Representations of Trauma, Home and Wars in Rasaq Malik’s No Home in This Land

Abstract

In Nigerian poetry, there is the employment of emphatic and riling expressions that move the readers to feelings of sensitivity, disillusionment, consciousness, dissatisfaction and sympathy. These feelings are designed to motion in and enforce the country’s betterment and development. Nigerian writers have had to contend with the social and political tribulations beleaguering Nigeria’s landscape by using poetry as a channel to end its wars and propel the country towards improved and better home and state. The discussion in this paper focuses on how Rasaq Malik, in his poems, perceives the notion of trauma, home and wars in Nigeria. The conceptual framework employed is derived from both the trauma theory and content analysis methods of reading literature. By explicating the trauma theory and content analysis perspectives in Malik’s poetry, the goal is to show and examine the waves of the poet’s exposition of traumatic experiences and depression regarding Nigeria as a home besieged by wars and, also, those displaced by the wars, and the internal exiles that ensued. The goal extends to what we know of his hopes for a great home and peace that is an important facet of his poetry and the basis for his resistance of the Nigerian social and political instabilities.