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Abstract
The Lekki Tollgate massacre, which was part of the brutal tactics used to put down the #EndSARS protests, underscored the incorrigibly violent nature of the Nigerian state. It also ruptured the sense of linear progressive time which governs the hegemonic conception of history and memory in Nigeria—for instance, time as post-civil war, post-dictatorship, etc. The boundary of this idea of a nation on a progressive march, made up of people healed of all traumas, and cured of their historical scars is fiercely and violently policed. A case in point is the fervour with which Biafra as a form of collective memory is being resisted and silenced. However, the murderous incident at the tollgate brought to the fore the fact that each violent moment in Nigeria’s turbulent history has created a fractured sense of history for many victims, and consequently hampered the possibility of forging a settled sense of belonging and national unity. One site where this sense of history as violently fractured has been adequately imagined is the creative arts, especially poetry. Poems have archived, mediated, and remediated memories of violence that are mostly excised from official history. Thus, in this article I read selected poems from Soro Soke, a poetry collection curated by Brittle Paper in collaboration with James Yeku and Jumoke Verissimo. My aim is to examine how the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present. I am also interested in the ways in which the selected works act as archives of violent memories and how they seek to recover the humanity of those killed by naming them and grieving their loss.
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Abimbade, Oluwadara, Olayoku, Philip & Herro, Danielle. “Millennial Activism within Nigerian Twitterscape: From Mobilization to Social Action of #EndSARS Protest,” Social Sciences & Humanities Open 6.1 (2022): 1–9.
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Achebe, Chinua. There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).
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Adebanwi, Wale & Ebenezer Obadare. “Introduction: Excess and Abjection in the Study of the African State”, in: Adebanwi & Obadare (eds.), Encountering the Nigerian State (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 1–28.
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Adediran, Ifeoluwa. “Lagos Govt. Releases White Paper on #EndSARS Report,” Premium Times, 15 November 2021, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/498237-lagos-govt-releases-white-paper-on-endsars-report.html/ (acc. 30 November 2022).
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Adenekan, Shola. African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in Writings from Nigeria and Kenya (London: James Currey, 2021).
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Adenekan, Shola & Helen Cousins. “African Short Stories and the Online Writing Space,” in Maggie Awadalla & Paul March-Russell (eds), The Postcolonial Short Story (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 199–213.
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Adeniyi, Emmanuel. “‘We’re Now the Walking Dead’: Predatory Policing, Youth Agency and Framing in Nigeria’s #EndSARS Social Activism,” African Studies 81.2 (2022): 149–169.
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Akinwotu, Samuel. “Rapport Management in President Buhari and Governor Sanwo-Olu’s Speeches on #EndSARS Protest in Nigeria,” International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 3.4 (2021): 182–195.
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Anya, Ike. “A Banner Without Stain,” in: Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know (London: The Borough Press, 2022): 169–181.
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Asemah, Ezekiel, S. & Emeke P. Nwaoboli. “Influence of Folarin Falana’s Twitter Campaigns on the Participation of Lagos Youth in the 2020 Endsars Protest in Nigeria,” KIU Interdisciplinary Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3.1 (2022): 115–130.
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Assman, Aleida & Shortt, Linda. “Introduction”, in Assmann & Shortt (eds.), Memory and Political Change (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 1–14.
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Balogun, Yusuf. “This Land Still Cracks Us,” “Soro Soke: An #EndSARS Anthology,” Brittle Paper (2020), https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
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Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
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Falola, Toyin & Kenneth Kalu. “Introduction: Exploitation, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Misrule in Africa”, in Falola & Kalu (eds), Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 1–25.
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Falola, Toyin. Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009).
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Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press, 2008).
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Menke, Manuel and Berber Hagedoorn. “Digital Memory and Populism: Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023): 2101–2112.
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Mbembe, Achille. “The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Accursed Share,” in Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (eds.), Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2010): 27–54.
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Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
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Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001).
