Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

134 Cooper underscores the importance of that strategy in defining contemporary postcolonial migrant writing. This material culture is underscored by the concept of migration, in which boundaries of space and place are broken by the textual transposition of a range of artifacts like traditional paintings, Nigerian recipes and the untranslated Igbo phrases found in the language. Like Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun moves back and forth in its temporal structure. By covering the period just after Nigeria‟s independence, the narrative shifts to the time of the Biafran war and back to the ordinary lives of a middle class house at University of Nigeria Nsukka. There is not only a shift in places and spaces but also in narrative points of view. The speaking voices in Half of a Yellow Sun are multiple and as they speak, they are involved in a meta-fictive textual strategy, through a book being written within Half of a Yellow Sun. The intersubjectivity found in the narrative and textual voices of those writing the book within this novel is highly complex and charged within the very controversial topic of the Biafran war. There is a disjuncture and conjuncture of storyscapes in Half of a Yellow Sun. Being a highly subjective and charged topic, representation takes on a complex and ambivalent subjectivity. Speaking subjects come with variant socio-ideological positions of class, age and generation. The authorial voice also comes with a language to represent the characters, with its own subjectivity (Bakhtin, To represent a highly fraught period of history like Biafra in the st century means collecting narratives and temporalities that are always in competition with each other not only because of the blurred lines of truth and fiction about the war, but also because they represent distinct discourses owing to agencies, positions and intentions of the different subjects that abound in them.
Half of a Yellow Sun, as a storyscape is therefore constructed from the concurring and competing temporalities of the Nigerian nation-state space/scape and the Igbo Refer to The Speaking Person in the Novel p. 331-366 – Bakhtin points out that the authors voice, one among the many in the novel, remains an organising principle for the other voices, as a kind of centripetal force.

135 nation/scape.
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Other concrete cartographical factors, like what Stephanie Newell
(2006:53-54) describes as the “Islamic-scape” complicate the orthodox cartographies and scapes that area legacy of colonialism (“colonial-scape”).
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Fraught with such a complex and already highly charged textual landscape, this raises the following questions How does Half of a Yellow Sun negotiate the tension in meanings, speaking voices, subjectivities, temporalities, spaces, places and scapes? How and why does it confront this highly charged atmosphere with its own multi-authorial subjectivities? What textual strategies does Adichie adopt within the genre of the novel that deal with the controversial nature of the history of the Biafran war In these novels, the two child protagonists Kambili and Ugwu, are used as bodies that navigate the textual topography. They are like the subjects and objects (figures, memories, images) of the narratives and producers of meaning who populate space and place with meaning. They are at the centre of the shifts in space, place and time in their various socio-cultural and political contexts. How they navigate these sites within the textual/imaginary topography speaks of the textual strategies employed by Adichie in this discourses) of childhood.

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