Socio-political 'dis-ease' and traumatic/post-traumatic stress disorder: a reading of Hyginus Ekwuazi's The Monkey's Eyes

Abstract

Trauma is usually understood as a particularly painful event of a very serious nature experienced at a given time. In this article, this understanding is contradicted by the argument that trauma is not always provoked by a single catastrophic event in a temporal fixity. It argues that trauma could result from and subsist in an ongoing experience or a series of experiences. Using purposively selected poems from Hyginus Ekwuazi's The Monkey's Eye, Joshua Pederson's Literary Trauma Theory, which emphasises attention to “augmented narrative detail,” is employed to tease out inscriptions of painful and traumatic experience of the poet-persona in his socio-political milieu. While some of the poems are read as symptomatic of trauma incited by certain socio-political maladies, others are read as signifiers of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The reading is further extended by apprehending the poet-persona as also metaphoric of many a Nigerian.

Keywords: Trauma in Nigerian poetry, post-traumatic stress disorder in Nigerian poetry, Hyginus Ekwuazi, The Monkey's Eyes