Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| 2.7 Conclusion The idea of memory in contemporary Nigerian fiction is therefore significant in trying to engage with the concept of history and time in childhood. Kambili, Ugwu and Elvis are 120 variations of childhood figures that allow us to engage with narrative memory in its autobiographical consciousness and diasporic inflections, through the notion of composite memory. The compositeness of this memory is found in the individual, collective and cultural practices through their imaginatively nostalgic, popular and traumatic dimensions. The idea of a history and time of represented childhood is therefore constructed through a matrix of memories. The everyday world of childhood domesticates, refigures and restructures the macro-memories of nations, ethnicities and families. Childhood engages therefore in the micro-politics of history and time, to provide an alternative processing of these aspects, as well as the archive of history and time. That these childhoods are set at a time of military governance is an implicit dimension that has been domesticated through the worldview of the child protagonists, images and memories. Indeed, to speak of Nigeria in the s, sands is to imagine narratives that delve into the macro-politics of military governance, something that has determined the literary historiography of those times. Perhaps contemporary Nigerian fiction seeks to engage a post-military dimension of this time A logical conclusion that can be drawn from these literary excursions into memory is a return to what Njabulo Ndebele (1991) calls the rediscovery of the ordinary through a narrative exploration and critique of the everyday life of individual and collective amnesias, nostalgias and traumas. Indeed, Ndebele‟s own predilection to a childhood consciousness in his seminal short story Fools underlines childhoods embodiment of everyday, mundane existence. |