Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| 5.6 Conclusion The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House portray childhood as a site of diasporic discourse on identity. Childhood figures, images and memories are located at the centre of identity struggles, which are linked to Oyeyemi‟s childhood experiences, having migrated to London from Nigeria at the age of four. Oyeyemi goes back to her childhood as an imaginative recourse and resource for engaging her sense of identity. Childhood is positioned at the centre of multiple myths, legends and narratives of diasporic subjectivity. The relevance of childhood in this discourse lies in not only its presumed innocence and naivety, but in its nature as a space and time of experimentation. In this sense, childhood generates a particular aesthetics of experimentation – animist, magical realism and mythopoeia, which use postmodernist devices of pastiche, intertextuality, historiography and metafiction. Childhood is used to question the reality and magic of events, the linearity of history and the contiguity of space. Drawing from her own experience of dislocation, Oyeyemi constructs her childhood figures, images and memories at the points of disjuncture, difference and displacement. These childhoods are already in a process of psycho-physical flux, when we encounter them. She uses them to elaborate on the diasporic space as a processual one, defined by the mobility of both material and metaphysical cultures – food, customs, rituals, myths, legends and religious paraphernalia. Childhood is therefore at the centre of the imagination of diasporic identity. Indeed, Oyeyemi‟s childhood in Lewisham London, was defined by a freewheeling imagination, which soared – Icarus-like – in an explicit attempt at dealing with the tyranny of dislocation and displacement. To connect worlds sundered apart requires the experimental nature that childhood provides through imaginative narratives. Through the discourse of childhood, frontiers are extended, boundaries extended and broken. Childhood discourse is allowed exploration of the fantastic and fabulous. Gaylard‟s description of that “Pandora‟s box 297 rife with childhood fears, repressions, social taboos, secrets, neuroses, traumas and the repositories of wishes, dreams, the fantastic, the fabulous and the transcendent (2005:3), is useful in summarising not only the thematic but also the poetics of Oyeyemi‟s works. While her texts reflect her own fears, anxieties, and traumas of diasporic displacement and dislocation, they imbibe a poetics of the fantastic and fabulous, for how does one deal with having to live simultaneously in multiple spaces, places and times The world of childhood provides an imagination that can deal with this “Pandora‟s box Childhood therefore becomes itself a postmodern moment that constructs postmodern identities to deal with the tyranny of displacement and dislocation of cultures and therefore scattered senses of identity. Its nature as a process, as becoming, allows it to engage with postmodernist poetics of pastiche, hybridity, irony, the displacement of meta-narratives, the multiplicity of margins and the provisional nature of reality as a diametrically constructed anthropomorphic phenomenon. The notion of childhood as a process, allows this chapter to foreground a particular ontology of Oyeyemi‟s fiction – provisionality, paradox and problematic subjectivity that constantly scuttle the meaning- making process. Linda Hutcheon (1988) foregrounds these elements as definitive of “historiographic metafiction,” which characterise what she calls a poetics of postmodernism and which another critic McHale (1987) attributes to postmodern fiction Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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