Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

279 grandfather Gbenga Oyegbebi, who immediately feels she needs exorcism from a
babalawo. The irony of course, is that while her grandfather urges her mother to pray and practice Christianity, he also performs the ibeji statue ritual to fulfil the cosmic balance of
Jess‟s abiku and twinning childhood worlds. The final part of the book culminates in the conflict caused by Jess‟s abiku ability to speak fluent Yoruba. Her mother, in an effort to shield her from the conflict raging between her father and her husband, decides to travel with her to Lagos and they (Jess and her mother) are involved in an accident, leaving Jess in critical condition. In her critical state, Jess inhabits The Bush. A wilderness. A wilderness for the mind
(298). The cosmological forces that have defined her life, central of which is the myth of twinning and abiku childhood become the main focus. She is here engaged in a cosmological peregrination, finding her way out of this bush to a perceived homeland This homing desire, takes on the dimension of not only a physical place but also a psychic place, where her personalities can find a home It was a wilderness here and Jess had been getting lost and beginning to despair that shed ever find her way out until someone came and bore her away on their back, away, but still not home. Not home, never home, no. (298-299) This person turns out to be her double, her twin sister Fern as Jess realised with a feeble, drowsy awe that she was looking at herself (300). The symbols of birth and death are juxtaposed into each other eyes full of the dark that shed found in the midst of the wilderness [...] the beautiful details of baby hair growing in as fuzz at the start of the forehead, away from the knotted hair (300). In this wilderness of the mind in this bush, her soul finds the balance from her twin sister who literally carries her through the liana of dried out, crackling vegetation (298). Strong enough to finally face her fears, she confronts TillyTilly, who by now is the nemesis. This is a final struggle for the self the psychic, spiritual and physical self that will signal a reconciliation of the multiple worlds struggling within her. When she finally gets back into herself the final image

280 we are left with is of her Icarus-self, flying up and up and up (302). The image we are left with at the end of the text, does not signify any final conclusion to Jess‟s endless identity struggle. She confronts her mythical and genealogical antecedents, meeting the other half of her soul (her twin sister Fern, in the bush, symbolised by the wilderness of her mind
Jess‟s childhood as portrayed in The Icarus Girl is a dialectical process. For Jess to find herself it means relentlessly flying in and out of imaginative landscapes, and battling with cosmological forces that date beyond her birth. Her psychic, spiritual and physical worlds are in conflict with each other. The silenced heritages of a different physical world haunt her present existence in London. Her abiku and twin childhood statuses present gulfs of conflict with her “half-and-half” racial status in London. Jess‟s childhood is therefore portrayed in the context of her identity conflict and defined by a struggle for self recovery, a journey away from self-immolation. She therefore has to live in that
“Pandora‟s box – an imaginative reality characterised by dreams, nightmares, visions, poetry and fiction to define her variant sensibilities. These different forms bear narrative and imaginative status.
Oyeyemi uses a syncretic meta-fictional structure that borrows from Greek, English and Yoruba myths and legends. Having outlined the autobiographical influences on The
Icarus Girl, it is logical to point out that the meta-fictional aesthetics employed, together with the syncretism of mythologies through magical and animist realism, is part of an identity politics that informs diasporic subjectivity. Oyeyemi uses childhood to enact the internal struggles of diasporic identity. Childhood is portrayed as a space, place and time of experimentation. Its imaginations, fears, desires and expectations, are played out in
The Icarus Girl, by foregrounding it as a site in which postmodernist attitudes and dynamics can be plotted with regards to diasporic subjectivity. Jess‟s biological and mythical heritages clash. The notion of race is complicated by the politics of heritage, myth and legend. The psychic dimension of diasporic subjectivity is portrayed as a site of vicious struggle, in Jess‟s childhood. But the power of imagination is also the navigational tool, in these postmodern childhoods.

281
Jess‟s brand of diasporicity is perhaps too stark in its differences – her mother is a first generation Nigerian immigrant and her father is English. While she might share Gilroy‟s
(1993) notion of “routedness” with a larger Euro-American African diaspora, generational difference in settlement provides something distinctive about her sense of diasporicity. This idea of a differentiated diaspora is dealt with by both Gilroy (1987;
1993) and Brancato (2008) as something that is implicit in the intra-politics of the Euro-
American diaspora.
174
Perhaps the polarities of Jess‟s heritage are more pronounced and their genealogies less mobile and more immediate. In the text however, her abiku status is foregrounded more, as a magnetic force, pulling her back to Nigeria, to tie up loose ends of the traditional Yoruba rituals. One could conclude that the history of her genealogy is more immediate as compared to the protagonist in Oyeyemi‟s second novel The Opposite
House.

Download 1.93 Mb.

Share with your friends: