduka will not allow her daughter to be married by an Hausa. A man from their tribe visits to inform them of an impending massacre of rich men from the ethnic region. He confirms his story with the assassination and decapitation of an Igbo businessman in Sabon Gari. He will live the city the next day and has come to warn them. An aura of confusion, tense and disbelief hang on the family as hardly they left Kano for the town of Nsukka do the ugly massacres take place. This is shortly after a military coup which witnessed the killings of some important figures in the north. Their family friends are not only killed but, an errand boy who normally delivered messages from Adaobi to Mohammed is slaughtered. In the eastern region, a military governor has proclaimed the right of self determination of his people and in the days following war commences. From Nsukka, the family moves to the village in Orlu. Papa Nduka and his brother, a university lecturer at Nsukka, have been offered jobs at different Biafran war directorates. As the war intensifies with heavy bombardment of Biafran soil by Nigeria and her international cooperators, the people begin to suffer displacement, hunger, disease and death. The air raids are of such ferocity that the hearts of many sank. Okoloma, Papa Ona’s friend is the most victimized. A shift in the population continues to advance with heavy bombardment and loss of territories and villages, leading to an all time high refuge problem. The will to fight and live by the people becomes a channeled propaganda story of conquests and heroic deeds. The people are told of retreating armies and offensives launched. The routes to relief measures are blockaded by Nigeria and their partners. This becomes a weapon of terror carried out on the landscape. The Biafrans are no more counting the dead but their belief in victory. Women and children suffer from diarrhea and kwashiorkor and relief efforts are limited. Ona’s ceaseless anger turns at the deceit of victory claims. She can see in her dream state many children dying of hunger because the people have taken on a self distraught path. The war, she claims as she lies on the mat, is already lost thus, manifesting delusion and neurotic withdrawal. All efforts to revive her fail. This proves the futility of war and terror. The death of Ona further devastates the entire family. From time to time, reports come from home about who has died. Papa Nduka’s desire to go and give his late father a befitting burial by Igbo custom in the third year of the war and terror is short lived. He is shot by the federal soldiers on his way. The news more than what Adaobi passes through at the death of Ona renders her speechless. She cannot cry. The family, each, 47
adopts a convenient psychological attitude. Biafra not long after, suerrenders and they cannot comprehend it. The idea of terrorism engendering an acute sense of fear and unease are hereby established. The characters engage in series of questions as for the reason for the war and the death of the child Biafra bringing to the fore the illusory and surrealist hold of life. Psychedelic accusations trail their losses in war and their suffering knows no limit. Everything, indeed, makes no sense to them. Mohammed surfaces. All the period of the war he had been overseas studying. He has come to formally contract his marriage proposal with Adaobi. She is schizophrenic. She asks a lot of questions and links him to the genocide perpetrated by his people. She will not marry Mohammed since her life and those of her people and their security will not be guaranteed: ‘I want you to realize the horrors I live with from day to day.’ Marrying him will be construed as accepting war and terrorism.
3.2 Physical Manifestations of War and Terrorism
The characters that emerge in a work of literature, particularly drama, explo re real life situations. The victims as we engage them in the texts are exposed to bodily harm and injury, displacement as refugees, loss of property and economic disconnect, hunger and deprivations. All these acts as we have observed physically threaten their individuals and status and constitute some of the weak points of war and terrorism. In Madmen and Specialists for instance, our first play, we see this in the macabre exhibitions by the Mendicants. They are four in number: Cripple, Goyi, Blindman and Aafaa. They are casualties of war who physically manifest several levels of deformations, having experienced the dangers of war. Cripple is a victim and must have suffered from chemical and biological weapons just like Blindman. They come as individuals rendered incapable of fending for themselves or blighted rather, that they can only solicit alms on the road, and via this create their own kind of nuisance. In their separate and collective actions one can see the extremity of hunger that ignites in them the passion to draw this attention. Their encounter with Si Bero in Part One is altogether not friendly, as she rebuffs the myth they seem to have woven around them: ‘‘…You can have work and eat. The two go together.’’ (10) But unknown to her, they constitute a kind of surveillance on her, for, Aafaa says that: ‘‘…until the millions start rolling in, we better not neglect the pennies,’’ (8) while beckoning on the Mendicants and, 48
pointing to Si Bero who is approaching with a small bag obviously containing some herbs. When Si Bero maintains how important it is for one to work, it is Aafaa who parades his lack of health: ‘‘With this affliction of mine?’’ to which the lady tells him that; ‘‘It comes and goes,’’ (9) thereby portraying the general lack of style of apprehensions in war. Ironically, she argues that war and terrorism are human nature and should not prevent one from living a purposeful life. The characters in Women are not of this thought- of bodily harm and injury- but languish as they are displaced by the war. Their hostage limits them from expressing what even the Mendicants in Madmen cling unto as freedom to espouse their future characteristics of terror. The women who remain leftovers or survivors of the war and terror are used by the invaders as servants. As the play opens, two of the women on their way to the stream, possibly to fetch water for the soldiers, when they are met by the deity Anlugbua, narrate this displacement. They not only complain of the soldiers reducing ‘‘the proud city of Owu to ruin’’ but the women claim that ‘they were the ones who came yesterday and scattered our lives into potshards.’ (1-2) The two plays of course are created through a technique of reporting device. The women tell us further of the arson and impairment of their dead relatives in what can be substantiated with the physical blight of the Mendicants in Madmen that; …The Allied Forces came with weapons they call guns Guns, Anlugbua! Deadly sticks Which explode, and turn a whole battalion Into corpses. Rags upon rags of bleeding flesh. (8)
They also report their hostage reminiscent of horror acts. According to Woman: “Meanwhile they make us wait here in abject terror, expecting the worst, and unable even to mourn our sons and husbands.” (7) We have been told of how the armies of Ijebu, Oyo and Ife ‘‘for seven full years’’ laid siege on Owu ‘‘because of a woman, and would not go away!’’ (7) This very tactic of surrounding their physical space is at the behest of war and terrorism. From this, they began to suffer from famine, disease and want. It was not though, until the seventh year that unable to bear the impact of this physical blockade that the Owu people came out and were ‘‘swooped’’ on and ‘‘slaughtered.’’ (2-3) But what would have happened to the Udemezue family in Kano, in our other play, For Love of Biafra as a siege became an escape couched in displacement and loss 49
of economic opportunities. Papa Nduka and his family, not only lose their business; they also suffer the loss of their home and privacy, including relationships that were built overtime. They share a cramped room with his brother and family in the staff quarters of the University of Nigeria. Thus the family loses their privacy; for we are told in the playwright’s guide that while Papa Nduka and Papa Ona are in the sitting room talking, Mama Ona and Mama Nduka are in the kitchen cooking, even as ‘‘close to the sitting room,’’ (29) Adaobi, Ebuka and Nduka are playing a game of whot. But in running away from Kano, it is not so much as to vanish and not return again, as it is the need to secure life which is most sacred. For, Papa Nduka and Adaobi are molded in the opportunistic school of necessity in which only those survive who have the enigma to act in time of danger. However, Nwoye does not see the need for this elopement [displacement]. According to him; “Who is chasing us? From whom are we running? If the Hausa people want to fight with us, then, let them declare it, and we will fight and conquer them. I do not understand this running away like cowardly dogs in the night. (20) Having chosen to interpret the brother’s desertion of Kano as cowardice, Nwoye was to fall victim however, although he survives, by escaping back to Nsukka. In a gory recall of the massacres in the north and the displacing of thousands of Igbo people, he discloses: They are killing us, the Hausa are killing our people indiscriminately. It is senseless. It is inhuman. They came into our Sabon Gari days ago, they slaughtered people in their homes, in the market places, in churches, in cars trying to take them to safety. It was like killing animals, they used machetes, there was a woman I saw with my own eyes, she was pregnant they ripped open her stomach… (32)
Says he: ‘‘I managed to escape with two other workers from the railway… I saw the entire household of Ofoegbu being slaughtered.’’ (32) The casualties and their survivors lost their businesses and economic outlets. Adaobi informs that the crop of the refugees exiled from all parts of north and west, of course, had their houses ‘‘looted, their friends killed, their property burnt.’’ (38) For example, Adaobi’s grandfather has gone to commiserate with ‘‘the people of the house of Okagbue’’ who ‘‘lost a son to the Hausas.’’ (39) The worst of physical abuse that can arise in wartime is such that we behold in Madmen . Dr. Bero who has returned from war engages in fisticuffs with Aafaa who refuses to take 50
instruction. It is in their exchange of words; including other Mendicants that one realizes that the war has so much affected them that they now turn into dictators and terrorists. The Mendicants tell him how they have been keeping watch over Si Bero and the hiding of the Old Man, Bero’s father in an underground hole. Bero who supposedly is the head of this terrorist gang gives a warning and from Aafaa comes a rebuff. What follows is that Bero cuts him across the face with his swagger stick. Aafaa staggers back, clutching the wound. (26) Physically the environment of war and terror turns them into mindless puppets. The terrorist is by nature and ideology an inchoate speaker. They rarely reveal much but use physical combat and other mechanisms of war and terror to threaten their victims, with the Mendicants being mercenaries and gang of kidnappers who hope to benefit from social distortion. The pain which the above action creates attracts the attention of Iya Agba, one of the earth mothers’ who impassively observes the scene (26) surprised at who Bero has become. But there is a confrontation of awareness of personality as they stare at each other. The play depicts the terrorist as an inhuman, cold and often diabolic individual. Si Bero’s developed ecstasy at seeing Dr. Bero is not allowed to sprout. He walks in stealthily like a secret agent and hushes the sister: ‘‘Be quiet!...I don’t want my return announced.’’ (27) A look of suspicion and frustration hangs on the young woman who has been taking care of his business of healing lives; for her comportment evidences a fractured self that has refused to develop outside the wish of her brother. She seeks for answers but we can’t be short for words when Bero in his characteristic manner describes the Old Women and their neighbours as ‘‘Corpses’’ (27) thereby furthering this preoccupation with killing and dying. This is almost the kind of attitude which Gesinde in Women puts on. His physical appearance before the women of Owu portends danger and doom to these women. His unannounced visits are seen as an encroachment on their culturally and politically defined spaces. They are subjected to disgrace and humiliation. They lose their husbands, sons and properties to the war. Their various prestigious positions as wives and mothers change to those of slaves and concubines sent to unknown destinations. This disconnection with their native land is encapsulated in the idea of 'restricted freedom' which their hostage affords them. Erelu testifies along with Woman that; ‘‘all they care for, all of them, is our freedom!...the kindness which has rescued us from tyranny in order to plunge us into slavery!’’ (13) As for the goddess Lawumi, the allied forces plunder and desecrate her shrine. This loss of a place of worship and the worshippers is mourned by 51
Anlugbua accordingly: I ask you-without a shrine, without worshipers. What is a god? Who now will venerate us? Who sing our praises among these ruins? (9)
The desecration of sacred places and homes in war sits bare in For Love. Targets of most terrorist organizations are places of worship and other social and political institutions. An example comes from Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun , where she describes terrorists as ‘‘vandals,’’ meaning ‘‘people who shit on God’’ (305) and murder the innocent to score political or religious point. Furthermore, the shelling of Nsukka devastates the victims and bring them untoward displacement and suffering. We are told that as people pack out of the University, some, especially women are “carrying their babies on their backs, pots and pans; pulling goats along with them, aside little children with ‘big bundles’ placed on their heads.” (46-47) These are the worst of physical violations of war and terror. Coming back from a hard hit war, it is not cheerful as Papa Ona discovers at the University quarters how the federal soldiers made rouges of his books. It is informed that the sitting room ‘‘sports none of its earlier pre-war furnishing.’’ (93) This may be balanced with the level of destruction in Owu and the hostage camp where we are told Erelu asks to know if she is ‘‘the one sprawled on the ground like this. In the dust like a common mongrel.’’ (10) According to Nduka in Adichie’s play: Do you know that the Nigerian civilians who go behind their troops and occupy whatever towns they conquer not only loot but desecrate the sanctity of peoples’ homes. They are even said to break open ceilings, looking for hidden valuables. It is only the good houses that they are said to occupy…all they think about is how to loot peoples’ homes and slaughter innocent people. (72)
In all of the above, images of futility and vanity are stressed. Erelu cannot draw affinity between her present status as slave and object of sexual desire and her former position of queen mother. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, it is Hecuba, mother of Hector, who lies ‘‘disheveled’’ and ‘floundering’ on the ground. The picture of these two noble women who draw from same situation indeed is not a happy one. In For Love, the physical strength or reality of some of the characters are also disturbing. For example, Adaobi now is thin, and her eyes are sunken. Papa 52
Ona is portrayed as ‘‘obviously different’’ (93) with aloofness to his facial existence as Mama Ona has become a ‘‘vacant-looking shadow.’’ (94) Mrs Ikwu, the new lecturer whose smartness and beauty are a kind of disguise suffers too physically. The hunger which drove the Mendicants to engage in very ludicrous performance acts in Madmen becomes a weapon of suppression and terror on the war ridden Biafra. While they elicit empathy in Madmen ; in For Love , access routes to relief supplies are blockaded by Nigeria and her foreign partners. Ona who dies as a result kept envisioning dreams of children suffocated by hunger. Hear her: ‘Our troops are hungry, how can they fight? They are dressed in rags, they have no guns and they are not fed. How can one fight under such conditions?’ (73) This is further worsened by their tactics to remain silent in the face of obvious suffering, lack and anguish. According to Ona; “Our people are afraid of the truth and hide behind lies. Things are getting worse and worse, more towns have fallen including the capital, Umuahia, the daughter of Obiduru has told me all this and it is true . The war is lost.” (73) Gesinde shares this feeling in Women. According to him; ‘‘when you have lost a war, you have lost, and there’s nothing you can do about it but to accept the consequences.’’ (44) Although deluded in her thoughts, she enlists our concerned judgment and irony at the perceived obvious irrationality of a people who would rather die than give in to defeat even when they have lost most of their iconic objects. This remains largely why they lead traumatic lives soon after hearing ‘‘General Effiong’s speech of surrender.’’ (91) Physically, they suffer lack of food and are dehydrated. For example, Adaobi, Ona and Mama Ona, including Mama Nduka all suffered diarrhea. The children of Briafra which Adaobi saw at the relief camp also suffer from hunger and kwashiokor, including acute diarrhea. The woman who flippantly announces the cessation of hostilities is described to be “anemic,” (87) having leaned in the war. The intensity of the problem is made visual in the streaks of human movements at the refugee [war relief] camps that wait in turns for supplies. The continuous movement of the Udemezue family as more air raids and bombardment of towns and villages forced them packing locates how severally they are displaced. The air raids physically devastate Okoloma who easily finds nest in the bush and whetting his body in the event. These apprehensions of war and terrorism are sad reminders of the various tactics that a terrorist could adopt in frisking an enemy. Their lives are simply mechanical and not organized. This is considered that they sleep ‘‘on a mat’’ and in one room. (81) 53
Physically, Bero and the Mendicants constitute danger to the Old Man in their constant and brutal demand for the key to the As. This is reminiscent of Gesinde’s invasion of the place of the women. He physically threatens them every now and then, and will see to the execution of the last male of Owu kingdom, Adumadaan’s infantile baby, Aderogun. While he pretends to be carrying out the orders of the soldiers the swiftness with which he initiates the execution is condemnable. Aderogun's brain, he reveals, was lashed “against a tree” and his skull crushed “as we have been orderd to do.” (45) As he appears, Erelu posits: ‘‘What do you want again this time, man of misfortune?” (43) And he replies cuttingly: ‘‘The boy’’ (43) In Madmen, Blindman's revelation of the physical condition of the Old Man in these austere terms: ‘‘The limbless acrobat will now perform his wonderful act- how to bite the dust from three classic positions,’’(8) suggests that Bero’s father cannot make use of his legs, having been rendered obtuse in war and as such, what remains for him is death. In the Mendicants and in their master who is Bero, and in Lawumi and Gesinde of Women of Owu, including Maye Okunade is terrorism and blights of war a ‘‘constitution more original than any individual decision.’’ Ricoer states that this trope recounts “an irrational event that unexpectedly takes place in a good creation.” (294) Thus, Dr. Bero and his agents represent obstacles, including Iya Agba and Iya Mate, to social growth, as Gesinde does in curtailing the freedom of the seized women. In the psychoanalytic play, Miss Julie by Strindberg, Christine idealizes this myth. In her religious deceit rivets the deadlock in the conflict between the sexes. (36) Hence, Bero and the other characters in the chosen plays who are within the range of terrorist appellation utilize various dimensions of terror such as kidnapping, religious fundamentalism, execution and assassination as an escape route from their world of despair, hopelessness and psychosis. The orchestration of irrationality manifests in the abduction of Iyunloye which is claimed to be one of the causes of the Owu war. While Iyunloye survives her abduction, Old Man does not. His failure to acquiesce to the son’s demand unlike in Iyunloye’s offer of self to Dejumo, ends in his terroric assassination by Bero and the robots around him. (77) The Old Women who had been all these while waiting for a payment in the form of a human life are startled by the gunshot and they set ablaze the store of herbs which is the symbol of Si Bero’s toil in life. Si Bero’s response to this new beginning is better imagined than expressed. It is only at the shooting of her father that she realizes that the Old Man had been with them and was imprisoned. The brother had lied 54
to her of their father incapacitated and being taken care of at the clinic. The Old Women in themselves come as terrorists- they had been involved in a drag of power and will- a sort of altercation with Dr. Bero who had also threatened to shoot them. They all belong to some ‘‘thieving cult’’ (57) and constitute physical menace to their neighbours. The Mendicants are also always in a rat race, each, wanting to subsume the other.
