Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

148 rural, countryside home, Ugwu‟s new world is confounding because of its modernity, the English language and the written word. Language becomes the central organising principle as he flounders to appropriate anew world and extend the horizons of his experience. Translations, Igbo dialects, inflections of Igbo dialects and of English become linguistic tools that Ugwu uses to make sense of this new world, form opinions about it and create a sense of self appropriate to finding his voice and place in this multicultural and modern world. Hence language finds a central place in his new experience. The reader can see authorial consciousness from the instances of translation, Language in Half of a Yellow Sun comes with an explicit sense of Igbo nationhood, because of its representation of the Biafran war. It reflects the multiple dialects of the
Igbo community as the nation that hitherto fought fora pan-Igbo consciousness. A critic, like Obi Nakwama (2008), refers to this novel as the “Igbo novel by bringing to mind the subject of the story as well as its linguistic consciousness. Adichie deliberately uses
Igbo words, as part of the material culture project of her novel. She leaves untranslated words as an authentication process but at the same time allows fora transformative process in her use of English as a second language speaker.
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Nsukka is a world partly textualised as Ugwu realises, They went pasta sign, ODIM STREET, and Ugwu mouthed street, as he did whenever he saw an English word that was not too long (3). There is a conscious attempt at the use of English language on the part of Ugwu. As a boy from the countryside, the linguistic terrain of Nsukka is heteroglossic and as Ugwu notices, his master Odenigbo code switches relative to the occasion. He speaks in a mix of Igbo and English sometimes incomplete Igbo to Ugwu.
Ugwu has to constantly translate and appropriate the language addressed to him in Igbo. Through Ugwu, we get to experience the contradictory standards not only of English but also of Igbo, symbolised by numerous dialects that portray difference and linguistic cartographies, which also signify regional variances immanent in the Igbo world. Bill Ashcroft (2001:75) points out that the use of untranslated words signifies a “metonymic gap when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, allusions, or references which maybe unknown to the reader According to Ashcroft these become “synecdochic of the writers culture and hence a marker of difference brought about by
„experience.‟”

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Ugwu enters into a world where his consciousness is aroused by signposts. They trouble his cognitive ability, stretching his imagination in his struggle to comprehend new spatial orders that he is forced to deal with
Ugwu had never seen a room so wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semicircle, the side tables between them, the shelves crammed with books, and the centre table with a vase of red and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. (5) Like Kambili, spatial practice heightens Ugwu‟s consciousness. If we fora moment highlight the importance of the words spatial practice here, we will come to see Henri
Lefebvre‟s (1991) understanding of spatial practice as that which is perceived and relates to a particular rhythm and organic existence. The representation of space is therefore the architecture in Ugwu‟s mind, related to his processes of cognition. Ugwu, we are told, in a manner foreshadowing his epistemic journey to come, edges closer and closer to the bookshelf (5). The house is filled with books, in every room piled on tables and even in the bathroom. Ugwu begins by navigating this new architecture, marvelling at the cold barn and the metal box studded with dangerous looking knobs He brings with him the innocence of the countryside with the mindset of a bucolic and pastoral existence, signalling for the reader that his narrative will entail an epistemic journey across this highly textual landscape.
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It will actually be a textual journey, for
Ugwu, in the midst of a multitude of books has to decode the written word, for him to be able engage in speech with his master Odenigbo. Hence, the construction of the character and voice of Ugwu is found in the instances of translation between Igbo and English, in code-switching, in the fluid use of the different dialects in existence in his new world and in the practice of writing. The university towns cultural landscape is different from the one in his native Opi. As an academic, his new master relates to knowledge textually and the way the word is consumed is different A textual landscape here also refers to the material existence of books in circulation within the house, making the text take on a material cultural role beyond its representative function.

