1.1 Introduction
This essay explores themes of alienation and despair in Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain. The main argument is that in this novel, Okey Ndibe depicts poor governance, political oppression, economic exploitation and suppression of human rights as the main causes of alienation and despair among the characters, and presents prostitution and mental derangement as some of the manifestations of the alienation and despair. The essay also argues that Okey Ndibe portrays alienation and despair as existential themes in the novel and he does that by presenting self-isolation, absurdity and meaninglessness of life. Abrams (1999) asserts that in the existential philosophya human being is viewed
as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe, to conceive the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning, and to represent human life in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end- as an existence which is both anguished and absurd (p. 1).
As Sawawa & Neimneh (2016) put it, “man’s existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification” (p. 109).In this essay I am interested in examining this assertion in Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain.
History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision, in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality—if only for an instant by means of creation.
In Christopher Okonkwo’s paper “Talking and Te(x)tifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post War Nadir: 1984-1998” given at the 2005 African Studies Association conference, he suggests that three contemporary Nigerian novels Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus can be “linked ‘dialogically’ …. [t]hat is, these are novels unconsciously in dialogue—they are talking about, conversing, and/or contributing discrete discursive voices or perspectives on that subject of Nigeria’s post-war bleak epoch” (par. 4). 1 This “unconscious” dialogue between the novels is inherently linked to the state of Nigeria that all three novelists describe in their novels. As such the actual historical condition of Nigeria and the events that took place during the period of dictatorship from 1984-1998 are used as a type of text that is alluded to symbolically in each of the novels, creating an unconscious form of intertextuality. Moreover, Okonkwo argues, all three texts “‘te(x)stify’ to the horrors of the nadir, thereby performing, recuperating and affirming the power and resiliency of that human and civil right of ‘voice’ which the army sought desperately to stifle and invalidate” (par. 4). These texts themselves “perform” and together “chart a liberation imperative and trajectory.” That is by retelling the history of Nigeria, the three novels are able to reinterpret and symbolically re-imagine in their texts the movement from “nihilism to hope, absence to presence, and from apathy to action” (par. 8).
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
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