3.3 Moral Manifestations of War and Terrorism
The myth of morality, our next discourse, is rooted deeply in ethics which in the Greek word is ethos . The concept strives to look at the nature of human conduct, or social action and human relationships and their accompanying implications. According to Inyama, morality can either be seen as ‘‘the theory of what is right or wrong in human conduct,’’ or ‘‘the differentiation of human actions into good or bad in accordance with accepted norms of human conduct.” (115) As morality remains the hub of ethics, ethics emerge as the instrument in the study of morality. For example, when we admit that in Women the playwright loads the play with ironical circumstances that enhance its beauty as a complete work of art, characterization of war and terrorism is a problematic issue, as in other plays. The first ridiculous and saddened circumstance in the play is located in the god Anlugbua’s seemed ignorance of the fate that has befallen Owu city. Ethical behaviour demands that being a god, he should be omnipresent, omnipotent, that is all-knowing and all seeing. His acquaintance with the destruction of the city through human beings, indeed, is an implication of the dubious role played by the deities in the destruction of the city. That he should demand from the women the knowledge of the war is, indeed, ironic.
Tell me, dear women- You seem to come from there- What’s the name of the city I see Smouldering over there? (1) The above is a ridiculous statement intended to further aggravate the condition of the women. Through his question Anlugbua communicates the hostility that exists between gods and man as 55
well as their superiority over mortals. However, the ignorance of the women of the character of Anlugbua and their disgust with the destructive activities of the Allied Forces, encapsulates the prayer: ‘‘And may Anlugbua choke them with it.’’ (2) The women are also unreceptive of this ancestor who from their further statements is evaluated for his role in the war.
WOMAN: Goodbye, ancestor, we cannot help you. We must return now to our own burden, and Join the other women To prepare for our life of slavery. (9)
We strongly repudiate Anlugbua’s sympathy more and more as we see his laws and benevolence unfriendly; we pity what is from our viewpoint an instinctual knowledge directed at the decimation of a people; as a wicked policy it is, situates covincingly that the sufferers of the war and terror are human beings like ourselves. In Anlugbua’s immoral stance, we draw the search for this truth with Freud’s analysis of “tendentious wit into hostile, cynical, and skeptical morality,” (38) as contained in Akwanya. Dr. Bero elicits this last response, in that in Madmen, his coyness is elucidated by his striking peculiarity to thwart the order of things and thus constitute a hiatus unfamiliar to all feelings of modesty. Of course, one is at a loss, what he stands to gain from imprisoning his father and violating the Old Man’s rights in the guise of hostage and leadership clientage. He makes this successful by recruiting mercenaries whose curriculum vitae’s are preposterous. Their actions continue to be seen as blackmail to Si Bero’s reticent ignorance of the trueness of the beggars who are the casualties of war. This idea is not mistaken in the Priest’s assertion that; ‘‘You know, it’s strange how these disasters bring out the very best in man – and the worst sometimes,’’ (33) and in that question by the former to Bero: ‘‘Our neighbours. All your old patients,’’ (27) meaning the Mendicants whose actuation is better described as cosmetic ‘‘corpses,’’ (27) according to Bero. While the war turns out bad for Bero and others, the Priest further believes that, as he discusses with Si Bero and Bero, ‘In your father’s case, of course, the very best’ (33). And it is this virtue that Bero and his thieving cult want to sap from the Old Man by tasting ‘‘just what makes a heretic tick.’’ (77) Alexander submits that terrorists employ 56
‘‘threats, bombings, and other destruction of property, kidnappings, taking hostages’’ (114) in gaining control. War and terrorism do admit ‘wickedness’ since by dealing with ‘men’s actions,’ Brook notes, …are ‘‘down to earth and direct.’’ (71) In Women, the moral question lies in the assistance Lawumi offered the Allied Forces in order to defeat Owu, her marital land, and not withstanding their failing to spare men or women who ran into her shrine and grope for protection. As a result of this, she worked to ensure that the return journey of the victorious force is terrific. ‘‘I want their return journey to be filled with grief’’ (21) Her claim that ‘human beings, it is clear, learn only from suffering and pain’ (21) is further disjointed as it is clear that this deity is the instigator of the social crisis. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund in a report examined in Awake! publication of July 2012, warned that; “violence directed at individuals, houses of worship, and community institutions because of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin remains unacceptably high and continues to be a serious problem.” (7) The gods will give man support but would be there to witness his disastrous end. Lawumi's retributive justice is only but a weapon to battle for supremacy. She accepts instigating the crisis due to ‘‘an insufferable display of arrogance’’ (18) toward her by the Owu people. This shows a goddess interested in the affairs of mortals and who will go to any length to protect her authority. As the women victims expose this invasion, gods and goddesses, on their own, are prepared to inflict more pains and incur losses as well. In the myth espousing the Biafran war in For Love, characters had based their victory on the ultimate support of the gods because Biafra is the child of God waiting to happen. That was why the planners of the offense would go as far as portraying illusory victories as truth even when it was seen they were losing the war. This is crass morality. According to Mrs Ikwu: We Biafrans became cowards, we turned and embraced lies. There was no kind of super-heroic story that we did not hear. Nigerian casualties littered the roads, ten thousand in just one town, some said, others said twenty. Ojukwu was personally at the warfront and driving the enemy back. Our troops were using some sort of gas to kill the enemy in thousands…it was all too much. It is our fault that bitterness crept and distrust crept into Biafra… (99) 57
s From Papa Nduka, we have this one:
It is easy to feed falsehood to the masses as far as it threatens them as a people, especially a people as gullible as the largely uneducated Hausa. They probably do not see anything morally wrong with the massacres as it was an activity widely participated in. (37)
The point is that while many of the characters resort to a blame of morality, others like Adaobi [For Love ]; Erelu Afin and the Chorus Leader and other women in Women of Owu take the blame of suffering which identifies an obvious morality lacuna to the door step of gods and God. Dramatic characters have always expressed reserve and disgust with the gods who they often implicate in the problems they encounter. Toni Duruaku’s A Matter of Identity is one play where even an elder Ntagbu, who doubles as chief priest of Umukwenu believed that ‘the gods are playing games’ with them. They hold a lot of ‘‘contradiction’’ because they ordered a festival, failure which is death but now, decreed that the festival must not hold. (31, 32) Or is it in Lear’s implication of the gods with his daughters’ calumny against him in Shakespeare’s King Lear . Surely, they say, the gods prevaricate. Contrary to Erelu’s resolution against the gods, that they are hardly keen on human affairs, the chorus still attributes some power and efficacy to them. They warn Erelu: ‘we beg you, restrain yourself. A word against the gods and ever worst things may still come upon us!’ but are to shift their grounds after assessing the level of devastation and ignoble role played by gods. The gods have done their worst to wipe us out. But they too will die without worshippers... Poor human beings! War is what will destroy you as it destroys the gods. (46 ,67)
The chorus leader’s remark on the broken symbiotic relationship between gods and man is as Adaobi's despair in Women. According to her, “Why did God let this happen? We had a just cause,…why did God let this happen?,’ and Nduka would argue that ‘we are taught not to question God.’’ (90) This is because ‘‘the god who tempts and misleads [the character], says Ricoer, stands for the primordial lack of distinction between good and evil.’’ (294) Erelu, 58
therefore, urges no belief and trust in gods as ‘‘each of us has become our own god.’’ (33) The Mendicants in Madmen present ethical questions with their hurling of abusive words on Si Bero, Bero and the Old Women, including the Old Man. For example, Aafaa in telling Si Bero how her herbs need to be scraped for its dirtiness, the implication of the statement is that Si Bero does not take good care of herself. Of course, she is not naïve or dead to all perceptions of reason, for she reminds him how the herbs are ‘not half as dirty as your anus.’ Aafaa takes up his weapon, a stick, implying to hit her and render her incapable of wits: ‘‘you go too far with that mouth of yours!’’ (22) When he is reproved by Blindman, Aafaa fires: ‘‘what did I do? What did I say? Just because of one stinking root. She has a mouth like a running gutter.’’ (22) Can we compare this with the attitude of Gesinde to the chorus of women in Osofisan’s play? The chorus asks the staff officer of the allied forces after the sharing out of the women of Owu about their circumstances- where they are to be sent to serve or the soldier to dress his bed. Gesinde’s response is: ‘‘what else do you think will happen to riff-raff?’’ (26) A morality of class politics is hereby achieved as the lower class women are not allowed to know their lot, ‘‘till we’ve finished sorting out the big fish.’’ (26) Even if one refrains from suggesting that in the aftermath of the Owu war some women suffer more than the others, it must be stated that the Owu slave women [in the play’s chorus] continue to bewail their inability to know the fate which awaits them, whereas the women of the aristocracy are able to learn their respective destinies from Gesinde who arrives from time to time from the enemy camp. The slave women bemoan not only their future, about which they are in the dark, but also their being severed from the environment and the life which they have got used to even as slaves. That the Owu slave women are subjected to even more degrading and bestial treatment by the enemy is clearly brought out in the consideration of the royal women as prestigious spoils of war to be divided among the soldiers. The very fact that they are noblewomen seems to add to the fantasy of the invaders who are able to carry them home as part of the loot conquered in war. The capacity of Women of Owu to suggest powerfully and vividly the destruction wrought on women in general as a result of war and terror rests to a great extent on the fact that the characters differ from each other in their social situations as well as in their personalities. While the women with composed manner bewail their woes, Gesinde in his utterances illustrate moral looseness. It is not surprising that he will say: ‘we Ijebus are civilized,…we will not allow bush people to embarrass us with any 59
barbaric act of self-destruction’ whereas Orisaye, who now manifests bizarre behaviour, having been allotted to Balogun Kusa, admits that ‘some words are such that when we hear them, all the light inside us dies at once.’ (26, 27) Her virginity is Kusa's object of desire. Gesinde is also a gossip like the Mendicants who are forever discussing the family of Bero by letting us into the sordid of their lives and the humane as well. When he discovers that Maye Okunade is willing to take Iyunloye his unfaithful wife back home, he comments: If I may inform you, beauty has conquered once again, as before. That celebrated slut has regained Maye’s heart, and joined his caravan. Yes, Iyunloye is riding back with us in triumph! (61)
He so callously announces the victory to the women in their agony. The terrorist has an ultimate objective and in realizing it does not weigh the moral implications. Iyunloye’s betrayal of Okunade in escaping with Prince Adejumo to Owu city is an example of this irony of war. In this respect, Maye threatens to kill her should he see her. But ironically, when the leader of the assault on Owu comes in contact with her and looks at her face, all the tough talk about having her killed pelts and in its place, changes his order that Iyunloye be allowed to join the victorious caravan back to Ile-Ife. Of course, all these do not come about without the unfaithful woman blaming both gods and man for her travails. We confirm this in Helen in The Trojan Women , who draws empathy in her allegations that the Aphrodite goddess is to blame for her own elopement with Paris. While Helen maintains the above, Iyunloye claims that it was Akogun Awolona who led the assault and who handed her over to Dejumo. (52) Again, while we will argue that Adumaadan who righteously bemoans her allotment to Otunba Lekki, having been married to slain Lisabi, elicits our sympathy; more so Orisaye who is given to Kusa and has depleted in behaviour in defiance of the arrangement, Iyunloye is the opposite that in justifying her innocence in spite of her argument that she had bought her life with her ‘‘beauty’’ typifies moral hazards in the play. Her textual abduction is implicative. She rationalizes her allurement to the young prince by hiding on the allegation that Okunade never gave a hoot if she existed, and by so giving herself in love to a prince, she became the symbol that brought about the destruction and waste of human lives on both parts. To follow Adejumo and his army of kidnappers to Owu, without repulsion, locates in her the Freudian complex [inferiority] personality type which 60
Iwuchukwu rightly testifies, ‘‘could be as a result of misguided psychological compensation for some unknown or vague feeling of inadequacy.’’ (116) Such women, Iwuchukwu notes, ‘‘are the oppressors of womanhood.’’ (116) Anyway, it is significant that in showing all of these, the characters, in their struggles and pains, allude the source of the calamity to the whims and caprices of headstrong and irrational gods and goddesses. But whatever Osofisan achieves with the moral blames in his characters, it satiates to know that it is in man’s nature to fight and thwart a social order of dependence which gods in their tragic fancies have created. Another level of reason with war being an unnecessary evil is that as achieved in For Love, where love itself is viewed as a commodity. The nature of this marriage market occurs with Ebuka, Adaobi’s twin brother, in asking her into a relationship with the son of a prosperous Biafran businessman, who lives at Onitsha. According to him, the young man [Nduoma Nwosu] had made his money during the war. But Adaobi has another thing in mind: Yes. He was selling goods at black market prices during the war, his father being a big man in the army, and he used the money to acquire property. (102)
This shows that harship and hunger could be great moral challenges in wartime and terror. This is why he advertizes Nduoma to Adaobi: ‘‘He is rich too, he has assets; he did well for himself during the war. He will do great things for Abagana in the future.’’ (101) Adaobi, evaluating things in new light since the war began seem to have this suave character that lacks in Ebuka, the latter, who has become so optimistic in his claims that Biafra died as a child because ‘‘we had a corrupt coward of a leader who ran away behind us’’ (102) questions if Ojukwu ‘‘brought the corruption that crept into Biafra?’’ (102) For Love of Biafra presents a square problem of leadership and anemic corruption. Both are entrenched firmly on the need to win and survive in war, as examined, not different from her repulsion with whatever strips one of his honesty, as she queries the attitude of some Igbo men who had worked in the Biafran military to seek their own advantage. However, it becomes deprecating when at the instance Mohammed came in, that on rejecting him, which we understand to be Adaobi’s pattern of psychic response to the massacres and the loss of her father and Ona, obviously what it was, she confusedly admits to liking Nduoma whom she would be prepared to marry. This is a moral issue. But either we say it or we forget it, Adaobi’s love is to Mohammed; her rejection of it being unimportant as of the 61
knowledge of the entry of psychedelic apprehension. What to note greatly in the above is that while rummaging on the plausibility of Nduoma becoming her future husband, she gladly decries the attitude of some Igbo rich men who during the war, had claimed to sponsor Biafra, only to feed fat on the already devastated victims. This is in light of Inyama’s argument that ‘‘we already make moral judgments even without reflecting explicitly on the principles underlying our moral judgment.’’ (116) Adaobi’s rejection of her infantile love and acceptance of a man she hardly know by virtue of seasoned acquaintance argues Inyama again, is that ‘‘ignorance, fear and concupiscence or passion and emotional attachment to a thing inhibit moral actions and responsibility.’’ (116) Therefore, her change of want rubbishes her claimed attunance with honesty-knowing what one wants-since her inconsistency as we see it is borne out of psycho reactance. The Freudian intellectual immaturity takes over, then, as her response not only to objective reality, but also to fantasy distortions inhibits even well thought out efforts. The execution of Adumaadan’s baby by Gesinde in Women calls to mind the issue of moral priorities in war and terror. We are told that it was Balogun Derin, who had decided to take Erelu, though she described him as beast; that ordered the killing, fearful [apology to Inyama] that the aforesaid boy would grow up and constitute terror to them. Gesinde, portending to loathe the execution, could not understand the the decision. This moral judgment exhibited by the allied forces is also reproachable in that other execution of Adeoti, sister to Adumaadan’s husband, Lisabi; which now is styled ‘sacrifice’ to assuage the killing of one of the invaders. The images of her death are despicable. Adumaadan who covered her with some sand reveals how she found the body ‘‘lying at the entrance to the shrine of the goddess Lawumi’ as Erelu points out how she was ‘slaughtered like a goat and abandoned to the flies.’’ (40, 41) The action of the soldiers being a moral issue underlies the perverse nature of the ideologies in which war and terror are always based. The interrogation of the Old Man in Madmen by his kidnapper and terrorist son is breathtaking. The distancing of the language and compulsion to kill by Bero leaves one wondering if ever in his action the metaphoric pole of a son being the continuum of the father, an archetypal, is well justified or located in him. He sets about this job of taking control or better put, setting up shop against the father, [apology Old Man] with a lack of moral rectitude. Friedrich Nietzsche in his Beyond Good and Evil described moral codes as ‘sign language of 62
emotion.’ This Nietzschean conception writes The Guardian publication of January 1, 2012, “unites with morality as a weapon of resistance against a decadent social order.” (9) However, the answers given by the Old Man and his cross examinations reveal schizophrenic distortions of reality but relevant to war and terrorism. The war if interpreted in the father’s decided response is the incomprehensibility of war, and Bero’s attitudinal posture the violence of terrorism; for toward the end, the son increases pressure in incapacitating the man whose tacit revelation would aid his prompt take over. (61-63) The point being argued is that Dr. Bero does this without bent on social norms, and like existential psychosocial characters want a re-order of social systems in which one leads his own type of life. In his treatment of the father; Bero also in his definitive moment of terror fails to reflect properly on the six stages of moral judgment listed by Damon. They include “punishment, reward; interpersonal relations, social order; social contract and universal rights, which come under self interest stage, social approval, and abstract ideals.” (108) His short grasp of the existence of moral emotions that introduce such appearances as shame, guilt and indignation like we have with Ebuka in For Love (103, 108) manifests in his lacking the ‘‘conscience’’ (502) of Freudian psychic structure, as pointed out by Smith. It is this pattern of behaviour which negates ‘‘the role of culture and family in personality functioning,’’ (507) according to Smith that characterize Inyama’s acute assessment of public morality where ‘‘militant materialism and worship of money, readiness to maim and murder for monetary gains…flagrant violation of public order, conscious disregard for the demands of social justice and the common good, arrogance and pusillanimity, selfishness and purposelessness in power, unjustifiable manipulation of subordinates and exploitation of the weak…sadism…and confusion of values,’’ (117) are the order of the day. In other words, Obafemi’s statement in Angya, that the specialist [Bero] is ‘the military dictator’ in countermotion with ‘his humanist father,’ (138) becomes a good example. Goyi’s conversation with Blindman again introduces the moral burden of arson and carnage in war: Goyi … I have a personal aversion to vultures
Blindman: Oh, come come. Nice birds they are. They clean up after the mess. (11)
Goyi builds upon other characters appearances in the play but Blindman’s words stand for the destruction of lives and festering of carnivorous terrorism. The Old Women also in their 63
differences and or close look ideology with Dr. Bero’s organization bear depressing moral problem in the play. Finally, the Owu people can be said to be the architects of their own doom as history lends some credence. The slave trade, more than other acts, brings the gods and goddesses into the fray because by so doing, a destruction of the communal ties binding them with their ancestral world have been tainted. The moral flaw which results equip these gods to punish ‘‘acts that violate social mores or norms,’’ as further pointed out by Smith. (502)
3.4 Psychological Manifestations of War and Terrorism
This segment is an appraisal of the various ways and methods in the texts of study in which the characters undergo trauma and psychological apprehensions and how they respond to it. It investigates the impact of their physical and moral invasions on the emotions of the characters, either as an individual and or group. It looks at this from the perspective of cognitive processes that are involved in emotion. In Madmen , for example, Soyinka’s realization of the Nigerian psyche achieves in discussing this important problem of war and terrorism. Through the language of the play and actions of the characters we understand that the setting refers to Africa and Nigeria, in particular. However, his use of Bertolt Brecht alienation effect or distancing motif kind of hampers the full realization of the characters several interpretation of psychological apprehension, due to language technicalities. The first glimpse across this motif is seen in the stage direction in which we are told that, Iya Agba and Iya Mate, are smoking leaves and preparing fire (7); this to illustrate the background and tone of the play as well as heighten a state of prevalent fear in the reader. As the play opens and the Mendicants are in a heated debate of game of dice, Cripple’s demand for Aafaa’s left eye lost to him in this game and the latter’s pandering over whether it was his left or right eye leaves the reader tensed and establishes this psychological defeatude in Aafaa’s disclosure that the third eye is ‘‘my evil eye.’’ (8) Goyi has lost his hands to the gamble and can only make use of the mouth with Blindman projecting him as ‘the limbless acrobat.’ The performance he puts up is to elicit psychological spasm in Aafaa’s unruffled supervision, ‘‘Roll up- roll up.’’ (8) But all these are clearly designed to penetrate the pity of the members of the 64
public and extort alms from the unsuspecting. More horror is to come with the Mendicants presenting themselves as ‘‘the creatures of As in the timeless parade’’ (8) and the playing out of their deformations lending credence to the physiological destructions of war and terror which further lead to psychological breakdown. According to Aafaa; “If it weren’t for the iron rod holding up his spine [Cripple] he would collapse like a toad you step on. Just what sort of work do you want him to do?” (9)
Being a question for Si Bero, there is an irony in the Mendicants lack of decided acceptance that they constitute psychological fear, threat and danger to the neighbours, though Goyi admits that, ‘‘something is driving them away from here,’’ (9) and resorts to heaping the blame on her. Obviously, the presence of the Mendicants on the lane negates public peace and freedom, and perhaps the constitution of terror by the earth mothers as well. In Aafaa’s clinging attitude to things and objects, we identify their propensity for danger and harm, more so in their differing acceptance of Bero as a dutiful son, are evil and contention located. Blindman acts out Bero’s preoccupation with killing and threatened violence by attempting to shoot Goyi. The latter holds ‘his chest’ and slumps twice, thus revealing the true picture of the person of Bero. Our fear and apprehension build as we confirm through discussions which are around the purposed burial of Goyi that the Mendicants are scavengers of human parts, thereby exposing their link with Bero. (11) But they also suffer psychologically. Aafaa reveals to us that, ‘‘we are not here because we like it. We stay at immense sacrifice to ourselves, our leisure, our desires, vocation, specialization, etcetera, etcetera.’’ (11) This regret finds a balance between the Freudian psychic superego and Machiavelli’s warning that mercenaries in war rather than achieve the utmost objective bring disaster to a nation as well as themselves. The Mendicants also constitute psychological terror on Si Bero and the Old Women. This can be seen in the invasion of the private space of these women by joining them in a song which the women interpret as obstructing the harmony and rhythm of their mental expression. The women retire deeply into the hut while Si Bero expresses her lack of ease with the nuisance. They incessantly monitor and spy on Si Bero as directed by the Specialist, the former who is described as ‘‘a devil… born with a stone in her stomach.’’ (12) This leaves the reader breathless on the next line of action of these terrorists. By constant and undefined invasion of the territory of an enemy, terrorists inflict heightened fear and anxiety in the victim. Alexander reveals that the ‘‘spreading of harmful 65
chemicals, executions and assassinations’’ (114) are deployed by terrorists to gain control. In Goyi’s allegation, though casual, that Si Bero is mad, (12) is her language and conduct a betrayal of this claim. She presents herself as deranged in behaviour and needs psychotherapy. She is always protective of objects and things around her just like Aafaa does, and evidences in the Mendicants an invasion of her humanity [property or toils if we chose to] even as the latter views her psychologically as a store-house of secrets which need to be opened. For example, Goyi and Blindman in separately confirming her as suffering from psychological problem, makes reference to her obsessive attachment to objects, especially the herbs which are ‘‘very carefully laid and dusted everyday of her life.’’ (19, 24) If she is not hysterically ordering what she wants, Si Bero is possibly cursing the Mendicants while remaining aloof to reality. The worst of psychological image labeled on her and which produces emotions of fear and hate was that Si Bero is a witch who has the capacity to remove the unborn foetus and spiriting them away as part of consignments for Bero’s many ritual experiments. In their psychological portrayal of the impact of war and terrorism, most of the characters reveal a deep seated unconscious problem with their pasts. The anger and hostility we increasingly see in everyday situations, for example, Bero’s attitude may be ‘‘a potential killer in more ways than one. It may be a factor in the development of coronary heart disease,’’ (551) says Smith. The mention of ‘‘burnt fingers’’ (13) by Blindman as part of Bero’s job acutely locates him as terrorist, cruel and brutal dictator whose sordid acts intensify the war and terror ideology. This contextualizes the psychological horror that characterized again, their experiences during the war through which they came to be Bero’s patients. And these experiences become a kind of pathological trap on the Mendicants who continue to put up schizophrenic appearances- of incoherent and contorted dialogues. This can be further evaluated in the various ways they employ slangs and jargons to distort reality and to a large extent present in incomprehensible terms their mission. Of course these are tailored toward the situating of acute fear and anxiety; that being the fear of childhood domination of a father’s love in what simply, Goyi sees as ‘‘just a simple family vendetta.’’ Their attitudes and put up appearances show them as psychological ‘‘freaks’’ (13) - types- of a sordid past. Madmen is set in the context of war and aftermath of war. The fear of an intrusion into an object’s love could also be the reason Aafaa abhors Old Man’s non-discriminatory life- that of ‘‘casting pearls before swine,’’ (13) and the official secrets representing the bone of family contention that 66
would lead to war and terror. No matter the psychological damage, the Mendicants are ready to rip open the system since they stand to gain from inflicting emotional pains on their victims. The concerted efforts by them to unearth the TRUTH manifest a more traumatic posture of obsessive- compulsive state realized in using Goyi to validate what they mean by contending for what stands in Freudian analysis the sexuality of child parent relationship as well as a psychotherapic search of their mental state. Just as we have with the slave women in Osofisan’s play, in their songs of agony and courage, so we encounter with the Mendicants; the latter being one of psychological penetration of realm for more destructive purposes. The Old Women in them is psychological abuse a rule of law. According to Iya Mate: ‘‘You don’t learn good things unless you learn evil,’’ (17) thereby revealing how warped her psychology is. Many times they had sent Si Bero out to the forest to look for potent leaves and herbs; it was to be understood, to see if she had an ulterior motive and then, draw her into quicksand. The earth mothers portray themselves as fortificative mercenaries on Bero and father while at the warfront. In engaging them on this devastating mission, Si Bero’s mental pursuit became influenced by the psychoanalytic psychology of war of holding onto objects and in one sacrificing his or her life for the love of the object. She sacrifices for the protection of her loved ones for which the women must wait for a payment that envelopes the full destruction of her life’s toil and death of her father. Further descriptions by the Mendicants on how they sort out herbs suggest meanings beyond the ordinary as psychological images of war and terrorism are projected in ‘‘probe the wound,’ ‘crack the plaster,’ ‘amputate,’ ‘or it will never heal.’’ (20) And these are meant to induce fear as they begin a play-in-a play surgical operation of Blindman to balance their theory of Si Bero being warped and insane much more in her herbs pillaging. Blindman is positioned as an ‘‘underdog’ whose surgery would unearth the mystery [truth] which they have been searching for, and Aafaa raising a suggestive ‘sword’’ (20) to decapitate him. Through the characters actions and speech laced with horror we are let into their transposed psyche of killing and dying. The first meeting between Si Bero and her brother in the play traffics an ultimate sense of surreal and unease. Bero reveals how he changed jobs at the front and the knowledge of him being carnivorous and scavenging human parts sickens her. Even the priest who comes visiting them had to make an exit when he realizes that the ‘supplies’ Bero is talking about means human 67
flesh. Victims of war and terror project cruel, somber, and difficult images of abuse and oppression. She is warned, in order to be free from harm, by Bero, to keep this information to herself. One can understand then the suffering of this woman as the Specialist invites all the Mendicants who in schizophrenic dialogues demonstrated their hostage of the Old Man. Of course everything is in dream where utilizing the conscious and unconscious inquiries, destruction sense pervades the lady who cannot extrapolate the reality of Bero’s cruelty and the role of the Mendicants’ she calls ‘pigs.’ The Mendicants accuse the Old Man further of transposing them in what is known with the mythic goddess Kali to be her job. We see this in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana in which Devadatta and Kapila’s heads are transposed, (142) and they are left psychologically wounded (145- 148) thereby taking them to the limits where at daggers drawn they contest the love of Padmini. (174-175) Cripple’s statement that the ‘picture forms in the mind’ and Goyi’s ‘on the eye’ (38) ambivalates the former in which the argument is whether it is the head or the body that makes the husband. The Cripple would not rest from being psychologically bruised by a dream that comes and goes in which he is laid out on the table and in the end manifests in the Old Man using him to experiment on what ‘‘makes a man tick.’’ This symbolizes a kind of psychotherapic evaluation, when he is eventually assassinated by Dr. Bero, (44, 77) and would become the final experiment of this kind. However, the meeting between the Mendicants, the Old Man and Bero thrives on the ego structure in which says Jung in Smith, ‘‘the persona develops as a result of social pressures and is often not an accurate reflection of the person’s real feelings and attitudes.’’ (504) We are therefore left drained of all emotions as son and father contest the leadership of the As because earlier, we had been informed that the Old Man is ‘‘motionless, unresponsive as they make fun of him.’’ (43). With the abominations festering, the earth mothers who are strung on the other ladder of terrorism and war cry out over these abuses, and in reclaiming their debt, set ablaze the store of herbs. The employment of ‘‘bombings and other destruction of property,’’ (114) states Alexander, are the terrorist’s arsenal. Iya Mate considers the blight of this destruction on the health of Si Bero, but Iya Agba is hard on that; for immediately the Old Man is killed and the herbs on fire, Si Bero flounders trepidatively from the women to the surgery and in the doorway, devastated. In Women, the first of this psychological devastation is expressed by the women slaves in 68
