HOMOSEXUALITY: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL STUDY OF SELECTED NIGERIAN NOVELS

Abstract

The Nigerian society frowns at the concept of same sex sexual unions because of the importance she places on biological procreation and her strict adherence to Christian and Islamic religions whose principles and tenets abhor the same sex practices. The above concept is the necessitating factor to the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill passed into Law by the then president GoodLuck Jonathan in 2014. This law however is against any form of agitation for the right to express such sexuality in Nigeria as captured in some literary texts like Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees, Nnanna Ikpo’s Fimi Sile Forever: Heaven gave it to me and Razinat Mohammed’s Habiba. This research uses Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical principles as its theoretical framework to investigate the minds of the characters in the literary texts to really discover the motives behind their actions and by so doing elicit the perception of the authors to the reality projected in their texts. The authors unravel their personal thoughts and emotions through their characters and this helps in interpreting the texts. With Freud’s psychoanalysis therefore, this research examines the cultural and religious implications of same sex sexual orientation in Nigeria where heterosexuality is the norm and tries to find out the gap in the sexual development of these characters that consequently lead to their taking on a sexual orientation that is abhorrent in their society. With the above literary texts, this research through the use of motivational qualitative research discovers that some societal structures like patriarchy, bad leadership and some environmental influences are some of the factors that lead the characters to negate the social acceptable sexual orientation to embrace homosexuality. This negation also attracts some resistance arising from the cultural and religious orientation of the Nigerian society, leading to depression, psychological displacement, identity disorders, fragmentation and alienation on the part of the sexual none conformists. It also recommends that formative institutions like the family, society, church and the schools should endeavour to inculcate the right societal orientation in the children so that they do not grow up becoming social misfits. Secondly, platforms should be set up to reorientate persons who are already homosexuals.