Conference Paper

Narrating Insecurity and Resilience: Discourses of Violence and Socioeconomic Transformation in The Chibok Girls and Song of the Crocodile

As the African continent grapples with insecurity, violence, displacement and socio-economic change, contemporary African writing has increasingly become a critical platform for such engagements. In Africa, literary and narrative texts are becoming significant repositories of lived experience that are frequently neglected by official political and media narratives as societies continue to struggle with issues of political instability, social fragmentation, and environmental crisis, as well as the threat of terrorism. This paper looks at insecurity and resilience as depicted in The Chibok Girls written by Helon Habila and Song of the Crocodile written by Nnedi Okorafor. It examines the meanings of violence, trauma, displacement and survival as discourses in the contemporary African context of insecurity and socio-economic problems, as constructed in both texts. The paper is based on trauma theory, postcolonial criticism, and discourse analysis, and suggests that these selected texts go beyond being simply representations of violence to highlight the human impacts of insecurity on the individual, family, and community. The Chibok Girls tells the story of the devastating impact of terrorism and the kidnapping of school girls in Northern Nigeria while Song of the Crocodile addresses the degradation of the environment, social marginalisation and communal conflicts in fragile spaces in Africa. Both texts, using narrative styles that render victims human and focus on local experiences, offer a critique of reductive representations of African crises and a focus on forms of resilience, resistance and social reconstruction. The paper argues that the contemporary African stories are an important way of questioning the dominant narratives of insecurity and at the same time envisioning possibilities for socio-economic change. The texts foreground the human agency in the face of hardships and provide a context for broader discussions of development, justice, and collective survival in modern-day Africa. Keywords: Insecurity, Resilience, Socioeconomic Transformation, Trauma, Contemporary African Literature