For more than a decade, the jihadist group Boko Haram—whose name roughly means “Western education is a sin”—has profoundly shaped Nigeria’s political, social, and cultural landscape. The violence perpetrated by the Islamist group—including the regular abduction of children—has caused thousands of deaths, forced population displacements, and a major humanitarian and security crisis, particularly in the northeast of the country.

In the face of this unprecedented terror and violence, literature and cinema have emerged as vital spaces for reflection, testimony, and symbolic reconstruction. In his short story “Boko Haram (1)”, included in Prayer for the Living: Stories (2019), Ben Okri depicts the situation of a child strapped with a bomb and sent into the heart of a market before the device he carries is detonated remotely. The narrative voice describes the violence of the act and the explosion: “He did not know about the scattered fragments of limbs and the ripped earth as the bomb tore up the marketplace” (2019, 2). In A Humanist Ode for Chibok, Leah (2019), Wole Soyinka denounces the terrorists’ frenzied violence and expresses concern for those he calls, after Fanon, “the Wretched of the Earth”: “Timbuktu reels. Borno implodes. Kaduna / Writhes in attrition. Mogadishu rains / Fragmentation shells. And the stateless? / Landless? Fanon’s Wretched of the earth?” Films have also taken up the subject, as is the case in The Milkmaid (2020), a Hausa-language film in which filmmaker Desmond Ovbiagele denounces the violence against women perpetrated by Boko Haram fighters, a theme also found in Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (2018) by novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.

How do poets, playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers engage with these events in order to reflect on horror, bear witness to the suffering of Nigerians, and interrogate the roots of terrorism? What narrative and aesthetic devices are employed to convey the extreme violence of this terrorist group? How are the voice and point of view of women who are abducted and raped, of child-soldiers who are drugged and indoctrinated, of the populations who are terrified and displaced represented? What are the ethical and aesthetic stakes of this literature and cinema of crisis?

Papers may be delivered in French or English.

https://reaf2026.sciencesconf.org/