Narrative Memory and Literary Historiography

53 becomes an artefact, a document of history of the novelists attitudes, emotions and feelings about a particular subject.
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The memory represented by the novelist in his work therefore has a sense of subjectivity that adds to the narrative trajectory and complicates the narrative form of its representation. Memory therefore drives the reconstruction of an authorial self, because, as King (2000) posits, remembering the self involves a narrative pattern that can be found in the example of the way a recovering amnesiac gets a sense of awareness of the past and present at the moment of healing. Hence, memory for King
(2000) and Ender (2005) is significant for examining the representation of self. The narrative of memory impacts significantly on conceptions of identity – of the self, within and without a collective cultural framework. For an author representing childhood therefore, their sense of the self is, at the process of writing, explored and affected through the memory of their childhood. This involves going back to a history of their childhood that inmost cases, by virtue of adultist frameworks of identity, is seen as mutually exclusive from it. Yet, for the contemporary Nigerian migrant authors, the representation of the world of childhood is no less constitutive of identity than their current representation of themselves as adults. For these writers, the representation of childhood is informed by these autobiographies. This is because of the effect of a diasporic consciousness that avails memory as not only an analytical tool in the construction of a fictional world, but also as an archive that can usefully deal with the fragmented subjectivities of a migrant identity. In this way, it can lay claim to heritage but at the same time create an alternative narrative of identity that has come to define contemporary selfhoods. Memory for the contemporary Nigerian writer is a crucial way of dealing with the oppressive historical process, within the macro-perspectives of the nation, ethnicity and family, and most importantly the histories of childhoods lived under the influence of familial, ethnic, national cultural institutions and also global cultural flows through contemporary forms of mass mediation. Tim Woods (2007:1,3) therefore warns that memory in African literatures is not just a trope, it also serves to foreground the crucial sites where postcolonial national and cultural In making these assertions, I am essentially underscoring the subjective consciousness of history that the novel as a specific narrative form can throw up to the surface.

54 identities are being formed and contested Through a personal and collective diasporic consciousness, memory also takes on the experience of multiple histories of migration and movement that result in fragmented subject positions. Memory becomes an organising principle, not only of the narrative of childhood, but also of the subjects positions) that shift as the migrant author presents the story of their childhood. These narratives of childhood, in their reflection through memories, of figures, and images are located in a macro-historical context and literary historiography. As we read them across specific times within the historical landscape of the Nigerian nation-state, the questions will be how do they construct and also reconstruct these macro-histories? Do these reconstructions collectively provide an alternative to the orthodox narrative of Nigerian History Tim Woods gives the hypothetical answer hereby saying Since history can bean aggressively exclusionary narrative […] African writing constructs memory as a form of counter-history that subverts false generalisations about an exclusionary History (13). In literary historiography, the narrative of childhood, has had along literary trajectory or critical heritage, starting from the Romantic period, in which it was examined as a utopia of time (Heath, 2003:20), as Coveney (1967), Aries
(1962), Pattison (1978), Cunningham (1995), Sommerville (1982) have also explained. In African colonial and postcolonial discourse, the narrative of childhood began by serving the purpose of cultural retrieval (Okolie, 1998; King, 1980; Abanime, 1998), another intensely utopian project that could not reverse the already internally diasporic” nature of postcolonial societies (Hall, In these normative cases, childhood was dismissed as an object fora cultural archive. In later narratives of childhood, as used specifically by the Nigerian author Benjamin Okri in his abiku trilogy, childhood was used as an allegory of the nation, in an era of postcolonial political disillusionment. In the West Indies, Kenneth Ramchand (1982) has also demonstrated how the novel of childhood is at the centre of the formation of new national identities away from past colonialist and hegemonic ones. In these historiographies, childhood has been represented and examined within the discourse of memory. Childhood has therefore been at the centre Hall points out that considering the history of colonization, postcolonial African societies are already removed from their previous states of existence and therefore internally diasporic in cultural terms.

55 of the project of anamnesis – in a rebuttal of the utopian dimension in Romantic imagination and in attempts at the cultural retrieval of a bucolic, pastoral existence in postcolonial African societies. Childhood has therefore existed as a useful connection with the past in the discourse of memory. The child has also been a symbolic object of macro-identities, be they as large as civilisations as in the Romantic tradition or as small as nation-states and nations as in postcolonial criticism of newly independent African nations. Contemporary Nigerian fictions representation of childhood figures, memories and images is complicated by a diasporic consciousness. Childhood is represented through the consciousness of a fragmented subjectivity that is the product of a disjointed migrant lifestyle. This subjectivity is a result of the tension between centrifugal and centripetal cultural forces that cut across continental, nation-state, ethnic, racial and gender assumptions and physical boundaries. One thing is significant the representation of childhood is an attempt at going back to memories of growth, through an imaginative and emotional continuum that evokes nostalgia, a sense of (reaffirmation of the self of loss and recovery, but of an engagement with times) and histories, some macro, others micro, some popular, others normative and orthodox. The engagement with times) and histories is an eclectic and postmodern approach that fuses together the imaginative memories of the fictional works and the emotional, intangible memories that characterise authorial diasporic subjectivity to time and history. In other words, the examination of the representation of childhood has to be read in the context of the autobiographies of the authors, the actual times of their childhood, and the fictional times represented in their works as well as their present subjectivities as diasporic individuals. As we turn our attention to the texts, we will foreground memory in various dimensions – traumatic, nostalgic, individual and collective. These dimensions will be seen as working
compositely, and/or competitively, but determined by the everyday world of childhood, which provides a distinct consciousness. In this way then, the notions of times and histories become sites of interrogation in the world of childhood.

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