Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

98 boundaries of the newly declared Biafran nation-state. Alongside this gradual progression is the movement of bodies, people and families towards an uncomfortably marginalised and narrow territorial allegiance as the dreams of a nascent nation are geographically diminished. Meanwhile, Ugwu and his employers domestic situation degenerates from the comforts of a middle class intellectual life in Nsukka and Abba to the radical discomfort of a one roomed mud house in Umuahia. While there has been a semblance of the life in Nsukka in terms of the regular meetings of the remaining academics forcibly moved when the towns collapse, the daily life has drastically changed from the abstracts of nation-state and identity theory to the realities of material discomfort. What has remained for Ugwu and his employers is the memory of the life in Nsukka. There is however an increasing solidifying of the collective and cultural memory of the people here. The erstwhile differentiation in accents, even some beliefs and cultural practices, portrayed for instance in Odenigbo‟s mothers discrimination of Olanna as an Igbo from
Ummunachi (97), have vanished, and the collective trauma has created a sense of collective cultural memory. A collective chivalry is depicted in the war songs,
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mediated by the propaganda machines like the Radio Biafra – a public sphere for the airing of wishes, hopes and dreams for the new nation. The section late sixties is therefore pervaded by nationalist rhetoric and military discourse. In this light, the sections chapters follow an ephemeral and staccato nature devoid of the detail of the early sixties in which long everyday dialogue was central to the content. At the climax of the war there is a blurring of battle lines, as the Home Front becomes a War Front with frequent air raids, depicted in the disruption of Odenigbo and
Olanna‟s wedding (202-203). When the war begins to affect the provision of basic needs like food, the realities of war and those of daily life collapse into each other, as the win the war effort gains a collective and concerted effort. It is here that such rhetoric as “afia attack as Mrs Muokelu calls it (293), brings to prominence a gendered dimension of the war. “Afia attack involves, as Muokelu says, women who trade behind enemy lines for basic food provisions to sustain civilian and military life in the Biafran sector. Critics See pages 198, 275, 277, 337. These songs work as part of a communal spirit, as part of a platform also of (reenacting a collective sense of trauma, victimhood and therefore a collective heroism at the hopes of a triumph against the federal forces, referred to now as vandals

99 like Ezeigbo (2005), among others, have used this phenomenon to foreground the role played by women in the Biafran war. Female authors like Flora Nwapa and Buchi
Emecheta have also depicted the role of women in “afia attack providing a critique of not only the important role women played in this war but also of the masculine perceptions of heroism that have been presented as historically synonymous with the battle or war front Hence it is through Adichie‟s dispersal of subjectivities, through her involvement of female, male and multiple voices in the novel, that the idea of masculine heroism attributed to the war is critiqued. The way the war front is brought into the everyday lives of these people as they move from the comforts of a middle class and intellectual environment to the penurious livelihood of the Igbo heartland reflects shifting perceptions of war fronts and home fronts, as well as the division of labour through gender and age. These gradual perceptions and conditions of war are what Cooper et al.,
(1989) point out as the changing dimensions of war and its discourse. The dimension of
Ugwu is particularly interesting, as he eventually gets scripted into the war and thus becomes a strategy for Adichie to represent the trope of the child of war. This is a strategy for diversification of subjectivities as well as topical currency in socioeconomic and political discourse in the states of war in postcolonial Africa.
Ugwu‟s epistemological journey, reaches advanced stages when the war comes for he is, by virtue of his now literate status, an informed participant in the discourse of nation- making. He has developed mental maturity to partake in the abstractions of the academic sodality at Nsukka. After a brief stint as a teacher, alongside his mistress Olanna, in their
“win-the-war”efforts, Ugwu embarks on a final, near fateful journey, when he is forcefully conscripted (357), thus becoming a Biafran soldier in his late teenage years. In the conscription van, “Ugwu was startled to see a boy sitting there, humming a song and drinking from an old beer bottle […] perhaps he was a stunted man and not a boy (357).
Hi-Tech, the boy soldier, in this case is already battle-hardened, with a dry cynicism in his eyes that made him seem much older (358). Hi-Tech turns out to be a boy soldier who pretends to bean orphan for the purpose of infiltrating enemy camps they call me

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High-Tech because my first commander said I am better than any high-technology spying gadget (358). High-Tech and Ugwu become acquaintances, as Ugwu is exposed to the army‟s bare food and military resources. Ugwu‟s authorial self, begins to emerge as he experiences the war – he feels the urge to write down what he did from day today. The need to preserve the memory of his traumatic experiences through the act of writing gives him anew self-reflexive position and authenticity within the narrative. The complexity of the stream of his consciousness can be gleaned from his much evolved thought process (361). Slowly, he builds his reputation as target destroyer by virtue of his skill at detonating the Ogbunigwe and causing as many casualties as possible in the federal governments army (362-364). It is sometimes clichéd, the way that at the intense moments when tension is high in the battlefield, Ugwu‟s memories drift to imaginations of virility “Ugwu thought of Eberechi‟s fingers pulling the skin of his neck, the wetness of her tongue in his mouth (362). In these sensibilities, we glean the discourse of reproduction and destruction, in which virilities are intertwined with the bloodshed and violence of war. The militarised masculinities are presented in a graphic scene in which
Ugwu and his fellow soldiers gang rape a girl in a bar. The rape incident shatters the identification of the reader with Ugwu, presenting him as a cog in the wheel of an already structured patriarchal war sexual economy and tainting his erstwhile authentic dimension as an evolving authoritative and moral voice within the novel. The vulgarised and militarised speech patterns, during this incident are also particularly striking, especially when Hi-Tech is ordered to Discharge and retire before he groaned and collapsed on top of her (365). The speech patterns of war are fairly similar to Achebe‟s character Gladys who in using war metaphors to allude to sex in the short story Girls at War asks
Nwankwo, “ You want to shell she asked. And without waiting for an answer said, Go ahead but don‟t pour in troops ” (113). A few operations later, Ugwu meets his fate. He gets all but mortally wounded, albeit goes into a coma, as the war slowly ends. When he finally emerges out of hospital, he is an embodiment of memory and trauma, and his status within his immediate society is elevated because he is now a war hero. The scars of his body become markers of memory and residual archives of pain and trauma. The process of healing involves a constant

101 engagement with memory of the war. On his part, expiation and healing come through his act of writing. Having evolved as a composite embodiment of memory – autobiographical, as well as part of the cultural memory of the Biafran nation, Ugwu embodies the convergence of collective and individual trauma and memory individual on the part of an autobiographical consciousness of genealogical antecedents and collective on the part of a Biafran nation whose emergence has been choked by the federal military government. Hence Ugwu suffers trauma through the recurrent dreams. The sounds of shelling, the fallen Biafran soldiers, the crying of the wounded in battle, become constant images in his dreams, assaulting his mental schema and defying his attempts at dealing with them His mind wondered often. He did not need the echo of pain on his side and in his buttocks and on his back to remember his

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