‘The World, the Text’ and the Writer: A Reading of E.E Sule’s Sterile Sky

Abstract

E.E Sule’s autobiographical novel, Sterile Sky, fictionalizes the infamous Reinhard Bonnke religious crisis that rocked the city of Kano in October 1991. Its reconstruction of the intolerance, conflicts and violence that have become characteristic of multicultural settings in contemporary Northern Nigeria reaffirms the view that fiction responds to the reality of human experience. Against this backdrop, this article argues that fiction bears witness to social facts, thus, its a functioning part of the social structure of a nation just as the school, the family or the law. Based on the concept of Worldliness, as espoused by the postcolonial theorist Edward Said, the essay explores ways that fiction can be an important tool for the assessment of the social, economic and political forces in human societies. It concludes that fiction holds the potential, however unconsciously, to shape human perception, and to help build societies with strong cultural consciousness.