Why the Bed Still Creaks: A Review of Sex and Sexuality in Toni Kan's Nights of the Creaking Bed

The newly experimented stylistic exploration in contemporary Nigerian literature is in the incorporation of sex and sexuality. Before now, writers stylized literary gestures represented matters with sexual connotations. However, recently, prose is rapidly fading away from this established modest order. In Toni Kan’s Nights of the Creaking Bed, it is observed that sexually related taboos are visible. Issues like love making, abortion, gay and lesbian love among others are receiving received colourful attention. In the whirlwind of globalization, the two genders, especially the African female gender, are beginning to own up to their sexual needs against the socio-cultural parameters of sexual correctness set by most cultures of Africa. This study examines Toni Kan’s selected work using postmodernist approach which exacerbates the depletion of socio-cultural attachment in African societies. It essentially depicts how Nigerian writers capture some alien values on sex and sexuality within the society which are products of socio-cultural, political and historic experiences that are central to the cognitive formation of individual characters in the society; thereby revealing a new trend known as pornotraiture – a graphical portrayal of sex and sexual narratives. It concludes that literature remains useful in the subject of sex education which campaigns for equal expression of sexualities and can help dismantle socially stigmatised sexual patterns especially in this globalized world that accommodates freedom on alternative sexual orientations.