Yellow Sun, while pooling into an already vast existing archive, excavates conversations that unsettle normative historical accounts of Nigerian history. It problematises the temporal map of the Nigerian nation-state. The cultural memory of Biafra is explored through the processes of composite memories that range from the autobiographical, individual and collective to a reflection of genealogical heritages of memory that are arguably part of a diasporic consciousness on the part of the author. The narrative voice of Ugwu allows Adichie to explore the story of war from the composite perspectives of a home front and war front as well as continue the project of domesticating war memories within the consciousness of daily life. Like Purple Hibiscus, marginal protagonists are important in exploring how everyday memories are important alternatives to normative histories. They are alternative archives that the world of childhood provides, as options for Adichie. The text of childhood is therefore an “architext of memory as Ender (2005) posits, as well as a source of alternative memory and history, as Hamilton et al (2002) espouse. As a shifting set of ideas (Cunnigham 1995), the text of childhood works through a Bakhtinian (1981) literary chronotope of time and space. For Adichie‟s fiction therefore, the memory-place of Nsukka is a pivotal toponym whose topoiof houses, compounds, flowers, furniture among other material cultures are triggers of childhood memory and objects with intrinsic memories of growth and trauma that represent individual, collective and cultural aspects of memory within the context of postcolonial Nigeria. These material cultures are aspects of memory that influence diasporic senses of identity from an authorial perspective. They are material cultures of memory that allow us to read Adichie‟s works as “literatures of memory with the organising consciousness of childhood worlds, figures and images. It is in this light of material cultures of memory in literature that we shift our focus to the urban novel of Chris Abani, Graceland. The idea of memory here deals with popular culture, with the process of migration, pitting the metaphoric continuum of the city against the countryside. The notion of memory-place is still instructive in defining the idea of popular cultural memory in the cityscape.
