The City vs. the Village Binary in Emeka Ukwuaba’s Benign Pain: Migration, Dislocation, and Failed Promises

The spatial tension between the city and the village in African fiction has long served as a productive literary trope for exploring the contradictions of modernity, development, and postcolonial social change. This study examines how Emeka Ukwuaba's Benign Pain (2021) employs the city-village binary as a structuring narrative device, using the migratory experiences of its female characters to interrogate the failed promises of urban modernity in contemporary Nigeria. The study is anchored on the theoretical framework of critical spatial theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's concept of the production of space and its application in African literary studies, as developed by recent scholars. A qualitative textual analysis methodology is employed, supported by sociological literature on rural-to-urban migration in Nigeria published within the last five years. Findings reveal that Ukwuaba constructs the city as a space of both aspiration and exploitation, where the rural migrant encounters not the promised liberation but a new and more insidious form of entrapment. The village, however, is not romanticised but depicted as a site of stagnation and diminished possibility that equally motivates escape. The novel thus dismantles both the myth of urban opportunity and the nostalgia for rural simplicity, presenting migration as a forced negotiation between two inadequate alternatives. The study concludes that Benign Pain makes a significant contribution to the literature of African urban-rural experience and recommends further ecocritical and spatial readings of Ukwuaba's fiction.

Keywords: Migration, City-village binary, Emeka Ukwuaba, Spatial theory, Nigerian fiction