Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

102 his mental schema, freezes time, becoming itself an indictment of Ugwu‟s actions, as with the memory of the rape incident tormenting his attempts at finding clarity of mind. These memories become therefore spatio-temporal metaphors of an individual and collective conscience and the need to actually deal with the guilt becomes increasingly intense until Ugwu engages with his mind through the process of writing “But he tried,
and the more he wrote, the less he dreamed” (398). The act of writing becomes important as the process of Ugwu‟s unburdening, healing, expiation and dealing with inassimilable forms of history and memory. Ugwu‟s authorial activities become part of a supplementary archive of the war, with his experience and body as a repository. The act of writing becomes therefore in the words of Shoshana Felman (1995:14) an act of bearing witness on the part of Ugwu. Writing allows him a voice in the traumatic history. In dealing with trauma history, Caruth posits that we are dealing with a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood
(1995:153). Therefore the content of Ugwu‟s writing is reflective of the complexity of the time and space of traumatic experience, in which traumatic memory collides with the present and its daily experience He sat under aflame tree and wrote in small, careful letters on the sides of old newspapers […] he wrote a poem about people getting a buttocks rash after defecating in imported buckets […] he wrote about a young man with a perfect backside […] Finally, he started to write about Aunty Arize‟s anonymous death in Kano
[…] He wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed after it and the lizard leapt off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree. (397-398)
Ugwu gains the status, within the narrative schema of the novel, of an authorial voice, as a source of traumatic memory and history as well as custodian of the same history. The

103 composite memory he carries is the result of his evolution, from houseboy to intellectual, to a Biafran soldier and eventually to an embodied archive of memory – he becomes an authorial voice. He carries the memory of Nsukka by virtue of his houseboy duties, having been part of a trajectory of war-induced collapse of the middle class. When the war ends and they return to Nsukka, nostalgia sets in and the sight of the abandoned house and buildings becomes a residual text of memory (418-419). The return to Nsukka, as Olanna laments is slower, yet the leaving was hurried (432). The process of return is aided by memory, as the protagonists try to recapture the past. The house, now dilapidated with Milky cobwebs hung in the living room, with dust motes, spiders and brown walls (418) stands as a relic, a monument of memory, in which anew sense of habitability has to be created. Much like the different kind of silence that liberates Kambili in Purple Hibiscus after her fathers death, there is anew silence at
Nsukka in Half of a Yellow Sun that is informed by the memories of the past and the scars of the present. Nsukka is now a monument – it is scarred by war, with fragmented memories of a past cracked by the war. And so as the snail-like pace of the return to life picks up, the federal military government embarks on a project of wiping up what is left of the memory of Biafra by searching for what one soldier says materials that will threaten the unity of Nigeria (424). While the memory of Biafra is embodied in the protagonists and their experience, relics like Biafran Pounds and flags are part of the material culture of memory – the residual aspects of memory that the protagonists hold onto She lay on the living room floor and prayed that they would not find her Biafran pounds. After they left, she took the folded notes out from the envelop hidden in her shoe and went out and lit a match under the lemon tree. Odenigbo watched her. He disapproved, she knew, because he kept his flag folded inside the pocket of a pair of trousers. You are burning memory he told her. I am not She would not place her memory on things that strangers could barge in and takeaway. My memory is inside me (432)

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Olanna‟s idea of memory is therefore embodied, stored away in the body and its experience and her emotions become part of the process of dealing with her missing sister
Kainene, who has not returned from “afia attack. For Ugwu, his experience as a Biafran soldier means the scars on his body are central to the idea of an embodied memory, but his trauma and sense of guilt at the rape is expiated and healed through writing. When Richard tells him that the war is not his (Richards) story to tell, Ugwu takes the mantle of the book-within-the-book, titled The world was Silent When We Died.”
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Thus his authorial journey comes to an end at the end of Half of a Yellow Sun: “Ugwu writes his dedication last For Master, my good man” (433. Emphasis retained. Indeed, one senses that Ugwu‟s dedication is a culmination of an accumulated process of memory and the manifestation of his authorial persona.
Ugwu‟s book project, drawn from the sketches of Richards story, from Ugwu‟s experience in the war, from his sense of guilt and want of expiation and most significantly from individual and collective trauma, is part of a process of creating a composite memory of the Biafran war. The disparateness of traumatic experiences and the fragmented nature of the experience of war can only be portrayed through various processes of archiving that involve personae of different ages, classes, gender and even races. Ugwu stands therefore as an evolution of traumatic memory, individual and collective memory and therefore of cultural memory. His childhood status provides an initially nave sense to start of anew cultural experience as he encounters modernity, yet his account proffers an alternatively significant archive of war, competing with a normatively adultist, class-conscious sense of history as depicted by the intellectual class at Nsukka. Indeed, the intellectual class anxiety in Half of a Yellow Sun is seemingly synonymous to those of this new nation-state, as portrayed in the regular debates on the constitution of the new nation-state. However, Ugwu‟s construction as a growing project of epistemological consciousness in the novel provides an internal critique to a bourgeoisie and intellectual class consciousness. That Ugwu eventually becomes a worthy chronicler of this turbulent history is a significant vision of the novel. This title takes on a collective voice of indictment, a strategy on the part of Adichie, to rope in a collective refrain and a sense of critical memory of the Biafran war in global politics.

105 The history of Biafra, as explored in Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun, is part of a process of individual, collective and cultural memory that continually problematises the illusion of organic unity that the nation-state of Nigeria proclaims at this point in time. Half of a

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