150 from how Ugwu has experienced it. Mental spaces are extensions of social spaces in this environment. The book is a product of this space, and therefore the idea of social space here is one in which the representations of space that exist in the mind have become apart of. The book here is also a representational space, in which apart of social life and practice finds extended space. Indeed, in multicultural worlds, Appadurai (1995) warns, the social space goes beyond what Lefebvre (1991) calls the “practico-sensory” existence
– representations, found in the mental landscapes are constitutive of the reality of the social space. Moreover, Lefebvre (1991:30-31) warns of the disappearance of
“physical/natural space due to thought, while Appadurai (1995) posits that the work of imagination is diacritical to modern subjectivity, something Gerald Gaylard (2005) attributes also to African (Post)modernity.
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Imagination, for Appadurai, becomes the mediator of subjectivity, to cope with the modern world. Ugwu‟s imaginative subjectivity is the key to allowing him to relate to his contemporary realities.
Nsukka has an intellectual cosmopolitan vibe. It is a melting pot of knowledge(s) about global history, a lot of which is consumed in the daily meetings of Odenigbo and his multiracial and multi-ethnic colleagues. The globe is brought to Ugwu‟s doorstep and apprehended through the conversations and soliloquies of his master Odenigbo. Nsukka becomes the toponym for an epistemic reevaluation but also for Ugwu, it is, in the words of Ngugi (1986), a place to decolonise the mind and reengage his mental appropriation of reality. Ugwu navigates his new cultural space at the margins from his position in the kitchen he eavesdrops on the conversations of his master and visitors. His relationship with his master is a portrayal of the Fanonesque Manichean world in which the colonised live in marginal existence with definitive roles as house and plantation servants. In these colonial economies, this division of labour was synonymous with racialised identities. Ugwu‟s world is therefore divided two-ways: that of childhood whose structures of living and feeling are determined by the adult world and that of a houseboy where his position is of servanthood in relation to that of his master In this way, one can seethe architecture of knowledge and distribution of functions and voices that runs along a public/private and adult/childhood split, where Ugwu‟s domesticity and
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Gaylard underscores the role of imagination in postcolonial and postmodern constructions of identity.

151 age is meant to confine his knowledge to the apolitical concerns of private space and childhood times – something implied in the term houseboy However, his presence as a voice in the text, points to a destabilisation of the hierarchy of rules, functions and voices in this narrative of war. There exists, if not, (using Homi Bhabha words) a vernacular cosmopolitanism in
Nsukka, a vernacular intellectualism.”
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Despite the multiracial and multi-ethnic composition of the academic community here, there is the strong influence of an Igbo ethnoscape, found in the stereotypes, portrayed in Ugwu‟s perception of the Yoruba academic Miss Adebayo‟s rapid, incomprehensible Yoruba and the often raucous arguments on the group identities of the nation, tribe and ethnicity (20). In this atmosphere of a newly independent nation, Adichie begins to paint the fractious ideological terrain that is the Republic of Nigeria, inlaying a background to the internecine Biafran war that later occurs.
Ugwu attempts at entering into the textual world around him (17), at first as a performance, whose impetus comes from a Toundi-like realisation of his different status as a houseboy.
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Moreover, his thirst for understanding the new world (of his master) was obvious in the conversation Odenigbo has with his colleagues
Ugwu did not understand most of the sentences in his books, but he made a show of reading them. Nor did he entirely understand the conversations of Master and his friends but listened anyway and heard that the world had to do more about the black people killed in Sharperville, that the spy plane shot down in Russia serves Americans right […] and Ugwu would enjoy the clink of beer bottles against glasses, glasses against glasses, bottles against glasses. (17-18) See footnote 66 Here I am drawing attention to the figure of the houseboy Toundi in Ferdinand Oyono‟s book Houseboy.

152 As hinted at earlier, there is a humorous reflection of Fanon‟s master-servant relations.
Ugwu‟s desire to be like his master, speak, command and be knowledgeable as him, indeed even occupy his position, presents a comic moment in his attempt at imitation Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would sit on the same chair and imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like decolonize and pan-

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