Theorising Childhood Critical and Conceptual Contexts

28 cultural products has redefined notions of the temporal and the spatial, by making them boundless. This study examines fiction written by writers in the diaspora. Like Segun Afolabi, the fiction of these writers is influenced by their migration to Europe and the United States of America. Here, influence does not necessarily mean that these works are exclusively about life in the diaspora. It means that these works are informed by the diaspora as a condition and experience, which becomes also a consciousness in the texts. It is also to say that these writers grapple with history through their alternating experiences of space and place. Therefore, to read their works means to examine the intersections of the different interpretations of history which produce diasporic senses of identity.
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In her examination of colonialism and colonial discourse for example, Ania Loomba (1998:40) points out that literary criticism no longer examines history as simply a background but as an essential part of textual meaning that is fundamental to the construction of culture. History in the imaginative and critical levels of this study is engaged with through the idea of childhood, which in African literature has been read as a minority discourse Jones, 1998). Innocence has been the dominant theme in the examination of childhood in African literature (Okolie, The image of the child was initially pitted against the structures of colonial power. However, it could be argued that in the case of Toundi in Ferdinand Oyono‟s Houseboy, the portrayal of naive childhood was also used effectively to ironize and satirize the colonial regimes use of authority. Moreover, colonialist discourse itself was guided by the binaries of colonizer versus colonized (Fanon, 1967; Said, Childhood, asset of critical ideas, remained a minority, like feminism. But with anew postcolonial dispensation, perhaps anew dimension of theorising childhood can be developed. The concept of diaspora is historicised as Paul Gilroy (1993) argues in his exploration of the Black Atlantic. Avtar Brah (1996) also examines the convergence of different trajectories of history within the concept of diaspora in its idea of homing or eliciting a desire for home.
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Maxwell Okolie, Childhood in African Literature A Literary Perspective pp.29-35.
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Fanon‟s idea of the Manichean and Said‟s concept of how orientalism is founded on a geographical binary of the East and West lay grounds fora critique of colonialist discourse

29 The emergence of the idea of childhood as the subject of this study comes from writing that is in the critical scope of the postcolonial. While the term and concept, postcolonial has come under discussion in numerous critiques (Appiah, 1992; Hulme, 1993; Williams
& Chrisman, 1994; Chambers & Curtis, 1996; Quayson, 2000; Gaylard, 2005), it is taken to mean the temporal locations of the texts. This does not only mean the time of publication as considered postcolonial but also the textual context as postcolonial the term here refers to texts set in postcolonial time after the receipt of independence. In this way, the term is used as a spatio-temporal signifier. However, all criticism and theory on the term and concept postcolonial seems to converge on the idea that postcolonial involves an engagement with colonialism and its consequences in the past and present, as well as global developments that are viewed to be the aftereffects of the empire
(Quayson, 2000:2; Huggan, 2001). A reading of the works this study examines is primarily seen through the notions of postcolonial discourse and postcolonial criticism. I use the term postcolonial criticism inline with Moore-Gilbert‟s (1997:12) definition as a set of reading practices […] preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination – economic, cultural and political While Moore-Gilbert (1997) instructively distinguishes between postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism Robert Young‟s (2001) historiography of “postcolonialism” as a creolised and hybridised concept helps in explaining why it is suitable for this study – because childhood memories, images and figures, are situated in material conditions that are postcolonial. At the same time, their diasporic consciousness opens a wider plane of discussion on concepts of mobility, borders, places, spaces and times that can be approached through an understanding of the postcolonial condition as a conjuncture and a disjuncture, as multicultural and transcultural – concepts that this section seeks to unpack further.
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Moreover, there are particular aspects that the novels present as I will discuss, that bring relevance to the specific ways in which such a theoretical approach can be constructed.
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Ania Loomba (1998:180) argues also that migrations have become a marker of contemporary livelihood and that therefore in crucial ways diasporic identities have come to represent much of the experience of
„postcoloniality‟”.

30 This study‟s aim to examine childhood as an emerging discourse means exploring how the world of the child in the texts is central to the production of meaning. Bringing the world of the child as central to textual analysis is also invoking postmodern readings of the texts.
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This postmodern dimension of childhood is underlined by the notion of mobile childhood which creates anti-foundational conditions that are complicated by the diasporic space. In fact, for us to connect the idea of mobile childhoods to the context of diaspora, it would be crucial to foreground the methodology or critical approach for this kind of scenario. In this way therefore, some critics of globalisation and diaspora realise the necessity of a pedagogical shift in theorising diaspora. Arjun Appadurai (2003) for instance argues that disjuncture and difference are the appropriate ways of approaching the concept of diaspora because the binary of the centre and margin is not enough to capture the politics of difference and the fluid and shifting determinants of social and cultural life. In the texts to be studied, diaspora is a conceptual context and when we talk about it, notions of place and space become important, especially because of the idea of home inherent in the conceptualisation of diaspora. Moreover, being in the diaspora as Bhabha
(1990) discusses, involves inhabiting marginal spaces and therefore identities in the fabric of that particular nation. The marginal identities, according to Bhabha, are engaged in a continuous erasure of national boundaries. Bhabha underlines the irony inherent in these marginal diasporic identities by arguing that they might beat the centre if examined in the context of the homeland. Hence if examined in context diaspora ruptures the specificity of space, place, centre, margin and therefore identity because of how these aspects shift. In this case, therefore, the st century experience of diaspora can be read as postmodern since its presence constantly erases national boundaries and makes them fluid, it subsequently rejects the exclusivity of the centre and the margins. Similarly,
Appiah (1992:235) posits that postmodernism is characterised by the rejection of the exclusivity of mainstream consciousness and a multiplication of distinctions. The culture of the postmodern, Appiah posits, is influenced by transnationality and is While postmodernism as a definitive marker remains fairly nebulous, it is usually appropriated into am lange of concepts. It can be a condition, a temporal marker, a descriptor of identity among other appropriations within different readings – there can be different postmodernisms.

