Paper short abstract:

Nigerian novelists are using their art to etch the civil war experience in contemporary consciousness in a bid to avert another costly attempt at state dissolution.

Paper long abstract:

The ways that current social and political developments in Nigeria highlight ethnic, religious and other cleavages and dredge up old conflicts are frightening reminders of what history documents as precipitating the civil war of 1967-70. Calls for national conferences to discuss the' future' of the nation, for a power-sharing formula that would rotate the office of the president on ethnic and regional lines in order to solve ethnic and regional tensions, the rise of fundamentalist religious and militant ethnic groups using lawful and unlawful means to achieve sectarian objectives, and the prevailing general air of insecurity are some significant intonations of an emerging paradox in which democratic governance seems to be threatening national cohesion. How all these (re)connect with the civil war, that failed but defining experiment with state dissolution in Nigeria's postcolonial history, is all too obvious.

The recent surge of novels dealing with the civil war suggests that Nigerian writers are taking backward glances and seeing both tacit and circumstantial evidences of history threatening to repeat itself. Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's Roses and Bullets (2011) and Onouora Nzekwu's Troubled Dust (2012) memorialize the civil war, in my opinion, to rouse the nation from what seems to be a collective amnesia. This essay engages these and other writers as activists who use their art to cameralize and re-center the tragic consequences of the civil war for a generation that seems eager to reenact the experience.