Poverty as the Root of Social Deviance: A Study of Emeka Ukwuaba’s Benign Pain and Hypnotising Minefield

Contemporary Nigerian fiction has increasingly turned its lens on the socioeconomic conditions that drive individuals toward criminal behaviour, domestic exploitation, and trafficking. This study examines how Emeka Ukwuaba, in his novels Benign Pain (2021) and Hypnotising Minefield (2025), constructs poverty not merely as a background condition but as the primary catalyst for a cascade of social vices including drug trafficking, domestic servitude, and human trafficking. Anchored on the theoretical framework of Marxist literary criticism, particularly its concern with the relationship between material conditions and human behaviour, the study adopts a qualitative textual analysis methodology, drawing on close reading of both novels alongside supporting secondary literature published within the last five years. The analysis reveals that Ukwuaba consistently positions economic deprivation as the master narrative that gives birth to all other social transgressions in his fictional world. Characters such as Lebechi in Benign Pain and Bright Kabula in Hypnotising Minefield are not presented as morally bankrupt individuals but as products of a structurally deficient society that offers few legitimate pathways to survival. The study concludes that Ukwuaba's fiction performs a crucial ideological function by redirecting moral judgment away from the individual and toward the systems that produce vulnerability. It recommends that scholars and policymakers engage more seriously with literary representations of poverty as sites of social knowledge and policy insight.

Keywords: Poverty, Social deviance, Emeka Ukwuaba, Nigerian fiction, Marxist criticism