Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| 1.0 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION CONSTRUCTING CHILDHOOD AS A SET OF IDEAS 1.1 Childhood, the Contemporary and the Diasporic Fiction coming out of Nigeria during the st century seems to be marked by attempts to deal with identity and (displacement through the idea of childhood. These attempts are underpinned by the fact that Nigeria has transformed itself from a period of military governance that shaped life in the late nineteen-sixties up to the late nineteen-nineties. From this turbulent and oppressive political history, different narratives have been constructed. These narratives can be traced through the works of writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Zaynab Alkali among others. 1 Out of the turbulent history, these writers constructed narratives which represented lived experiences. It is important to note that as these narratives were constructed, that of the nation was dominant. As the dominance of narratives of the nation in literature continued to spread, other complex issues related to global currents began to emerge, accelerated by the migration of Nigerians as a result of the turmoil caused by military governance, as well as the oil-related economic gains of the s. Indeed, as cultures made contact and bodies moved across national and continental borders, new concerns began to emerge, related to identity in view of an emerging postcolonial Nigerian diaspora in Europe and America. The term identity is used in this study largely to refer to the way that selves are represented in light of the individual and collective, which, in this study is influenced by the perspective and framework of childhood and by the context and consciousness of diaspora. Diaspora is a word with Greek origins referring to dispersion (Kilson, L.M & Rotberg, RI. 1976: 1-2). It is used in this study to refer to the product – people and cultural products – of the process of dispersal. The works of these writers featured after Nigeria‟s independence and have since been included in literary studies allover the world, making them canonical to Nigerian literature. 2 Concerns with identity began to shift away from their focus on the nation to those of the individual. 2 Yet, individuals invariably felt that their identity was informed by their sense of nationhood. Moreover, migration, as a consequence of social, cultural, political and economic gains and challenges brought about diasporic Nigerians, in Europe and America. These diasporic Nigerians works grapples with the increasing senses of identities that transcend geographical boundaries. These writers use the symbolic figures, images and memories of childhood to reflect on their experiences, which are informed by how they choose to identify with Nigeria after migration. They use the experiences of migrant childhoods to grapple with diasporic consciousness. In other words, childhood is used as a trope to grapple with diasporic condition and space and to construct what this study refers to as contemporary forms of identities in the twenty first century. The notion of childhood in this study is a set of ideas that refer to images, memories, figures, as well as to social identifications of sonhood, daughterhood, boyhood and girlhood. The phrase set of ideas used here echoes Hugh Cunnigham‟s (1995:1) method of studying childhood as a shifting set of ideas However while Cunningham‟s study focuses more on childhood as a history of ideas, this study intends to specifically construct a theoretical paradigm, that argues for childhood as category of critical analysis more than just a historical vehicle for socio-cultural and political debate. The term contemporary is used not only as a temporal but also a conceptual marker in relation to the place/country, viz Nigeria and the imaginative expressions related to it. In fact, when we speak of contemporary Nigerian fiction, we refer to fiction whose authorship has or identifies with Nigerian citizenship, whose spatio-temporal setting is Nigeria or whose thematic concerns relate to Nigeria. Hence, the noun Nigeria specifies the geographic location for mapping out a particular literary topography. Moreover, even though it can be seen otherwise, we can borrow Van der The appeal to collective identities began to wane with the period of disillusionment moving the focus to the daily struggles of the individual. Even though other markers of collective identities like gender, ethnicity and class remained significant, their importance reflected on the subject of individuality Indeed, as Anthony Appiah (2005) discusses, one can begin to seethe private and the unscripted part of individual identity found in aspects such as wit, intelligence and greed becoming central to the concern for identity and informing the other scripted and collective part of identity namely class, gender, race and ethnicity. 3 Merwe and Viljoen‟s (2004:3) assertion that one obvious way of giving meaning to space is through the idea of a national identity The ascribing of national identity to space is however complicated by the term contemporary a temporal marker that implies a shift in space and place, hence delimiting and despatialising Nigeria as an overdetermining marker of national identity. Moreover, the term contemporary as a signifier of time, endows that place called Nigeria with shifting meanings, including the subjects and objects occupying it, as well as representations of them. In fact, to represent a place called Nigeria is also to (re)imagine it. Moreover, Nigeria as a place with a historically-imbued meaning is reflected in the contemporary imagination that represents. The eco-critic Lawrence Buell (2005:72) ascribes to these spatial representations the notion of “place-attachment as phenomenology In other words, childhood, for this study, portrays Nigeria as the memory place (Buell, 2005:75) in view of an adult diasporic self writing from outside their geographical upbringing, descent, genealogy or birth. Memory place, as understood by what Viljoen and Van der Merwe (2004:7) also call memories of place is figurative. Therefore the represented memories of a particular place shift from being representations to become recreations in their narrative status. Viljoen and Van der Merwe‟s ideas are highlighted herein anticipation of this study‟s examination of childhood as a chronotope 3 - a site in which there are competing narratives of space, place and time. These narratives need to be expressed within the contemporary Nigerian writers engagement with their migrant and diasporic senses of identity. The study, therefore, frames itself as an examination of contemporary Nigerian fiction with the term contemporary signifying not only fiction coming out at the present, but also what this fiction represents in a categorical process (not just in terms of publication time, in the context of the larger corpus of an existing African literary tradition of imagination and criticism. However, this study is not a pointed attempt at defining this writing as anew tradition or generation. While the issue of grappling with traditions and generations This term is used by Bakhtin (1981) to refer to the semantic structure of the novel which is organised around the intersection of the axes of space and time. 4 is something of importance, the choice of texts was not guided solely by that factor. Apart from the idea of temporal coevality and the shared diasporic space, each of the writers selected raise a range of issues that as we will soon see, are critical to the study of childhood. Childhood is therefore examined as a set of ideas that deal with contemporary forms of identity that arise from an embodied diasporic experience, as well as the anxieties and multiple/plural consciousnesses of diasporic experiences. The narratives that have come out from Nigeria in the st century are largely represented through the genre of the novel. There is a proliferation of writing from the Anglo-American Nigerian diaspora. Other than the benefits of access to networks and institutions of publishing by these writers, the issues they are grappling with are informed by their condition of living in the diaspora, their experiences as children growing up after Nigeria‟s independence and therefore as witnesses to the period of military dictatorship, oil boom and bust. They are indeed, to borrow the words of Waberi children of the postcolony” (1998:8). Waneri‟s phrase places the notion of childhood in the context of a postcolonial dispensation – as a product of the conditions of postcoloniality. Let us begin with a quick overview of these works. In 2001, Ike Oguine‟s A squatters Tale was published. It portrays the notion of the American Dream and the theme of brain drain Preceding this was Okey Ndibe‟s Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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