Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Graceland. The aims set will follow specific strands of argument that will be delineated below. Firstly, the chapter examines the meticulous attention to the detail of everyday life, in Adichie‟s Purple Hibiscus. Being a novel Adichie wrote after staying five years away from home, there is a nostalgic mood to it. Kambili‟s subjectivity is constructed through the emotions of loss and nostalgia that oscillate between her family‟s home in Enugu and her paternal aunts home at Nsukka. The traumatic memory of her violent experience 45 with her father, which influences the trajectory of remembering in the novel as well as her growth, independence and freedom through her daily regime of reciting novenas, cooking, praying before and after meals and doing homework are constructed through an emotional and imaginative memory. The everyday, will be read, as Michel De Certeau (1984) says, a tactic in the context of a history of defiance and resistance towards a sense of liberation and freedom. Kambili‟s emotions are also read in the context of Chimamanda Adichie‟s imagining of home after being away for almost half a decade. Therefore Nsukka, the psycho-physically liberating place for Kambili is also a memory- place for Adichie‟s authorial nostalgia. Secondly, memory-places such as Nsukka in Adichie‟s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun are significant in reflecting on the notion of childhood memory. Nsukka as will be discussed in the next chapter is a toponym of meaning, while in this chapter it is an “architext” of memory in Adichie‟s works. In Nsukka, meanings converge and diverge through the semantic structure of her texts. Place names are evocative of Adichie‟s familial genealogy, history and identity. This is for instance reflected in the controversial Biafran war, in Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun, which is also characterised by authorial nostalgia. This nostalgia does not only come from the triumphant excavation of a nations (Biafra) heritage but also out of the trauma of the perceived loss of a cultural identity. In this sense, the memory of Biafra is considered cultural. Hence, the idea of memory in Adichie‟s works is a collage of macro and micro memories of families, homes, ethnicities, nations and nation-states as represented within the discourse of childhood. In the last part of this chapter, I examine popular cultural memory through the urban landscape of Chris Abani‟s Graceland. Abani‟s idea of memory is derived in the portrayal of a childhood in the sands where the image of Elvis Presley defines the popular imagination of that time. Popular culture becomes therefore an alternative form of existence and experiencing of time in Graceland. 47 History and time are contextualised in the challenges of poverty in the informal settlement of Maroko in Lagos, where time is I use the term popular culture hereto mean Abani‟s use of videos and films, as well as the music of Elvis Presley among others as cultural elements that define the texture of the everyday life of the protagonist. 46 lived in a continuum of utopia and dystopia, in the context of a landscape of desires derived from the consumption of popular culture. At the same time, the narrative is set along the normative construction of historical time, with the infamous event in Nigeria‟s urban history of the destruction of Maroko, which signified the gentrification of land in Lagos and the subsequent continual consolidation of the status quoin the land economics of the city. These issues provide the basis for the argument that contemporary Nigerian fiction is significant for its interrogation of history and time. Childhood as a discourse can be read as a site of interrogative memory where contemporary Nigerian novelists are reconstructing history through childhood memory by revisiting the times and spaces of growth and using these to not only reflect on the migrant senses of the self but also create an alternative source of memory from the inimitable position of their autobiographical subjectivities. While the notion of the nation-state in Nigerian fiction has been, largely, the concern of a previous generation of writers – Achebe, Soyinka, Emecheta, Nwapa, Okri and others, for contemporary Nigerian writers like Abani, it is an implicitly reference. Contemporary Nigerian fiction, while set in a time of military dictatorship and political turbulence, provides an alternative perception through the world of childhood. Moreover, the concerns of the world of childhood, lead us to experience macro-histories through a different yet complicated angle – via the subjectivities of a diasporic authorial presence. 48 Childhood provides for the representation of imaginative memories that affect the perception of historical factual efficacy. The representation of childhood therefore creates unofficial sources of memory which is an alternative means of archiving. In fact, as Hamilton (et al., 2002: 10) posit, Literature, landscape, dance, art and a host of other forms offer archival possibilities capable of releasing different kinds of information about the past, shaped by different record-keeping processes Hence through representing childhood, the novel engages in the notion of an alternative archive and history, which the next section seeks to explicate. I prefer to use the term “macro-histories” to refer to Histories at a normative, collective level, say of the nation-state and “micro-histories” for smaller “proliferations” that perspectives of childhood provide us with. |