Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

139 intermediary space of Nsukka, where all the competing narratives, spaces and places find grounds for interaction. Moreover, Ashcroft (2001) talks of the postcolonial subjects ability to interpolate discourse and regain cultural capital from the dominance of colonial or western machinations. He says that postcolonial subjects are not passive ciphers of discursive practices For Ashcroft, these subjects are engaged in an ordinary “dialogic engagement with the world which as a strategy involves the capacity to interpose, to intervene, to interject a wide range of counter-discursive tactics into the dominant discourse without asserting […] a separate oppositional purity (2001: 47). Similarly, in
Purple Hibiscus, childhood occupies the transcendental space of engagement (with our spirits) that interrupts the dominant discourse of fatherhood and of adulthood, which is illustrated in the description below I pushed my textbook aside, looked up, and stared at my daily schedule, pasted on the wall above me. Kambili was written in bold letters on top of the white sheet of paper […] I wondered when Papa would draw up a schedule for the baby, my new brother, if he would do it right after the baby was born or wait until he was a toddler (PH, 23. Emphasis retained)
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In a sense, the foregrounding of the place Nsukka is also investing it with notions of resistance and transformation that come with apperception of it as a habitation Ashcroft, 2001). However, Nsukka gains its significance as a liberating place/space/habitation by virtue of the other place, Enugu, the narrators home where a haunted and gothic topography is found. The wide yard and garden that Kambili describes for us (9) belies a self containment. As is typical of an upper middle class family, there is a conspicuous consumption of space. A suburban atmosphere, found in Such are the structures of living which literally order Kambili‟s childhood. The idea of a scripted childhood is expressed by Kambili in a further statement, Papa liked order. It showed even in the schedules themselves, the way his meticulously drawn lines, in black ink, cut across each day, separating from siesta, siesta from family time, family time from eating, eating from prayer, prayer from sleep (23-
24). It is ironic that textuality is used by Papa Eugene also as a tool for resistance – through the editorials of his newspaper The Standard.”

140 the bushes of bougainvillea, roses and hibiscus flowers, wide yards, spacious corridors, large and airy living rooms is represented. Despite the impression of an abundance of space, Kambili disabuses herself of this facile impression by being conscious of compound walls, topped by coiled electric wires […] so high I could not seethe cars driving by on our street (9). Indeed we never get to even know whether the Achike family has neighbours. Therefore, the image of the natural dialogue of the hibiscuses flowers, reaching out and touching one another is stifled by that of coiled electric wires. The urge fora dialogue beyond these walls seems like a natural instinct, something that Kambili has to find beyond the precincts of the walls. Indeed, the coiled electric wires speak an illusion of grandeur for Kambili, they are metonymic of a sense of entrapment. Kambili‟s window, where she is wont to constantly peep out into the gardens, paints a topography of entrapment, grotesque and oppressive silence found in the airy stillness of the ceiling fan and the measured steps of a Sunday afternoon after church (31). The architecture of this mansion is therefore symbolic of the “architexuality” of
Kambili‟s narrative.
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In this mansion, we are privy to the experiences of Kambili, on the issues of freedom, violence and silence – all these exist within the precincts of these walls. Kambli‟s space is portrayed with contradictory meanings of freedom, oppressive silence and the undulating endlessness of time. The spacious corridors and rooms ironically become claustrophobic. Kambili describes her fathers bedroom thus All that cream blended and made the room seem wider, as if it never ended, as if you could not run even if you wanted to, because there was nowhere to run to […] the softness, the creaminess, the endlessness. (41) In the wake of claustrophobia, her speech comes out seemingly impaired as we see
Kambili is wont to choking, stuttering and mumbling whenever she tries to speak. Speech is translated into telepathy as Kambili talks about speaking with our spirits (the title of
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Architextuality, as Genette (a 1) writes, is the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation.”

