Language, Power, and Resistance in Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday

This study examines the relationship between language, power, and resistance in Elnathan John's debut novel Born on a Tuesday, focusing on how the novel's narrative construction of a young almajiris journey from street boy to political and religious consciousness articulates the social dynamics of Northern Nigerian poverty, religious radicalisation, and the possibilities of individual moral resistance. John's novel is set in the North West Nigerian context of street politics, Islamic learning, and the radicalisation of disaffected youth, and its critical reception has primarily addressed its political timeliness in the context of Boko Haram. This study approaches the text from a linguistic and literary critical perspective, attending to the novel's deployment of a limited first-person narrator whose constrained language gradually expands as a formal index of his widening consciousness. Analysis focuses on the narrator Dantala's code-switching between Hausa and English as a marker of his social mobility and ideological formation, the representation of mosque discourse as a site of competing hermeneutic authorities, and the language of violence and its relationship to spiritual vocabulary in the novel. Findings reveal that John constructs language acquisition and linguistic confidence as the primary form of resistance available to a young man with no material or social resources. The study argues that Born on a Tuesday makes a significant contribution to literary explorations of Northern Nigerian social experience. Keywords: Elnathan John, language and power, Northern Nigeria, almajiris, resistance.