Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Graceland, which deals with memory-places and shifts in a spatio-temporally divided childhood. Trajectories of childhood memory alternate between the city and the country, as the idea of cultural memory also shifts between these places and spaces. Cultural memory is explored through the tensions between the city and the country. The protagonist in Graceland is caught in a rapidly shifting cityscape, with a fragile yet very creative cultural existence. Memory in Graceland is explored through the popular imagination through the idea of popular culture. In Graceland, popular culture defines the everyday life and experiences of the teenage protagonist Elvis Oke. Daily life, depicted in the performance of popular cultural memory, through Elvis‟s impersonation of the pop icon Elvis Presley, can be argued as reflecting critically on normative ideas of culture that work through the processes of genealogy and teleology, fostered by institutions such as the family. Yet the time and space of childhood, as Elvis seems to demonstrate, not only presents the daily performance of popular culture, but also the importance of the discourse of childhood in reflecting on how everyday life is increasingly affecting macro-identities through its performance of popular culture. This is an argument that Tim Edensor (2002) makes when he posits that popular culture, as it is performed in the daily life of citizens, redistributes, reconstructs and destabilises the boundaries of national culture. Edensor‟s critique therefore follows a postmodernist logic, in which processes are no longer teleological or chronological, but in fact in a matrix, where subjectivities are fragmented, fluid, shifting and constantly extending and 52 protracting spaces of engagement within national boundaries. 54 Popular cultural memory is performed as part of Elvis‟s everyday life, through his impersonation of Elvis Presley and through his internalisation of this simulated identity to the extent of this representing a hyper-reality of his sexual identity as well as sustaining an economic livelihood. The representation of childhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction is presenting a critical engagement with history and time as represented through narrative memory. In examining Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Graceland, the specifics of the world of childhood, familial spaces and places are sites of a critical engagement with memory, the everyday and archive. Memory-place and space, cooking, eating, playing, dancing, music and other activities, depicted in the process of growth, are points of connection that reflect on the critical role of memory as it engages history and time and also as it helps to (redefine contemporary forms of identity. In the next section, I discuss important assumptions about narrative memory and identity, in relation to the act of writing, as well as a brief examination of how memory and history in African literature has been studied. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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