Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Download 1.93 Mb. View original pdf
|
| strategies laid out by her father, which Kambili describes here I pushed my textbook aside, looked up and stared at my daily schedule, pasted on the wall above me. Kambili was written in bold letters on top of the white sheet of paper, just as Jaja was written on the schedule above Jaja‟s desk in his room. I wondered when Papa would draw up a schedule for the baby, my new brother, if he would do it right after the baby was born or wait until the baby was a toddler. (23.) Emphasis retained The narrator is a dominated, marginalised figure in this household. She therefore operates as de Certeau says of the ordinary man, under the structures and strictures of the familial space, in “force-relationships” (xix) with subjects of will and power – in this case Kambili‟s father. Kambili and her marginalised brother Jaja, have to find ways of operating and speaking, as tactics that do not, as de Certeau says, rely on space, but on propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogenous elements (xix. Hence speaking with our spirits as the narrator calls it, defines her position of otherness and yet of creativity and resistance. Telepathy becomes an art that defamiliarises what is practico-sensory, as depicted in this narrative statement “I wish we still had lunch together, Jaja said with his eyes (22) Emphasis retained 63 It is within the everyday that events, seen as spectacular, as the incident on Palm Sunday help to illuminate the fact that what is spectacular has its basis in the routine. Purple Hibiscus‟ detailed attention to the everyday is referenced from time to time by the memory of spectacular events like the coups that were regular events during the historical time in which this narrative is set. 59 Yet spectacular as the coups may appear to be, and as Kambili references them, they are imbricated in the ordinariness of family time It was during family time the next day, a Saturday, that the coup happened. Papa had just checkmated Jaja when we heard the martial music on the radio, the solemn strains making us stop to listen. A general with a strong Hausa accent came on and announced that We had anew government. (24) Events such as the one above seem to break the monotony of daily life in the narrators life. They also reference normative political history in the milieu of everyday life, allowing the contextualisation of specific historical events by the narrator. What is interesting is the way allusions of ethnic politics are drawn from the consciousness of childhood. The naivety inherent in the recognition of Hausa accent speaking in the radio, references the politics of military governance in Nigeria, reflecting, for any astute historian, the “tripartitioning” of political consciousness into ethno-religious blocks during the colonial occupation and at the advent of flag independence in Nigeria. It also draws into sharp focus the consciousness of ethnic identity, as the reader is already familiar, at this point in time, that the narrator is a member of a middle class Igbo household in Enugu. There is a dimension of history that the memories represented in this narrative introduce the clichéd idea of a dovetailing of a familial experience and that of the nation. While it is worth pointing this out, it is not worth reducing Purple Hibiscus to an allegory of the The narrative is historically set in the period between 1985 and 1998, reflected in Kambili‟s memory project, which shifts back and forth, to the present, which at the last section of the novel, hints at the popular rumor at the time of Abacha‟s death they say he died atop a prostitute, foaming at the mouth and jerking (296-297). 64 Nigerian nation. It would definitely benefit this argument though, by pointing out the complex way the narrative references the macro-history of the Nigerian nation state in everyday life as narrated by the fifteen year old Kambili. Firstly, the events of the sociopolitical world are mediated, for Kambili, by her father, who owns a newspaper called Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|