The Writer as a Psychiatrist: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail

Abstract

Chris Abani is one of the prominent writers of our 21^st century. Notable for his enchanting, moving and rare style of writing with which he has flavoured the scene of African literature, the writer continues with the combine efforts of other notable voices to proclaim a new dawn and display realistic signs that future of African literature is only getting brighter. In the novel, Becoming Abigail, the writer narrated a soul touching and emotional laden tale of a traumatized young girl who in trying to become herself as well as the Abigail the society wanted her to be ended up destroying her life and the lives of some other characters around her. Our aim in this paper is to examine the novel from the perspective of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. This theory deals with the workings of the human mind, the id, the ego and the super ego. Id is the pleasure seeker; ego provides the balance between the id and super ego while super ego is the extreme part of the human psyche. This is also the adopted theoretical framework for this study. The idea of examining the novel from a psychoanalytical point of view is to demonstrate how the writer created characters under the workings of many unconscious elements beyond their control. It is from this perspective that we tend to understand our human environment better and come to term with the intricacies and complexities of human lives, a knowledge that will help us to adjust and continue to adapt fittingly in our alien environment. How the writer created characters who are under the dictates of the unconscious part of their human psyche, their actions and inactions and how these fictive characters come to play roles in enlarging and enriching our understanding of life that will aid a cohesive and adaptable society is the crux of the study.

Keywords: Psychiatrist, Psyche, Psychoanalysis, Literature, Oedipus complex, Id, Ego, Super Ego