141 the second section – before Palm Sunday. Kambili and her brother Jaja find dialogue through their transcendence from the physical environment. They ask questions and speak to each other, expressing needs, desires and fears through their eyes (22, 30, 59, 81 and 105). Having experienced the violence of her father, Kambili‟s childhood is characterised by an acute consciousness of speech and sound, even making her conscious of her own ability to speak. She has to constantly anticipate her stuttering because the act of speaking is arduous, owing to an internalised silence and the use of telepathy.
Kambili‟s visit to her countryside home, Abba, makes little difference in terms of her quest for freedom and dialogue, but maintains an awareness of space. In this rural home, her family is set apart, by virtue of its class, and indeed during Christmas, the spacious yards surrounding their palatial home are peopled with villagers, for her father is an
“Omelora” – one who does for the community The landscape here is dotted with what
Kambili describes as mud and thatch houses […] to three-storey houses that nestled behind ornate metal gates (55). Of their multi-storey countryside home, Kambili is in awe Our house still took my breath away, the four-story white majesty of it, with the spurting fountain in front and the coconut trees flanking it on both sides and the orange trees dotting the front yard (55). The feeling of unfamiliarity and non-belonging, of silence and oppression, of alack of dialogue is still persistent. There is a disconcerting mystique, in the aura of this plush architectural presence The wide passages made our house feel like a hotel, as did the impersonal smell of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and toilets, of uninhabited rooms. We used only the ground floor and first floor the other two were last used years ago […] no I went up thereonly when I wanted to see farther than the road just
outside our compound walls. (58-59. Emphasis added)

142 The consumption of the space – the wide corridors, yards and storeys feels as cloistered as in her Enugu home. This mystical citadel is juxtaposed almost immediately with
Kambili‟s grandfathers compound a few yards away The compound was barely a quarter of the size of our backyard in Enugu. Two goats and a few chickens sauntered around, nibbling and pecking at drying stems of grass. The house that stood in the middle of the compound was small, compact like dice, and it was hard to imagine Papa and Aunty
Ifeoma growing up here. It looked just like the pictures of houses I used to draw in kindergarten a square house with a square door at the center and two square windows on each side. (63) This topography paints another perspective of Kambili‟s family history, what Kambili has been denied access, for she can only visit her grandfather for fifteen minutes, on condition that she doesn‟t drink or eat anything as her father demands. This place, as
Kambili has been indoctrinated by her father to think, has an ideology of godlessness, of heathenism and Kambili consciously looks out for these to no avail (63). In contrast, Kambili experiences a culturally shocking topography at Nsukka. Nsukka becomes a central chronotope where all meanings diverge and converge. Nsukka‟s topography contrasts that of Enugu and Abba. Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, the duplexes, driveways, bungalows and flats in Nsukka all speak a different language of freedom, liberty and noise. Kambili envisions again, the tall gmelima trees bordering the Marguerite Cartwright Avenue bending during the rainy season thunderstorm, reaching across to each other and turning the avenue into a dark tunnel (112). Kambili has a penchant, as we notice here, for dark imagery. Indeed her life is full of silence, even as she yearns to reach across like the gmelima trees in Nsukka, and the hibiscus flowers outside their yard in Enugu to find her voice and dialogue.

