PATHOGRAPHIC REPRESSION OF CORONAVIRUS-INDUCED TRAUMA IN REMI RAJI’S WANDERER CANTOS

Abstract

Coronavirus (also known as Covid-19) is one of the deadly pandemics in the history of mankind. It claimed many lives
in Nigeria and across the globe in 2020. Some survivors of the virus employed different means to recount their experiences.
Such narrative helps to suppress the trauma and possible posttraumatic stress disorder of the virus. In the medical
humanities, such literary narrative is dubbed pathography, scriptotherapy, bibliotherapy and pathotextualism. This study
examines the pathographic repression of Coronavirus-induced trauma in Remi Raji’s poetry collection, with a view to
explicating the poet’s experiences, in poetic thought, at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Oyo State Infectious Disease
Centre, Olodo, Ibadan, in December 2020. It adopts a qualitative research methodology within the ambit of the Freudian
psychoanalytic theory. The poems reveal that the poet undergoes traumatic conditions such as solitary confinement,
anorexia, syncope, trance, hallucinations, thanatophobia, and also witnesses a condition worse than his. Raji represses
these traumatic experiences by narrating them in the pathographic text called Wanderer Cantos. The poetry collection
affirms the therapeutic potency of poetry. Poetry performs therapeutic functions by soothing achy minds. Raji employs the
poetic genre to heal his psyche of coronavirus-induced trauma and sensitises his readers to its devastating effects.