Metaphors of Pain and Healing in Chimeka Garricks’ a Broken Peoples Playlist and Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late

Student: Happiness Anietie Okon (Project, 2025)
Department of English
University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State

Abstract

Modern African literature has incorporated the motifs of pain and healing in its writings. It is within this context that this study explores the tropes of pain and healing in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never than Late and Chimeka Garricks’s A Broken People’s Playlist, to determine the agents of pain and the different healing strategies adopted by characters. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic literary theory is adopted as the framework for this study with a qualitative design in analysing the aforementioned texts. The study reveals that physical pain is not more damaging than psychogenic pain as some characters even affirm that the latter wrought more pain than the former. It also reveals that love itself is an agent of pain as the death of a character causes the bereaved severe pain. With such healing strategies as rationalisation, sublimation, and displacement, this work has revealed that a healing strategy may double as an agent of pain in the context of ‘paper marriage’ where an already married man takes a second wife, specifically a Western woman, to heal from the pain of racism. The study concludes that not only are the manifestations of pain diverse but there also are no standard healing strategies as each character devices what works for him/her.

Keywords
Modern literature metaphors psychoanalysis emotions pain healing Garricks Unigwe Freud
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