Defective Body Symbolism as a Countenance of Despotism in Hama Tuma’s Selected Short Stories
Defective Body Symbolism as a Countenance of Despotism in Hama Tuma’s Selected Short Stories

Summary/Abstract: Postcolonial Africa faces many governance problems chief among them being dictatorship. Literary artists try to expose the follies of the despots; however, such endeavours subject them to deep conflict with the political leadership who perceive them as malcontent voices of dissidence. Many literary artists consequently employ various literary devices to indirectly project such despotic socio-political settings to stave off the possibility of explosive confrontation with despots. This paper engages with Hama Tuma’s twelve short stories that employ symbolism of the human body. The stories have been purposively sampled from the thirty four short stories in his anthologies: The case of the socialist witchdoctor and other stories and The case of the criminal walk and other stories to examine his dissident mettle. The critical analysis of these texts is hinged on the theory of hermeneutics of suspicion which is grounded in allegorical hermeneutics that significantly coalesces in the skepticism of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The trio perceived consciousness as false necessitating interpretation to unmask hidden meanings. The paper argues that Tuma disapproves of despotism and succinctly voices his standpoint by effectively deploying defective human body symbolism to express his contempt for despotism in Ethiopia. He exposes the flaws of despotic establishments through physical and physiological handicaps of the characters in authority or their surrogates while favourably presenting those characters that antagonize them

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