THE GIRL-CHILD, MANIC DEPRESSION AND OTHER MATTERS ARISING IN IKECHUKWU ASIKA’S TAMARA

Abstract

The alarming, yet steady rise in cases of manic depression among young people has been of grave concern in African societies. Whereas most cases are attributed to economic factors and drug abuse, the role that the family plays in the phenomenon does not often attract the focus of literary scholars. This paper, therefore, brings to the front burner, the epistolary account by a teenage girl, of her tortuous and lonely life’s experience in a home that is bereft of parental love and affection in Ikechukwu Asika’s Tamara. The situation pushes the protagonist, Tamara, to the brink and eventual death. The methodology of research is qualitative. Textual analyses enable the work to interrogate aspects of human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and prejudices that emanate from the neglect of children in the home by a high-handed father and a docile mother. The study deploys a combination of psychodynamic theory and womanism to validate our findings. This research discovers that the narrator and protagonist, who is the main victim, blames her father’s cold and over protective behaviour for her plight while ignoring the role that her mother, who is weak and robotic, ought to play in the lives of her children against the backdrop of a twenty-first century that boasts of educated, active, assertive and emancipated women. The dangers of raising children and young persons in such circumstances of indifference and insensitivity are unquantifiable thus necessitating an up-scalling of advocacy by proponents of feminism for responsibilityconscious mothers in homes.