Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Achebe, on his part makes it known that Adichie is his daughter of sentiment. 41 We notice in Achebe‟s comments, an affirmation not only of the element of the new in the old – new writer endowed with the gift of old An instructive exploration of Julia Kristeva‟s concept of intertextuality is found in Graham Allen‟s text Intertextuality, in which he historicises the term through Bakhtin‟s notion of “dialogism,” a concept that he says comes from the intersection of the outer and inner meaning of texts. Hence the concept can be invested with a melange of other concepts. This study therefore uses the term intertextuality to mean a conversation across time, space, fact and fiction. 41 In the blurb of Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun there is a comment by Achebe which reads We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is anew writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers […] Adichie came almost fully made.” 37 storytellers,” 42 but also the significance of the alternative genealogy of the father and the daughter, something that this study seeks to explore in discussing the image of the father as problematically eponymous to familial genealogy, heritage and history of the postcolonial and postmodern Nigerian context. Hence, the above idea of a socially oriented notion of intertextuality can be further extended into the representations of fathers and sons and fathers and daughters in the texts to be studied. The texts represent these relationships in new ways, to give a deeper meaning into the idea of childhood. Kambili as well as her brother Jaja in Purple Hibiscus are in a complex relationship with their father Papa Eugene. Enitan in Everything Good Will Come struggles with the influence of her father against her mother and her career choices. Elvis Oke in Abani‟s Graceland engages with his fathers masculine prejudices about him. 43 Jessamy Harrison in The Icarus Girl and Maja in The Opposite House also struggle with racial and ethnic genealogies from both their fathers and mothers. The discourse of the absent and yet dominant father as it will ultimately be realised is not just about the fictional fathers in this study but also the absent fathers those whose influence creates daughters of sentiment in the words of Lynda Zwinger (1991. In this manner the study invokes, at a meta-theoretical level, a Lacanian reading of symbolic, imagined and real fathers. Ultimately and as Adichie demonstrates in her texts, there is a danger of the daughter (literary or otherwise) being a patriarchal alibi (Zwinger, 1991:8), an acolyte of the father who is acquiescent. To say “coming-of-age” logically means having reached a specific point in ones development that allows one to be given responsibilities of adulthood. It also implies that one has to follow a particular pattern of expected growth. See footnote above 43 In Abani‟s other text The Virgin of Flames, Black, the protagonist, constantly flashes through memories of his Nigerian father as he grapples not only with his complicated familial genealogy but also his sexual orientation. 44 Robert Con Davis (1981) refers to them as fictional fathers whose manifestation in the text is a rediscovery of the absent fathers. 38 The representation of the child in the works to be studied here engages with the increasingly psychological nature of the family. The portrayal of the protagonists in these works and how they deal with father figures indicates how the novel, like the family, has overtime resisted nucleation. The novel has also played a role in providing alternative genealogies, a role that has allowed it to resist critical frameworks that read narrative closure. The novel has therefore moved from the eighteenth century picturesque representation to a deeply psychological one in which childhood becomes not only a period of transition to adulthood but also a significant in Bakhtinian (1981) terms speech type”. 45 As a speech type childhood is a set of ideas within the novel that adds up to the novels heteroglot nature. Childhood, in the texts to be studied, is contextualised at a time when the orthodox definitions of the concept of family have been problematised by newer unions like gay and lesbian families and single parent families. Traditional gender roles increasingly get challenged by material realities. Childhood is a time for the reproduction of gender roles through societal institutions. However, the reality of newer unions of the family means grappling with these roles. Chris Abani for instance, has been curious about transsexuality as he mentions in a talk. 46 In Graceland, he portrays Elvis as having an affinity to feminine lineage – an influence from his mother. His father Sunday detests his impersonation of Elvis Presley, seeing it as something unmanly. In Abani‟s other text Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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