Abstract
Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (2014) and Ayobami Abebayo’s Stay With Me (2017) both engage with the representation of ethnic identities in the context of Nigeria. The two authors present characters whose senses of ethnic identity and commitment to ethnicity are complicated by either language, upbringing, or mixed parentage. In The Fishermen, Obioma creates Igbo characters who grow up, live and socialize in Akure, a Yoruba town in southern Nigeria. Ayobami’s protagonist in Stay With Me, is a daughter of a Fulani mother and Yoruba father. Through this narrative strategy of characterization, both authors engage the discourse of ethnic belonging and present language as, not only, a political tool and site where ethnic discourse flourishes, but also as a problematic identity marker.
In this paper, I thus seek to examine the social and psychological processes through which identity and belonging are formed in a space like Nigeria where ethnic belonging is still forged based on historical and blood affiliations. I offer a socio-linguistic reading of both novels to argue that language and ethnicity are not inextricably linked. I seek to unpack the myth around the construction of social behaviour based on parental belonging, and ethnic purity anchored on language and history.