Research Focus Group Talk: Disease and Inclusive Healing in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom

Literature, and children’s literature specifically, helps instill value and humanity in times of crisis, as portrayed in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom. Both adults and children find it challenging to handle chronic diseases, such as sickle cell, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis B. Focusing on one of these lethal diseases, sickle cell anemia, this study argues that, even with great innovations in medical science, society is the main killer and not the disease itself. Since disease forms a part of human life, literature has responded, including in the case of sickle cell. Children with such diseases have been stigmatized by society, while even some parents see them as burdens and curse them, forgetting that they themselves are the cause of it. Through its power to instill value in life, literature offers a reminder of how to handle people with such diseases. Idada is a point of focus in this study. Through the child protagonists, Eghe and Osaik, Idada talks of unquestionable love towards the child, community collaboration, government involvement, scientific research, media involvement, and African consciousness on technological innovations. Deconstructionist critical theory challenges the traditional notions of language, meaning and truth by exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies held within ideologies and beliefs about children living with such diseases in the world. This study will show that healing for complex diseases like sickle cell is not only clinical but that other forms of healing are also important.

Dr. Nfor Noela Mankfu-Ngwa hails from the North West Region of Cameroon. She has a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature (specifically, Children’s Literature) from the University of Bamenda. She is a part-time Lecturer at the University of Bamenda and a Secondary School English Language and Literature in English teacher. She obtained her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Literatures in English from the University of Buea. She holds a DIPES II from HTTC, Bambili. Her publications include “Identity Construction in Black Children’s Narratives: A Reading of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give.” She is also part of the socio-linguistic profiling of Cameroon.

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Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group