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Postcolony as a Charade: Signposting the Uganda’s Disillusionment in Harriet Anena’s A Nation in Labour
by Niyi Akingbe
HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.33234/SSR.18.2
Abstract
The paper contends that Harriet Anena’s A Nation in Labour provides a dissident reading of the postcolonial Uganda. While Anena does not take delight in the ongoing sufferings borne by most of the masses, she does not fail to invoke the poetics of lamentation to express Uganda’s mismanagement of the postcolonial political dividends. The poetic strength of A Nation in Labour lies in the extravagant use of symbolism to capture the ‘sickening’ Uganda’s nationhood. Arguably, Anena understands the import of word, which is relentlessly, abundantly, harnessed to speak to the unspeakable, diminishing, oppressive system, and for the profiling of the loss of a nation. The paper will illustrate how A Nation in Labour further constitutes a socio-political site where the meaning of a nation is subverted and contested. Deploying semiotics of disillusionment situated in truculent poetics, Anena in the collection, provides an insight into a nation trapped in unremitting contradictions.