Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Memory of War Trauma, Textual Archive and Cultural Memory
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| 2.5 Memory of War Trauma, Textual Archive and Cultural Memory in Half of a Yellow Sun. As an event in a specific time and history, the exploration of the Nigerian civil war as a theme in fiction returns us to the focus on memory and its connection to narrative forms. The war happened in 1967-1970 when the South Eastern states, led by Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu decided to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria, following a period of social, cultural, political and economic tensions. These tensions culminated in a spate of coups and the Pogrom in Northern Nigeria in 1966, where allegedly, Igbo soldiers and civilians were targeted and killed. The secession led to the self-proclamation of the Republic of Biafra. The Nigerian military regime led by General Yakubu Gowon declared a blockade on Biafra and embarked on police action leading to a full scale civil war that went on for four years. This war is the subject of Adichie‟s second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. It is important to delineate the different shades of memory and their theoretical dimensions that we are dealing with here. Firstly, the memory of Biafra is influenced by the ethno-geographic politics that preceded and succeeded the independence of Nigeria, found in the notion of the tri-partitioning of Nigeria into ethno-religious polities during colonial occupation. In this sense then there emerges the politics of cultural cartographies and here I am referring to language and religion as distinguishing semiotic clusters. The memory of Biafra can therefore be seen as primarily cultural, especially from the perspective of the Igbo as the dominant nation affected by the war. Secondly, the events preceding the Biafran war, including the coup and Pogrom of 1966, precipitated a series of massacres, and by 1970 when the war ended, an estimated 3 million lives had been lost. In this way, the memory of Biafra takes on a traumatic dimension and the discourses 82 of victims and victors begin to take on the dimensions of communal trauma, and therefore the idea of shared or collective trauma, through collective memory. Biafran literature therefore shares with Holocaust literature the characteristic of literatures of trauma or literatures of memory. Judging from the vast amount of literature on the Biafran war (Amuta, 1982; McLuckie, 1987) 62 , one cannot but as McLuckie observes reflect upon and emphasize the residual effect of the war on the consciousness of Nigerians (1987:510). As an open sore in the history of state formation, its traumatic nature problematises the temporal axis from which the Nigerian state wants to project itself in relation to the present. The vast body of works about this war complicates the normative idea of a socioeconomic and political history of Nigeria, therefore acting as an alternative archive. Hence, this political/military trauma takes on a historical dimension that refigures normative perceptions of history. As Cathy Caruth (1995:8) points out The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place and in another time. Therefore, in light of Caruth‟s observation, a traumatic event like Biafra is the bane of the presumed organic unity and spatio-temporal existence of the Nigerian nation-state. The vast amount of work about the war, presented in the bibliographies of Chidi Amuta and Craig McLuckie, present an archive of an alternative spatio-temporal existence that can be ascribed to the socioeconomic and political livelihood of the Nigerian nation-state. This vast amount of work on Biafra is an array of memory that provides the textual 62 Chidi Amuta (1982) and Craig McLuckie (1987) provide bibliographies of the vast amount of work in all literary genres and criticism on the Biafran or Nigerian civil war. 83 background fora collective memory of the Biafran war. Hence, the literatures of the Biafran war become themselves sites of memory in its cultural and traumatic dimensions. In their bibliographic form these function as a monument in fixing the events of the Biafran war within the pages of the texts they inhabit. In this material existence of the books, articles, journals and magazines on the Biafran war there is an ongoing tension with history, making the printed work on the Biafran war problematise historical assumptions by its ontological latency and peculiar atemporal structure. In other words, one is reminded of Susan Stewart‟s (1984:22) astute observations on the general simultaneity of the printed word, and its problematic material existence in relation to the acts of reading and writing and how these acts disturb chronologies of time and history. She avers that The simultaneity of the printed word lends the book its material aura as an object, it has a life of its own, a life outside human time, the time of its body and its voice […] the book stands in tension with history, a tension reproduced in the microcosm of the book itself, where reading takes place in time across marks which have been made in space. Moreover, because of this tension, all events recounted in the text have an effect which serves to make the text both transcendent and trivial and to collapse the distinction between the real and the imagined. Susan Stewart‟s idea of simultaneity reflects on the writer-reader dimensions of the book, going back to the idea of an imagined audience or a “community of readers (1984:19 Emphasis mine) and their abstract existence. In Stewart‟s reflections, one finds undertones of Benedict Anderson‟s notion of Imagined communities (1983), or audiences in the history of print media. The idea of community is fascinating here because it underscores the importance of the collective, of a shared sense of values, artifacts (books and cultural things) and memories (as with the trauma of Biafra). More interesting, at the heart of the discourse on Biafra is an actual nation predominantly Igbo 84 – and its foreclosed attempt at imagining itself as a nation-state, with a communal sense of victimhood. Hence the literatures of the Biafran war are themselves repositories of a collective trauma that reflects on a collective memory of either the macro-community of the Nigerian nation-state at this point in time, or the specifically micro-community of the Igbo. While not globally monumentalised like the Holocaust, Biafra was and still is a tragic and traumatic time of Nigerian history, monumentalised in the material products of its discourse – in the novels, the journal articles, poetry, drama and fiction that have collected over the years into a significant textual archive. Due to its traumatic effects on the nation-state‟s consciousness, it remains a wound that refuses to heal and, in borrowing the words of Houston Baker Jr. a critical memory that judges severely, censures righteously, renders hard ethical evaluations of the past that it never defines as well passed (1999:264). Therefore, if we read Biafra as a critical memory we can make the assertion, like Baker that it is the cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship significant instants of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now” (264). 63 As a critical memory therefore, Biafra‟s representation in literature depicts trauma, loss, and nostalgia because of its invocation of a troubling relationship with the notion of belonging. In light of this highly charged landscape of memory, Adichie‟s Half of a Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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