Homeless Children, Witnessing as Aesthetics and the Diary of a Street Biographer: Onyekachi Onuoha’s Earth Corners

Onyekachi Onuoha’s Earth Corners (2019) establishes a creative intervention that seeks to remind society of the shared responsibility towards the underprivileged and the underdogs of the earth, especially the millions of vulnerable children left to the vagaries in the streets at ’the backside’ of sprawling urban centers. Through the ’eye-witnessing’ narrative technic, the author magnifies the prevalent moral atrophy and the decline of humanity in the 21st century socio-cultural system, where the well-adored values that firmed up the fabrics of traditional societies and promoted shared social goals, especially in African cosmology, seems to have been blown away by the ruptures of postmodernity. The phenomenon of stranded, abandoned or uprooted children, as vividly captured in the Onuoha’s collection of short stories, locates its microcosm in Nigeria which has been ironically reputed as a country generously endowed in material and human resources, yet notorious as one of the ‘poverty capitals’ of the third world societies. In the social setting of the stories in the collection, the monster of almajiri urchins, abandoned and out-of-school children, trafficlight children-beggars, motor park children, dustbin children (scavengers), mentally challenged, hunger-humiliated homeless children, among others, are a common sight captured in the writer’s lens. The study avers that the ’eye-witnessing’ approach deployed in the collection enables the author to penetrate the conscience of the audience and also serves to ventilate his disgust and protest against the seeming conspiracy of silence of the powerful elites towards the dire conditions of the downtrodden in society.

Keywords: Stranded Children African Socio-Cultural Values Witnessing Aesthetics Street Biography

Author

• David Ekanem Udoinwang
  Department of English
  Akwa Ibom State University, Nigeria
  davudoinwang@gmail.com & davudoinwang@aksu.edu.ng
• Uwem Affiah
  Department of English and Literary Studies
  University of Calabar, Nigeria