Boko Haram Insurgence and the Poetics of Terror: Postcolonial Reading of Abubakar Othman’s Blood Streams and Nereus Tadi’s Season of Sounds.

Colonialism has had an immeasurable influence on both cultural and historical outlook of the colonized people, and the ongoing contestation of postcolonial modernity is hugely attributed to its ripple effects. Thus, in Africa, the myriad of adversities bedeviling the continent, ranging from apartheid to genocide, pandemic to epidemic, terrorism and insurgency are but postcolonial aftershocks; targeted at slowing down the pace of social change, political independence and economic emancipation. Oftentimes, the adversarial circumstances of ethnic and civil wars, terrorist acts and insurgent movements are visibly manifested as re-incarnation of history in the postcolony, where cultures wrestle with each other and against each other for survival and supremacy. African writers and poets have coped with, survived in, and even thrilled under such quagmires. Thus, the creative writers have taken the disabling effects and inspiring legacies of adversities as investigative motif in literary mode. Consequently, this has inspired unique creative expressions to tell the stories of loses and survival, trauma and resilience, woven with the paradoxes of scenes and contexts that lay bare the wavering conditions of the continent. This essay explores the representation of terrorism and insurgency by focusing on how some African poets respond to adversity and how such calamitous circumstances incite or impede creative expressions. Using the poetry of Abubakar Othman and Nereus Tadi, the essay reveals a renewal of artistic energy in the lamentation against an existing status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]