“Laughter Through Tears” in Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories

In this paper, I will explore the notion of irony in Achebe's "Girls at War and Other Stories". My choice of Achebe’s collection of short stories is due to the scarcity of the critics written about it. All the focus and attention went to Achebe’s novels leaving out his short stories which are interesting to study especially that they represent different points of time in Achebe’s life as a writer. I will be specifically studying three of his short stories dealing with the Biafran war and their relationship to my main topic war and identity production. These stories are “Girls at War”, “Civil Peace”, and “Sugar Baby”. As far as the rest of the collection goes, I will be studying the use of irony as an important tool that Achebe utilizes to pass on his critical views of the Biafran society. Irony is indeed prevalent in the whole collection which makes it difficult not to touch upon it while studying Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories. Irony is one of the most important features of the African short story. Many critics such as Killam and Balogun state in their writings that African short story writers are fond of irony for three different reasons in addition to the aesthetic one. The first reason is that in using irony in their stories, the African writers go in the same flow with the European and American short story writers. They resort to irony to be able to write about the modern age which is complex and multi-dimensional. Irony enables them to escape the binary judgments that the readers used to see in the stories written earlier.
Secondly, irony is meant to be used as a cure or a remedy by African short story writers. Since people cannot see the distorted reality (colonialism, exploitation, racism, etc) as it really is, the writers present it to the readers ironically making it more shocking and hoping that it would be seen easier in that way. They hope that by ridiculing the reality it would be more noticeable and visible to the readers and as a result