Traumatic Voicing of Patients’ Relatives In Yejide Kilanko Stay With Me And Ayobami Adebayo's Daughters Who Walk This Path

The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of an interdisciplinary relationship between literature and medicine, a dialogue that has continued to attract attention within Nigerian literary studies. This study addresses the problem of traumatized voicing among relatives of sick characters in contemporary Nigerian fiction. While illness has often been examined from the perspective of the patient, less attention has been given to the psychological burden borne by caregivers who endure the anguish of watching loved ones confront life-threatening conditions. Their fractured expressions of pain highlight a critical gap in both medical humanities and literary discourse. Adopting psychoanalytic and trauma theories as frameworks, this study interrogates the narratives in Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk This Path and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me, examining how the authors’ succinctly capture the disorientation and fragmented voices of relatives as they struggle with the dual task of caregiving and self-preservation. The findings reveal that guilt, denial, repression, displacement, transference and sublimation are literary representations of relatives’ traumatized responses to pathological disorder. The study concludes that illness narratives in Nigerian fiction extend beyond the patient’s experience to expose caregivers' precarious emotional states.