essay on short story

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Recommended: Effects of drug trafficking in Nigeria

The degeneration of moral values in the Nigerian society in the last decades led to a multitude of scourges; one of which is drug smuggling. Drug mules’ numbers increased to reach an alarming level. In her short story “Last Trip” the Nigerian writer Sefi Atta tries to shed light and give some explanation to this phenomenon through the journey of a drug smuggler who is a single mother with her mentally disabled son from Lagos to London in what might be her last trip.
Sefi Atta is a notable Nigerian writer born in Lagos, winner of Wole Soyinka’s prize for Literature in Africa in 2006 and the Noma award for publishing in Africa in 2009. “Last Trip” is a short story taken from her collection “News from Home” (2010). Atta declared in an interview that she was influenced by newspaper articles for her short stories, thus, she provides readers with realistic portraits of the actual Nigeria and its urging problems. “A writer observes and interprets the norms, values and the customs of society. He or she affirms or negates those values according to his or her personal convictions” (Lauretta Ngcobo) in other words, the contemporary African writer acts as an interpreter in the way he or she interprets some aspects of his or her society and projects them in his or her artistic creations. In her short story “Last Trip” Atta tries to expose the illicit drug smuggling as it is, from the perspective of an unnamed woman, we come to know only her alias “Simbiyat Adisa”. She is a single mother, raising her handicapped son Dara alone. Atta kept her narrator unnamed, a sort of a common experience narrator that serves as a case study, for hundreds of drug mules, which should be observed, studied and learned from. The short story is full of flashbacks, ...

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...ugs with no judgment or prejudice. She left it for readers to consider these drug mules as victims or as criminals, to sympathize with or accuse. She had used drug smuggling to refer to the decay in the Nigerian society's morals and values. The society is no longer concerned with what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, but only concerned with what is profitable and what is not, consequently, confirming that corruption prevails where moral values fail. She can earn a lot of money from one single trip and has plenty of time to spend with her son, so even if she says that each trip is her last she doesn’t mean it and doesn’t make an effort to actually change her situation and stop it. Ultimately she will make her last trip but then it would be too late to her inevitable destiny unless she considers an alternative, she is going straight toward her own destruction.

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