their encounter with Anlugbua, who beholds the level of destruction in Owu kingdom. The pathos of the war is exposed and the problems faced by the women whose husbands and children have been slaughtered right before their eyes. In fact, the quality and destructive power of the weapons used in the war were such that they had never been seen before and the result being the terrorization of these women. One of them tells Anlugbua that: ‘‘No one had ever seen a weapon like that! But the Ijebu troops brought them in abundance!’’ (8) And ‘‘with fire in their guns! Shooting, killing, mowing down our men!’’ (36) Not only are the impact devastating, the women bemoan its explosive quality which can in a minute wipe out a whole community. The Allied Forces came with weapons they call guns. Guns, Anlugbua! Deadly sticks Which explode, and turn a whole battalion Into corpses. Rags upon rags of bleeding flesh! (8)
As they warm back to their hope of salvation in the deity, they are to be disappointed as the ancestor too expresses his lack of comprehension and order with the destruction and thus inform them of his own helplessness. This information destabilizes the women who remind him how shameful it is looking for help in humans. Anlugbua cannot help thinking what would become of him now that his worshippers have been mowed down. And the women in their defeatist appearances urge him to ‘‘also learn how to cope with pain’ in order for them to ‘join the other women to prepare for our life of slavery.’’ (9) When Erelu- Afin is discovered, in the second scene, she lies floundering on the ground saddened by the war. She blames her fate and penetrates into the sub-realm of resignation, urging herself to ‘‘accept it all with forbearance!’ as her ‘tears pour out nevertheless.’’ (10) The women in recognizing their misfortunes continue to shed tears and bewail their losses. They are not only troubled by the reality of losing loved ones to the war, they also cry, especially the royal women, that they have become sexual objects to the soldiers who murdered their husbands and children. The irony of what they suffer, they claim, is the ‘‘freedom’ which they now enjoy, as from tyranny they have been plunged into slavery imagified as ‘freedom of chains.’’ (13) War and terrorism again projects images of rape, abductions and imprisonment. The lower class slave women are disturbed by Erelu’s agony and tears and identify their situation in what she idealizes; “Your cries of anguish, Erelu Afin are like the talons of a hawk clawing at our breasts. They pierce our ears with terror.” (13) 69
With these images of terrorism the women accept their defeat as they behold the packing of booties by the allied forces back to their respective places. The sight of this ongoing business devastates them as they know that it won’t be long for them to ‘‘be shared out soon to become concubines to the officers.’’ (14) Their despair and sorrow find more expression in songs of woe through which they communicate their helpless state and their super reality to create their own world. Accordingly, Erelu says: ‘‘each of us has become our own god.’’ (33) According to her, “I want the earth to open like a mouth and suck me in! There, at least, in the dark indifference of her womb I may be able to rest at last from pain.” (33) From time to time Gesinde the armor bearer of war comes with information designed to threaten and devastate the women. Though he claims to carry out the orders of the men, Gesinde albeit assaults the privacy of these women having been confined in a camp pending their sharing to the soldiers. Erelu cannot rethink to justice her allotment to Balogun Derin, a man she loathes, let alone her daughter, Orisaye, the priestess at Obatala to Balogun Kusa. The women strung on the low class ladder also are devastated knowing that they are not valued. To compensate for this inadequacy, they are made to undertake most of the humiliating jobs and errands and again, consoling Erelu as well as themselves. When Gesinde makes his first appearance in Scene Four, Erelu announces that his ‘‘appearance always meant some doom to our people’ asking ‘what further misfortune” (23) he has brought for them. Spreading the news about their distribution to their new husbands and masters, he reports casually how Adeoti, Erelu’s daughter had gone ‘‘to a safer place.’’ (24) It is in the coming of Adumaadan, Lisabi’s wife, that mother learns that her daughter had been killed at the shrine of Lawumi and her throat cut open (40) and she cannot endure it. There is tearless lamentation in which the women hibernate in the dirge: B `uj ´e- b`uj ´e pa m ´i o, meaning I have been stung by death . Also, Orisaye, upon hearing her allocation to Kusa, loses her sanity. According to her, ‘‘Some words are such that when you hear them, all the light inside us dies at once.’’ (27) She is the bride of a god and cannot understand the theory of such sharing and her mother’s. Her behaviour takes on the bizarre as she holds out a touch, possibly the symbol of a new emerging order. In her hysteria, Orisaye conducts a judgment in which the mother would die on Owu soil than be assaulted by Derin, who has also ordered the execution of the last Owu male [Adumadaan’s baby] fearing “that their future would not be safe after this.’’ (43) She describes a grueling picture of her marriage to Kusa in which his blood will 70
flow, ‘‘gurgling like fresh wine from the palm tree’’ (29) in an ‘‘unbreakable pact with death.’’ (28) However, the Chorus Leader among the women slaves thinks Orisaye is deluded in her prophecies, reminding her how futile her proclamations were, and how her ranting plunges the mother into more sorrow. But she says she is not mad as it being the ‘fear’ that she may not be able to put a blade to Kusa’s throat. (28- 29) Gesinde would not make any meaning out of her ejaculations but comments that having lost her sanity, ‘‘she would have learnt very quickly how dangerous some words could be in a careless mouth!’’ (30) Gesinde means terror to these women but the transformation of Orisaye is the manifestation of more psychological troubling behaviour being unable at her age and by her designation to the service of Obatala to subsume the catastrophe. She reminds us of the Cassandra character in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon whereas Adeoti portrays Hecuba’s daughter slain in honour of Achilles in The Trojan Women- women whose circumstances in these plays reflect the suffering psychology. We would stress here that the last of these assaults that questioned Erelu’s world is not in the victory Iyunloye gains over them but in the execution of her grandchild, Aderogun, who until now had formed a mental picture of hope for them. Thus his destruction becomes the full wipe out of her humanity and the exaltation of the irrationality of gods and goddesses. As the child is handed over to Gesinde, Erelu collapses (45) and the women continue with the dirge: If I’d known, I’d have stayed back in heaven. (76) The songs and dirges are couched in a sensitive language to create a pathos thereby inducing a kind of shared or felt grief and melancholy. Through them, the wailing women express a kind of emotional involvement and evocative power semblance of the Freudian repressive principle and conversion personality. Adumaadan loses contact with reality and expresses regret with a world disjointed in which she would grease the body of same man that shot her husband. The suffering, indeed, is bewildering. (42) The emergence of Iyunloye and Maye Okunade in the last part of the play does not bring much hope to the women either. Looking forward to a victory based on the unfaithfulness of the woman, they were to be disappointed when Gesinde again, casually reports to them: ‘‘That celebrated slut has regained Maye’s heart and joined his caravan. Yes, Iyunloye is riding back with us in triumph!’’ (61) The armor bearer, though loses emotions, and volunteers to dig a grave for the baby Aderogun, yet traffics psychological fear, anxiety and uncertainty to the women. (43) There are also chains of soul searching questions in the play which psychologically crosses with the issues of alienation, 71
identity, displacement and hopelessness of war and terror. Some of them include: ‘‘How was it that no one remembered?’ (3), ‘Who will save Erelu Afin?’ (11), ‘Who can save me now?’ (11), ‘No, what do you mean?’ (15), ‘To whom will they sell me?’ (16), ‘But why did you do it?’ (18) And ‘What’s to happen to us?’’ (26) Adichie’s For Love of Biafra presents another plane of psychological behaviour and response to impact of war and terror by the experience of its characters. As the play begins, or rather when Nchedo comes with the news of a planned massacre, the Udemezue would flee the city of Kano. The bicker between Mama Nduka and her husband about Adaobi’s relationship with Mohammed renders the first psychological impulse of animosity and strife that could result in war and terror. According to Papa Nduka, “ Nchedo has just told me that trouble is brewing, our kinsman has been killed. A list of people to be killed has been compiled. He is going home tomorrow. I think we should go home too.” (19) It is not long as Nwoye who had remained behind was seen at Nsukka recounting the extent of destruction in the ethnic killings. The manner of the murders was so devastating that in telling it, Papa Ona and his Indian colleague, Harish, including others spoke in gasps of apprehension. Adaobi would not bring to bear the fact that her friend, Chinwe was ‘‘brought down by one stroke of the matchet.’’ (33) She commences the mourning of the loss of an object. Chinwe, according to her; ‘‘was to get married this month, they were going to drink her wine this month.’’ (34) She sojourns into grief. It is here that the character of Adaobi loosens her insides and emerged a totally different woman. Her reaction as the Igbo took on the few Hausas in the South became one of rationalization. According to her, ‘‘I do not blame them if they set upon the few of the Northerners living in our parts. I do not blame them at all…You cannot expect the refugees from the North to be rational about this, not after their houses were looted, their friends killed, their property burnt.’’ (38) Rather than calling for an end to the war the woman of Adaobi became a psychological adherent whose delusive belief in a Biafra is the product of her vicarious victimization. ‘‘Biafra is a mighty nation; we will subdue them in a short while. If not that Papa would strongly object, I would join the militia.’’ (45) This compensatory thought is borne out of an unconscious need to redeem an image battered in the massacres and anger broiled inward. The Hausas have become rivals that she would admit casually, without remorse, that ‘‘the house of Okagbue… lost a son to the Hausas,’’ (39) being an act of incitement. Of 72
course not all the characters explore delusion or sees through the eyes of Adaobi. Ona, for example, expresses fears at the sound of the guns very close to the University. ‘‘The guns we heard yesterday scared me very much, they sounded so near’’ (39) and would wish the war were over so that everyone would return back to their businesses. The fact that she cannot join Nnake her future husband seals her fate psychologically. It is thirteen months into the war and Biafra has lost many towns and villages to the federals fighting for Nigeria amidst ravaging Kwashiokor on the children. Adaobi cannot help but think about some Biafran children blightly affected and whom she had seen during one of her visits to the war relief center at Orlu, Aba having fallen. ADAOBI: Look at those little children, Mama, they can hardly walk.
MAMA NDUKA: My daughter, have you looked at yourself? You are almost as thin as they are.
ADAOBI: It is the relief centers that are saving us. The white people in the World Council of Churches and Caritas Internationalis will forever be blessed (58)
She is brutalized when her mother’s corned beef given to her by Dr. Ifeka is taken away by shell- shocked artillery soldiers. Apprehensive, Adaobi walks calmly into the room where their bed is a mat, lays hand on Mohammed’s photograph and starts shredding it. (62) He projects images of hunger, attack, destruction, genocide, terrorism and war. The tearing of the photograph being a kind of purging ritual in which in it a psychological transfer of aggression is accentuated signposts even the death which they would soon die. Mohammed represents whatever that denied her people the choice and freedom to live anywhere they chose, and anything that strangulates humanity and turns them into beasts. Thus her withdrawal did not start at the death of her father or that of Ona, but at the brutalization of her mother by Ojukwu’s soldiers and the denial of what would prevent the diarrhea which led to Ona’s death. As messages keep filtering in about Biafra’s loss of strongholds and deaths of loved ones, the frustration and helplessness that read in their faces could better be imagined than stated. Propaganda as one of the weapons deployed to win the war became a mischievous psychic death trap in which says Mrs Ikwu, “many people went unprepared and hid in super-heroic stories that seemed far from reality.” (98-99) And for Okoloma whom every sound of shelling and air raids had him running to the bush for cover: Is there anything one does deliberately? I have heard you but in panic, I 73
often lose my head. See, I have even soiled my trousers, my diarrhea comes at the instant I hear the sound of the bombing. (65)
Psychologically, the women of Biafra as seen from the perspective and characterization of Adaobi, Ona, Mama Nduka and Mama Ona, including Mrs Ikwu and the anemic woman, not to forget Mama Nnukwu, Adaobi’s grandmother have their emotions ripped open by the war. They witness their wards; especially children undergo pains of hunger and deprivations and the loss of loved ones. Nothing could blank the mind of a mother as what all these experiences did to Adaobi, Mama Nduka and Mama Ona. The men are also not spared in this war as Papa Ona, Ebuka and Nduka become former ghosts of themselves; with Ebuka, in particular living in shadows of regret and miscalculations, or Papa Ona’s friend, Okoloma who retreats more into confusion, despair and neurotic psychedelism from the shock and tense of the shelling and bombings. Adaobi suffers more psychological mishap and trauma as she hallucinates: ‘‘I miss Papa so much it is unbearable. Sometimes, I often think he will walk in through that door at any moment.’’ (103) While Adaobi may seem to be mourning the loss of Biafra, Ebuka projects his disaffection with the loss of lives, in which his father and Ona, including others died. (102) The sudden reappearance of Mohammed in her life traffics a psychotherapic attitude – the one in which the individual clings unto things in their formless undifferentiated state. An extract would help us with proving Adaobi’s metamorphosed mental behaviour given the environment of war and terror: Did you see your people committing genocide in the Sabon Garis’ before the war, or perhaps you joined the war? They killed my Chinwe with one stroke of the matchet…Ona died in my arms while I watched helplessly…my paternal grandfather died and my father was shot to death on his way to say goodbye…Mohammed, I will look at you sometimes and see the soldier that shot my father, or the pilot that bombed the busy market in my home town. (106- 107)
Therefore, her rejection of Mohammed’s love would not be interpreted as her refusal to marry him on the ground of one’s patriotic change of this love to an object nation, but the consequence of some social pressures which in them characterize abnormality and psychedelic clinging to 74
objects and do not the true picture of an object’s love. Psychological apprehensions are the makeup in the plays of discourse in which images of war and terrorism are portrayed in characterization, thought, spectacle, language and music. In Madmen we have images of destruction, blood strife and terrorism. Aafaa leads us from the front as Bero is called the Old Man’s ‘‘blasted son.’’ (52) In For Love such words as ‘‘vandals,’’ ‘‘infidels,’’ and ‘‘nyamilis’’ create metaphors of looseness, fundamentalism, destruction, prejudice and evil whereas in Women ‘‘blood splattered demons’’ achieves images of destruction, rape, imprisonment, abduction and nihility.
