ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to Nigeria in order to discuss how contemporary writers are manipulating western genres to represent traumas informed by neocolonialism, globalization, and diaspora, as Nigeria moves farther away from the immediate moment of decolonization. If Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch weaves explicit elements of Igbo cosmology into a novel that straddles both YA and fantasy, it also demonstrates the degree to which the author’s self-coined subgenre of “organic fantasy” is, at its heart, animist in orientation, form, and metaphor. The young protagonist, Sunny, must discover and develop her affinity with her spirit face, as part of a group of juju-practicing teenagers known as Leopard People, in order to defeat Black Hat and prevent his summoning of an ancient spirit into the world and ensuring the country’s domination by big oil interests and neocolonial forces from abroad. Conversely, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater compels the most extreme reevaluation, in this book, of trauma theory’s reliance on western tenets. It is narrated, in large part, by the multiple voices of ogbanje, the capricious Igbo trickster-spirits who inhabit Ada, a young Nigerian–American subject for whom the metaphor of ogbanje serves as the most vivid parallel of their own growing trans identity. The animist qualities of the novel’s narrative structure are both the mode and the ethical call for stepping into a world fully liberated from western trauma theory’s tendency to diagnose fragmentation as evidence of mental illness.
