Homecoming, Trauma, and Identity in Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland

Travels in Nigeria

Bibliographic Data

ID8864889
AuthorsJuan Zhong (0000-0002-7805-0185, University of Hong Kong), Zhong Juan (0000-0003-3968-3876, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume104
Issue1
Pages154-172
Publication date2022-11-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0013838x.2022.2141480
OpenAlexW4308443717
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited18

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) by British-Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa is part travelogue and part memoir. The book chronicles Saro-Wiwa’s return to Nigeria, the country in which her father, the activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed in 1995 and which she had not visited for more than ten years, except for two brief visits. Saro-Wiwa deploys trauma as a narrative strategy to show her grappling with her painful memories in relation to her family history and socio-political conditions in Nigeria. The effect of the deployment of the thematic motif of trauma in the structure of the narration is that the return, which explicitly sets out to resolve the past traumas, seemingly comes to re-enact those traumas instead. The paradoxical dramatic effect of being traumatised and being healed reveals the complexity of her diasporic identity and the ambivalence in both her travelling and her writing

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Homecoming · Identity (music · Literature · Media studies · Memoir · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South African History and Culture · Travel Writing and Literature · History · Law

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