a view from elsewhere cross-gender discourse and

224 disposition. He remembers his father telling him that, as an infant, they had to masquerade him as a girl for him to survive from magical attempts at ending his life
(164). For Black, these were nostalgic times, for up to the age of seven when the threat to his life was presumed over and the mask had to be unveiled, the worst of times began his fathers absence as well as the physical abuse from both his parents. It was the beginning, for Black, of gender consciousness. Black grew up to hate boyhood, yet girlhood, something that he was made to perform by manner of adornment, before the age of seven, was also problematised by a violent mother. For Black and Elvis therefore, there is a porous line between masculinity and femininity and their biological corollaries – maleness and femaleness. Elvis and Black perform androgeneity. Sexual difference for them is a technique of dealing with a critical memory of a troubled parentage, of finding away to earn a living and navigate through multicultural worlds of contemporary Nigerian city life. Their economic lives are entangled with their sense of identity, one which they negotiate through socially intolerant perceptions of sexuality. For them, their fathers represent very problematic notions of identity. Yet because the normative idea of identity is heavily invested in notions of sexuality (Frosh, 1994), Elvis and Blacks biological nature as males puts them in a confrontational position with their fathers in memory and reality – because of how they perform sexual difference. Both protagonists problematise the notion of gender. Through simulation and impersonation, they give an alternative meaning to the idea of biological sexual difference as definitive of gendered identity. They give a view from elsewhere beyond the binary of masculinity and femininity. It is a different understanding of androgeneity that is functional and practical to their plight as “second-class citizens of their society. The problematic idea of gender performed by Black and Elvis curiously reflects Chris
Abani‟s attitude towards the received notions of identity based on gender. They speak also to Abani‟s own problematic relationship with an absent father in his childhood Chris Abani‟s 5
th
May 2006 talk at the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

225 Instructively also, they illuminate, in the words of Stephen Frosh (1994:10) the struggle to write as a man about sexual difference that is, to find away of writing from the subjective position of masculinity and yet emerge into a space which unsettles that position and its assumed complementarity with femininity Frosh posits that to write as a man about sexual difference is to seek to transgress gender assumptions in a manner that involves a process of deconstructing the constructed categories of gender. According to Frosh, masculinity and femininity are constructions which are built around anatomical difference, signifying only because they are granted significance in the context of the particular power relationships that constitute, and historically have constituted, our social environment (1994:11).
Muchemwa & Muponde (2007) also highlight the critical relevance of seeing the slippages and coalitions of masculinities and femininities within the larger symbolic order of patriarchal economy. Moreover, beyond the idea of significations, the pragmatic dimension of gender is found in the creation of fixed categories that give an illusion of essence, depicted by what Frosh calls the realities of power and subsequently inverting what is subjective to be objective, what is psychological as physical and what is a behavioural state, be seen as chromosomal or anatomic. Frosh‟s ideas are informed by
Lacan‟s seminal essay The signification of the phallus (1966), in which Lacan argues that the ultimate signifier for masculinity is essentialised by its attributed synecdochic equivalence to the penis.
145
Practically, Elvis and Black deconstruct gender, through performance, in a manner that pits them against the father figure, in memory and in reality. Societal perceptions consider this performance taboo and even the state, the ultimate symbolic phallic order, that ultra-presence of fatherhood, represented by the Althusserian Repressive State Apparatus (1976:136) proscribes this performance Admiring himself from many angles, he thought it was a shame The penis, for Lacan is the visibility of masculinity and therefore made to appear as an essential signifier, the signifier of signifiers” – the transcendental signified”.

