Angst of War in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's Roses and Bullets and Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn

Abstract

Every literary work attempts to mirror the experiences and conditions contemporary with its place and time. This article looks at the time during which the novelists Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Chukwuemeka Ike penned down their novels Roses and Bullets and Sunset at Dawn with a view to opening their vistas on the events of a war and helping us to learn valuable lessons. Before and immediately after the years 1966 -1970, the period of the Nigeria-Biafra war, the angst eating up the Nigerian populace went very deep. Many literary works have consequently expressed their feelings, experiences, observations, sense of sympathy and patriotism. As an instrument of social change, novelists bring to the mind of the people the social vices in their societies and advocate the reformation and rehabilitation of their societies towards a beautiful and glorious future. Adimora-Ezeigbo and Ike portray the images or symbols of dismal situations and pains which are characteristic of war situations, appropriately depicting the conditions prevalent in the era of the Nigeria-Biafra war. They exposed the atrocities of the miscreants, how one evil thought leads to another if not well settled and the negative effects of class discrimination, racism and consequences of violence. This work uses Trauma theory which attempts to understand the different ways by which traumatic occurrences are demonstrated, processed, exposed and repressed throughout a variety of literary and historical texts. The data for analysis were obtained from the two texts above, literature reviews and journals.