Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Download 1.93 Mb. View original pdf
|
| Yellow Sun, we examine them alongside paratexts at the threshold of the novels. These protagonists are therefore not located in an intrinsic hermetic textual world but in a matrix of meanings brought in by the dialogic process between adult and childhood authorial selves. Adichie‟s essays are examples of paratexts which occupy the margins of her long fiction and which dialogise and concretise meanings to be generated. 82 In The Writing Life for instance, Adichie gives us a spatio-temporal autobiography of her formative stages of authorial consciousness. In these are sources and influences of her narratives and in them we come to visualise the symbols she draws of place and space from the viewpoint of a childhood self In 1982, my father was appointed deputy vice chancellor of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka and assigned anew two-story house, number 305 on Marguerite Cartwright Avenue graveled, landscaped, bright with red hibiscuses and green whistling pines. At the age of five, Nsukka holds the fond memories we see here, where a conscious authorial self is hatched – at her fathers desk where I wrote my first book at 10 […] in an exercise notebook, titled The Hopscoths.‟” When Adichie transposes the same memories twenty years later in the essay Heart is Where Home Was we notice memories of an adult authorial self We moved from a bungalow to a duplex on Marguerite Cartwright Avenue when my father was made Deputy Vice Chancellor. Our We can refer hereto particular essays like The writing Life Diary Real Food and Heart is Where Home was in which the writing process for Adichie involves not only occupying spaces of memory, but actually going back to the spaces and places she lived as a child. In the essay Real Food for instance, we seethe attention to Nigerian Cuisine that informs many scenes in Purple Hibiscus – like the resistance to food that Kambili enacts to reflect her silenced voice in the household. 132 neighbors were colorful, literally. Sic There was the childless Ghanaian woman married to the German professor opposite us […] Up our street was the Irishwoman married to the Nigerian and their brood of eight. The Writing Life and Heart is Where Home Was hold an interesting trajectory that reflects authorial persona respectively between Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The memories of Nsukka take different authorial selves in the two essays with The Writing Life paratextually informing a nostalgic childhood perspective of Purple Hibiscus while Heart is Where Home Was projecting an adultist memory of childhood in Half of a Yellow Sun. Nsukka acquires a significant meaning, as a toponym that represents a particular place and space within the novel. As Miller (1995:6) therefore says, such a topographical setting connects literary works to a specific historical and geographical time Miller examines time as both historical and geographic, pointing the interesting way in which topography functions in a textual terrain. Following Tindall (1991), Miller (1995) seeks to ask whether places and spaces have a function beyond that of mere setting or metaphorical adornment. Tindall goes onto point to the subterranean psychological journeys meant to be achieved through place-attachment and topographical markers in the novel. Since contemporary Nigerian fiction is informed by the diasporic context, it is clear that topography plays more than its orthodox role of establishing a setting. The topoi within topography – the houses, streets, roads, gardens, towns, cities and markets are specifically selected for the achievement of an organic topography of belonging. Nsukka stands out directly because it is a metaphor of childhood. Authorial psychological journeys are mapped across the topography of Nsukka as well as the figures, images and memories of childhood. The storyscape is the terrain from which is enacted a series of journeys across time and space, reshaping, (remoulding and (re)inscribing the physical topographies of the places where the protagonists are growing up. Adichie constructs time and space by moving her narrative across, back and forth in both Purple Hibiscus 133 and Half of a Yellow sun. She demonstrates how chronotopicity is characterised by intersections of the axes of time and space. At the same time, she makes use of the storyscape as a terrain where there can be multiple competing narratives as this chapter will demonstrate, particularly with Half of a Yellow Sun. In Purple Hibiscus, Adichie marks the events of the novel around the Roman Catholic Advent calendar of the Palm Sunday by using temporal markers such as before and after Palm Sunday. The narrative, told from the point of view of a teenage girl shifts back and forth and moves towards foregrounding the main event – the disintegration of the narrators family as an ironical process of her growth. Adichie constructs competing temporalities, by using the Roman Catholic calendar which assumes a superficial yet facile ordering of the narrators life and a secular one, which is defined by political upheaval which disrupts and redefines the ritualistic and calendrical one of the Roman Catholic Church. There is therefore not only competing temporalities, but also a dialogic ground from which these temporalities engage in, through not only juxtaposing religiosity and secularity but also involving them in a structurally dialectical narrative process. The protagonist in Purple Hibiscus is seventeen years old, as the final section of the novel titled The Present reveals. What we have in the earlier sections is a trajectory of memories, of the two years preceding the present Purple Hibiscus‟ concept of temporality is a mixture of memories, played out against aback and forth movement of the past, culminating in the present of the teenage protagonist Kambili. The temporalities in Purple Hibiscus are entwined with spaces and places. Kambili, the speaking subject in the story, offers a detailed description of the architecture, interior designs of houses, furniture, recipes for cuisines, landscape designs and species of flowers among other topoi inside and outside of houses. Most of the time, Kambili describes these in a somber tone, constructing a gothic topography (Mabura, 2008). Mabura argues that the haunted setting in Purple Hibiscus has a symbolic precedent in Adichie‟s second novel Half of a Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|