Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

108 Popular cultural memory in Graceland influences the life of the protagonist, whose sense of identity is tenaciously connected with his impersonation of Elvis Presley, and with his vision fora better life, in the Graceland of his dreams – America. This is a dream he manages to achieve at the end of the text. Popular cultural memory is therefore presented as pervading the day-to-day hopes, dreams, activities and visions of the protagonist in the text. Another level of analysis can be found in the idea that popular cultural memory presents an alternative plane of existence and experiencing of time in Graceland. As the trajectory of memory in Graceland migrates, back and forth, from country to city, the concerns of daily life, experienced through popular cultural aspects like music and fashion, takes us away from the encumbering presence of the military regime of this time. Hence temporal disjunctures are created out of the consumption of popular cultural forms, as the protagonists imaginations fly in the face of political and economic dystopia. Hence while the text is temporally set in the s to s, the overdetermining condition of military governance, which was at its peak at this time, does not seem to deter the cultural rhythm of this city. Economic survival, immediate day-to-day concerns of survival foreground De Certeauan tactics ways of using and processes of eking out a living. Hence, the rhythm of Lagos follows a dizzying pattern of survivalist movements and rat races through a landscape of desires, with the organising consciousness being that of the teenager Elvis Oke. In light of the substrates of memory and everyday life outlined above, and in relation to the organising consciousness of childhood, Graceland‟s textures of memory carry a sensory dimension of smellscapes and soundscapes, as part of a daily organisation of a myriad of socio-cultural orders that pervade the home and the city. We are therefore drawn, through a redistribution of the sensible (Jacques Ranciere, 2004) to the nasal and auditory experiences that allow fora (remapping of the cityscape. Maroko, the slum where Graceland is set, is a tenement city, visualised through a scatological imagery of its material conditions, as well as a medley of nasal and auditory sensibilities that define the landscape of daily experience. Thus, when Elvis wakes up at the beginning of the

109 novel, a concoction of auditory sensations, a soundscape, what Edensor calls a space of tactile sensation (2002:60) opens up a room for auditory consumption. This is portrayed by Bob Marley‟s Natural Mystic the Highlife music of Celestine Ukwu, the bickering of two women in the street and the sounds of molue conductors competing for customers (4). This auditory map redefines the cartography of the cityscape, through the perspective of Maroko, allowing for the beginning of a micro-experience of the cityscape
– by the dominated, as De Certeau (1984) calls them – the consumers. Indeed, such a concoction of popular cultural music speaks to a pastiche of experiences defining dominated corners of experience. The hybridity of soundscapes also mirrors the popular cultural memory of this time. As the ontology of the cityscape, the cacophony of auditory experiences defines and borrows from what Highmore (2005) calls the “rhythmicity” of the city. In fact, the rapid and chaotic movement of people and vehicles defies the logic of the organised architectural plan of the ideal city. The material culture of consumption is visible in the half slum, half paradise image of Lagos as Elvis describes it, with skyscrapers, flyovers, well landscaped yards alongside the seething cauldron of filth and dirt of the slum Maroko. Elvis‟s perception of this city is binarised: having arrived at the age of fourteen, he was marked out because of his
“small-town thinking and accent and the Americanisms he knew were old and outdated (8). The consumption of Americanisms becomes definitive of cultural survival in this city. One of the symbolic markers of this kind of chaotic hybridity, consumption and popular cultural acculturation is the “Molue” buses that transport passengers around the city. They are the apotheosis of not only acculturation, but also of a De Certeauan way of using on the part of the dominated. This is the kind of consumption that is the product of the creativity that comes out of the desires of the dominated – a secondary production hidden in the processes of utilization (xiii) as De
Certeau would call it. While this kind of consumption reflects an overarching order of capitalism, it creates a certain play in that order, a space for manoeuvers of unequal forces and for utopian points of reference (1984:18). The molue buses are literally vehicles of acculturation. They are described thus

110 The cab of the bus was imported from Britain, one of the
Bedford series. The chassis of the body came from surplus Japanese army trucks trashed after the Second World War. The body of the coach was built from scraps of broken cars and discarded roofing sheets – anything that could be beaten into shape or otherwise fashioned. The finished product, with two black stripes running down a canary body, looked like a roughly hammered yellow sardine tin. (8-9) As navigators of the city landscape, these vehicles portray a materialist culture of consumption and an aestheticization of popular cultural consumption. When Graceland starts, they are the first impression the reader gets of the city of Lagos. As carriers of culture, they are also transformed into mobile churches and marketplaces, where preachers and hawkers ply their trade. These buses portray the fast-paced cultural life of the city, cutting through the monstrous highways across the city, via the slums and into the upmarket suburbs. Elvis, the teenage protagonist traverses the city, to tourist beaches to try and, through the impersonation of Elvis Presley, eke out a living. Inspiring his performance is the memory of his mother, who took to Elvis Presley as her hero. The popular memory of Elvis Presley is passed down to the protagonist who takes it as a performance of memory at two levels firstly, as the popular cultural memory of that time, when the pop icon was a global brand. Sewlall (2010) examines Elvis Presley as part of global cultural semiotics. He postmodernist tools of analysis to examine the pervasion of the Elvis Presley imaginary across the globe, and concludes that it is a system of signs defined and redefined, localised and globalised in all manners, genres and forms of expression. This popular memory‟s semiotic importance in Graceland can be seen as helping to define temporal maps in the sands as well as in the depiction of landscapes of desires and flights of imagination redolent of the slumscape in the postcolonial city. Secondly, as a performance of memory, the impersonation of Elvis Presley allows the protagonist an alternative identity, through the memory of his mother. The dance act (12), involved in

111 the impersonation ritual is a symbolic gesture of freedom, invoking the liberating memories of his late mother, while unshackling him from the claustrophobic clutch of a highly masculine cityscape that has rendered him economically baseless, having been uprooted from a middle class countryside childhood. As the structure of the book is organised around the spatio-temporal maps of countryside and city, and the periods of time in the sands respectively, Abani connects these through a structuring device of memory – part of the larger framework of material cultures of memory in
Graceland.

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