This Story

Abstract

This Story follows unhoused and aggrieved child narrators who are either trafficked, abused, married off to idiotic old men or are brainwashed into actors of mayhem. It ferments at some point into the frantic protest and resistance of heinous political schemes and affliction, as it turns to the personal grief of a woman who losses her husband and her only child to state violence—and who seeks the ghost of the latter for closure. At its core the body of work comprising five long stories—three of which are interconnected and preface a larger narrative—uses the canvas of childhood within distinct sociopolitical contexts to raise questions on the living conditions of the voiceless, the have-nots and the politically oppressed in contemporary Nigerian societies: for instance, what does it mean to be human, especially when the social contract between a people and their government is fractured? How do people cope when they are denied human dignity or rights? How do they resist control, oppression, and poverty? How do they create happiness for themselves and survive?