226 he couldn‟t wear makeup in public. That‟s not true, he mentally corrected himself. He could, like the transvestites that haunted the car parks of hotels favoured by rich locals and visiting whites. But like them, he would be a target of some insult, or worse, physical beatings, many of which were meted out by the police, who then took turns with their victims in the back of their vans. (77) Elvis leaves it for the reader to discern how taboo subjects are punished and yet how, through the workings of prohibition of taboo, as Freud would have it, is also a strong element of desire, raising in this prohibition an innate sense of ambiguity, reflected in the statement physical beatings, many of which were meted out by the police, who then took turns with their victims in the back of their vans (77).
Elvis‟s existential moments are accompanied by emotions that play out his helplessness and reveal the claustrophobic reality around him. These moments are evoked during his activities of adornment, especially in rehearsal for impersonation. The destitution he lives in delegitimises his father as breadwinner, and entrusts in him his own future as he realises he is abandoned to be free and to fashion his way out of an economic instability and a multilayered identity crisis What if he had been born white, or even just American Would his life be any different [...] without understanding why, he began to cry through the cracked face powder (Informing Elvis‟s disposition to effeminacy is his spite for his father. Notwithstanding the incestuous rape from his uncle Joseph, his multicultural experience of the world has uprooted him out of the normative idea of a genealogy of fatherhood, into the possibility of androgynous transsexuality that exists, unfortunately for him, in reality, out of the society he lives in. His father represents a deficient masculinity, and an absence that can be complemented yet transcended, by the femininity engendered by the memory of his mother – one that will also propel him to the Graceland of his dreams and imagination. Indeed one could say that the city emasculates the masculine familial genealogy, reflected in Elvis‟s fathers loss of his symbolic capital as breadwinner and therefore custodian and gatekeeper of familial identity.

227 Yet his fathers annoyance at his impersonation activities might as well be attributed to the memory of Elvis Presley as an object of rivalry, since his late wife took to making Elvis Presley her hero, as was the zeitgeist at that time. In another sense then, father and son are caught up herein the tangle of memory, rivalry and spite, playing itself out through the constructed and now contested idea of masculinity. For Black, his parental heritage presented a genealogical dilemma, With an Igbo father and a Salvadorian mother, Black never felt he was much of either (37), while his father embodied an uncanny absence On her deathbed, his mother had accused him of always siding with his father. He wished now that he‟d had the words to say its not that I hated you or loved him more […] how could I hate a man who never really existed for me (173) My father was searching for something, but I have no idea what
[…] I thought he was an artist at heart, or at least a scientist like Einstein a dreamer. I thought that was why I have the same existential melancholy
(196)
Black‟s melancholic existence and perplexing sense of identity is embodied in the spaceship he built, where he spends most of his time, on the roof of the ugly store He embodies an alien (sic) sense of identity in which is inhered an attempt at a process of self-invention. In similar existential moments to Elvis in Graceland, Black reflects on his crisis and agonises over it during the process of adornment, when he puts on the makeup He simply didn‟t recognize himself at least not as Black. He began to cry. He struggled against the melting mascara. Pulling himself together, he realized that his face looked even darker against the white dress and blonde hair (77). Blacks libidinal desires take a very graphic image through the constant descriptions of the turgidity of his penis. Yet this sexual desire is directed at a transvestite named Sweet

228 Girl to whom Black is attracted. While Black knows that Sweet Girl is male, Sweet Girl seems to appeal to him because of her complex effeminacy – it is interesting to note that the omniscient narrator refers to Sweet Girl as she Even more interesting is the idea that Sweet Girl claims to be a lesbian. Sexuality and sexual difference in biological and constructed senses form part of Blacks struggle to reconcile his fragmented self. The penis, biological signifier of his masculinity, is insufficient in giving him a stable sense of self. He feels inadequate in practicing heterosexuality and yet derives pleasure at being raped, describing it as a burning which felt right (138). Black hankers to experience femininity, to be feminised, and at the end of the text, Sweet Girl performs the act of physically disguising Blacks genitalia. Black goes through conflicting emotions and desires during this incident, which culminates in an explosive reaction of his fragmented self. Ina bid to reconcile his heterogenic self, Black realises he not only deconstructs received notions of identity defined by masculinity, but that he is in a continuous process of reinvention The fact of the matter was that he was obsessed with origins, and he believed that in his case, origins held the key to self- discovery. It seemed though, that those with a clear sense of the past, of identity, were so eager to bury it and move onto reinvent themselves. What a luxury, he thought, what a thing, to choose your own obsession, to choose your own suffering. Him, he was trying to reinvent an origin to bury so he could finally come to this thing he wanted to be, and he knew that if he didn‟t find it soon, it would destroy him, burn him up. (123-124) Elvis and Black are both in an existential crisis, living in penurious conditions and trying to negotiate a means of living through the very problematic core of their identities. To engage with a rapidly transforming world necessitates having a reorganised self yet the case of Elvis and Black is otherwise. It is exacerbated by their inhabitation of a

229 contemporary culture which is also in an incessant process of postmodernisation. Elvis‟s

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