Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Arrows of Rain (2000), a story about the excesses of military regimes. In 2003, Helon Habila‟s Waiting for an Angel, which also dealt with the brutality of military regimes in Nigeria, was published. It was followed in 2007 by Measuring Time, an archival rendition of a community in Nigeria. Two-thousand and three saw the much celebrated emergence of Chimamanda Adichie‟s Purple Hibiscus. It was followed in 2006 by Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel based on the Biafran war in Nigeria. 4 Alongside Adichie was Helen Oyeyemi who in 2005 published a novel titled The Icarus Girl. Oyeyemi went onto publish The Opposite House in June 2007 and White is for Witching in 2009. Seffi Atta‟s Everything Goodwill Come published in 2005, is a portrayal of childhood, Even though throughout this study I use the terms Biafran War and Nigerian Civil war interchangeably, I am aware that the terms might have contestable conceptual implications. My usage is nominal. 5 friendship and family in a context of military governance. It was followed by Swallow in 2007. Chris Abani‟s Graceland (2005) portrays the marginal economic spaces in the Lagos of the sands, through the experiences of a sixteen-year old protagonist. In 2007, Graceland was followed by The Virgin of Flames, which is set in Los Angeles. Other contemporary works include Uzodinma Iweala‟s Beasts of No Nation (2005), Akinwumi Adesokan‟s Roots in the Sky (2004), Jude Dibia‟s unbridled (2007), Segun Afolabi‟s Goodbye Lucille (2007), Sade Adeniran‟s Imagine This (2007) Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani‟s I Do Not Come to You By Chance (2010), Chika Unigwe‟s On Black Sisters Street (2009) and Unoma Nguemo Azuah‟s Sky High Flames (2005). Most of these authors write from their experiences of the diaspora or with a diasporic consciousness. Adichie, Oyeyemi, Atta and Abani – the writers selected for this study, saliently foreground the narrative of childhood. As we will see, while their selection in this study does not purport to assume synonymy or claim to be absolutely representative to the times, to Nigerian diasporic experience or to Nigerian literature, their foregrounding of the narrative of childhood, while variant and to some extent individually distinct, presents a case for examining the rising importance of childhood as a set of critical ideas dominating contemporary Nigerian fiction. They choose the novel as their genre of expression for the reason that their experience of different spaces and places requires a medium that can, as Seffi Atta says, allow them to fail. 5 As a form, the novel is considered important to them because it allows for multiple entries of narrative voices, for dialogue as well as grounds to challenge the idea of closure. Indeed, the literary theorist Bakhtin (1981:3) refers to the novel as a “genre-in-the-making” and as the genre of becoming (1981:22). He refers to the languages of the novel as those that are not only alive, but still young. These contemporary Nigerian writers concept of their time – its contemporaneousness – is defined by the process of growth and by childhood figures, images and memories. Thus, while the novel, allows them multiple points of entry and exit, it also affords them space to proceed with their literary growth. These writers, having grownup as children in Nigeria in the sands 5 Atta says Novels give me space to fail in an interview with Ike Anya titled “Sefi Atta: Something Good Comes to Nigerian Literature [ www.sefiatta.com/news .html accessed 20 January 2008] 6 experienced the brunt of the military regimes, including the oil boom of the sand bust of the s. It is against this background of childhood that these writers are writing while also presenting a different set of experiences from their older predecessors. Significantly, the experiences that come with migration and living their adult lives elsewhere influences these writers narratives of childhood. Moreover, the challenges that come with having to grapple with their country‟s troubled political and socioeconomic history as they grew up is affected by the different places they have traversed, which continuously demand them to renegotiate what it actually means to be a Nigerian. 6 It is instructive to indicate here that each of the writers selected for this study migrated for different reasons Adichie and Atta migrated to study and build professional careers, Oyeyemi migrated at the age of five, Abani migrated after political detention and coercion. Each of these explain the dis-junctural nature of diaspora – it not a homogenous and linear experience. The selected works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helen Oyeyemi, Seffi Atta and Chris Abani are instructive in examining the emergence of a (trans/multi)cultural and diasporic group of writers who, through their writing, are not only mapping out a particular Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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