Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

289 Dickinson, so that The Opposite House takes on the eccentricity of Dickinsonian poetry, which as Cooper demonstrates, is defined by the metamorphosis of reality, magic and allegory, and the razzmatazz of narrative structure. Oyeyemi uses mythopoetic language here, drawing from a reservoir of Afro-Cuban, European and Yoruba pantheons and the influence of Euro-American literary traditions, to come up with a narrative structure that defies interpretative regimes, destabilising aesthetic regimes that lay claim to specific spatio-temporal historiographies. The language used is metonymic of material cultures from variant cultural spheres, words are drawn from Yoruba, German, Spanish and Afro-
Cuban Creole to describe literary influences, religious historiographies, cuisines, slang words of affection, myths, legends and philosophies. This reservoir reflects Maja‟s hybrid worldview and scurrying thought process. She has been brought up amidst variant cultural practices that range from the worship of Yoruba gods, to observing Catholic rituals. The Yoruba pantheon coexists, in animist fashion, in her parents house (35-37). On the other hand, the somewhere house where Greco-Roman and African deities coexist also implicitly connects with the real house where Maja stays, in slanted and oblique ways. Yemaya Saragua, the deity of the ocean, the essence of motherhood and protector of children, whose evolved versions exist in varied nomenclature across the Caribbean and America, is perhaps vaguely personified by Maja, whose name is a derivative of Yemaya. Yemaya stands as a symbol of a maternal genealogy, which is drawn from along relationship of priesthood that runs through Maja‟s maternal genealogy But then perhaps my mothers family is favoured. My great-grandmother,
Bisabuela Carmen, was a female babalawo, a Santeria Priest) Emphasis retained As Maja‟s middle name is Carmen, she carries this maternal genealogy. It contains genealogical importance, supplemented by the oral tales that abound in her maternal ancestry. These tales are carried down through the female members of the family in a griot-like manner

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Mami‟s apataki tales aren‟t only about the gods they flow and cover her family too, her memories place a mantle around Bisabuela Carmen, whose namesake I am. (37-38) The tales function in finding connections between the gods and humans, as with Maja‟s great-grandmother wrestling with the Yoruba god Chango, in away similar to Jacobs wrestling with God in the Old Testament of the Bible
Chango broke both of Carmen‟s arms and a leg, sparing her her life because she surprised him – her boldness surpassed humanity. But Chango was wary ever afterwards of Carmen‟s sharp nails and deep bite. (37) The practice of Santeria provides the connection between the terrestrial and celestial, whenever someone is possessed with a particular deity, like the incident above. But perhaps the most symbolic connection between Maja‟s family and the somewhere house is the portrayal of intra-deity coexistence in the somewhere house and the practice of Santeria by Maja‟s mother. The narrative of the somewhere house relates to the coexistence of Yoruba and Greco-Roman gods. The goddess Yemaya Saragua is made to coexist with Proserpine (from Greco-Roman Patheon), in a tense metaphysical environment that symbolises maternal genealogies invariant mythologies of African and European origin. The juxtaposing of mythological beliefs and practices, allows fora discourse on differences and similarities as nodal points of identity-making. As observed in The Icarus Girl, Jess benefits from the experience and consciousness of seemingly contrastive discourses of subjectivity – she is caught, in her self-reflexive subjectivity at that third space between modern psychology and the Yoruba myth of abiku and twin childhood. In The Opposite House, Oyeyemi situates this discourse in a more complex space, in which the meta-fictional structure that she begins within The Icarus Girl is

291 complicated by intra-deitic mythopoeia, something that is concomitant to the immigrant
Afro-Cuban sense of identity represented by Maja‟s family in The Opposite House. Familial genealogy in The Opposite House is historicised in the travelling mytho- religious practices, rituals and customs. What we have, in the form of the actual practices of Santeria and the narrative of the somewhere house is a historiographic processing of mythical and religious identities that are informed by transcontinental experiences and consciousnesses. In other words, genealogies, histories, customs, practices and rituals, which are the specifics of the process of identity-making, are defined by travelling myths and legends. The idea of travel, mobility and movement is an underlying analytic in the identity discourse going on in The Opposite House. The narrative takes on a complex subjectivity, as the voices of slave history, carried orally via Maja‟s maternal genealogy are tempered by the forces of the present – spatio-temporal locations (which carry their own sense of history. In other words, there is a spatio-temporal disjuncture occasioned by what Linda Hutcheon (1988), in examining postmodernism has referred to as the present past where the past is interrogated from the subjective positions of the present, because of the limiting access to the past. Maja finds herself in a position of disjuncture, having to be conscious of her scattered spatio-temporal experience – Cuba and London, genealogical slave history and her migrant present. At the same time, being an Afro-
Cuban also means having to engage with a mythical and ideational experience of Africa, specifically Yoruba origins, which come with a different spatio-temporal status. One could therefore trace three levels of discourses that Maja is trying to negotiate. The first and primary one is related to the chronotopes of her childhood, signified by the rupturing tyranny of movement – Cuba and London. The second and genealogically immediate one has to do with the Cuba of her parentage and grand-parentage. Portrayed in her maternal genealogy, this is found in the material cultures – in the rituals, customs and practices of Santeria religion and the maternal line of priesthood that she acknowledges. The third level of discourse goes back to the annals of diasporic history.
Maja shares this sense of history with a black Atlantic diaspora across Europe and the Americas. This is the transcontinental history which traces its spatio-temporal co-