CHAPTER FOUR
RESPONSE OF CHARACTERS/VICTIMS TO INVASION OF WAR AND TERRORISM AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE
4. 1 War and Terrorism as Politics of Dying, Death and Disillusionment
An inconceivable thing occurs when we die. The human senses would vanish. Our senses of touch, taste, sound and smell become not really part of us- but acquiring a distant memory. The unconscious emerging with the conscious become the only way out for us to inquire for new meanings as what is visible to the dead could also be seen and reinterpreted by the living. In the plays, the characters reminisce on the nature of dying and death and of losing contact with reality. But the point is that they view war and terrorism as bearing political undertones in what they feel and how they die. In Madmen , we come bold with the above subject in Dr. Bero, a political dictator whose untoward quest for authority has serious implications for human life and identity. In a desire to topple the father’s political organization, the specialist recruits mad agents. A look at the warning he issued out to Aafaa would tell us much: “And you’d better remember some other things I know. You weren’t just discharged because of your- sickness. Just remember that…and other things.” (26) This can reveal that the Mendicants which Aafaa is a member are casualties of war and Bero's patients in the clinic. This would account for why they are manifesting psychological awkwardness. This belief is situated in Aafaa’s recall to the Old Man that: 75
They told me up there when it began, that it was something psy-cho-lo-gi- cal. Something to do with all the things happening around me, and the narrow escape I had…I still remember the first time I was standing there just like this, blessing a group of six just to go off…Then- well, I can’t say I heard the noise at all, because I was deaf for the next hour…Six men kneeling in front of me, the next moment they were gone. Disappeared, just like that. That was when I began to shake. (54)
We could confirm from the above extract that Aafaa is a victim of terrorist bomb explosion in which six persons lost their lives. Having lost his senses, he had begun to question the reason for living. According to him, ‘‘nothing I could do to stop it. My back just went on bending over and snapping back again, like the spirit had taken me. God! What a way for the spirit to mount a man.” (54) The subject of dying, death and disillusionment can be seen in Bero’s symbolic description of his ‘old patients’ as ‘‘corpses,’’ (27) and his fearful tale to the priest that; ‘Human flesh is delicious…I prefer the balls myself.’’ (35) Through his actions and words, Bero underestimates the nature of, and his involvement with killing, dying and death. In his rationalization of this ugly subject, he informs us that; “Power comes from bending Nature to your will,” (31) thereby sharing belief with Iya Mate that; “You don’t learn good things unless you learn evil.” (17) Images of this nature are further in their unclear terms expressed by the earth mothers in their discussion with Si Bero. Such images of death and dying include ‘‘weeds,’’ (16) ‘‘bats,’’ (16) ‘‘leaves;’’ (16) and ‘‘poison,’’ (17). Hear them:
IYA AGBA: Poison has its uses too. You can cure with poison if you use it right. Or Kill. SI BERO: I will throw it in the fire. IYA MATE: Do nothing of the sort. You don’t learn good things unless you learn evils SI BERO: But it’s poison. IYA MATE: It grows. IYA AGBA: It lives. IYA MATE: It dies. (17)
In the women is the urge to establish an environment of killing and dying a constitution. For example, Iya Agba’s jocular hope that; “We shall drink palm wine soon, very soon when 76
someone returns” (18) is an ironic expression suggesting tears, bloodshed, dying and death. It is pertinent to note that these earth mothers would achieve this preoccupation by the death of the Old Man. Bero’s come back home foists on the women the participatory role of hounding and terrorizing Si Bero for a payment of life which is seen in the brutal assassination of the father. The politics of death here is constructed around the Freudian parent- child domination psyche in which according to Iya Agba: ‘‘He and his father- There is too much binds them down here,’’ (17- 18) meaning the serious contention that is already going on behind Si Bero. The war further has grave consequences on the psyche of Si Bero who in order to compensate for losses in war went out of her way to employ the earth mothers for the sole purpose of protecting spiritually her father and Dr Bero at the warfront. But rather than yield her the needed desire, it achieves the reverse. Her mental inertia is as accurately analyzed by Aafaa, as also observed by Iya Agba that; ‘‘It is that kind who tire suddenly in their sleep, and pass on to join their ancestors.’’ (67) According to Aafaa: “That woman’s herbs are not just herbs. She hoards them and treats them like children. The whole house is full of twigs. If it’s a straightforward business, why doesn’t she use them? Or sell them or something?” (12) Si Bero’s mind has been battered by the war that her response to the happenings around her follows the mentality of a psychopathic patient. With the actions of the terrorists consequent upon her forlonity, she looks on to an uncertain future. This is evidenced in her failed desire to pacify the Old Women. The mood and disposition of these women and the Mendicants, including the Specialist, unperturbed by their existential and absurdist apprehensions, do not leave anything unsaid as Si Bero is ransacked by a meaningless and strange humanity, even as ‘‘the lights snap out simultaneously.’’ (77) But we are also not to forget that the berries given to the Old Man by Bero is from the store which houses the herbs above, (61) and must have been poisoned to eliminate him. The Mendicants overtime express dismay with the state of things and the workings of their psyche. They can see themselves losing touch with humanity and find it awfully difficult to establish a kind of relationship with reality. As they maintain these illusions, much as the Old Man and Bero, they also pry into other characters lives; in revealing to the reader, the psychic condition of the individual character. In their actions and speeches are hopelessness, despair, uncertainty, inadequate response to life, frustration, and meaninglessness achieved as politics of 77
war and terrorism. For example, Goyi notes his dejection and unfamiliarity with existence as he questions, ‘‘Where? I’m still lost,’’ (14) and ‘‘In any case, we are not much use to any one.’’ (24) Other life searching questions and statements which remain unanswered include, ‘‘Where am I?’’ (15) ‘‘Is there really much difference?’’ (51) ‘‘But suppose you find no answer to take back, what then?’’ (51) ‘‘How do I get there, Aafaa?’’ (68) and ‘‘the thing I call my mind, well, was no longer there.’’ (37) In Women, death is given a position that war and terror are its elicitor. Some of the characters in their symbolism of war and terror perpetuate actions that lead to dying, death and other characters loss of contact with reality. In order to punish the people and or battle for pre- eminence, the gods are willing to orchestrate animosity and strife. They would go to any length to ensure that humans contravened and failed in their mission to observe social norms that make for peaceful living. In Anlugbua’s constitution, we evidence an irrational law devised to annihilate humanity and perpetuate destruction. In the encounter between the deity and the two women, he asks why no Owu person ever summoned him during their moment of attack. According to him:
My words were clear enough, I thought! Whenever any grave danger threatens the town, I said! Whenever some misfortune arrives Too huge for you to handle, run To my hill and pull my chain! How was it that no one remembered? (3)
It is indeed when plans have been concluded for mass murder that laws become entrenched. In Anlugbua’s law is the mask of dying, death and disillusionment a constitution. The gods are craftily aware of man’s shortcomings and in their concerted war and greed to establish monopolous authority they will rationalize all acts of terror that undermine human population and instill mental fear and anxiety in their victims. Erelu does not shriek at all from admitting this wickedness when she says that; ‘‘Happiness is a fake. The gods employ it as a mask to trick us each time they are about to plunge us into grief.’’ (37) This may be balanced with the prophecy in which Owu was asked to sacrifice the child Adejumo at infancy to avert disaster. 78
Erelu, the mother, would not do that, since that would amount to, in itself, a violation of the rights of the child to live. The gods being who they are will manipulate man and use him as an example to further widen their political space. The statement by the queen implicates them in this shoddy deal: ‘‘We are only human beings after all. Against the pettiness of gods and goddesses, we have no defence.’’ (37) Blaming Erelu for the conflagrating deaths and despair, Adumaadan, whose baby Aderogun is executed, reveals:
Right from birth that man brought the curse of death with him From heaven. But, against the priest’s instructions, you refused To have him destroyed. Now it is he who has destroyed Us all, exactly as predicted. Because of you, Because of your pride which you disguised as a mother’s love, Now I am a widow about to be mated with the very man Who murdered my husband! (40)
Anlugbua’s law suggests that even peace in war and terror is elusive. It becomes therefore a mask that Anlugbua’s indulgence is a ploy to decimate a people disliked for engaging their neighbours into slavery and exhibiting pride. Their failure hence would be seen as the rational for the contrived killings and deaths inflicted on them. Thus they are routed and terrorized by the unbearable slaughter of their loved ones. In order to reclaim his abducted wife, Okunade views killing that result in death as definite, and as his proclamation of the natural right of man to determine the cause of his existence. This is why his evaluation of the war in terms of its impact on the weeping women is porous: ‘‘All right, enough of that! Good, I don’t want to hear even a single sigh of sorrow. This is a happy day.’’ (46) The war that results seems to explain the logical response of a people to the historical interconnectedness existing between communities. In other words, the superiority exercised by the Owu is absurdly and manifestably contested by the allied forces and the ties and social contract terminated. A critical reading of the text would reveal that, though Lawumi does not admit it, Okunade’s adoption of war and terror, rather than dialogue, opens up the gods’ decision to have Dejumo sacrificed for evaluation. Of course we are aware that neither Erelu had sought dialogue with the gods over the declaration; as her decision to hide her child from the 79
eyes of the gods is the unconscious emotion of protective bonding that binds mother and child. Hence, the politicization of the war that orchestrates what we are talking about in the play and in the characters become carefully launched at the door step of Lawumi. According to Erelu: ‘‘Our priests, remember told us our tribulations are the work of our ancestral mother, Lawumi. Let us be consoled then: This defeat is her shame.” (37) Lawumi says so herself: ‘‘Because I led them on. I made them attack the Ijebu traders at the market too.’’ (19- 20) As mother and child decree the punishment of the soldiers we are informed that Lawumi’s anger is based on the fact that her shrine was burned and the people who ran to the place seeking her protection were massacred. ‘‘They seized them all! Even Princess Orisaye, Obatala’s vestal votary, was literally dragged out of my hands, without any of the soldiers protesting!’’ (21) All her actions of unleashing death and the state of dying and confusion in the characters depict her as fundamentalist and capricious. She would incite victims against one another and then rationalize her decrepit actions which are always not in their favour. For example, she says:
These Allied Forces, the very soldiers I gave my total support, did not spare them! …Let every one of them perish Till human beings everywhere learn That the gods are not their plaything. (21, 22)
Thus Lawumi as indicated above ends up disgraced in the war she contrives, with her shrine burned; she floats without shelter, disillusioned in same war and bearing identity questions. But the slave women recognized their inadequacy and admit that: ‘‘We are always eager to forget that the sky is at its calmest in the moments before a mighty thunderstorm’’ (37) as ‘‘It’s us, not the gods, who create war.’’ (15) This is not without saying that the latter as stated by Chorus Leader is an ironic statement directed against the domination of gods. The women in vacillating between fragments of reality and elements of absurdity question the interest of gods and goddesses in the affairs of men as they view the hands of these lawless ancestors in their death and displacement. The act of sharing these women to new masters and engaging them in sexual rape is an indication of the politicization of the war. They intend to through it launch fresh death attacks and make them live in unfriendly environment. 80
Orisaye’s spasmodic behaviour and delusion as well as her mother’s frenzy are such instances where we are made to witness what could happen in death and how dying starts. In their experiences, we locate sadness, mourning and agony which characterize the above subject. Her acute but painful performance of her sadness and dejectedness with death due to her allocation to Kusa is intended to remind us of how fragile and transient all of life’s glory or meaning in war and terror can be in spite of their ideologies. Orisaye, for example, sojourns into the deepest of fantasy as she proclaims: ‘‘So promise me, mother! Promise that if you see me stumble, you will rush at once to my side and help me on! Promise to push me into the Balogun’s arms and have him carry me off on his splendid horse.’’ (28) However, she promises her mother death in Owu as she would not be taken to her new master. Erelu is disillusioned with the coming of Okunade and gladly declares her hope that Iyunloye, the ‘second-hand woman’(76) would be justly punished for inflicting death in the land through her amorous marriage to Dejumo; but her relief is to turn to agony when Okunade, the husband accepts her back. The war and terrorism become the expression of romance for Okunade and the romance being the basis for the orchestrated deaths. In her gathered response, Erelu says: ‘‘it is time to say goodbye…The Erelu you knew, but just another corpse still talking.’’ (61, 62) However, Gesinde who returns with the ‘dashed’ head of Aderogun in the last scene for proper burial as demanded by her mother now on her way to Otunba Lekki’s home rationalizes the politics of dying, death and displacement. According to him; ‘‘even though he gave the orders to kill the child. But it’s the logic of war, the law of defeat.’’ (59) The chorus women want to know what would happen to them and there are no answers and they cannot be consoled. (42) Erelu’s forlonity with reality is against the background that; ‘‘All the gods we knew seem to have turned their back on us’’ (41) even as Chorus Leader in accusing them, remind them about their own identity tag: ‘‘they too will die without worshippers.’’ (46) Women of Owu exemplifies John Arden’s Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, in the market scene, in its concern with the horror and futility of war, in which “Musgrave communicates his sense of surreal by cascarading props as machine-guns, flags of war, and a uniformed skeleton that he holds menacingly,” (70, 71) as stated Brecht. In his absurdist preoccupation to persuade, he loses humanity like Aafaa in Madmen and Specialists and takes on the existentialist form of 81
the unpredictable in violent dance. Our Orisaye is like that; unable to draw boundaries between man and gods and man. So to say, war and terrorism as vestiges of death, like Brook’s ‘The Rough Theatre’ outlines, ‘‘wear no conventions, no limitations, no style’’ in its psychopathic strain, since by admitting ‘‘wickedness,’’ politicization of war and terror, deals with ‘‘men’s actions’ and is ‘down to earth and direct.’’ (71) Adichie’s play, For Love of Biafra radiates many themes on dynamic levels. It is a story of how the people, for love of Biafra, yielded themselves to the grim horror of war. It is more the recapture of the deceptive politics of dying and death metamorphosed as war and terror. The painful killing and death of Papa Nduka, for instance, in the hands of the federals, involves a magnitude that alienates man cuttingly from family and society. In an act of tactic to induce hope and courage in the people, the fighting Biafra introduced propaganda machinery as weapon of war; but the results it achieves, more than the objective, are as devastating as what happens to the women slaves in Osofisan’s play. The necessity of the machinery is highlighted by Papa Ona: Our people needed the propaganda, a necessary evil, perhaps. They believed it all, they needed to believe it, they had to believe something. You saw people dying every day, children starving to death, bombings, houses falling, strafing…you simply had to believe something positive. (99) Mrs. Ikwu’s husband, described as ‘the handsomest of men,’ and who died in the war leaving her childless and producing no heir in the marriage views the machinery as senseless. Her marriage thus becomes a waste. Her failure to realize this social and cultural necessity means the expunging and neglection of her husband’s duty to society. He would be welcomed at the after- life an unproductive, dejected, and destructive example of war and terrorisms impact. According to her, ‘‘We had no child and now I am wondering, for what did he live? For what did we marry?” (101) Re-linked to the issue of blockade by Nigeria and its unavoidable hunger that leads to kwashiorkor, diarrhea and painful deaths of young people and the aged, propaganda is so much politicized that suspected saboteurs, what they called Biafrans who sold the cause out, were apprehended and killed. The fall out was the incident Mrs. Ikwu cited and which happened in Ugwuta where ‘‘there was a stampede and many died.’’ (99) According to her: There was no kind of super-heroic story that one did not hear. Nigerian 82
casualties littered the roads, ten thousand in just one town some said, others said twenty. Ojukwu was personally at the warfront and driving the enemy back, our troops were using some sort of gas to kill the enemy in thousands…it was all too much…it is our fault that Biafra lost. (99)
