Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Download 1.93 Mb. View original pdf
|
| The Standard that provides a voice of resistance against the military regimes, through the editor, a man called Ade Cocker. Ade Cocker is portrayed as a fearless editor who as the story unfolds, regularly gets detained and tortured. He is later killed by a parcelled bomb. 60 Secondly, and most interestingly, the decay of the state, the corruption, as well as the cycles of coups which should normally take on a spectacular dimension, in contrast to what we consider to be everyday events, have instead taken on the ordinary life of the nation-state. Hence as Kambili does insightfully reflect at the beginning of the text Jaja‟s defiance seemed tome now like Aunty Ifeoma‟s experimental purple hibiscus rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. (16) In the reflection above we see two apparently spectacular events within the rhythm of the narrators everyday life. However, her brothers defiance presents an unfamiliar spectacle, in comparison with the coup event and its riotous aftermath. By contrasting the colours green and purple, Kambili highlights the monotony of the riots that seem to be a routine activity after coups. The colour purple, of the hibiscus flowers here represents something exotic and unfamiliar, as she says a different kind of freedom…A freedom to be, to do (16). Ina sense then, Kambili outlines for the reader an inverted perception of what in her experience is a daily occurrence. Later, during the coup that happens at family time Papa Eugene gives a history of the vicious cycle of coups, in a manner that explains the ordinariness of the spectacle of these coups as well as a placid internalisation of these events within the national psychic consciousness 60 Ade Cocker‟s character in Purple Hibiscus, is modeled after an actual editor of Nigeria‟s Newswatch Magazine, Dele Giwa, who was allegedly killed by the Babangida regime, through a parcel bomb that was delivered to his house, allegedly bearing a State House seal. 65 Coups begat coups, he said, telling us about the bloody coups of the sixties, which ended up in civil war just after he left Nigeria to study in England. A coup always began a vicious cycle. Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk. (24) Hence what we have is an inversion of the spectacular as the everyday, in the macro- space of the nation-state. The cyclical nature of political turbulence presents a routine government-in-crisis, an “abiku nation as Ben Okri‟s protagonist Azaro calls it (1991:478). Ben Okri‟s Famished Road uses the spectacular and the surrealist style in defamiliarising the everyday, by rendering the spiritual in the physical and vice versa. The everyday, in Ben Okri‟s work is told through the twin matrices of a spirit world and a physical one, by Azaro, the child protagonist who straddles the two worlds. Ben Okri therefore defamiliarises the everyday, creating a spectacle of vision as the reader is transported into a world of jinn and all sorts of spirits that inhabit the physical world, unseen by ordinary humans. Okri‟s narrative technique basically domesticates the spectacular. Ina sense, the spectacular becomes pervasive in the daily life of the narrator Azaro. Moreover, the everyday in Okri‟s work is depicted as grotesque. The idea of the grotesque, relates to the project of defamiliarisation that we see in Purple Hibiscus. From a fundamentalist practice of religious ritual, the silence that pervades the narrators home allows for her imagination to wander. Through the violence meted out to her and other family members by her father, Kambili‟s consciousness of the silence here allows for the portrayal of a gothic topography (Mabura, 2008). This is shown when the narrator and her brother speak with their spirits as well as in expressions such as The off-white walls with the framed photos of Grandfather were narrowing, bearing down on me. Even the glass dining table was moving toward me (7). There is also the constant image of the dancing figurines throughout the narrative. The grotesque is achieved by the defamiliarisation of objects and pieces of furniture. The act of defamiliarisation of the objects is related to Brenda Coopers (b) notion of the material culture of postcolonial migrant writing. While it is not a material fetishism, it is the effect of a 66 diasporic consciousness that allows authors to migrate objects and memories, through their narratives across the continent to their presently diasporic places. Again this is the effect of nostalgia and a constant feeling of loss. These objects become synecdochs of homeliness and belonging because they represent aversion or slice of home, in the reality of imaginative memory. The narrator juxtaposes the macro and micro-spaces of the state and the outside world to that of the family in an interesting way. As a middle-class family, they are cloistered from the spectacle of the street, and at all times Kambili‟s contact with the world outside her home is fleeting – she always sees the world from inside her fathers car. She however, in the little moments she peeks outside, can sense the change the green leaves and the chanting, as well as the spectacle of guns and soldiers In later weeks, when Kevin drove past Ogui Road, there were soldiers at the roadblock near the market, walking around, caressing long guns. They stopped some cars and searched them. Once I saw a man kneeling on the road beside his Peugeot 504, with his hands raised high in the air. (28) Immediately, she draws our attention to the irreconcilable situation at home, as if to signal stability, while at the same time to leave a subtext that tells an ironically different narrative But nothing changed at home. Jaja and I still followed our schedules, still asked each other questions whose answers we already knew (29). However, Kambili goes onto mention that the only change here is her mothers pregnancy, and then typical of her precocious observation, she describes her mothers slowly distending belly covered by a red and gold embroidered church wrapper (28). This attention to the chromatic is a repeat of the metaphor that as we saw earlier, describes the startling red hibiscus flowers that began this trajectory of her memories. This metaphor is extended to describe the church altar which was decorated in the same shade of red as Mamas wrapper with red as the colour of Pentecost and the priest wearing a red robe that seemed too short for him (28). This metaphor is vividly portrayed, as colouring the 67 trajectory of the memories invoked by the startling red hibiscus flowers growing outside her home in Enugu. In this particular church incidence, the redness of the colours the narrator describes eventually builds up to the reality of a violently induced miscarriage, therefore summing up the extension of this metaphor and depicting the trauma of daily existence for the narrator. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|