Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

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4.2 In Her Father’s House The Sentimental Daughter in Purple
Hibiscus and Everything Good Will Come.
4.2.1 the ontology of fatherhood
We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is anew writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. Her experimentation with the dual mandate of English and Igbo in perennial discourse is a casein point. Timid and less competent writers would avoid the complication all together, but Adichie embraces it because her story needs it. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria‟s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made.
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This remark was made by Chinua Achebe, a man who is widely considered as the father of modern African Literature,
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upon the publication of Adichie‟s second critically acclaimed novel Half of a Yellow Sun. While this comment might sound like many others usually on the blurb of a newly published novel, its significance lies in the fact that Achebe is the doyen of the African literary creative canon. It is also significant because the civil war, for Achebe and Adichie, is a shared critical memory. Both are Igbos, but of different generations and therefore, they share a cross-generational desire to grapple with a memory that is critical in understanding their genealogy, not just as members of an ethnic Igbo nation but more specifically for Adichie, as part of familial genealogy.
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Thirdly, Adichie‟s works have often been linked intertextually with those of Achebe.
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The comments in the epigraph are crucial for Adichie not only because of the stature of See www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum
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See Ker Talpade Davids (1997) Modernism and the African Novel.”
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Adichie lost her grandparents and her parents lost property during the war – chapter two of this study deals extensively with this memory as traumatic and cultural.
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See Heather Hewett‟s Coming of Age Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voice of the Third Generation This notion of intertextuality, which connects Adichie‟s work to that of her forebear, can be seen as an implicit literary genealogy, found in the sentimental relationship between a literary father and daughter.

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Achebe‟s works in the African literary canon but also because of a strategic gesture of affirmation on the part of Adichie. In fact, the two writers are related through a coincidental historical convergence, which Adichie points out
Chinua Achebe and his family lived in Number 305 before we moved in. I realize now what an interesting coincidence it is that I grew up in a house previously occupied by the writer whose work is most important tome. There must have been literary spirits in the bathroom upstairs.
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This essay underlines the symbolic importance of the father in Adichie‟s imagination. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis Achebe is the symbolic father, who is the law and the letter.”
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The father represents what Adichie calls “Odeluora” which means, one who writes for the community – it is symbolic of the paternal ontology of the law. Indeed, if we recall, in Achebe‟s Umuofia in Things Fall Apart, wisdom and judgement was affirmed in many instances beginning with the expression as our fathers said
Achebe‟s remarks towards Adichie signals to us the sentimental relationship between a father and a daughter that we will explore in Purple Hibiscus and Everything Goodwill
Come. The protagonists, daughters in their fathers houses experience sentimentality which from a psychoanalytical understanding invokes readings about the politics of heterosexuality within the family. Moreover, the sentimentality between father and daughter has been described by Ingrid Walsoe-Engel (1993) as patterns of seduction that represent what another critic has called the daughters dilemma (Cohen, 1993).
Walsoe-Engel (1993) captures this dilemma and sentimentality through the idea that the father has a natural desire of possessing his daughter who equally wants to escape her fathers world, which she feels is confining her sexuality. The sentimental daughters See Adichie‟s essay The Writing Life where she remembers the desks – including her fathers – where she learned to write. Sunday, June 17, 2007; Page BW In Adichie‟s essay titled As a child, I thought my father invincible, I also thought him remote she points out that her father was given the title “Odeluora.” In this essay it is symbolic that the art of writing for her was developed on her fathers desk in his study room. In this case we seethe dimensions of symbolic, real and imaginary father implied in the essay.

191 dilemma is in this chapter contextualised in the realities of female childhoods in the contexts of postcolonial worlds. While psychoanalytic conceptions remain latent as theoretical underpinnings in examining gendered childhoods, their inward focus on the nuclear family constrains these conceptions to the notion of gendered identities. The multicultural world that these girlhoods are located demand that we break familial and even national spaces. These new postcolonial contexts or geographies of reading, allow us, as we will for instance see with Abani‟s works, to find useful the post-Freudian work of Stephen Frosh (1991; 1994). Let us begin with a short discussion of the political context of Adichie‟s and Atta‟s texts.

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