Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Graceland. Sefi Atta invokes her genealogical connection to the poet Christopher Okigbo but most importantly, in her writing, she was excited by her childhood days when the military regime was less dangerous than the visit of a mother-in-law. Helen Oyeyemi admits that a lot of her childhood experience is reflected in the anxious and weird characters of her texts. Her childhood life has been highlighted by an attempted suicide and a hermitic school life affected by anxieties of identification after relocating to London from Nigeria at the age of five. Childhood for these writers therefore determines the multiple meanings that arise from their texts. Their texts are transcultural and multicultural by virtue of the writers diasporic consciousness and intertextual in view of the presence of literary foremothers and forefathers, with whom the writers affirm or deny influence. Childhood is therefore a significant set of ideas which they use to negotiate often conflicting worldviews, Refer to www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum . (Accessed 22nd September 2008) 27 concepts, ideology and in which they are using to construct a significant discourse, as a critical evaluation of their texts. As might have been gleaned from the above, this study‟s examination of childhood is located in a dense matrix of ideas, concepts and themes. Indeed, I have introduced a collage of concepts – postcolonial, postmodern, diaspora, transcultural, multicultural as related to the narratives of childhood this study examines. It would therefore be logical to define and delineate how these concepts influence the study of childhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction, in relation to the objectives the study has set out to accomplish. The next section attempts this process of delineation, while foregrounding the notions of space, place, time, memories, genealogies, heritages, legacies and traditions which are sub-conceptual levels of analysis that underline the texts of childhood that the study examines. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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