The Silence That Remembers: Why Nigeria’s Headlines Echo My Story - By Nnamdi Nwogwugwu

I wrote Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter because, as I say in the text, “memory is fragile. Because silence is patient — and skilled at erasing.”

Born in the dying days of the Biafran War, and writing the first pages of this story while navigating medical school and my own dark night of the soul — as the first cracks of the collapsing Soviet empire spread across Eastern Europe — my life has been shaped by the quiet griefs of nations fractured by conflict.

Today, as Nigeria moves toward the end of 2025 — a season of explosive celebration unfolding alongside profound national disquiet — I find the story of my novel playing out once again in the headlines.

The themes I explored — trauma, inherited fear, silence, and survival — are not confined to history. They are present tense. They are shaping lives now.

The Shifting Shadow of War

When I write about the war as experienced by people from Ahiaba, I am describing an era of brutal, conventional warfare — armies, frontlines, uniforms, declarations. Yet as I read the news today, I realise the shadow of war has not lifted. It has merely changed shape.

This week, Nigeria finds itself under renewed international scrutiny, designated by the United States as a country of particular concern over allegations of targeted violence. The government disputes the framing, and the reality is more complex than any single narrative allows. What cannot be disputed, however, is the scale of fear: the proliferation of kidnapping, killing, and displacement that cuts across region, religion, and class.

The war we now face is no longer fought over secession. It is fought over the safety of the ordinary — the farmer, the commuter, the child on the way to school. It is a war without uniforms, without clear beginnings or endings, and therefore without closure.

My characters, grappling with PTSD and the intergenerational scars carved into Nigeria’s dark intermission between 1967 and 1970, were trying to learn how to live in a world where violence had become a memory — but not a ghost.

Today, many Nigerians are fighting to ensure violence does not even reach the status of memory. They are fighting simply to survive the present.

And I find myself asking the question that sits at the heart of my story: what becomes of the children raised in this atmosphere of constant threat? What happens when fear is not an interruption to childhood, but its background noise? What shadows are being formed now — quietly, invisibly — that will only announce themselves decades later?

Against the Silence of Erasure

I dedicated my novel, in part, because “too many names have disappeared between the lines of history — unspoken, unburied, and unheld.” I wrote against the silence that allows suffering to vanish without witness.

Silence, however, does not only follow violence. Sometimes it walks beside it.

In a nation where headlines move quickly and attention is fleeting, loss risks becoming normalised. Numbers replace names. Tragedy becomes background. And when suffering is not spoken, it does not disappear — it sinks inward.

This is the silence I fear most: not the silence that follows mourning, but the silence that allows forgetting.

Playing the Note Truly

The most haunting image at the conclusion of Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter is that of a boy playing the final note — “not perfectly, but truly.”

I think of that image often as December unfolds in Nigeria.

As the more fortunate revel in Detty December — dancing through the nights of Lagos, clinking glasses in the parlours of the nouveau riche and returning diasporans — I wonder what breaks through the brief, lucid pauses between the next glass of champagne or shot of Hennessy.

Will the sound of the flute be heard?

Will it interrupt the music, even for a moment — reminding us of the children growing up in fear, of the griefs that have not yet found language, of the shadows forming quietly in places we do not visit?

Or will the silence continue to do what it does best: wait patiently, gathering what it will one day return to us.

That question — unanswered, unsettling — is where my story ends.

And it is where Nigeria, in December 2025, now stands.