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Obadare, Ebenezer. “A Hashtag Revolution in Nigeria,” Democracy and Development 5.3 (2021): 25–31.
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Ogunoye, Oladimeji. “Fevered Children”, in “Soro Soke,” eds. Jumoke Verissimo & James Yeku, https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Olaogun, Wale. “Before the Devil Speaks,” in “Soro Soke,” ed. Jumoke Verissimo & James Yeku, https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat Fela and the Imagined Continent (Ibadan: IFRA, 2005).
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Osundare, Niyi. Style and Literary Communication in African Prose Fiction in English (Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2018).
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Owoaje, Tolu & Kadupe Shofola. “The Clamour for an End to Police Brutality: Satire Songs of the EndSars Protests in Nigeria,” East African Journal of Arts and Social Sciences 3.1(2021): 70–81.
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Reading, Anna. “Seeing Red: A Political Economy of Digital Memory,” Media, Culture and Society 36.6 (2014): 748–760.
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Ruin, Hans. Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness (California: Stanford UP, 2018).
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Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke UP, 2016).
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Siobhan, Kattago. Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time (London: Routledge, 2019)
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Siollun, Max. Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria’s Military Coup Culture (1966–1976) (New York: Algora Publishing, 2009).
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Soyinka, Wole. You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
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Tubosun, Kola. “The Blood Spangled Banner,” in “Soro Soke,” ed. Jumoke Verissimo & James Yeku, https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Uwalaka, Temple & Bigman Nwala. “Exploring the Influence of Celebrities in the Organisation of the 2020 #End SARS Protests in Nigeria”, New Media and Mass Communication 101 (2022).
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Verissimo, Jumoke & James Yeku (eds.). “Soro Soke: An #EndSARS Anthology,” Brittle Paper (2020), https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Verissimo, Jumoke & James Yeku (eds.). Soro Soke: An #EndSARS Anthology (Ibadan: Noirledge, 2022).
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Verissimo, Jumoke. “A Generation in Motion,” in “Soro Soke,” ed. Jumoke Verissimo & James Yeku, https://brittlepaper.com/2020/10/a-collection-of-poetry-and-reflections-on-the-endsars-protest-curated-by-jumoke-verissimo-and-james-yeku/ (acc. 1 September 2021).
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Yeku, James. “#EndSARS Shows Why The Police Is Not ‘Your Friend’,” London School of Economics (2020), https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2020/11/12/endsars-shows-why-the-police-is-not-your-friend/ (acc. 21 September 2020).
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Search for other papers by Stephen Temitope David in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
The Lekki Tollgate massacre, which was part of the brutal tactics used to put down the #EndSARS protests, underscored the incorrigibly violent nature of the Nigerian state. It also ruptured the sense of linear progressive time which governs the hegemonic conception of history and memory in Nigeria—for instance, time as post-civil war, post-dictatorship, etc. The boundary of this idea of a nation on a progressive march, made up of people healed of all traumas, and cured of their historical scars is fiercely and violently policed. A case in point is the fervour with which Biafra as a form of collective memory is being resisted and silenced. However, the murderous incident at the tollgate brought to the fore the fact that each violent moment in Nigeria’s turbulent history has created a fractured sense of history for many victims, and consequently hampered the possibility of forging a settled sense of belonging and national unity. One site where this sense of history as violently fractured has been adequately imagined is the creative arts, especially poetry. Poems have archived, mediated, and remediated memories of violence that are mostly excised from official history. Thus, in this article I read selected poems from Soro Soke, a poetry collection curated by Brittle Paper in collaboration with James Yeku and Jumoke Verissimo. My aim is to examine how the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present. I am also interested in the ways in which the selected works act as archives of violent memories and how they seek to recover the humanity of those killed by naming them and grieving their loss.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 632 | 335 | 32 |
| Full Text Views | 15 | 10 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 43 | 27 | 0 |