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Aunty Ifeoma‟s garden in Nsukka has a circular burst of bright colours – a garden- fenced around with a barbed wire. Roses and hibiscuses and lilies and ixora and croton grew side by side like a hand painted wreath (112). Nsukka is definitely bustling with activity. There is a dialogic air to it that begins with a vigorous dance which Aunty
Ifeoma performs, as a welcoming gesture for Kambili and her brother Jaja (113). Typical of her conscious self, Kambili begins to notice the spatial (unfamiliarity of Aunty
Ifeoma‟s house I noticed the ceiling first, how low it was. I felt I could reach out and touch it it was so unlike home, where the high ceilings gave our rooms an airy stillness. The pungent fumes of kerosene smoke mixed with the aroma of curry and nutmeg from the kitchen (113). There is a marked difference in the consumption of space here. There is, in the words of Michel de Certeau (1984) a poetic geography of space unfamiliar to Kambili. The bookshelves, narrow passages, frayed cushions, stacks of rice, suitcases and medicine bottles all in one room speak a polyvocal language unfamiliar to that in Enugu. These minutiae of objects portray a chaotic yet intimately dialogic atmosphere in Nsukka. Dialogue is so mundane in Nsukka while the material culture is variform – it speaks of a different order to the one Kambili is accustomed to. Plates and cups are multicoloured, as well as the chairs in the living room. Laughter,
Kambili says always rang out […] it bounced around all the walls, all rooms The
Ifeoma family is boisterous, effervescent and carefree in their laughter. If we remember, laughter is a concept that Bakhtin (1968) in Rabelais and His World uses to discuss the dialogic strategies that brought about the use of parody and made popular art conspicuous, as well as for later Bakhtin (1981) set the foundations for the “novelistic word Laughter takes Kambili out of the monochromatic state of mind she has come with from Enugu. The airy stillness of the rooms in Enugu is replaced with laughter bouncing of all the walls of the rooms in Nsukka. The architecture in Nsukka is not dogmatic, neither is it didactic, like that of Enugu. They even pray for laughter. Indeed,

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Bakhtin (1968:123) points out how laughter is anti-dogmatic, works against fear and intimidation […] didacticism […] naivette and illusion There is, in the Aunty Ifeoma household, a “polyvocal speech in the laughter and noise that as Hewett (2005: 86) argues interrupts and contests the dominance of Eugene‟s monologue Moreover, Jo Anna Isaak (1996) posits that laughter gives an agency for intervention – it has a subversive potential that pluralises, destabilises and baffles any centred discourse The contrasting topographies of Nsukka and Enugu are subliminally juxtaposed by
Kambili to create the effect of one being a parody of the other. The navigation and meaning of the different spaces varies significantly. After having experienced both, the tone of her voice is now fearless when she goes back to Enugu after the visit to Nsukka. The expression of her spatial consciousness is critical Our living room had too much empty space, too much wasted marble floor that gleamed from Sisi‟s polishing and housed nothing. Our ceilings were too high. Our furniture was lifeless the glass tables did not shed twisted skin in the harmattan, the leather sofas greeting was a clammy coldness, the Persian rugs were too lush to have any feeling. (192)
Kambili‟s heightened awareness after Nsukka redefines her idea of home. The feeling of belonging, which defines the place and space called home, has been reconstructed with the experience of the liberating topography of Nsukka. Hence, the movement back and forth Nsukka and Enugu, signified and symbolised by the purple hibiscuses blooming outside their compound, has extended the idea of home for Kambili. Nsukka becomes a place of growth, beyond silenced familial spaces in Enugu. It dialogises the topographical artefacts that reify her sense of belonging – the furniture, walls, ceilings, corridors, food
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Isaak (1996) examines laughter as a metaphor for transformation and for cultural change. Laughter, for
Isaak gratifies libidinal desires – in this sense Isaak tries to connect the social and symbolic. As we see with
Kambili, the polyvocal environment gives her the ability to laugh and appreciate laughter hence lifting silence off her body and allowing her sexuality to come into focus, as she gets attracted to Father Amadi.

145 and other aspects of material existence are invested with laughter and noise, giving them a different metaphorical significance within the storyscape. Hence, Nsukka is centrally positioned as chronotopic to Kambili‟s childhood experience and its textual relevance, as we realised earlier, goes beyond the boundaries of the spaces of Purple Hibiscus as a novel. Indeed, the acute nostalgia that Kambili expresses in the final section of the novel titled A different Kind of Silence the present says a lot more about the centrality of
Nsukka beyond the fictional discourse here (298-299).
Kambili‟s account of her final visit to Nsukka is informed, perhaps, by Adichie‟s nostalgia, of going back to Nsukka almost half a decade after her studies in America. The short story Tiny Wonders which is also included in the Harper Perenial edition published in 2005 portrays an autobiographical nostalgia of a visit to Nsukka, similar to what we see of Kambili‟s return to Nsukka in the last section of Purple Hibiscus. The chronotopical importance of Nsukka is amplified again in Adichie‟s second novel

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