Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
postcolonial sonhood(s): material dystopia and cultural utopia
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| 4.3.2 postcolonial sonhood(s): material dystopia and cultural utopia The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have extended information circulation to new levels of cultural mobility that have created what Frederic Jameson (1991) calls spatial utopias The Baudrillardian simulacrum has become characteristic of this information age, especially the pervasive influence of Euro-American cultural artefacts in postcolonial Africa. Hence, for the sons in postcolonial Africa, growth is influenced by mobile cultures, an increasing experience of spatial utopianism and flights of imagination. Other worlds are brought to the localised familial space through information infrastructure, and the rapidity of this movement of cultures increasingly defines and affects childhood identities and cultures and hence begins to construct new forms of postmodern identities. Ina situation where the culturally symbolic authority that came with the figure of the father is in decline, anew sense of responsibility comes with childhood. The son, a priori masculine heir of familial genealogy, is burdened with expectations of maturity, with penurious material conditions on the other hand creating an accelerated cultural exposure and growth outside of his fathers influence. 139 It is in this kind of postcolonial world that the protagonists in Abani‟s works are depicted – they struggle with a problematic sense of identity that is complicated by multicultural socialisation at the margins of the city. The memories, images and figures of their fathers largely inform their attempts at negotiating livelihoods and selves in the city. Problematic notions of masculinity define the identity framework provided by the father-son metaphor that Abani‟s texts provide, in depicting these micro-relationships as central to (redefining ideas of genealogy and identity. Chris Abani‟s Graceland is set in an informal settlement called Maroko in Lagos Nigeria. It is a sprawling slum characterised by abject penury and a cultural porosity brought Indeed, Appiah (1992:157) is amazed at cultural productivity in Africa, he says despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline despite unimaginable poverty despite wars, malnutrition, disease and political instability He therefore concludes that The contemporary cultural production of many African societies – and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain – is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist 219 about by a desire for escape and what in the words of Bhabha (1994: xiii) can be called a culture of survival Maroko is actually a site of vernacular cosmopolitanism.” 140 In Maroko‟s hybridized soundscape, Highlife music plays alongside reggae music and Nigerian Afro-fusion. The presence of bioscopes, strewn over the slum showing John Wayne and Actor movies alongside Eastern Kung fu Movies sums up this landscape of desire that overhangs the material dystopia in Maroko. Chris Abani‟s The Virgin of Flames is also set in downtown East Los Angeles, another marginal location in the megalopolis, with a protagonist named Black. Black is a thirty- six-year old painter trying to negotiate his identity cloaked by the shadow of childhood memories. Elvis and Black share an entrenched displeasure of the memories of a childhood of physical and sexual abuse, an attraction to transvestites and a disturbing relationship with the figure of the father in their lives. In the wake of transsexual and transvestite dispositions, Elvis and Black practice and adopt marginal and problematic gender positions and sentiments, and the fact of their biological sonhood presents a set of complexes in their relationships with their fathers, in memory, for Black and in reality and memory for Elvis. Elvis‟s maternally-inclined genealogical sentiment is expressed in his love for the music of Elvis Presley, something his late mother impressed upon him. For economic reasons, he impersonates Elvis Presley, but this activity puts him at odds with the normative discourse on gender – how masculinity is perceived, constructed and performed in this society and more importantly, how it is historicised in his relationship with his father and the male figures in his childhood life. His impersonation ritual involves using beauty products to adorn his face in an attempt to reproduce an image of Elvis Presley, as well as keep the memory of his late mother alive. These activities are perceived as effeminate by his father and also, as we shall see, by the overtly patriarchal society he lives in. I refer hereto Bhabha‟s idea of vernacular cosmopolitanism in reference to the cultures of the marginalised immigrants and diasporas in the West. According to Bhabha, it is a functional cosmopolitanism that consistently erases the gains of globalised cosmopolitanism and its illusionary idea of global development.”For Bhaba, vernacular cosmopolitanism is the essence of cultures of survival in marginalised, economically poor communities at the edges of the urban nation. Refer to Bhabha‟s (1994) Looking Back, Moving Forward Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism pp. ix-xxv. |