The above interacts with the state of hopelessness and despair expressed by Adaobi and her brothers following the loss of the war. Its meaninglessness becomes the first unconscious symbol that traffics their loss of contact with reality. Nduka enquires: ‘‘So it is the end of the war but it makes no meaning to me.’’ (90) His disillusionment stems from an abrogated ‘‘war of survival’’ (90) for he points out further that, ‘‘I never lost my conviction because we were fighting a war of survival and now I do not know what to do. I feel nothing.’’ (90) Adaobi implicates the gods in the politics surrounding their loss of war and death like the women blamed the gods in Osofisan’s Women , and Richard’s question of this loss in Half of a Yellow Sun , even in Ugwu’s direction of the failure at the world which watched as Biafrans died. She would not accept any rationalization, because, ‘did the Hausas not slaughter our people for no reason at all?,’ hence her question again, ‘‘Why did God let this happen?’’ (90) Her questions are similitude with Boy’s questions in Oswald Mtshali’s poem, Boy on a Swing which largely remain unanswered, thereby revealing a battered identity, anxiety and uncertainty. It is now that she realizes that the war is over, having been politicized into death and anguish. So for what did Papa lay down his life? For what did Ona waste away to common diarrhea? For what did all those children ravaged by kwashiorkor die? What of all the young men who fought the war? For what did they die, for General Effiong’s speech of surrender? (90- 91)
Many questions. All the rhetoricals are in themselves a metaphorized search of an identity brutalized and terrorized by war. If one is left to admit, Adaobi’s dying and death and lost sense of the world occurred immediately her father was killed. As she starts to cry, Adaobi feels that, ‘‘Papa will be turning in his grave now…We will continue to be oppressed.’’ (91) The merging of hallucination and objective reality are pivotal to Adichie’s technique in elucidating death and disillusionment. Hallucination in this reading indicates Adaobi’s longing for a shared relationship with her father and the meaning of her life in an inchoate war. Or is it in her 83
expression of incalculable loss to the war. For example: …My uncle and aunt are shadows of their selves and my aunt has developed a nervous disorder. My mother’s spirit is broken but she is very brave about it all for the sake of my brothers and me. Nduka is finding himself playing father and he feels inadequate. Ebuka is too full of bitterness and thinks of nothing but trading. (104)
Her lost contact with reality strikes at the Freudian superego personality and compensatory mentality in which the characters mentioned each carry a weight of regret and transfer of strength and disturbing inferiority complex. We are startled by more revelations from her on the impact of the war, especially in her vision to see things as they are: “Something tragic, something unforgettable has happened since then and I cannot ignore it. You cannot ask me to ignore the war, it happened, and it left in its wake very strong ethnic resentments. (107) This immediately reminds us of Linda’s similar agony with her husband’s condition in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman when she says directly to the children: ‘‘But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.’’ (273) As Linda establishes that Willy though a common man must not be allowed to die because he is not rich, so Adaobi appeals to our emotions on this particular tragedy- the tragedy of the loss of her loved ones, especially in that Kano massacres in which Chinwe and others died and the Udemezues returned home; only to lose their symbol of love. The unforgettable is that Mohammed wants her to return to Kano where she continues saying that, ‘‘Nigeria is a faraway place full of genocidal Hausas, a blood thirsty place which claimed my father, cousin and grandfathers.’’ (91) In this is vicarious victimization entrenched. Of course, we would not accept Adaobi’s disillusionment with Mohammed on the basis that, ‘‘my faith in Biafra overshadowed every other thing’’ (107) because her loss of contact with reality or identity to peculiarities of this nature became needful against the background of incurring human losses. Thus Adaobi’s distancing of self from her previous object of love becomes the transfer of this quality to an object father whose death relinquishes it to an object nation. Therefore, Mohammed’s further enquiry into the nature of her love would make no sense to her, as clinging she is now, would transfer the object to Nduoma Nwosu. (108) For, says Adaobi, “I will marry Nduoma Nwosu... He is rich, he will take care of us,” (110) and “I would feel like I was betraying the memory of Papa... the memory of Biafra if I 84
turned right back and married the enemy.” (109) And impressing this beginning upon Mohammed, she adds, “You were no longer everything, your memories were no longer the center of my world.” (107) This is her kind of emotional outlet about despair, hopelessness and meaninglessness of life. Her mother reveals this animosity directed at war and terror when she alleges that, “You are angry because the war came between you and Mohammed. Because you feel that he has to pay for all the atrocities his people committed.” (110) Papa Ona is also one of the characters whose experiences in the play are touchy. Bemoaning the loss of a silver-plated trophy he had won in the club at the university to the federals, (98) he becomes disillusioned following the loss of her daughter: ‘‘But I did not lose hope in Biafra. The war only ended for me when my daughter and my brother died.’’ (96) His expression of resignation is located in his consumption of the painful diarrhea experienced by Ona and which led to her death. He would tell her while she lay on her mat: You know I have only one eye, and that is you. You know I have only one hand, and that is you. You know I have only one leg, and that is you. Good girl, drink it and keep it down. (83)
Her death is so devastating that in being interpreted as one of the politics of war and terrorism, the entire family of Udemezue loses comprehension with what has befallen them. We would assert that Ona while alive had kept on dreaming about the loss of the war and how children died as a result; but she was always hushed, especially by Adaobi, from proclaiming Nigerians as victor. Their acceptance to die and not to recognize that they are dying is couched in General Effiong’s speech of surrender that, ‘‘throughout history, injured people have had to resort to arms in their self- defence where peaceful negotiations fail.’’ (88) For one thing, she doesn’t even know whether Nnake, her engaged, is dead or living; having ran away to Nsugbe after Abagana fell. According to Ona: If hunger does not kill us then perhaps the bombing will. My life is wasting away, I should have been married with children by now, I suffer from diarrhea almost every day…I have been quiet long enough. Our people believe the lies and blame saboteurs for showing the enemy the way. (68) 85
While we note that Papa Nnukwu’s death in Abagana remains the cultural peak of politicization of Papa Nduka’s killing by federal soldiers as he goes to offer him a decent burial by custom, the condolences that are associated with death and burial, particularly in this play are also metaphorically political. Emma who brings the message of elder Udemezue’s death says of him: Your father was an old man, a good man, the most intelligent man in Abagana and a man of achievement. The people of Abagana were proud to have him as a son. They boasted with his name. Please accept my sympathy. (76)
According to Emma:
He became ill during the time Abagana fell and it got worse when they got to Nsugbe. He developed pneumonia, there were no drugs, no adequate medical care, and he never recovered. (75)
Mama Nduka’s father’s death report is not also cheering. According to Papa Nduka who consoles the wife, ‘‘They have buried him in Uke, in a foreign land. He is not resting near his ancestors in Umunachi. He is in a strange land.’’ (70) This is loss of identity; the type which Ricoer will describe as “an irrational event that takes place in a good creation.” (294) The characters statements and actions which are their response mechanism to victimization in war and terrorism are therefore connected with loss, either to death or disillusionment.
4.2 Grieving and Suffering under the Actuality of War and Terrorism
The most confounding particularity of thought, right from human history, has been the reality of the spiritual realm, haphazard, and constantly in battles with the human sphere- the physical, which the former exercises authority on. In almost Greek drama, tragic suffering is meaningless in all matter of speaking, save the presence of cosmic forces. But the nature of the human world as mentioned is cruel, thus these forces remain largely utopian, strange and unfriendly, until the very man designated to pine away and die, has been destabilized. Suffering indeed is not mainly one of gods in countermotion with individual characters, as in the modernist view, man is made to suffer as a result of an unfriendly and hostile environment. 86
Under the influence of politics, however, the Owu war in Osofisan’s Women , had become a contention for gods and goddesses whose orchestrated spiritual world lies antithetical to the nature of the human world. This struggle is the technique of ‘structuration,’ and in the other plays, of different styles and forms, but bearing close affinities. In all of them we observe the flowing of reversals. The turns in fortunes are reflected by the subject of war and terrorism, and the characters also, who engage in it, on the other hand. In Adichie’s For Love of Biafra , human error (Papa Nduka), pride, victimization and indecision (Adaobi), deceit and obsessions (Ona and Biafran chidren) are what elicit grief and suffering. Tragic suffering and grief as a result of human motivated war and terror as we see in Adaobi and her father, reflect again what is almost the problem in Women of Owu where Erelu’s human error and pride, the latter was not brought down amidst increasing harassment and abuse, and in Madmen and Specialists , where it is the unconscious need [human weakness] to protect the loved ones that gives rise to grief and suffering, on both sides of Old Man and her daughter, Si Bero. There could be many other levels of thought in the texts that incite characters as there are many evils that are privation of all good, each, being ‘‘a parasite, a tag along the goodness of this world,” as pointed out by Madu. (94) The texts may be understood more in terms of the subject and the patterns of representation in forms of symbols and myths. For example, shortly after Aderogun is handed over to Gesinde for execution in Women , the Chorus Leader, in her effort to build Erelu’s courage and those of the other women, asserts that, ‘The gods have done their worst to wipe us out: But they too will die without worshippers’ illustrate one thing for us: the unharmonious relationship that exists between gods and man and how because of the latter’s human free will in deciding how to live, these higher laws become inimical for hostilities. The understanding of the characters in the texts is that the gods are the ultimate harbinger of their suffering. According to Akwanya, ‘‘the perception of the hand of the god in human suffering is a mythic symbol; hence it is expressed only in the form of proverbs,’’ (209-210) an argument which Richard Brian shares, in Echema that; ‘‘For many of course, the very existence of evil (natural disasters, the terminal illness of a young child, the sudden death of a father or a mother, a brutal murder, an act of terrorism, Auschwitz) is the single most persuasive argument against the existence of God.’’ (136) Lawumi and Anlugbua in Women and God, in For Love and Madmen may represent myths 87
and symbols of thought. The sense of construed suffering here is seen in the ‘terrible mother,’ Akwanya states, who eats up ‘‘its own young’’ and the terrible mother is a ‘‘mythic symbol,’’ (210) and vice versa. Women , however, is dynamic in that gods and goddesses participate, according to Echema, ‘‘in the joy, pain and suffering of human beings.’’ (137) This is why like God; Anlugbua seems ‘‘the great companion- the fellow sufferer who understands.’’ (138) Madu argues that ‘‘it would be illogical for an omnipotent god to keep pain and misery in existence in order to make possible the virtues of benevolence, heroism, etc,’’ (92) even as Echema claims that, ‘‘suffering and death have eschatological dimensions that go beyond our temporal lives.’’ (147) This is realized in Erelu’s death, Papa Nduka and the Old Man in Women , For Love and Madmen , respectively. Their freely accepted deaths under the terrorisms of war are a victory over mortality that rubbishes whatever claims and all ideologies of higher laws and weapons of war which ‘‘exert power over humanity.’’ (147) But Erelu’s utmost sacrifice for the future of Owu has not paid for her not dying physically, for in her ritual frenzy and subsequent death, Erelu’s grief ‘‘is placed within the context of a history of salvation.’’ (147) According to her as she is taken over by the god Anlugbua: A father can only chew for a child; he cannot swallow for her. If only you had read your history right, the lessons Left behind by the ancestors! Each of us, how else did we go Except by the wrath of war? Each of us, Demolished through violence and contention! Not so? (66)
According to her again, ‘‘The Erelu you knew, but just another corpse, still talking. Grief has drained out my powers.’’ (62) What exactly the above has achieved is in placing tragic death where it belongs, since Plato in Laws: Book XII as reviewed by the Awake! publication of February 2013 says that; “that which is the real self of us, and which we term the immortal soul departs to the presence of other gods, there… to render its account, -a prospect to be faced with courage by the good, but with uttermost dread by the evil.’’ (13) Whereas in same play we never encountered Orisaye in contention with these gods that are scorned, of which she is a vessel, for her predicament; but her non- justification of them in her performance of psychoses, relates a balance of those who grieve and suffer- who sit on two 88
sides of the coin, either against, or in support of an evil action, or better still in the third, chose to remain neutral. The gods are against the Owu and have proclaimed the destruction of the allied forces; but Orisaye becomes the mouth-piece through which Gesinde, though he chooses not to comprehend, would hear of the decimation, as she calmed the women slaves promising Owu hope. What to be gathered is that the beings’ ‘‘respects humanity’s use and lamentable misuse of its freedom’ as in the play, they suffer and grieve, as revealed by Echema, ‘with all those who suffer and die.’’ (139) According to Alban Goddier, cited in the above: ‘‘the firm hope that suffering, even from an evil source [war and terrorism], can be…transformed and used to defeat the evil from which it originated,’ for when we look at the nature of the women’s sharing as booties and Orisaye’s grief and curse on Balogun Kusa [who prefers her for being a virgin] and Iyunloye’s marriage to Dejumo [both to gratiate sexual orgies] we believe and accept Goddier’s testimony that the sharing ‘is a mystery, which holds together a multitude of paradoxes: defeat and victory, sickness and healing, disintegration and wholeness, fear and hope, death and life.’’ (141) In all the significant characters: Erelu, Orisaye, Aderogun; Adaobi, Papa Nduka and Ona; Si Bero and Old Man, we evidence the ‘unavowable’ where the tragic character in suffering is at the same time innocent and guilty. Therefore, the problem of war and terrorism will remain unsolved until we are preoccupied with eradicating man’s inadequacy, and as Madu clearly pointed out, the challenge which constitutes evil in itself ‘is the problem of man himself and to solve it completely is to solve completely the problem of humanity. This would be because the challenge of war and terror will always be evaluated ‘‘by the value of the being which it destroys.’’ (94) Orisaye, Erelu, Aderogun, Adumaadan, the chorus of women and in For Love , Adaobi, Papa Nduka, Ona, and Old Man and Si Bero in Madmen are tacit examples of this untoward destruction. In Adaobi and Si Bero, we confront what seems the difficulty explained by Shelley, in Akwanya, which the mind enters into at the moment of composition, and the notion of ‘the profundity of life,’ and which Baudelaire claims to “manifest in certain states in the most banal objects…of the primary symbol.’’ (210) In Soyinka’s Madmen, these characterize Si Bero’s holding on to things, even in their lifeless equation, as representative of lived lives- that of protecting the father and brother from the evils of war and terrorism by enlisting the assistance of the earth mothers [mythic symbol] 89
and in the personalities of the Mendicants now unfolding before her the obvious meaning of what she has harbored as illusion. When she requests to know about their father, Bero calls in the Mendicants. Then she is alarmed as Cripple symbolically picks a flea from his rags and explodes ‘Got him!’ (39) It is here that Si Bero in grief understood the import of that, and declaims: She cannot shout. She cannot cry. It is now that things are unfolding before her in their truth. A weight of sorrow hangs upon her. This represents her grieving hour; for Si Bero’s emotional outbursts here replicates the mood of suffering in a very conspicuous structure: ‘What is this, Bero? Where is father?’ (39) His hostage strikes at the symbol of what she had wished never came to be. The future really stands helpless and dark. She does not know what to do, but we are told that Si Bero turns and runs towards the OLD WOMEN who receive her at the door of the hut . (40) In For Love, the immediate traffic of Mohammed in the life of Adaobi soon after the war lies in it the meaning of her loved ones deaths and the continuum of the action characterized the present mood of fear, hate and meaninglessness. This accentuates her grief. Just like Si Bero pays often half attention to the Mendicants, perhaps, for their deformed bodies and public nuisance, this attitude which is of dread, so Adaobi looks upon Mohammed, northern Nigeria and England with dread. While there is the likelihood that in most of the questions she asks lies her belief of her life sealed in the fate to die for the war, there is also the tendency that her plea with Mohammed as he leaves the house, ‘Please, don’t ever forget me’ (108) lies an unexpressed longing for him. She is devastated by her loss. The following conversation will do:
MOHAMMED: But Adaobi, the war is over. It’s done with. We are all Nigerians… ADAOBI: Mohammed, I am a Biafran first, a Biafran last, a Biafran always, don’t ever make the mistake of calling me a Nigerian again.
