Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| 4.4 Conclusion The sons, uprooted from the domesticity of their families, therefore seek their independence through reifying sexual difference. They have intricate connections between economic pursuits, gender identity and the contemporary culture they are trying to negotiate around Eze Chielozona (2005) refers to this as Cosmopolitan solidarity with protagonists attempting to negotiate transculturality.” The father-son dyad acts as a template to problematise the idea of genealogy, teleology, and origins that engender a postmodern sense of authority and legitimacy for fatherhood and for the father figure. The sons in Abani‟s works are not archetypes, this is due to contemporary realities they are living in, where the traditional markers of identity held as definitive of the self are torn down and demystified and replaced with alternative ones. They, unlike daughters do not have a sentimental disposition to their fathers, whom they, ab initio, demystify as 148 Abani uses the popular myth of origin of Los Angeles as the city of angels through the protagonists vision of the Angel Gabriel, acting as his conscience and something like a guardian angel. Blacks long term project throughout the text is also to paint a distorted image of the Queen of Angels of Guadalupe as described in the text, related to the actual Mexican origin of the formation of Los Angeles as a city. 232 insufficient as sources to refer to, in dealing with the multicultural realities they face. Also, unlike the daughters, they have a teleological order of inheritance and therefore are not destined to occupy an ambivalent space within familial genealogy. They cannot afford luxury for patriarchal sentiment, for their world is functional yet fraught with infinite alternatives, possibilities and potentials beyond the grasp of their sexualised identities. Therefore, the idea of false fathers is a relevant revelation for the daughters in their fathers houses, as well as the sons. Yet for the sons, it is iconoclastic, by breaking the myth of masculinity because they confront the orthodox structure of identity that transcends the intangibility of genealogy. Their experience of the multicultural cities of Lagos and Los Angeles is more direct, their senses of the self face a more intense battle against fragmentation and tolerance/acceptance of sexual difference is conspicuous in their process of identity construction. The contemporary postcolonial and postmodern condition as we see in Adichie, Atta and Abani‟s works is consumed more by the sons than the daughters, reflected in their performance of sexual difference through their transsexual, bisexual and transvestite dispositions. |