War, Trauma and Psychotherapy: Bullets for Roses (a review of Akachi Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets)

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War, Trauma and Psychotherapy: Bullets for Roses (a review of Akachi Ezeigbo’s Roses and
Bullets)
Sola Adeyemi
First, one thing is certain: the popular myth lied – there is nothing glorious about war.
With its alluring fragrance and beautiful softness, the rose in bloom is riddled with sharp thorns. When
that rose grows in the war front, the thorns drip with poison, turning dreams to putrid nightmares. Coming
after a long tradition of literature influenced by our recent war, the Nigeria-Biafra war, Akachi Adimora-
Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets reminds us in gruesome details that the effects of those three odd years at the
tail end of the 1960s still course through our collective veins. The results still feed our thoughts and
therapy. Our future has since remained stunted, trapped in the shallow trenches of our consciousness.
Numerous, these novels, all of them filled with the pathos of war, the courage of the fighting forces, the
resourcefulness of those left behind, the strategies of survival. These novels nourish our understanding of
what happened during those dark months, more than the history books. Accounts like Elechi Amadi’s
Sunset in Biafra (1973), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace (1976), Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986) and
Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1994) all narrate the experiences that continue to
bring that war to every Nigerian parlour and bedroom, metaphorically and physically, through the
upsurge of armed robbery, political chicanery and underdevelopment. But none of the earlier published
works has attempted to dissect our minds with the psychological consequences of the war as Ezeigbo has
done in Roses and Bullets.
Of course, nobody could doubt the right or competence of Ezeigbo to write about the war. She lived
through it; she was even a militia, and her experiences must have informed the creation of Ginika, one of
the important personas in the novel. Additionally, she has written short stories and other works of fiction
on the conflict, apart from her critical study, Fact and Fiction in the Literature of the Nigerian Civil War
(1991).
The novel has not deviated much from the basic formula of war literature – two lovers, Eloka and Ginika,
desperately in love become separated by the war they could not understand or want to be part of, but a
war that would end up defining their existence. While their relationship endured the war, it did not
survive the peace that followed. But Ezeigbo goes further than that: we are drawn into the divisiveness of
war, the agony of dejection but equally the humanity that triumphs as a banner, waving away the pain and
violence.
The two lovers find a link in drama, and after a series of performances to boost the morale of the soldiers,
they decide on marriage. Soon after though, Eloka joins the Biafran army, and later becomes a Captain,
same as Nwakire, Ginika’s brother. Ginika herself, having trained as a militia, becomes a worker at the
Relief Centre – her contribution to the war – a situation that bodes serious consequence to her future. The
two men, with Ginika, display a fervent and spirited humanity and maturity that, without giving away the
ending, lead to their destruction.
And destruction is an operative word in the novel. Every segment of narrative renders the human soul
practically numbed. Everything reminds us of the ‘primitive animal’ in us. For instance, in recounting the
exodus of the Igbo people from the north after the pogrom that contributed to the war, Ezeigbo paints a
gruesome and macabre image on the eye and the mind:
“An open carriage filled with human debris. Ginika saw severed hands and legs chopped, lying like
pieces of wood on the floor of the carriage; there were dead bodies that were whole but with deep gashes
in different places – the neck, chest and belly… her eyes caught the figure of a woman lying naked,
disembowelled; a dead fetus was hanging from her abdomen, its umbilical cord still attached to its lifeless
mother” (p. 166).

Or: “in the open space lay the headless torso of a huge man clad only in black trousers” (p. 166).
And that was before the war; Ezeigbo leaves us under no illusion that war is noble or that there was “no
victor, no vanquished”. Everybody involved was vanquished. The language is brutal; the imageries
punishing, gnawing our sensibility like a blunt knife exenterating a live specimen. The anguish fills us
with despair; hauntingly, you cry for respite but your curiosity gets the better of you. And the ending does
not disappoint, though the twist transports you unwittingly into the worlds of Ekwensi and Saro-Wiwa.
And you wonder: have we really survived the peace, as Ekwensi prayed almost forty years ago?
But it’s not all gory, for in the midst of violence, the future grows. Ezeigbo indulges the romantic in her
with brazen rendering of love, disvirginity and sex. Even though those images are also filled with
metaphors of violence!
“The kisses they gave each other ignited a flame that engulfed them. She panted and clung to him, even as
his fevered and moist lips set out on a passionate journey from her mouth down the smooth road of her
neck. Enticed by the firm swell of her breasts, his lips paid homage to each honeyed fruit from Nature’s
own garden… the climax was so intense and poignant that the wrench caused little or no anguish; her
terror emptied in great delight” (p. 234).
But the images that linger in the mind are not of the violence and sex. The images that remain and nourish
our memories are those of the importance of family ethos, the ingenuity of creative endeavours and the
fickleness of human ego that provided the psychological balm against the war.
Roses and Bullets is a fascinating read providing a generous insight into the core of that gaping sore that
continues to blight our socio-political universe. Realistic in its portrayal, dispassionate and candid in its
narrative, Roses and Bullets is an insightful read into our survival psyche.
In reading the novel, you will notice one other certain thing: those who survived the war did so because
they allow the rose petals to envelop them in a cocoon of hope. They are not – as Uncle Ray, one of the
major personas in the novel, says – ‘opportunists’, but humans engaged with their survival instincts,
optimists with dreams of freedom. But they need to heal; the land must heal them, as it gently drains of
the poison of war. And that is why Ezeigbo’s novel, coming at this time, is a soothing balm to the trauma
of our existence.
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. Roses and Bullets. Lagos: Jalaa Writers’ Collective, 2011 (518 pages).