Women as sandwiches in the jaws of violence

This chapter examines the impacts of violence on the female gender in the novels written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her prose works are stories about Nigeria in the early 1960s. Just as women are victims in the Boko Haram insurgency in contemporary Nigeria, so it was in the political crisis that engulfed Nigeria during the Civil War of 1967–1970 and the period of military tyranny. The descriptive power of Adichie is manifested through her diction, which gives an image of women as sandwiches in the jaws of violence. Though the bulk of the people who are members of a terrorist group such as Boko Haram are male, the operations of this group and the effects of their dastardly acts very significantly impact the female gender. Sexual abuse of women from enemy camps is seen as a means of demoralizing the enemy. The majority of writers have focused particularly on the impacts that the various conflicts have on women.