Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

272 the characters in the text. The practice of Santeria in The Opposite House is one such aspect that connects multiple myths and legends through its rituals, customs and practices. The ontology of Jess‟s childhood is defined by an identity struggle. At the outset, her racial identity, as a “half-and-half child seems to visibly put her at crossroads, especially with friends at school. However this is symptomatic of the multiple heritages battling in her consciousness. The psychosomatic conflict, derived from multiple cosmological perspectives with different practices, is at the core of her identity struggles.
The Icarus Girl contrasts for us the modern psychological forms of treatment, with the religious Yoruba cosmological alternatives of twinning and abiku childhood. Oyeyemi constructs these worlds through a meta-fictional narrative structure, privileging the act of imagination, through the implied myths and legends of Yoruba spirit childhood, the reference to fiction and historical European works as well as the symbolism of the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus that informs the title of the novel. Jess is surrounded by imagination and narrative. Stories are the warp and weft with which Jess weaves her sense of identity she lives in them, feeling self-contained in them and in the power of their imagination. Her dreams, visions and states of delirium are woven together by her flights of imagination. Indeed this imagination constructs the reality of TillyTilly, who in turn becomes a subject of the myth and legend of abiku childhood. TillyTilly affirms the ontology of Jess‟s abiku childhood, while at the same time multiplies her psychic subjectivity. Claiming to embody the other half of Jess‟s departed soul. TillyTilly literally becomes Jess‟s twin, her double. Childhood in The Icarus Girl is therefore portrayed in the fragmented and fragile subjectivities that multiply while occupying the margins of identity. Jess is portrayed in a matrix of discourses that reflect multiple heritages, legacies and genealogical histories. The myth and legend of abiku childhood finds itself in conflict with the one of modern psychology, as Jess‟s tantrums, states of delirium are defined as uncanny and bordering on madness. She is, in other words caught up in the dilemma of a racialised abiku; finding herself at the centre of bi-continental allegiances, heritages and silenced histories.

273 The notion of the abiku is indeed exotic in an English cultural landscape, where classmates, teachers and other acquaintances, faced with the dilemma of her screaming tantrums choose to explain it away as racial dilemma, as a product of her “half-and-half” childhood.
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Jess seems to experience a different, alternative magical reality, implied by the now overwhelming hints Oyeyemi makes in reference to Yoruba mythology. It is an epistemological quest, on Jess‟s part, to rediscover the hidden knowledge in her genealogy that explains the magical reality that has taken over her life. Her mother finally explains to her the notion of the ibeji statue and how it relates to the situation with Fern, her dead twin (182-183). This knowledge comes out as constitutive of a silenced maternal heritage. Told as a narrative to Jess, it sounds like a myth but its striking familiarity is portrayed in the image of the ibeji statue that Jess‟s mother shows her. As examined earlier, images in The Icarus Girl are imbued with mythical, legendary and magical potential, as they straddle between reality and Jess‟s dreams and states of delirium. When Jess‟s mother shows her the image of the ibeji statue Jess looked and looked, then pulled the book from her mothers lap into her own, her fingers tracing the features of the statue, her lips moving in silent amazement as she tried to understand. The statue was beautiful, looked about half human height and was intricately carved – the broad lips, the sloping cut of chin, the stylised markings around the eyes. It was of a boy twin, but despite that, it was familiar. As she moved her fingers over the long, long arms of the statue, she realised that she had already seen one of these a poorly done one, drawn with charcoal, not carved. (183) The image of the statue becomes a metonymy for abiku twin childhood, relating to Jess‟s experience. Drawn from a text, the image can be examined as the material cultures that This ascription underlines a racialised essence, binarised in the exoticism of the other half – the black one as seemingly the cause and effect of Jess‟s psychic problems.

274 characterise new diasporic writing (Cooper, a. These material cultures portray the mobility of diasporic identity, in terms of how cultures are migrated through the text. Descriptive attention is paid to these images and metonyms of mobile cultures which are lost or hidden in diasporic experiences. While Jess can only relate to them as images in a book titled All about Africa, the ibeji statue image is familiar in her experience, with the charcoal drawing of the long armed woman in the Boys Quarters which constantly appears in her dreams and delirious states of mind. The images are the visibility of her silenced heritage, the tenuous links between her “half-and-half” childhood status in this diasporic space. The image appears and reappears in her dreams and visions, as she struggles in the wilderness of her mind The notion of the mind as a wilderness is an extended world of experience for twins in Yoruba mythology. Jess‟s mother confirms this to her when she says Traditionally, twins are supposed to live in, um, three worlds this one, the spirit world, and the Bush, which is a sort of wilderness of the mind (182). As the reality of her multiple worlds settles home, Jess and her imaginative double decide to actually morph into each other. Ina bizarre and magical turn of events TillyTilly jumped inside her (190) and she “wasn‟t there anymore This process of intertransmutation is the apotheosis of subjective fragmentation, where the magical is embodied and vice versa. This is, perhaps, the core of the vision of Oyeyemi in The

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