MOHAMMED: Adaobi, Adaobi please listen to me. I understand how you feel. I understand your anger. Please let me help you, let me help you come to terms with your anger and your pain. You cannot live with it forever. I will take you to England. You can put everything behind; lay every painful memory to rest. I love you, I love you so much and it hurts me to see you so bitter.
ADAOBI: Did you see your people committing genocide in the Sabon Garis’ before the war, or perhaps did you join the war? They killed my friend Chinwe with one stroke of the matchete. You know 90
Chinedu, the little boy who brought your messages to me, they cut his head off. And his mother who was heavily pregnant, the cut open her stomach, brought the baby out and cut off his head. They preferred two corpses to one…
MOHAMMED: Adaobi, stop, stop it! Why are you saying this? (106)
Thus Adaobi’s grief takes from Frye’s analogy that ‘‘a victim of war is innocent in the sense that what happens to him [her] is far greater than anything he has done or provokes.’’ (41) She has lost her father, Ona her cousin and now, the Biafrans have surrendered. Her committance to the war are much that in losing all, she becomes ‘guilty,’ psychedelic and threading on the surface of life, which according to Frye again, is ‘‘in the sense that he [she] is a member of a guilty society where such injustices is an inescapable part of existence.’’ (41) Now she will not return to Okija, where Mama and Nwoye are, with her father who had spoilt her with the pet name, ‘‘My grandmother,’ nor with Ona back to Nsukka. This suffering becomes a portrait of the loss teenagers encounter in war and terror, as we are informed that Erelu’s daughter in Women , Adeoti was a sacrifice executed to appease the blood of a fallen soldier. (24) In rejecting Mohammed, as we speak, Adaobi departs markedly in her ritual of grief and suffering from Chimene in The Cid by Pierre Corneille, the latter whose father’s death in the hands of her love she wavers between duty and love to bring to book, and Si Bero in Madmen who appears to be less emphatic in her role. Her denial of the love between them is strength of courage and uncowering sense a symbol of this suffering, because Akwanya tells us that; ‘‘the dreaded object can only be approached with courage or with despair, strength or weakness.” (211) The fear of being sexually abused places Erelu and Orisaye in a web of grief that lacks identification. Balogun Derin stands for Erelu the destroyer of all that is good and noble, not after he had ordered the manslaughter of the last hope of Owu. We are told that as the child is given, Erelu collapses, (45) and a dirge to ritualize her suffering commences. This last act saps the queen of whatever courage that laid in her until the coming out of Iyunloye and Okunade. Tragic suffering, in it, one is transformed by the experience into a new and higher being. For example, Ona in For Love understands what is at stake, just as Erelu in Women takes up the duty of a sacrificial lamb, which Akwanya notes is ‘‘the ritual of ablution and commendation of the dead,’’ (211) and of defining the future . Adaobi seems to take this brief too. And in 91
Madmen , this is lacking because one cannot exactly define Si Bero. She says so little, with other characters describing her most often. This interprets her kind of grief and suffering as a result of war and terror. Ona is tied up in an irreversible tragedy, confronted as she is by the imperturbability of human deceit enlivened in a deadly propaganda; for her grief is expressed not only that she suffers from hunger and diarrhea, but that her people has given in to Ojukwu’s lies. She can only ask them while they chose to keep the other way, ‘‘Do you know how many children have starved to death in this war?’’ (82) Mama Nduka calls her an Ogbanje , and this is a pattern; for is Ona, not a child that comes and goes? The child of this type in her characteristic fashion always leaves her parents distraught. The problem of tragic characters or those caught up in war drama is fear. From Greek era until the present times, we have had characters nursing an inner turmoil of something evil occurring to them. Examples are Oedipus, Dr. Faustus, Willy Loman, Miss Julie, even Ikem in Nwabueze’s Spokesman for the Oracle expresses an unknown fear of the woman she met at the Pyjamas party being his biological mother, let alone Everyman in the anonymous play of same title, and whose fear every point of the way discloses his despair and uncertainty. Ricoer says “this is pertinent for the character to ‘fall into fault’ being the one ‘subject to a fatal destiny.’’ (294) So when eventually, Ona declares: ‘‘I am afraid, I do not want to die. I feel so empty, as if there is no life in me, and it frightens me. My courage has deserted me,’’ (82) we are left with a gash. In expressing grief about her helpless condition she comes close to the character of Dr Faustus in eliciting pathos from her readers. This fear is also seen in Miss Julie’s suspicion that she may not be able to undertake suicide. Erelu expresses this fear. Ona is a sacrifice. Although she suffers, she is not alone in her despair, as she represents a moral voice for the dying Biafran children. She comes as the worth of a family whose years of toil would soon be laid to waste. This is even made worse as a neighbour, described as anemic, comes to give the news of the surrender. ‘‘We have surrendered! We have surrendered!’’ (87) And Adaobi cannot rethink it. Ona’s suffering is tragedic. Her father’s response to this is one of associating with her in the suffering. Ona must not leave him seeking out his ‘‘one eye,’ ‘one hand,’ and ‘one leg.’’ (83) Ona is his only child and must not die. Hence, a character already penciled for destruction has no freedom, nor clarity or sight in respect of what will be his lot, as Ricoer argues again that; ‘‘the god [whatever] who tempts and misleads [the character stands for the primordial lack of 92
distinction between good and evil.’’ (294) After the death of Papa Nduka, whose crime was his desire to give his dead father a decent burial, the playwright would inform us of the sudden grief of Adaobi. Her response becomes a vacant expression which had formed with her distraught face to give us an absence of life. Hers’ is a special case of the destruction, futility and absurdity of war and terrorism as her concentrated rocking of chair lends her a contemplative sojourn with the ethereal. In Adaobi's grief we come to know that the world is filled with good fathers. They are the ones who are missed terribly that everything falls apart in their absence. The best of these fathers as we see in the texts are the ones who make the women in their lives feel like good mothers and good daughters. In Women , Adumaadan's husband, Lisabi is of this mould; Si Bero and Old Man included in Madmen. The loss of these banal objects will invariably aggravate mental health and intensify, in the main, war and terror. As for Si Bero however, Madmen lives not in correlates of the world of experience, as by its evidence in the mental world. Here we remember Bero’s ‘‘submental apes,’’ (31) and his conversation with the sister attests to this:
BERO: The specialist they called me, and a specialist is – well a specialist. You analyse, you diagnose, you –(He aims an imaginary gun )- prescribe.
SI BERO: You should have told me. I have made pledges I cannot fulfill. BERO: Pledges? What are you talking about? SI BERO: I swore I was sure of you, only then would they help me. BERO: Who? The Old Women? SI BERO: They held nothing back from me. (32)
Si Bero’s tragedy of war and terror is in her trusting so much in those she loves by going out of her way to incur the wrath of the earth mothers who plan to have their pound of flesh. In Spokesman for the Oracle , Ikem trusted so much in Ossy and Ofoma, that in the end, they become his agony. On trusting in people and being brought to a capricious end, not in death though, Si Bero elicits our sympathy; for she does no wrong in loving but in protecting her people. This represents the fortunes of the Old Man, whom we are informed suffered a huge failure. Hear Bero: “Ever since he came out. Maybe the… suffering around him proved too much for him. His mind broke down under the strain.” (31) 93
Why Bero would hide it that his father’s life came under heavy grief and strain because of his inability to change a child that has taken to cannibalism is not a contention. The Priest, we would remember, told of how Old Man would not endure it to see the specialist to have a rethink. Accordingly: He was just reading me a letter from you and he got all worked up. It can’t be, he shouted. And then he leapt up and said – right out of the blue- we’ve got to legalize cannibalism…For three hours I fought him foot by foot. Never been in better form. Nearly all night we argued, if you please, and then in the morning he was gone. What do you make of that? (33- 34)
The Old Man suffers a reversal in his love of a child being rejected and paid with destruction. In both ways, especially on how Si Bero interprets her despair, Akwanya remarks that, ‘‘there is no reason why courage and strength may not consist in merely looking on,’’ (211) as she completely is a victim, who suffers capricious destiny, the one we can link to surreality. Whereas Old Man freely accepts death, Si Bero stands helpless in a battle where the aim is to repress her. In the Old Man, we confront what is the problem of society loading all its inadequacies upon one man; who in an embodiment of chaos symbolically becomes a figure who must be done away with. But the ideal is in human suffering, whether for victims of war and terror, or other forms of evil, offering a glorious transformation for those in the light, but achieving the reverse for those whose sympathy stand with the world of evil.
4.3 Signification of the Wars and Terrorizations within the Formative of Psychoanalysis
The capacity of the texts to suggest acutely and effectively the concern of war and terrorism on the landscape and on the victims in general rest to a great extent on the various levels of attitudes exhibited by the characters. Whereas a lot of them manifest the psychoanalytic strain, others view their condition of war and terror based on the humanist and existentialist encapsulations. But this is not to say that the characters, the principal ones as we speak, do not evaluate this concern not just from one formative. They take us through the psychological ideologies in unearthing the scope of the problem, the frame of perception and the dimension of 94
the receptive task. Characters do not just pass comments but have receptacles of motivations that weave even the less, unnoticed, and often not too important thought.
For example, in Madmen , we are confronted by a society where insipid political quest occasions killing, economic deprivation, hunger, psychological apprehension and animosity that take all forms of war and terrorism. In this, the Old Man and Si Bero are the victims and remain the grass which in proverbial lore is said to suffer such inescapable [Frye] power tussle. Admittably, Bero's adult life, of killing and dying, is more or less not a psychological preference but the result of unresolved childhood trauma. The abduction of his father and hostage represent more his inner turmoil, a perversion which finds expression in him experimenting on human bodies symbolic of the Old Man's previous career. We have been informed by the Mendicants about Bero's animosity with father being a 'family vendetta' as the earth mothers, too, reveal the close- knit structure between both. It is against this personality strain that factors of war and terror are introduced. Bero's actions and those of the Mendicants constitute a privation of the freedom and humanity of his father. The Old Man's statement in Part Two of the play suggests an awareness of child- parent related psychology factor. His admittance leads to further search fo answers. According to him: “Is it sensible to cling so desperately to bits of the bitter end of a run- down personality?... a perfect waterproof coat is rejected for a patched- up heirloom that gives the silly wearer rheumatism.” (49) It is to be noted that whereas the Old Man is the waterproof coat, being the foundation, simple and elegant, Bero is the patched- up heirloom, rough and dangerous. Madmen , critically examined, is a clear case of escapism. In the Mendicants joining of Bero's cult to wrestle power from the Old Man's As, as unfolding before us lie an answer to young peoples' “unbearable insecurity and loneliness,” (60) says the book, Understanding Abnormal Behavior . In Bero's individual identity quest and search for independence situates escape from freedom as lying behind the specialist's formation of his warfare organization. Another evaluation of him and his political deviants would reveal not more than what characterizes terrorists globally. They are educated and enlightened, although they happen to have been brainwashed. Aside Bero, Aafaa and Cripple are precursors of intelligence; not blacklisting Blindman and Goyi, who are the vision house. Their case, says David Sue, Derald Sue and Stanley Sue, presents a strange and puzzling “attempt to avoid choice and responsibility,” (60) being the result of social and 95
environmental pressures as they emerged from adolescents to adulthood. Bero idealizes Horney's innate capacity theory for human growth in which, states Smith, “social influences on the personality begin in the home, where the parents act as agents of society.” (506) We see this also in For Love , with Adaobi and her father. Here, the actions of the parents are critical to the psychological development of the child and response to situation of war and terror. With the reported war where Bero served as a medical specialist looming his seperation from father and sister, it becomes tenable therefore that his arising feeling of sense of loss and loneliness would be the base for which value system is severed, and in his association with patients, friends and lovers, who obviously are the children of war and terrorism, destruction becomes critical. Adaobi's stand out positivism with Biafra is not a preference or an act of patriotism, so to say, as it is with perversion that reeks of unresolved childhood trauma. We have instances where Papa Nduka referred to her as “My grandmother,” (6, 17, 38, 50) and in the early part of the play, had asked to know the level of fraternity that existed between the people of Ibe Agwucha, her childhood suitor, and her own people. These are symbolic layers of psychopathic movement. Therefore, her childhood biological bond to Papa Nduka's mother sees her offering a mother's love and role to Biafra based on her perception of the destructiveness of the war and terror. There is the indication that her father's grandmother must have manifested tensions with people. We make this case from the character makeup of Adaobi. She must have, like Adaobi, woven around her a psychopathological personality that incriminates failure and teleguide repression of truths. The animosity that relives her deadened compromise of psyche is hence, feeded by this factor. Also in Ebuka, her twin, we discover a thread of perversion as his preference for business trade soon after the war is a compensatory personality attitude reminiscent of Adler's context of social function and Freudian regret of pacificatory act. This being not exactly what one wants but a deep- seated childhood unresolved trauma that picks on war and terrorism as its cause. Hence, his mind is perverted, and being Adaobi's half, yet manifests inferiority tension that is the basic motivation for all his mental attitudes. According to him, “I wish I had told him how much I appreciated him, that he was the rarest of all fathers.” (103) This is the sense of regret that pervades Biff in Death of a Salesman as the play folds to a tragic build, both being children who, now realizing the greatness of their father wished they had given more, said more and 96
appreciated more. And mentioning how he would have taken to teaching like Papa Ona, Papa Nduka admits that; “I am sure I would have been if I had not inherited my father's business after my college,” (3) as a result of which Adaobi informs us, as it is in telling Mohammed that; “Ebuka is too full of bitterness and thinks of nothing but trading.” (104) The stain of course that corrupts Ebuka's mental course is nothing but war and terrorism. Adaobi's implicit discovery of love in Nduoma Nwosu is a miscalculation than a continuum of what she had expressed for Mohammed as Ebuka’s choice of future career is a negation that looks upon the world as being indifferent. We strongly argue that Nduoma Nwosu is an imaginary character created by Ebuka and Adaobi to fill the place of Mohammed. Imaginary lovers are often created as a coping mechanism to deal with loss. It might occur as the result of some major change or extensive alteration in their lives, being a manifestation of some deep- seated unhappiness. Her birth order is also the germ in her domination of the war in the context of the entire family's experience. She dominates the war, the father's view of life which philosophically prepared the moral and mental weapons for battling these experiences. For example, Papa Nduka informs: “She knows that we trust her, and when a child is aware of the great trust her parents have in her, she strives not to betray it.” (3) Thus, the victim's psychedelic emotions are the result of believing so much in the goodness of the father and in the possibility of a victorious Biafra. His destruction in this war and the failure of the emerging nation adopt a kind of psychic meaning as she would have said earlier, without knowing it: “Papa would listen; he always listens to my theories and of course disagrees. He says I have too many ideas in my head but it's Mama who will raise hell.” (8) This is why against all odds; she maintained a positive posture on Biafra. “How can we ever lose hope in Biafra? We are not the only ones going through the hard times... If we must die let it not be like hogs.” (50, 51) All these being offshoots of childhood related emotional factors. And like in tragic drama, this personality brings her capricious change of fortune, say individuality, for “many mental disorders have a strong biological basis,” (44) notes David Sue, Derald Sue and Stanley Sue. This allows her to display a wide ranging bipolar affective disorder previously identified as manic depressive psychoses and characterized by inflated self- esteem, expansiveness, and to depressive moods of loss of interest [vacant eyes], feelings of worthlessness [seen in her mother's attack by shell- stricken soldiers], and thoughts of death. It is germane that in these 97
