Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Foregrounding the Concept of Childhood in Contemporary Nigerian
Download 1.93 Mb. View original pdf
|
| 1.2 Foregrounding the Concept of Childhood in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction In view of the foregoing, childhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction can be seen as a world constructed to deal with diasporic anxieties, consciousnesses and experiences. It is a set of ideas that preoccupies the discursive terrain of the contemporary works outlined above. Therefore, the notion of childhood is explored through the figures of children in these works, as well as the images and memories of childhood from adult protagonists. These various elements are portrayed as constructed through spaces, places, times, genealogies, traditions, heritages and legacies that point to anxieties of identification in contemporary Nigerian fiction. In this way, childhood becomes a discourse where new forms of identities are being represented and which area product of mobile bodies, histories, memories and times on the part of this group of writers. It demands therefore that this study engages with the notion of childhood not just as a theme but as an idea which helps to construct new ways of identification. In this manner, the works selected for this study present particular dimensions that help to locate childhood as an intriguing and complicated notion in the examination of contemporary forms of identity as represented in the fiction to be studied. Firstly, while childhood has been used in creative and imaginative expression in African literature, a sustained critical examination of it, as will be shown soon is lacking. In Nigerian literature, critical works have been dealing with the challenge of Nigerian nationhood through aspects like gender, class, ethnicity and religion. While the point of focus for these issues has remained from the perspective of adult figures (as also represented in the creative works, the memories, images and sensibilities of the child have remained subsidiary to the larger issues. Thus, it is time the discourse of childhood came of age as a substantial area of critical analysis in Nigerian literature to explore the themes issues affecting identity today. 10 Secondly, the works studied here provide a critical impact as new writing that is diasporic in context and consciousness. These works break fresh ground in a post-independent and post-military Nigerian context. 11 Their imagination of the memories of childhood and use of child figures demonstrates the possibility of engaging with fragmented histories simultaneously through conjunctions, disjunctions and mutability foregrounded by the process of growth that is definitive of childhood. Childhood memories and symbolic figures have helped these works to transcend the polemics of nationalism that have been an imaginative and critical pastime in Nigeria literature, yet achieving the possibility of footnoting them as part of the process of growing up. Therefore, childhood is instructive in justifying the need to approach the construction of post-independent, post-military imagination in Nigeria through a diasporic context, consciousness and experience. Thirdly and of historiographic importance, this new writing from the diaspora is preceded by an already established writing in African literature. In this way therefore, while this study is not directly engaged in mapping out generations of writing, it draws upon an existing historiography specifically related to childhood, to locate the different writers in this study, positioning them at points of intersection and departure in the representation and criticism of the discourse of childhood. It is in this sense that in an interview after the publication of Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie says that the work is supposed to provoke conversation”. 12 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always invoked conversations between her works and those of Achebe and other earlier writers. In fact, Adichie strategically links herself with Achebe in her first text Purple Hibiscus, where there is an intertextual relationship. 13 Adichie‟s other text Half of a Yellow Sun is also significant because it deals with the Nigerian civil war, a topic that has been a preponderant theme in past fiction, nonfiction and criticism. Adichie not only pays tribute to early works on Biafra I use the term post-military hereto refer to the end of Nigeria‟s long period of military rule marked by the third republic of Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 after the death of the last military ruler Sani Abacha. 12 Refer to Adichie‟s interview My Book should provoke a Conversation - http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/bookshelf/book-reviews/my-book-should-provoke-a-conversation- chimamanda-ngozi.html (accessed 30 January This is through the striking similarities between Eugene Achike, Okonkwo and Ezeulu. Purple Hibiscus invites this comparison through the invocation in its first page of Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart through the statement Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère.” 11 but also insists that Biafra is still a terrain of many silences and in light of this, she strategically draws upon the early works on the topic. 14 Adichie‟s works are therefore important in aiding continued conversations, imaginatively and critically with previous works, giving them currency and influence in contemporary imagination. Adichie‟s works eventually create and extend critical trajectories in Nigerian, literature while dealing with contemporary diasporic experiences. Helen Oyeyemi‟s fiction portrays multiracial and multinational childhoods) in the context of diaspora. One of the styles that she uses, which foregrounds her articulation of complex diasporic identities is the combination of the animist, the magical and the real. Her fiction is experimental intone and structure, as seen in The Icarus Girl where she uses the abiku motif. This motif is complicated by racialised cultural difference and the frustration of the child protagonist in not neatly fitting into any of the black or white racial categories. In this story, Jessamy Harrison who is eight years old has never been to Nigeria (her maternal antecedents, but is haunted by the fact that she is half Nigerian. Her journey to Nigeria unveils a twin spirit by the name TillyTilly and from this point, the magical world opens up for her, as she not only moves from her intermediary cultural space but also between the spirit and real world propelled by TillyTilly. Oyeyemi‟s second novel The Opposite House attempts to engage with transnational and multilingual identities. 15 Seffi Atta has an interesting perception of the family as a grand narrative. When she was growing up, she points out that the prospect of wives seeing their in-laws was more dreadful than soldiers picking somebody up for detention. 16 Her text, Everything Good Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|