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Women in Internally Displaced Persons’ camps, a halfway house or a purgatory? Discourse analysis of Embers and Preamble to Apocalypse

This is a study of two plays that are based on the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok Girls’ Secondary School by the Boko Haram insurgents. The plays, Preamble to Apocalypse by Fidelis Okoro (2016) and Embers by Soji Cole (2018), are here treated as a narrative continuum, which tracks the girls' abduction from their school to the Sambisa Forest, to the IDP Camps, and culminate in their degeneration into suicide bombers. The concepts of halfway house and purgatory are used to equate both the intended and the actual experiences of the girls, and sexual objectification theory is employed to underscore the causes of the traumatic experiences of the girls and argues that their radicalization is due more to their disillusionment with the government than with Boko Haram. There are three categories of characters in the plays - the abductors (villains), the rescuers (heroes), and the females (victims). However, as the narrative progresses, the line between terrorism and heroism blurs. The boundary between villainy and victimhood collapses. Apart from a close reading of the selected texts, the paper also draws supporting data from media reports that validate the literary accounts.