Healing with African literature: Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen as auto-scriptotherapy text
Abstract
There are a lot of literary studies on African experiences right from colonisation to the present as well as exploration of the Literature of the Black Diaspora but little attention has been paid to Literature and Medicine as a field of study and synergy between the two as life-nurturing and life-preserving disciplines. Therefore, this paper examines Literature as therapy that heals the writer and characters in Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen as well as the readers. The Psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung is used to drive this work as he posits that components like animus, anima, persona, and shadow are the drives for human behaviour which could be positive or negative as well as survival of man on eartth.The findings in Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen views the text as Auto-scriptotherapy as it heals both the author and the readers with the assistance of using the complexity in the portrayal of Adah to teach medical personnels how to deal with their patients with patience, sympathy and love with a view to healing both the sickness and the sick. Therefore, both traditional and Contemporary African Literature are capable of healing writers, doctors, patients and the depressed as explored in the text. While African Literature can be recommended to units of Medicine in Nigerian and African Universities as it serves as therapy to all, as they erect medical humanities classes.
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Firozpur Jhirka, Haryana, India
