a student prepping for exams
Christened after a Yoruba warrior-queen who delivered victory to her people by infiltrating enemy ranks, Moremi—a brilliant, ambitious, and self-spoken postgraduate student—is thrust into a battle for academic survival when she accuses Lucien N'Dyare, a prominent professor, of sexual harassment and attempted rape. A noticeable feature of the Nigerian university space is that the voices of sexual harassment victims are often hushed and their perspectives undermined, especially when female students make allegations against male lecturers. Citation employs reverse chronology and flashback to weave the fabric of the story, inviting the audience to journey through Moremi's eyes. N'Dyare was captured by Moremi's intelligence, eloquence and perhaps, beauty, that he feigned vulnerability and inability to drive a manual car to invite her attention. Did Moremi fall for the trick? Did she see a mentor in N'Dyare, and sought to build a relationship with a professor who holds the key to a UN internship she had always sought? The situation quickly degenerates into more obvious advances: N'Dyare tries to kiss her during a class excursion to Cape Verde, seized every opportunity to engage her in inappropriate venereal conversations, and attempted to rape her when she inadvertently stayed back after a class party at his residence. When she withdrew from and threatened to report him to the university, he became hostile and failed her dissertation.
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