Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
In the Name of the Son Critical Legitimacy of Fatherhood
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| 4.3 In the Name of the Son Critical Legitimacy of Fatherhood, Sonhood and Masculinities in Abani’s Graceland and The Virgin of Flames. 4.3.1 false fatherhood and critical legitimacy In his extremity many a man sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and to bring back the promised immunity. Thereafter any yam harvested in his fields was harvested in the name of the son (Arrow of God, 230). Using the father-son metaphor, the epigraph evokes Christianity‟s mad logic as the narrator refers to it in Chinua Achebe‟s first novel Things Fall Apart. It implies the death of tradition and traditional authority, the crisis of legitimacy and consequently, of the symbolic order of communal identity in the village of Umuaro. In Achebe‟s fictional villages of Umuofia and Umuaro, custom, tradition and law are validated by a constant oral invocation of what our fathers said However, Christianity now shifts symbolic authority and moral/spiritual capital to the son, who arrives in Umuaro with an alternative view which challenges the traditionally symbolic power base of the father and the established institution of fatherhood. Through Christianity‟s redefinition of worldviews, sonhood gains legitimacy by its provision of an alternative myth of identity in which traditional logic is overturned, with the Holy Trinity‟s” figurative blurring of the hierarchy between the father and the son In this particular Umuaro scenario, there is a proliferation of the narrative myths of belief and the traditional/customary ways of doing things, which challenges the wisdom historically embodied in the figure of the father. There follows a crisis of recognition and legitimacy of the father as the symbolic progenitor and embodiment of a discourse of knowledge, power and identity. The idea that the father represents a false genealogy becomes apparent, and is crucial for allowing the son to seek alternative sources that allow him to forge his own identity. 216 In light of Achebe‟s use of the father-son metaphor to represent and open up a discourse on the spread of colonial modernity in Africa, this section extends this metaphor by examining the representation of contemporary postcolonial worlds and identities in the fiction of Chris Abani – in how the father-son metaphor is used to (reexamine ideas of genealogy, inheritance and identity, through the gendered discourse of masculinity. In other words, the father-son metaphor represents a reservoir of ideas on knowledge, power and identity, including the debate around postcolonial subjectivities and the influence of global cultural movements. As in the earlier sections of this chapter, Mudimbe‟s (1994) argument on false fathers extends Achebe‟s debate further by positing that the discourse of the father consigns the child to a position of marginality. Mudimbe underlines the child‟s increasing feeling that it lacks honour and status within the real and symbolic world of its father. The child begins to question their hereditary identity, while seeking alternative ones that present an oppositional discourse which becomes ground for new legitimacy and power. As Mudimbe (1994:192) says, the child would like to affirm anew authority and the voice of new ways to come Mudimbe‟s idea of false fathers questions the myth or reality of the father as progenitor of discourse on knowledge, power and identity His thesis on the symbolic falsity of fatherhood is informed by a critical attitude towards the knowledge created and theorised about Africa, in politics, art, the sciences and all spheres that ascribe a critical tradition to Africa. As Mudimbe intimates, “Postcoloniality,” a definitive condition of post-independence Africa, is a creation of colonial patriarchy. Ina sense, postcolonial subjects inhabit a symbolic order that was legitimated at the juncture of political independence, in which the sons of independence took overpower from colonial patriarchy, going onto establish a vulgarised and pervasive patriarchy through such symbols as the father of the nation as Mbembe‟s (2001) trenchant critique depicts. In his earlier debate in The invention of Africa Mudimbe (1988) is critical of postcoloniality‟s claim to knowledge, tradition, art and identity. 217 Kortenaar (2007), like Mudimbe, posits that the generational conflict playing out through the metaphoric father-son relationship in the representation of postcolonial realities is found, at a macro level, in the illusion that power was handed over to the sons of independence This illusion reflects the strength of the traditional law and letter that founded the authority of the father figure. Kortenaar implies that this illusion, once unveiled, would lead to a desire for the death of the father and new legitimacy for sonhood. In recent times also, Muchemwa & Muponde (2007: xv-xxiii), argue specifically about the “fatherhood-paternity-manhood nexus in colonial and postcolonial contexts. As a discourse in Zimbabwean literature and society, this nexus underscores the importance of reexamining masculinities in such contexts as father-son relationships and in what Muponde in his essay refers to as narratives of self-making” 138 that herald new legitimacies for sonhood, away from traditional biological inheritances and paternal genealogies. Traditionally, sons in Africa are born in a teleological order, taking over the baton from their fathers – born in the name of the father However, the new realities in their postcolonial worlds provide for possibility and the invention of anew discourse in the name of the son much like Achebe puts it in the epigraph that began this section of the chapter. The son is caught in a conflict, at the crux of a critical memory of fatherhood and that of newfound sources of identity that seek to displace, even delegitimise the discourse of the father. Sonhoods in contemporary Africa confront a deluge of identity alternatives found in the increasing mobility of cultures and the worlds that come with them, via the pervasiveness of forms of mass media and other sources of new media, which create hyper-realities, spatial and temporal utopias, flights of imagination and landscapes of desires that challenge their genealogical forms of identity legitimation. See Robert Muponde (2007) Killing fathers p. 17-30. |