Trauma and Voicelessnss in Razinat Mohammed’s the Travails of a First Wife and Abubakar Ibrahm’s Season of Crimson Blossoms

Abstract

Trauma describes an agonising experience – physical, emotional or psychological - that individuals undergo at micro and macro settings. Such an experience often disorients and dehumanises such individuals and deprives them of agency and voice. Traumatic experiences can impose despondency and disconsolation on their victims. This is why the victims of trauma usually require and deserve diverse forms of support to enable them surmount the harshness and pains that characterise it. Sometimes, victims of trauma express their pains to specific people around them. That itself is therapeutic. However, several victims tend to conceal the pains they suffer from trauma, or find nobody trustworthy enough to divulge their pains to. This inability or failure to express their feelings is described in this paper as voicelessness. Voicelessness can be seen as an inevitable concomitant of trauma, which also retards and damages its victims. This paper examines the nexus between trauma and voicelessness as depicted in the lives of the heroines in Razinat Mohammed’s The Travails of a First Wife and Abubakar Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms, respectively. The paper adopts Cathy Caruth’s Trauma Theory which explores, from a literary point of view, the emotional and psychological responses to distressing events in society, and Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s African Womanism which examines the power dynamics and gender inequalities, to interrogate the texts under study.  The methodology involved a close textual reading, analysis and interpretation to elucidate the issues in the texts. Findings indicate that through the use of literary techniques such as simplicity of diction, the use of the omniscient narrator, interior monologue, etc., the authors have succinctly established the fact that the voicelessness of the heroines in question is as a result of their traumatic experiences. Their inability to voice their sufferings further deepens their trauma, for speech itself could have offered a measure of catharsis, rehabilitation and agency. Therefore, their silence entombs them in a ‘zombified’ existence. They embody the paradox of yearning for agency while being imprisoned within structures that deny them space for healing. In conclusion, this study reveals that the true burden of trauma lies not only in the sufferings endured by the heroines in the texts under study, but also in its persistent demand to be voiced, even when words are inadequate: this is where African Womanism and other positive feminist theories come to the rescue, to give the traumatised a voice.