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Autobiography and Scriptotherapy in Oluremi Obasanjo’s Bitter-Sweet and Funso Adegbola’s He Gave Me Wings

Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: This study investigates how autobiographical narratives enhance wellness, and it pays a specific focus on Oluremi Obasanjo’s Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo and Funso Adegbola’s He gave Me Wings: Me and My Dad. The writers are two prominent Nigerian women. Both of them wrote about how a man’s influence significantly shaped their lives. While Oluremi Obasanjo presents her husband as a villain that almost maimed her, Funso Adegbola presents her dad as a hero that made her. Oluremi reveals how the syntax of her existence was only punctuated with momentary joys before her divorce, Funso unveils how her dad gave her wings to fly high above the common storms and limits of young women in a third world country. The study identifies the literary merits of the autobiographical narratives; it highlights the points of convergences and divergences between the two narratives understudied, as well as the inherent mental health benefits to the writers. The process of autobiographical writing is depicted as providing therapeutic authentication for the writers’ grieves. Both authors gained audibility and visibility through the instrumentality of writing. The process of writing these autobiographies became a resilience building device for their authors as they were able to negotiate their traumatic experiences by expressing themselves through writing. While Oluremi creates a positive public image for herself against the domineering political stature of Obasanjo in Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, Funso re-enacts positive memories of her late father through writing to ‘re-member’ him to their community from which death exited him in He Gave Me Wings: Me and my Dad.
DOI: 10.11648/j.ijla.20210905.13
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3205580934
FWCI:
Cites: 15
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Related to: 10