Abstract:
Migration has continued to attract the interest of scholars and critics of Nigerian literature, especially as Nigerian migrants are constantly victims of xenophobia. The migrants, particularly the women, are grossly objectified and insufferably abused, both nationally and internationally. There have been spates of incarcerations, killings and deportation of migrant women in different parts of the world: Italy, Malaysia, Libya, to mention but a few. There have also been records of deaths and harrowing experiences of female migrants in the Mediterranean Seas and the Sahara Desert. It is against this backdrop that this study adopts Post-colonial Feminism to analyse the motivations and experiences of the female migrant characters as post-colonial subjects in the Diaspora. Female characters from Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked are studied in order to ascertain the extent to which the cultural environment, legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism interplay to influence the decisions taken by these women. It is discovered that the woefully pathetic plight of migrant Nigerian women is a product of a disordered psyche induced by the socio-political, economic and cultural realities prevalent in postcolonial Nigeria. This study recommends that women empowerment and sustainable developmental policy implementation can help to curtail the psycho-emotional realities that are capable of misleading young Nigerian women.
