Dictatorship, Trauma, and Scriptotherapy in Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters

ABSTRACT: This article examines how Remi Raji, a third-generation Nigerian poet, reenacts the social pains and “dis-eases” of the military dictatorship era in Nigeria in A Harvest of Laughters as traumatogenic, as well as how the poet writes himself out of the trauma. While the article espouses the extant critical notion that the poet offers laughter to the victims of structural violence, social pains, and “dis-eases” of the military rule era in the country as a balm, it complicates the view by arguing that the poet’s versification in the volume and, more importantly, his infatuated exploration of laughter is readable as scriptotherapy. The poems titled “Introit,” “I rise now,” “Gift,” “Black Laughter,” “Silence,” “Silence II,” “Orphan Cry”, and “Harvest I–VI” are used to demonstrate this. The analysis draws anchor from Laura Brown’s and Stef Craps’s conceptions of trauma and Geri Chavis’s and some other psychological therapists’ insights on writing and therapy.