The Literary Artist as a Mediator: the Case of Nigerian Civil War

Abstract

This paper contends that there exists a paradoxical relationship between violence and conflictual situations on one hand, and the literary art on the other. While conflictual violence exerts tremendous strains on human relations, literary artists have often had their creative sensibilities fired by such conflicts. The above accounts for the emergence of the war-sired creative enterprise collectively referred to as war literature. These writers have used their art either as mere chronicles of the unfolding drama of blood and death or as interventionist art to preach peace and restoration of human values.

Using the Nigerian experience, this paper does an examination of select corpus of poetry, which emanated from the Nigerian civil war experience. It isolates the messages of peace, which went a  long way in not only pointing out the evils occasioned by war and conflict but also in suturing the broken ties of humanity while the war lasted. As our societies are becoming increasingly conflictual, our literary endeavours should also assume more social responsibilities in terms of conflict mitigation, prevention and promotion of global peace.

This paper therefore envisions a new literary movement i.e. peace literature which creatively interrogates social contradictions that create tension, conflicts and violent clashes. A literature that will serve as a veritable instrument in the promotion of the message of peace, understanding and restoration of human dignity in our contemporary world riddled with moral, religious, racial and idealogical conflicts

Keywords: Violence, Conflict, War-literature, Peace-literature, Interventionist-art