Family Disintegration and Communal Grief in Emeka Ukwuaba’s Hypnotising Minefield: A Sociological Reading

The family unit in African fiction has long served as a microcosm of the nation-state, with its internal tensions and ruptures reflecting broader social and political crises. This study examines how Emeka Ukwuaba's Hypnotising Minefield (2025) constructs family disintegration and communal grief as the primary human costs of state violence, tracing the ripple effects of Bright Kabula's condemnation on his family and the wider community in which they live. The study is anchored on sociological literary criticism, particularly the strand that reads fictional families as representative social formations, and draws on recent sociological literature on grief, community, and institutional violence in Nigerian contexts published within the last five years. A qualitative close-reading methodology is employed with particular attention to characterisation, plot structure, and narrative perspective. Findings reveal that Ukwuaba constructs the Kabula family's suffering with remarkable specificity and emotional depth, attending to the ways in which institutional violence produces distinct experiences of grief for mothers, siblings, partners, and unborn children. The novel also traces how communal bonds are both strained and strengthened by shared suffering, showing how Merimba's pregnancy and grief function as a focal point for communal solidarity. The study concludes that Hypnotising Minefield makes a significant contribution to the sociological novel in Nigerian fiction and recommends further readings that attend to the family as a site of political meaning in Ukwuaba's work.

Keywords: Family disintegration, Communal grief, Emeka Ukwuaba, Sociological criticism, Nigerian fiction