Interweaving the Uncanny and the Surreal in Modern Life and Tragedy: Deconstructing Specters in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Dreams and Assorted Nightmares

Surrealism and uncanny elements have been an invaluable resource for the explication and narration of tragic experiences in modern life. Previous studies on the existence of surreal devices in African literary creativity have focused on magical realism as an up shot of African folkloric tradition. This article examines the link between surrealism and tragedy in modern life using the Nigerian context such as Boko haram trauma, gender dynamics and ritual violence and at the same time engage in a deconstructive criticism of Ibrahim’s use of specters in the narration of tragedy in his collection of short stories Dreams and Assorted Nightmares. Freud’s theory of Uncanny is adopted for the study and complemented by Derrida’s Deconstruction to account for the mode of instilling the uncanny feeling by the writers and to provide the foundation for reading the text against itself, respectively. The study reveals that the author’s employment of a haunted setting, an unsettling mode of narration, nature as a haunter of humanity or harbinger of bad fortune, psychic automatism in the creation of art, and dreams, with an assortment of trance-like perception, heightens the uncanny and surrealist perception of the stories. Also, a deconstructive approach reveals a gap in Ibrahim’s employment of ghosts showing the inconsistences, contradictions and non-linearity in the stories, delineating the state of modern life and engaging traumatic experiences in Nigeria.