Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

85 protagonists in the text, which also form part of the collective memories of the extinguished Biafran nationalism. It is instructive to underscore the idea of authorial subjectivities here. Adichie‟s experience of the Biafran war is genealogical. It is a heritage as Hawley (2008) calls it, from a familial line that was directly involved in the war. Adichie lost both her grandfathers in the war and writing Half of a Yellow Sun can be seen as a symbolic act of retrieval, of a genealogical heritage. For Adichie, Biafra is therefore partly a memory carried down from the oral archive of her surviving grandparents. While it is directly embodied in these figures that experienced it, there are specific sites of memory like the place Nsukka that are residual and of monumental value to the memory of Biafra. The place Nsukka becomes a site where the memory of individuals and of a community is negotiated, because it is a place of shared history. Hence, in view of Liliane Weissberg‟s
(1999) ideas about sites of cultural memory, Nsukka‟s significance is reflected in its negotiation of individual and collective memories of the war. Ultimately, its material existence as a place of these memories endows it the relevance of a site of cultural memory. Moreover, its importance as a place of memory in Half of a Yellow Sun gives it the quality of a texture of memory in the words of James E. Young (1993). Young implies here the activity of textualising cultural memory – finding space within the material culture of the book. The book itself is therefore also read across avast bibliographical account of the war collected over the years – an archive that remains foundational as the loom from which the warp and weft of the narratives on the war are processed. In this way, the fictional work becomes part of this archive of imagination and narrative.
Half of a Yellow Sun is therefore preceded by other texts, which claim a shared historical concern with the Biafran war. On Adichie‟s part there is an awareness of shared stories, especially across her familial genealogy, from people who experienced the war in her nuclear and extended family. The precocious tone of the Authors Note at the end of the text reflects shared memories and an awareness of an event that is defined by a variety of disparate experiences and different people. We notice not only its

86 acknowledgement of individual memories, but also collective memories, providing the book with a material platform to launch a familial monument around this traumatic yet nostalgic event of the Biafran war. I quote this in detail However, I could not have written this book without my parents. My wise and wonderful father, Professor Nwoye James Adichie,
Odelu Ora Abba, ended his many stories with the words agha ajoka, which in my literal translation is war is very ugly He and my defending and devoted mother, Mrs Ifeoma Grace Adichie, have always wanted me to know, I think, that what matters is not what they went through but that they survived. I am grateful to them for their stories and for so much more. I salute my Uncle Mai, Michael EN. Adichie, who was wounded while fighting with the 21
st
Battalion of the Biafran Army, and who spoke tome of his experience with much grace and humour. I salute, also, the sparkling memories of my Uncle CY (Cyprian Odigwe,
1949-98), who fought with the Biafran Commandos, my cousin Pauly
(Paulinus Ofili, 1955-2005), who shared his memories of life in Biafra as a thirteen-year-old, and my friend Okla (Okoloma Maduewesi, 1972-
2005), who will now not clutch this under his arm as he did last. The note above provides a reflection of the theoretical construction that began this section of the chapter. It does this by foregrounding the notion of memory in writing, as a process, in both its individual and collective dimensions, with the trauma memories embodied in surviving family members, who then become sources of narrative memory by the act of testimony to the author. Reading like a family monument, this note eulogises the departed in a chivalric tone and in a cross-generational and extended family network, dispersing the trauma memory of the war across familial lines while allowing the author, through the vantage point of the present, to assemble those memories and accord them a monumental space within the confines of literary history. When the author was born, seven years after the end of the war, she is born with the scars, visible within

87 her own familial line in the form of memories and persons who have been scarred psychologically and physically by the war. Nsukka, the place of her childhood, is abound with the markers of these memories and in Half of a Yellow Sun, it forms the terrain where individual and collective memories are triggered and narrated. The title Half of a Yellow Sun is a textual translation of the symbol of the Biafran flag which had the image of a half of a yellow sun engraved on it. The symbolic capital of the title is found in its explicit invocation of historical markers of an extinguished Biafran nation(-state). As a text that invokes symbols of that nation, it also represents material cultures of textuality that characterise postcolonial migrant writing. These material cultures are textualised through words or texts that invoke specific material things that then become synecdochic of larger cultures, or experiences. Indeed, the half of a yellow sun engraved in the flag was metonymic of Biafran nationhood. The symbolic capital of the text and phrase half of a yellow sun is found at the convergence of individual and collective memories preserved in a textual form as metaphoric of the hopes of a community – a nation – that were nipped in the bud, but which continues to haunt the psyche of the contemporary Nigerian state. The novel Half of a Yellow Sun is therefore, from the outset, an excursion into the controversies of national history through memory, with avast background of narrative forms that the author is conscious about. As a caveat, to call it a historical novel is to put a limit on the multiple meanings that we can derive from its engagement with history through narrative forms of memory. While, as Dominic
LaCapra (1987) argues, the historical novel has stirred a methodological debate about disciplinary processes in history and literature, Richard Terdiman (1993) extends the argument further by underscoring the centrality of memory in the crisis of remembering, and the importance of the novel in unpacking the post-enlightenment crisis of history and archive. The idea of memory that narrative forms such as the novel engage in would therefore seem to problematise perceptions of history. Half of a Yellow Sun therefore transcends the generic classification of a historical novel as it can be read through the vast archive of not only the Biafran war, but also orthodox history of the Nigerian nation- state.

88 It is instructive, as we try to unpack the multifaceted idea of memory in Adichie‟s works to always put in mind autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is influential in organising narrative memory, as a cue and repository of an archive of childhood.
Adichie‟s return again to Nsukka as the geographical setting of Half of a Yellow Sun underlies the relevance of an autobiographical consciousness. This means that one has to be careful of authorial subjectivities informing this highly controversial topic of the
Biafran war. Hence, one is conscious of the multilayered process of remembrance and of engagement with the project of memory in Half of a Yellow Sun. The ways in which
Adichie‟s childhood affects her concept of memory as well as the impulses of a diasporic consciousness that always underscore the return to the narrative of childhood cannot be belabored further. Once again, it is important to emphasise an important continuity in the project of memory between Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun: the consciousness of childhood is also foregrounded and the theme of Biafra is constructed from the memory of everyday life of childhood.

Download 1.93 Mb.

Share with your friends: