Trauma, Testimony, and the Question of Representation in Fiction About Boko Haram: An Original Theoretical and Textual Contribution

This dissertation makes an original theoretical and textual contribution to the study of literary representations of the Boko Haram insurgency, developing a framework for the ethics and aesthetics of representing extreme violence, mass displacement, and religious extremism in Nigerian fiction and engaging in detailed readings of the emerging body of literary work addressing this conflict. The Boko Haram insurgency represents one of the most destructive episodes in Nigeria's postcolonial history, yet the literary response to this crisis remains relatively small in volume and underanalysed in the scholarship. The dissertation argues that this gap reflects both the practical challenges of writing about an ongoing conflict with complex political stakes and the theoretical challenges of representing a form of violence that is simultaneously intimate, mass-scaled, and ideologically distinctive. The theoretical framework integrates trauma theory, ethics of testimony and witness, postcolonial theories of religious and political violence, and the specific cultural and cosmological contexts of North East Nigeria. The textual analysis engages in extended close readings of Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday and I Am Still Your Negro, selected short fiction, and poetry by North East Nigerian writers, examining the formal strategies each author deploys to approach unrepresentable violence, to construct testifying subjects from experiences of extreme silencing, and to situate a highly localised conflict within transnational political and theological contexts. Original contributions include a poetics of Boko Haram fiction, a theory of the aesthetics of extremist violence, and a framework for reader engagement with atrocity narrative. Keywords: Boko Haram, trauma fiction, testimony, North East Nigeria, ethics of representation.