Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away Literary Elements

Fiction

Present time at Lagos and a village at the Niger Delta in Nigeria

The narrator is a 12 year old girl called Blessing

Accusative, Ambivalent, Sympathetic

Protagonist: Blessing ; Antagonist: the war in Nigeria, the loss of identity she is feeling, and the loss of a proper family

Blessing tries to find her identity through all the challenges of the war, poverty, and sickness. She also tries to adapt to the new religion, tradition, and lifestyle of the village since she moved from a very luxurious place in Lagos. She realizes that her family is her grandparents, and that the father she always thought was perfect was the worst father who hurt her mother. She realized that she was born to be a birth attendant.

The climax is when Timi married Dan and Ezekiel joined the Sibeye boys and told them to kidnap Dan.

"You're a natural." Grandma to Blessing. This foreshadowed that Blessing was good at handling babies and so she would become an excellent birth attendant.

"The devil is in you. I can see it." Grandma to Ezekiel. This foreshadowed that Ezekiel would become one of the Sibeye boys who killed innocent people.

"I had wasted my prayers on electricity." Blessing.
This is an understatement because prayers never end, and people can pray whenever they want with whatever they want in limitless numbers.

Blessing kept repeating the fact that her father is always right and he would know what to do in the worst situation until she knew who her real father was, not the father she imagined in her mind. She realised the he was a drunk father who cheated and hurt her mother, and that he was the reason their family became in this condition. He was careless, and he was never right.

"The brightest stars I had ever seen covered the sky, and the air was blue. The garden was full of spiky shapes and shadows. But the sky was lit up. The stars were so bright that when I closed my eyes they remained there, behind my eyelids, as though my body had swallowed some of the sky for itself." Pg. 23

"As we neared the Western Oil Company compound, the road became smooth and easier to walk on. The rubbish lining the roadside disappeared, and even the air smelled fresher, the smell of burning stopped suddenly, as though the compound enjoyed its very own pollution-free air. The buildings sparkled and shone above the high walls, reflecting the bright blue of the day. Mango trees and palms shaded the road and bursts of bougainvillea and bright red hibiscus attracted butterflies so large they glided instead of fluttering, from one plant to the next. The way they moved made me think of Dan’s birds." Pg. 302

"I was almost happy the fighting had started." Blessing

N/A

N/A

"The sun was angrier than I had ever known it." Pg. 275