TRANSLATING THE WOUNDS OF THE BIAFRAN WAR
TRANSLATING THE WOUNDS OF THE BIAFRAN WAR

Summary/Abstract: The Biafran War (6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970) wounded deeply the Nigerian nation. The continuous fight among political exponents triggered a bloodshed ending in millions of deaths and a social and political nightmare. Hatred and distrust fragment the national conscience of Nigeria, and the would-be reconstruction of the post-war period came as a further proof of the profound levels of anomy in which the war had thrown “the African giant.” Those years have drawn a dramatic canvas in which children with deep sad eyes die without having lived, mothers out of their minds caress the heads without bodies of their children, and politicians continue to make promises not meant to be fulfilled, a period of de-fragmentation and meaninglessness, a social turmoil in which not only the weapons wound, but also the empty look in the eyes of the executioners. Wole Soyinka foresaw the perils of yet another armed conflict in a country already crushed by political belligerences and social incongruity and in his novel Season of Anomy (1973) Wole Soyinka exposes the darkness in which the social actors live their fears and shed their tears. Famine, malnutrition and death are coordinates on which only a deeply marred society may be constructed. Nigeria, the bright hope of the post-independence period, becomes a wild, frenzied social beast, biting its own flesh and struggling to annihilate its own identity. A harsh study in the consequences of war, written in the bleak conditions of a Nigerian prison, by a profound humanist on the brink of depression, Season of Anomy speaks with the voice of the dead, in an attempt to inform the present and the future of Nigeria, which must first of all heal its profound wounds, learning the lessons of the Nigerian genocide, in order to re-write the story of the African giant.

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