Covid 19 and the metaphors of crisis in selected texts by Adichie and Achebe: a Jungian psycho-analytical reading

Abstract

This article aims at exploring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Chinua Achebe’s discourses on melancholy and grief in times of Covid 19 and Biafra crises in Notes on Grief (2021), and There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012), as artists’ experience with crisis. The study especially examines language from a Jungian perspective, to bring out the aesthetics of grief or pain as expressive modes of memory and the ideological concern for reviving self and deconstructing otherness. Taking a Jungian psycho-analytical stand, the study focuses on the self’s perception of the other in the context of social crisis. It means to show that crisis is a powerful tool for intellectual regeneration of the artist and an experimental opportunity for society to assess itself, redefine values, reset boundaries and regenerate itself through the teachings drawn from the imposition of the new realities generated by that very crisis. The study finds that Adichie and Achebe’s discourses highlight the necessity to reconceptualise grief and crisis not only as problematic occurrences that create emotive choc and despair, but also as recreational events that contribute to the mental and affective growing of both the artist and his/her society.