apprehensions, heredity seems to have played a role in her response to impact of war and terrorism. As we saw in other cases, it is only when the Adaobi character is in control of this biological challenge that other characters like Mohammed, even Nduoma Nwosu, can begin to win in relating with her. A psychoanalytic view of Prince Adejumo's kidnap of Iyunloye in Osofisan's Women would suggest that the prince had been denied of love and care, at critical psychosexual stages, that a child requires so as to develop into a healthy human by the Owu community. This is based on the allegation by Iyunloye that the child was at its infantile stage in life proclaimed ill-fated and hidden by Erelu, the queen mother. Since you are looking for blame, why not start With this woman here? She it was after all who mothered the man Who captured me. Ask her, and she herself will confess that At his birth, the priests ordered his immediate Execution. They warned that he was evil' That if he was left to grow up, he would bring disaster To Owu. They said he would seduce a woman, and through That act cause the death of many. But she chose instead To hide him and nurse him to manhood. (51)
And Adumaadan points out to Erelu that; “Dear mother- in- law, you had only one son whom you loved, as far as I remember. It was not my husband.” (40) He was neglected, underestimated by gods, even the Owu kingdom, and was left to suffer the fate. The result is that his public acceptance of love had been questioned as he felt rejected and unloved. This provokes the abduction which on a closer look is a psychological warfare [repression of truth] in which there could be the desire to pay back to the woman (Erelu) who had shown him love. This may also be the case with Bero in Madmen who upon being enlisted in the war had come face to face with a battered image of love and care, impulsively which he translates into anarchy and chaos. This represents Adaobi's problem in feeling that Mohammed being all the time of the war and terror away in England was an act that attended the refusal of the love they shared and what would have ordinarily come from him as concern. His father's removal of him at this critical time was to further alienate him from Adaobi. 98
We have evidence that Adejumo was by the gods proclaimed fatal and incidental to war and terrorism as there was also no record of the community ever coming to his rescue, aside what we are told of the mother. This is the argument for which Erelu in considering the ruthlessness of gods and an unfriendly environment was determined to provide him succor and love. We believe that this is not Erelu's pattern of fighting these faceless higher laws but a clear representation of her unconscious attempt to gain attention and to validate a mother's love for her child. Thus, Erelu's act becomes a radical departure in which unlike some Greek characters like Jocasta and Laius in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex would challenge a so called offensive law. Strict compliance and adherence to gods by man, we can see from Erelu's act of challenge, does not bring one salvation. For example, in Madmen , the Old Man's reported act of going back to the warfront as a sort of moral rectitude to Bero is an unconscious effort to draw attention also to the destructiveness of war. Adaobi's negation of the love Mohammed espouses would be that in the event of war and terror, loved ones are evidently backbone of support, courage, love and care. Mohammed as we read in For Love lack all the above as Nduoma Nwosu sold fuel during the war, though Adaobi laments that it was at black market prices. We can begin to interpret all these from Papa Nduka's glory that Adaobi is 'full of ideas' as emergent of the many psychic impulses she undergoes. However, Erelu's tinkering with life and death immediately after the destruction stand possibly for the futile efforts that man makes in creating that world of his own. It is significant that Bero's unnoticed change of occupation to that of killing are the evidence of his attempts at political clientage and a reflection of the Freudian death instinct, thanatos . Although he may not have been aware of its obtuse impact on his family, it is obvious that Bero is deeply incensed by his father's negative attitudes, as he views it, in allowing him into the war, at the first instance, to restore lives, and of his father's unconscious confrontation of the evil of war and terrorism which Bero symbolizes. The Bero character interprets this as control signs that could liquidate his after sought independence and would do much to truncate his father's well intentioned act. Many of the characters' actions and speeches suggest the awful experience for a young person to believe he is unloved, uncared- for, and unprotected. It is something that we would wish never happened. In Women , Iyunloye's compromising release of self to Adejumo's thugs is the significance 99
of her being the victim of marital unhappiness. The record as we evidenced in scene five of the play indicates couples living monotonous lives devoid of sensual feelings. Okunade is always on business trips and Iyunloye can only find love in the art pieces which she sold at the Apomu market. In this therapy session, Iyunloye paints the love denial and its transfer, however rationalizing this is, she implies that Dejumo is not hostile as would be said of him, for he did not personally abduct her but had sent his guards. The mental symbols are achieved as the gods sending their priests to warn on the impending calamity and Adejumo, the privation of law, sending guards also to initiate his own law. The hostility between man and gods entrench this theme of war and terror. In same play we watch Orisaye whose reclusive and hyperactive sense of the devastation would be her frenzied and fearful expression of domination and privation of the world of the living by higher laws, Obatala for example, whom she is a vessel. Avoiding potential conflict, she proclaims the surreal end of the combatants and declares 'gloriously' how these deities, in their acts of omission and commission, would guide her steps and that of Kusa to their wedding bed where she would draw her own pint of blood. Repressed anger is certainly replete in both Adaobi's fantasies in For Love , and her behaviour, as we often witnessed in Bero, the Mendicants, Si Bero in Madmen , and with Okunade and Orisaye and other characters in Women . Adaobi's perversion with Nduoma Nwosu is to identify with the father and Biafra and a indirect psycho attack of her mother who in the early stage of the play was described as “unreasonable.” (8) She languishes further in the realm of psychoses as she admits the inexpressiveness and supposed peace of the women survivors in her family. Her depression with the women not expressing properly their sense of loss apparently are anger broiled inward and her attempts at rejecting reality, a classic apprehension of psychoanalytic withdrawal template. It is clear that Adaobi continues to search for a 'father figure' even after the war, and unconsciously selects men who are most like her father. Her mother's brief is quite revealing of this. “You know I am happy that Adaobi is flying where only men have been known to walk. I myself know nothing about books but at least Adaobi should have someone, a nice young man who will be her intended...” (7) While we maintain that Adejumo's abduction of Iyunloye in Women and bedding are additional evidence that the prince consciously views the act as substrate of the original privation of his fundamental rights to live, Si Bero's act of herbs gathering in Madmen explore the 100
relationship between appearance and reality and serve as a kind of repressive principle and denial preparatory to the salient action of war and terror- obviously which ends in bloodshed and loss of property. About the former, in Nigeria, kidnapping in some states attracts the death penalty, being an unthinkable and reprehensible act. We further assert that Erelu's construed defiance of gods formed the moral ground for the Owu people to clandestinely and otherwise engage their neighbours in acts of slavery and economic contention. They invaded the Ife Army, reclaimed the Apomu market which originally belonged to the Ijebus' and abandonned their ancestors at the utmost time. It would also be said that this had provided at least the basis for the Allied Forces to throw caution overboard in their war and terror against the injustices perpetrated against them. One cannot deny the fact that while a larger percentage of characters in the chosen texts maintain the psychoanalytic strain, some of them and others engage a cross fertilization of suffering, fatality, loss, alienation and death based on the realms of humanism and existentialism. A few examples of course would do. For example, we have Erelu and Gesinde in Women , Old Man and the earth mothers in Madmen , and Nduka and the women that Adaobi evaluates in For Love . The characters express their shortcomings and are not ashamed of being who they are. Erelu- Afin accepts defeat in loving a son, and the war as the result of man's misunderstanding of the authority in the cosmos; for even Gesinde admits the fallibility of man as represented in the pretentiousness of the soldiers, their frailty and the alarming mental challenge which victims suffer in war. The Old Man freely accepts death and is not perturbed that his son is the harbinger of the evil. Even in death he does not succumb, while in For Love , Nduka acceptes defeat and advises the sister on the future. He identifies their corporate existence in the future that lies ahead of them than in the destruction that was their past. Gesinde advises the women to persevere even in the moments of greatest pain as the soldiers in their war and terror are in their foolishness digging their graves. For example, nothing seperates them from those who lose their sanity in the event since a respectable soldier can stoop as low as to desire a woman as Orisaye. According to David Sue, Derald Sue and Stanley Sue, “humanistic characters project 'this positive view of the individual,' as reflected in Nduka and the Old Man, in For Love and Madmen , respectively, and where their concerns are 'with helping people actualize their potential and with bettering the state of humanity.” (64- 65) Whereas the Old Man is benevolent to the Mendicants and offers help to 101
their identity problems, Erelu and the chorus of women are never hostile to Gesinde, though they are on opposing dramatic movements. Accordingly, as stated by the above authors, the Old Man prefers “to cope with unpleasant realities rather than to avoid or deny them.” (64) He wastes no time in feeling sorry for himself and develops a philosophy based on external realities than on himself. He withstands economic deprivation, physical hardships and trauma caused by a loved one. Erelu's decision to hide her infantile baby is a humanist psychological self- actualization need, which lies in it the “curiosity” (65) to actualize the son's potential as a fully functioning person. Adaobi's accusation of her mother and Mama Ona as lacking all feelings of loss is defeatist. The women's obvious grief and melancholy are the expressions of a healthy independence from the destructive environment of war and terror. Characters like Si Bero, Mama Nduka, Mama Ona and Nduka, from a cultural point of view, that restrain their feelings and apprehensions are obviously not the denial of accordance of mourning rites to loved ones lost but their kind of individual expression of perception of the invasion of their humanity. Erelu greatly attests to the existential psychology in her proving a mother's love. In this, the character becomes responsible for the war and terrorism, for choosing this direction because 'such factors as... environment, and culture are merely excuses for not experiencing the process of “becoming' - attaining their potential,” (68) noted the authors discussed above. Admittably, the character of Erelu proves verisimilitude; breathing and moving. It is then, unthinkable, that someone, whether in the scope of higher laws, would want to pigeonhole her into a defeatist acceptance of the destruction of her child's life. It is this anguish expressed by a mother that translates to war and terror. Erelu in her action could be asking whether these gods have a full control of our lives? And suppose, what should man do? She clings to this perception of herself because she is afraid that, if no push is given, her world would cave in on her. These are again reflected in the identity issues in Madmen and For Love . In Madmen , for example, Si Bero raises a wall against the destructions of war and terrorism by employing the help of the Old Women for the protection of her loved ones. This represents the flowering of her humanity, though it becomes catastrophic. Hence, Erelu cannot understand the relationship between man and deities and what stands as their separation. A feeling of entrapment, immobility, loneliness, and unable to make choices 102
invade her. She performs these weaknesses and views herself as a passive victim. In this the queen mother further accepts the prison confinement, which is a restriction that forbids her- even the Mendicants who are well teleguided by Bero in Madmen , and the characters in For Love , who are ransackled by displacement, hunger, disease and air raids, from being responsible for their destiny.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
5.1 Summary Social systems, policies and human behaviour can be explored through drama and given the Nigerian experience the study texts critically looked at mirror the state of mind and health of our body polity and citizenry. It was able to do this by diagnosing the actions and feelings of the texts’ characters who are either masterminds of wars or terrorists and victims and casualties of these untoward evils. The implication is that wars and terrorisms are social, political, religious, psychological and human evils which are to be seriously discouraged because a kid-glove handling of the problems may lead to more serious acts of plunder, squandamanier, satanism and nihility. The hostilities that abound generally in Nigeria reflect in the psychological tensions which pervade the plays. In Women of Owu, suffering is of the colour for which Erelu-Afin and her daughter, Orisaye is penciled for destruction, both characters being victims by blood. Si Bero’s forlonity in Madmen and Specialists, is the mask of her failure in Dr. Bero to recognize the Old Women whose payment is the sacrifice of a life; as Adaobi though she lives in For Love of Biafra is a victim caught hapless by the death of her father and the surrendering of the Biafran side. What 103
the above suggest as we see in Anlugbua’s exorcism of Lawumi’s slothful incitement of the war in Women , or in Adaobi’s apprehension with the loss of the war and in Dr. Bero’s constant demand for the key to the As, evidenced in Madmen, is the helplessness and the inner fears discharged in questioning, explaining and evaluating not only the characters actions or that of forces in countermotion with, but also the social structures and public policies within which they operate. Conflicts and misunderstandings that translate into identity tensions are to be properly handled as there are no justifications for any acts of war or terror when considered in terms of the human and social costs. The absence of a healthy society as gleaned through the texts and literature would always install anarchy and doom. The place of adequate and working security system and network to properly safeguard the lives and dreams of the Nigerian population cannot be more emphasized. Depressive moods and other psychologically associated health problems of war and terrorism may, in fact, take a long time to heal. It is however unhelpful to feel they last permanently as there are new ways of understanding and handling problems of grief, loss and violations occasioned since those that are not properly and effectively handled may snowball into future greater challenges.
5.2 Conclusion
The affected characters draw our sympathy because they need to realize that they are responsible for their own actions and cannot find their identity in others. They need to get in touch with, and follow a pattern that is individually ideal to the flowing of their humanity, and attained through implicit love of the person and unregimented relationship- devoid of war and terror. The role government plays in alleviating some of the problems victims and casualties face are ill-disposed and temporary. They are left on their own soon after the devastations. Authorities’ entrusted with providing the violated access to social justice have too looked the other way. The role of drama is to effectively checkmate society. The plays of research confront these responses and urge for the readjustment of the ideologies that feed them. The imprisonment to life of Umar Mohammed, a terrorist by a Nigerian court in November 2013 for engaging in terroric activities is a welcome development, considering the 104
severe costs, aside being asked to pay one hundred and fifty million naira (N150, 000,000) damages to families who suffered the reprehensible acts. Nigerians have the free rights enshrined in the constitution to live wherever they choose and any actions that try to subvert these freedoms should, within the operation of the law, be strictly handled.
5.3 Suggestions Nigerians more than ever express fear of living in a war and terror prone environment. As a result, government has a role to play in ensuring the security of her citizens as well as the rehabilitations of victims and survivors. In other lands, victims suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression and other moods disorders are, for example, taken care of. This is to ensure their nationals are healthy and do not continue to feel the weight of the crimes committed against them. This is not presently being done in Nigeria. Efforts have been to compensate victims without looking ahead of the future health dangers, including survivors of casualties. Victims who are undergoing critical mental behaviour need care providers and therapists who will spend more time focusing on them and their needs as it has become glaring that Nigerians facing the trauma and violations of war and terrorism urgently require a social justice system that compensates their loses, especially in the immediate. Since this work is based more on studying the impact and response of characters towards war and terrorism by using psychoanalysis as tool of reading, the researcher feels that the following areas need to be fully covered in future research works:
• Role of Government in alleviating the problems of victims and casualties of war and terrorism. • Theatre, neuropsychiatry and war and terrorism: Effects and Relevance. • A hermeneutical study of the relationship between war, terrorism and evil. • Coping with trauma, grief and identity crisis in war and terror.
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