Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Famished Road defies both his spiritual companions and also his earthly relations by staying on earth. Even though Okri‟s worlds in his trilogy are essentially bi-cultural and bipartite, as in the spirit and human worlds, and no different from the city/country, colonial/anti-colonial, innocence/conflict worlds in earlier representations, the agency of Azaro is a concept this study highlights as significant in marking the evolving portrait of the child. Agency is crucially enhanced by exposure and the availability of mythico- physical choices. Azaro has the worlds) at his feet and his fluid movement from one to the other provides him a sense of agency. It must be pointed out as Hawley (1995) does, that Okri‟s predilection for youthful protagonists parallels many of his contemporaries. The fiction coming out of Nigeria in the st century is characterised by the use of children and youthful protagonists. For example Kambili, Jaja, Ugwu, and Baby in Adichie‟s works, Enitan in Seffi Atta‟s work, Elvis in Abani‟s and Jessamy in Oyeyemi‟s works are all protagonists in childhood and youthful stages. They represent an array of worldviews at different stages of their lives. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‟s Purple Hibiscus tells the story of Kambili, a thirteen-year old girl, who struggles with an overbearing father a man who is fundamentally Catholic, publishes a newspaper that is against oppressive military governance but ironically inflicts physical and psychological abuse on his family. Kambili not only struggles with a conflicting attitude of fear and reverence towards her father, but also with voicing herself as an adolescent and female child. Half of a Yellow Sun tells a story about the Biafran war and the role of Igbo intellectuals, who are caught in the daily struggles of raising children. The story is partly told through an adolescent houseboy Ugwu who is later drafted into the war, and whose voice is examined later in this study as Adichie‟s construction of a conceptual persona. Helen Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl is the story of Jessamy Harrison, an eight-year old girl, living in London and struggling with a dual parentage history. Her maternal origins are in 20 Nigeria while paternal are English. Jessamy‟s quest is related to her sense of identity, as she struggles with belonging to both worlds that are racially and culturally different. In The Opposite House, Oyeyemi‟s second novel, this identity politics is extended further through an even more complicated family setup where multiple languages, histories of dispersal, living and migration define the daily life of the protagonist Maja. Chris Abani‟s Graceland, set in Lagos Nigeria is the story of Elvis Oke, presently sixteen year old, which goes back to his formative years, alternating it with his present life. Elvis struggles with a feminised sense of belonging, which is influenced by his dead mother, but which his father despises. At the same time he is caught in amaze of transcultural, virtual and fantastic worlds that help him cross spatio-temporal worlds with the ease of imagination. The Virgin of Flames is a story about Black, an American of Nigerian and Salvadorian descent, whose memories and images of childhood influence his choice of economic livelihood which is also intricately linked with his multiple sexual identities. Seffi Atta‟s Everything Good Will Come is the story of Enitan, a lawyer who follows in the footsteps of her father, an ever-present figure in her familial and professional world. She struggles to reconnect with her maternal genealogy, until secrets of her fathers past life come out. In view of the earlier representations and critical examinations of childhood I have already drawn attention to, these writers (Adichie, Abani, Atta and Oyeyemi) imaginative representations of childhood figures and memories redrafts earlier accounts and criticisms because of migration and a resultant diasporic context, not to mention an increased expansion of the idea of the postcolonial and its continued experience. It would therefore be interesting to trace these shifts in representation, how they converse with previous texts that influence them and how they ultimately, at an imaginative level provoke new critical paradigms, affected by the postcolonial, postmodern and contemporary world that they engage with. 21 In literary critical circles, the emergence of these writers works marks the beginning of what has been classified as a third generation of Nigerian writers. This group of writers is defined as third generation with the idea of children who have come of age. The symbolic figure of the child which is used to classify these writers as anew generation does not however give sustained critical value to childhood as a significant discourse in these works, other than a little more than being symbolic of putative literary growth. A special edition of English in Africa (May 2005) was dedicated to these works. Adesanmi and Dunton, in the edition of English in Africa set out what they call preliminary theoretical considerations for these works. The editors point out the emergence of the novel in Nigeria since the turn of the st century as a shift in genre that has consolidated the presence of this third generation. In an illuminating statement, they summarise what they see as an order of knowledge in which these works have been crafted, providing conceptual contexts for these works. They also suggest critical tools for the examination. They say The first obvious theoretical implication is that we are dealing essentially with texts born into the scopic regime of the postcolonial and the postmodern, an order of knowledge in which questions of subjecthood and agency are not only massively overdetermined by the politics of identity in a multicultural and transitional frame but in which the tropes of Otherness and subalternity are being remapped by questioning erstwhile totalities such as history, nation, gender and their respective symbologies. (2005:15) The notion that these works remap the ideas of subjectivity and agency is important. It implies that these works deal with an alternative order of, as the critics above say totalities such as history, nation, gender and their respective symbologies.” Heather Hewett, in the same edition, takes the debate further by her examination of Adichie‟s Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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