Abstract:
Sectarian terrorism has become one of the dominant thematic areas in contemporary literature and public discourse. Existing studies in literary criticism have interrogated western novels on the phenomenon more than Nigerian novels while those available in Nigerian novels concentrate mostly on trauma, neglecting the postcolonial comparative perspective of representing Islamic sectarianism and terrorism. Edward Said and Elleke Boehmer's aspects of Postcolonial theory are deployed to interrogate how the binary construction of self/other, good/evil is interrogated and deconstructed in relation to religious fundamentalism in connection with power relation between the terrorist and the terrorised. Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday (Tuesday) and Adaobi Nwaubani's Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (Baobab Tree) are purposively selected for this study because of their in-depth, prosaic representations of terrorism and they are subjected to interpretive analyses. Terrorism or extremism is depicted as perpetrated by extremist Muslims in Tuesday, while, in Baobab Tree, the perpetrators are portrayed as non-Muslims, despite appropriating Islam as their ideology. Similarly, Tuesday focalises the perpetrators while Baobab Tree narrativises the female victims' experience of terrorism. The postcolonial condition that stimulates sectarian terrorism is also portrayed in Tuesday. Significantly, the authors' gender influences their plotting of terrorism. This paper concludes that the two Nigerian writers narrativise sectarian terrorism in the Nigerian state differently, to suit their visions based on given points and contend that Islamic sectarian terrorism may be a more appropriate term than the generic Islamic terrorism.
Description:
Terrorism is a difficult word to define due to its politicisation by different state hegemonic structures (Ditrych 2; Jenkins 5-6). This accentuates the dictum that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. To postcolonialist critics like Boehmer and Morton, the discourse of terrorism is framed around a hegemonic perception that constructs the enemy other as the terrorist. Although the history of terrorism is more documented in the West than in Africa, however, it is generally agreed that terrorism is perpetrated by both state and non- state actors. Thus, terrorism is broadly categorised into state and non-state terrorism. Frank and Guber define terrorism as “politically, religiously or ideologically motivated acts” (10). Law opines that terrorism is based on the tripod of the perpetrators, who act against the few – the victims – and the reaction of many, the audience. Hence, non-state terrorism is perpetrated by non-state actors against states or their representatives to accomplish a particular goal, mostly political/religious, through the mechanism of fear and extreme violence. A good example is Islamic sectarian terrorism. In this study, terrorism is posited as symbolic acts of extreme violence that is perpetrated by state or non-state actors to instil fear in a designated population based on peculiar motives ranging from religious to secular.