31 therefore global, a concept that he later elaborates in his text Cosmopolitanism (Appiah,
2006). Diaspora invokes anti-foundational sentiments. Adichie, Abani, Atta and Oyeyemi by virtue of writing in the diaspora, write with a postmodern consciousness. This postmodern consciousness is enhanced by their need to engage with migrant life the need to influence their writing by the different places they have traversed through their childhood. The condition of diaspora, by rupturing space and time, obliges these writers to look back through the time of childhood, to reconcile their multinational, transnational and multicultural identities.
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Hence, childhood is characterised in their writing by aspects of space, place and time. To examine childhood is also to deal with the aspect of time because childhood is a set of ideas about a particular time. Moreover, to foreground childhood as a significant discourse in Nigerian literature means to open up alternative critical space that converses with time, in this case that of adulthood. As writers who are coming of age the idea of a time of childhood is significant in plotting a narrative of their growth. It is through the time of childhood that this writing can be seen to engage with the process of growth. However, this time is constructed as a composite of events in historical narratives and those outside them – alternative accounts from the everyday living of childhood. Therefore, we can foreground the use of time in Kambili‟s Purple Hibiscus. Spent in the house in Enugu, Kambili‟s time is characterised by daily religious rituals and affected by culinary ceremonies in the context of a very brutal military regime, which she experiences indirectly and which is used as a metaphorical sounding board. Similarly,
Jessamy Harrison‟s use of time in the Icarus Girl is portrayed as being spent in the cupboard and around her house in an uncannily precocious and delirious state. Elvis
Oke‟s time in Graceland is spent trying to bean Elvis Presley impersonator in a bid to eke out a living against the background of a brutal military environment. All these are alternative times that also tell us something about the fragmented positions (Quayson, An instructive theorisation of the concept of diaspora as distinct from such concepts as transnational and multinational is found in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003:8) in which they posit that as distinct from the other concepts, diaspora is more anthropocentric while transnational includes cultural artifacts, NGOs, capital and other non-anthropocentric elements. This is similar to Appandurai‟s (2003) idea of the “ethnoscape” as an anthropocentric dimension of the different scapes of global cultural flows
(technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes) which he argues, are in a disjunctural relationship with each other.

32 2000), of a postcolonial and postmodern subjectivity.
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These times as it were, are in fact inscribed in the ordinariness of daily life and as this study examines, through the ideas of Michel De Certeau (1984), they become tactics that open up spaces for resistance, for irony and therefore agency for the figure of the child within an adultist regime. Subsequently, the authors rewrite orthodox experience of time and history and therefore ways in which archives are processed. In Helen Oyeyemi‟s works, the element of time is also captured by the medley of nationalities. Jessamy Harrison‟s time of childhood in The Icarus Girl is spent in trying to understand her English and Nigerian nationalities. Maja‟s family in The Opposite
House is also a boiling pot of nationalities and histories. Her father is a black Cuban and her mother can trace her antecedents in Yoruba while her boyfriend is a Jew who grew up in Ghana. They all live in London. Her mother, called Chabella, teaches German and speaks Spanish, which all of them speak, as well as English by virtue of living in London. There is, in postmodern terminology, a pastiche of nationalities and languages in this household, making the postmodern concepts of dispersal, hyper-reality and metafiction relevant interpretative contexts for these works.
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Aspects of dispersal and hyper-reality are essential in defining diasporic identities. In fact, in this text, there is an intra-diasporic dimension of worldviews, portrayed in the patchwork of nationalities as well as heritages, legacies and myths that comprise various simultaneously influential genealogical frameworks. At the same time, diasporic identities are processed meaningfully through memories of childhood a time of rapid mobility, scattering of cultures, selves and geographies as in the case of Jessamy Harrison and Maja in Oyeyemi‟s works desire and successful attempts at mobility in the childhoods of Elvis Oke and Kambili in Abani and
Adichie‟s works respectively. Furthermore, one encounters an obsession with space in the works of these writers as they rack through the childhood memories of their characters. In Adichie‟s work for instance, her upbringing in Nsukka, a university town in Nigeria is leitmotific of her own childhood as represented in both Purple Hibiscus and See Ato Quayson (2000) “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism pp. While dispersal basically implies the instability and potential for multiple meanings, hyperreality in postmodernism refers to the blurred lines between fiction and fantasy. These concepts therefore inform the meta-fiction that characterises postmodern writing.

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