Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

312 simultaneously. Her childhood is defined by an imaginative subjectivity characterised by myths, legends and otherworldly narratives of belonging. Jess‟s identity is negotiated around that diasporic space of imagination, where competing genealogies struggle to assert themselves. This space is one of traveling myths, legends and cosmologies. In this sense then chapter five explores the notion of a racialised abiku – a notion that has always been read in a specifically Nigerian and Yoruba locality in the works of Ben Okri. The racialised abiku is in this case a metaphor of the transcultural and multicultural childhoods, having travelled from one continent to the other. Oyeyemi‟s The Opposite
House takes on a deeper and complex black Atlantic historiography through the memories of Maja‟s childhood. It is a highly meta-fictional text, which explores the historiography of slave history through a mythopoetic narrative where deities from varied pantheons and cosmologies live in the somewhere house Oyeyemi experiments with the form of her novel, by informing it with varied languages, myths and legends, through the Afro-Cuban identity of the protagonists family, who have migrated their memories, beliefs, customs and rituals to a cosmopolitan cultural landscape in London. Childhood in Oyeyemi‟s works therefore extends the frameworks of reference in this study – needing us to disabuse ourselves of the idea of a specific spatio-temporal experience as we have done in previous chapters. In fact, Oyeyemi‟s works present classification and categorical challenges – should we refer to her as Black British or Nigerian Having migrated to London at the age of four, her African experience is more mythic than practico-sensory. Perhaps the ambivalence that we can see in her interviews
– not wanting to be called a Nigerian writer, but again opting for the collective pronouns us in reference to Nigerians, informs the nature of her fiction.
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Her protagonists claim simultaneous genealogies – Jess in The Icarus Girl is a mixed-race eight-year old girl, born to Nigerian and English parents, while Maja in The Opposite House is an Afro-
Cuban who categorically asserts that In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos – the Cuban Lebanese
(98). See Brenda Coopers (2009) article The middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora Helen
Oyeyemi‟s The Opposite House.”

313 The authors in this study revert to childhood, as an archive of imagination. In its various forms as figures, memories and images, childhood provides an imaginative recourse. This return to the narrative of childhood does two things. Firstly, it helps to grapple with the authors diasporic lives at the present, having migrated from their various lands of childhood to Europe and America. Their connection to Nigeria means that that is where negotiations of the notion of home begin – manifested in desires, nostalgia, trauma and amnesia. In this way childhood for these writers is an affective landscape populated by emotive memories of loss and gain, but a significant point of departure for their own senses of identity. Childhood becomes a site for negotiating their present diasporic selves. Secondly, a return to the narrative of childhood allows this study to plot a shift in the narrative of identity. While realising the increasing importance of diasporicity in the contemporary postcolonial discourse of identity, this study underscores the narrative of childhood as increasingly defining diasporic identity as reflected in contemporary Nigerian fiction. The return of the narrative of childhood signals the increasing senses of diasporicity between authorial (read adult) and childhood selves. It signals to the increasing mobility of the spatio-temporal elements of identity. Moreover, contemporary experience is defined by nomadic experiences of families, which translates to the movement of cultures. This kind of mobility is not only spatial but temporal, in this case, aided by forms of mass media. Material cultures can, for instance, find their way to any part of the world via “technoscapes” (Appadurai, 1995). Music, fashion and other expressive cultures are engaged in a “disjunctural” flow across the globe. In this case, there is the contemporary creation of transcultural identities. The narrative of childhood seems to be the product of this contemporary moment. While childhood has in the past been used for the purposes of cultural retrieval and romantic imagination, it now claims a stake in the contemporary identity setup. Indeed, as the notion of identity has shifted from that of civilizations, to empires and to nation- states, the postmodern moment has taken us further to the micro-politics of the self, what Foucault (1988) calls technologies of the self Foucault‟s focus on the history of the

314 subject brings us back to the micro-level of identity discourse that constitutes subjectivity on its own terms, before its inscription to the rest of the society. Anthony
Appiah‟s Ethics of Identity also foregrounds micro-aspects, what he calls unscripted accounts of identity-making – tools of self-making, through a deontological framework. Therefore, the micro-relationship between the self and other selves becomes the focus of the discourse of identity. In this way the world of childhood offers insights as this study has engaged within terms of memory, time, history, genealogies, space and place as the sites for the alternative, for the re-figuring of the politics of identity. Childhood constructs ground for interrogation of the macro and micro aspects within various frameworks of identity. As this study privileges, the imagination in contemporary Nigerian fiction foregrounds childhood as a set of ideas used to negotiate the multifaceted nature of identity. The return to childhood aids this imagination in reconciling the disjunctural planes of diasporic identities, by exploiting the experimental and processual nature of the world of childhood. In this way childhood, as a set of ideas, is portrayed as amenable to the diasporic condition and consciousness of mobility and its disjunctural spatio-temporality. Childhood actually extends spaces for engaging contemporary forms of identity portrayed in contemporary Nigerian fiction. Its figures, images and memories take us to the alternative experiences of postcolonial Nigeria, away from the determination of collective and macro identities to the unscripted and unlimited vistas of identity formation. The aesthetics of childhood, as portrayed in the works studied here engage in the fantastic, the fabulous and magical realist and therefore allows us to deal with that “Pandora‟s box of fears and repressions that define contemporary identities. The rapid mobility of cultures and the movement of information in this new technological age require afresh set of ideas to discourse emerging identities. These emerging identities are negotiating much larger grounds that range from the familial, ethnic, national and the continental. In this way, these are multicultural yet transcultural identities, involved in a continuous process of formation.

315 Childhood provides discourse for continuous interrogation of identity formation. The novel, a genre which is predominant in contemporary Nigerian imagination is itself amenable to this multi-voiced discourse. Indeed, Bakhtin‟s (1981) reference to the novel as a “genre-in-the-making” makes it appropriate for the imagination and portrayal of childhood.
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So, childhood as a set of ideas is located, between the generic, stylistic and thematic. Its shifting, mobile and experimental nature as this study has portrayed, allows for it to construct identities that cut across the familial, ethnic, national and continental frameworks of reference. In this way it becomes a category of discourse that is beginning to influence how we talk about identity and identity formation. The author reflects on notions of time, history, memory, space, place, familial relationships and ultimately their own diasporic senses of identity. Can we perhaps draw a conclusion, like Richard Priebe
(2006) about the transcultural identity formation in the narrative of childhood Such a conclusion definitely elicits questions about the inevitable tensions between the particular and the transcendental, for indeed the notion of the transcultural can be accused of glossing over tensions between the local and the global. But perhaps, in partial agreement with Priebe, this study has foregrounded childhood as an emerging category of discourse, whether we want to call it a genre, a style, or a theme is left for another debate, but this study foregrounds it as a set of ideas that allows it to initiate a discourse on contemporary postcolonial and postmodern forms of identity and identity making. Perhaps, therefore, we can conclude somewhat prophetically, by quoting Richard Priebe: The genre of childhood continues to be written by writers who come from almost every geographical area in Africa, a fact that likely reflects an increasing presence of the transcultural theme and the likelihood that we will see an increasing number of works in this genre well into our new century. (2006:50) In fact,
Adesanmi and Dunton (2005) trace trajectories of Nigerian literature through a generic dimension, foregrounding the reemergence of the novel in contemporary Nigerian imagination.

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