Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the significance of oneiric mediation in select artistic responses to the Nigeria-Biafra war. It argues that the recurrence of dreams, visions and mirages in these art works make manifest alternative, intersubjective and partly unknowable versions of its entangled legacies.

Paper long abstract:

Towards the end of Chris Abani's novel Song for Night, which is set in the midst of an unnamed war reminiscent of the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970), the narrator observes of his surroundings that '[m]irages are common here'. Building upon this perception, this paper studies the significance and recurrence of moments of oneiric mediation - in the form of dreams, visions and mirages - in artistic responses to the Nigeria-Biafra war. The internecine conflict, waged between the Nigerian state and the breakaway eastern region, resulted in a humanitarian emergency and Biafra's eventual capitulation. Despite not being widely commemorated in the country today, the conflict has become a vital imaginative touchstone for creative writers and artists concerned with mediating Nigeria's postcolonial history. This paper suggests that moments and forms of oneiric expression - in novels such as Abani's Song for Night and Ben Okri's Dangerous Love, as well as in paintings by artists such as Ben Enwonwu and Middle Art - offer a useful prism through which this multivalent mediating impulse in the post-war Nigerian arts can be illuminated. By synthesising Bill Ashcroft's theorisation of dreaming and utopianism in Caribbean literature and Augustine Nwoye's psychological study of dreaming in African contexts, it contends that oneiric expressions and experiences represent a destabilising as well as generative mechanism in these works. By refracting the history of Biafra through various oneiric lenses, they engage in a form of ethical mediation, making manifest alternative, intersubjective and partly unknowable versions of its entangled legacies.