Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| The Opposite House follows a narrative structure that is informed by the scattered consciousnesses, histories and heritages of the protagonist Maja. The narrative structure is deliberately disjointed in texture and mobile in thoughts, references, hints and scattered historiographies. Maja‟s sense of disjuncture is captured in her scuttled thought process and stream of consciousness, which is portrayed in her own awareness of the tyranny of diasporic movement I was seven years old when I came here. I have come to think that there‟s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them them down sic with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. (12) This fragmented moment occasioned by movement shows how diasporic identities are constructed as processes of becoming. Mobility occasions cultural dynamism and identity tensions and struggles. It is a culturally destructive but also constructive process. The diasporic subject is at an intercultural, multicultural and transcultural space defined by Bhabha‟s (1994) underscoring of this third space as a culturally potent yet disruptive space to national cultures and spatio-temporalities. However, Bhabha signals to the solidarities that can be fashioned out of this diasporic space of difference so that migrants, immigrants, colonials and postcolonials create a minority discourse at the frontiers of national boundaries and spaces, which always disrupt the homogenous empty time ascribed to the nation by Benedict Anderson (1991). 287 In Maja‟s skittered and disjointed consciousness, there is a collage of references and hints that portray the liminal cultural space she inhabits. References and hints are made to Catholic Saints (12), Cuban History (9), German philosophers (12), Ghanaian cuisine (20-21) and Afro-Cuban religious and slave histories (23-25) as defining the protagonists liminal and hybrid epistemological, historical and cultural makeup. Moreover, it is interesting the way language is portrayed as a synecdoche to continental topographies Mami sat with me then and told me again, with long pauses as she moved the ideas she remembered from German to English. When she prays to the saints for intercession, her Spanish is damaged and slow because she is moving her Thoughts from Africa to Cuba and back again. (12) The Opposite House is therefore underlined by a methodology of mobility, with the narrative style portraying highly mobile thoughts, memories and histories. Diasporic identities as portrayed here are constantly underlined by creativity, by politics of aesthetics to borrow Jacque Ranciere‟s (2006) words. The narrative draws for instance on religious slave histories as temporalities that are hidden, silenced and always defined by anaesthetic artifice of syncretism, adaptation and assimilation in essence a politics of existential negotiation that portrays the aesthetic and narrative spirit of The Opposite House. I will quote at length, how Oyeyemi portrays these historiographies: The slaves in Cuba learnt to recognise their gods when they saw ripped white bed sheets, forked scraps of wood, overturned tin buckets. These things marked places where mass could be celebrated. If you still knew who you were, you had to keep it a secret. The gods hid among the saints and apostles and nobody perceived them unless they wanted to it didn‟t take as much as people had thought for Catholicism and Yoruba to fuse together. The saints intercede for us with God, who must despise us with Olorun who, being a 288 darker side of God, possibly despises us more. A painting of a saint welling holy tears and the story of an Orisha teach you the same thing – if you cry for someone, it counts as a prayer. (25) Maja takes on this Afro-Cuban historiography as instructive of historical affirmation, foregrounding silenced heritages at the core of her fragmented sense of identity. The religious tenor of these histories is useful for navigating diasporic landscapes of identity its visibility in the material cultures, practices and memories of Santeria religion, practiced by her mother, has been at the centre of scholarship on Afro-Cuban identities George, 1993; Falola & Childs, 2004; Bial, 2004; Holloway, 2005). The middle passage of the gods as Brenda Cooper (2009) calls it, connects the worlds that Maja belongs to – Lagos, Habana and London, which are metonymic of the triangular slave trade – the black Atlantic – and therefore endowing Maja with a transnational historical genealogy. The mobile histories, genealogies and heritages are the reservoir that Oyeyemi draws onto construct a narrative structure that is as confounding as it is bewildering a labyrinthine narrative structure that reflects the multiple consciousness of Oyeyemi as a diasporic subject. Brenda Cooper makes the point that the use of language in The Opposite House is important in portraying for us the multiple cultures, histories and tongues (2009:108) that Oyeyemi has inherited. One can also see a shift in the dimensions of diasporicity, portrayed in Oyeyemi‟s oeuvre in The Icarus Girl, she explores the idea of Africa, from a migrant first generation genealogy of Jess‟s maternal parentage. The Opposite House takes us further, to a more historically complex notion of diasporicity with first generation Afro-Cuban migrants in London. White is for Witching takes on a white subjectivity as its organising consciousness. The complexity of representing competing influences, histories and genealogies of this Afro-Cuban immigrant family, is reflected in the labyrinthine narrative structure of The Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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