From tactical objects to testimonial subjects: Chibok schoolgirls, trauma and narrative agency in Edna O’Brien’s Girl

The 2014 abduction of Chibok teenage girls from their school in Northeastern Nigeria by Boko Haram insurgents attracted global attention. A few years after the incident, the celebrated Irish writer, Edna O’Brien, visited the country to confer with some of the schoolgirls who escaped from the captivity of the Islamic extremists. Her findings resulted in the publication of Girl (2019) which chronicles the jihadists’ use of terror as a panopticon to break victims’ willpower thus enabling the terrorists to manipulate, abuse, and deploy them as symbolic objects of ideological warfare. This article reads the text as a testimonial life-writing (testimonio). It argues that O’Brien created a protagonist who uses explicit flashbacks, bodily memory, fragmented sensation, and dream mechanisms to narrate the traumatic knowing of subaltern subjects and articulate their impersonal voice. I adopt testimonial autobiography and literary trauma theory as frameworks to expound how power dynamics shapes bodies and embeds trauma reenactments in the novel. Though a subjective genre, I argue that testimonio provides an outlet for traumatised subjects to release their pent-up wounds and can be used to create vicarious identity in readers.