292 ordinates in the land of Africa and the mobile slave ship. Cutting across these levels of discourse is the notion of Black subjectivity that as Michelle Wright (2004) underlines can be examined as a signifier in the discourse of identity for people of African descent in Europe and America. As a signifier, the notion of Blackness according to Wright is self-conscious of essentialisms that bracket it with the notion of race or culture, an argument that Gilroy (1987; 1993) emphasises in relation to Black British identities.
Maja in The Opposite House is struggling to reconcile the different notions of blackness, having grownup in the mestizo culture of Afrocubanismo and later migrating to London. Her childhood in Habana, characterised by creolised histories, cultures, customs and practices, was also defined by a mythic and ideational relationship to Africa, which was also mediated by the slave history known to her from her maternal genealogy. In contrast, London presents different senses of black subjectivity. As a less creolised cultural landscape, black subjectivity in London is defined along the continuum of essentialised
Caribbean-ness (as Gilroy‟s Aint no Black in the Union Jack demonstrates) and a migrant Continental “African-ness.” These categories collapse the notions of race, culture and nation together, something that Gilroy‟s (1987) project aims to (de)emphasise. In London, Maja constructs her subjectivity, against a multitude of others with varied national significations. At her schoolgirls from Africa perform their varied nationalisms in various symbolic practices girls with perfectly straightened hair and mellow gospel voices that changed the sound of the sung school Mass girls who had (or pretended to have) Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba,
Chiga, Ganda, Swahili. sic They built a kind of slang that was composed of slightly anglicised words borrowed from their pool of languages. (95) These symbolic markers, variant allegiances to African nationalities are part of the performance of nationalism in this diasporic space. Despite their disparateness, they are creolised into an anglicised slang that while seemingly vogue, puts Maja at the cross-

293 roads of identification (96-97). Confronted by the diasporic reality of the ideational and mythical Africa via the African girls in her school who perform their nationalisms in various ways, she realises the essentiality of Blackness as a signifier of her identity I strip to my underwear and study myself in the mirror it is a bronzed sorrel woman with a net of curly hair who looks black, and she does not look Jamaican or Ghanaian or Kenyan or Sudanese – the only firm thing that is sure is that she is black.
(98) While this notion of blackness transcends its geographical signifier (Africa, it is ascribed a transcontinental and transnational ontology In my blood is a bright chain of transfusions Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos – the Cuban Lebanese (98). Maja finds herself reflecting on the notion of blackness as an essential signifier of her identity in London. Yet her sense of being in London is disturbed by her childhood in Cuba, before migrating to London. The skittering narrative pattern and the uncoordinated thoughts skip from one spatio-temporality to another, transgressing the logic of coherence. Temporal patterns in The Opposite House follow a particularly disjointed trajectory. Maja speaks predominantly in the present perfect tense, describing events in present day London. There is however the constant interruption of narrative threads from the past. She picks up a particular thread, abandons it halfway through while going into a historical detour. The narrative therefore follows a disjointed trajectory, where the present is imbricated with the past. This kind of fiction, which Linda Hutcheon (1988) calls “Historiographic metafiction” is defined by a present past where self-reflection is complicated by historical events. The narrative of childhood as previous chapters have tried to underline, follows a present past. In chapter two, the notion of memory in the narrative of and about childhood is seen as influenced by the autobiographical self-reflection of a childhood past and the identity anxieties of an authorial present. Maja is therefore caught at this point of disjuncture, as a character that bears a vague semblance to Oyeyemi‟s own migration to

294 London at the age of four and also lays claim to the histories of Cuba which in turn trace back to a mythic and ideational relation to Africa, connected through slave history.
Maja‟s childhood is therefore the past of her present, as she is constantly haunted by a particular blighted memory of Cuba – while under the table at her family‟s going away party, where she becomes amnesic. Cuba assaults her mental schema, like a traumatic memory, which she ascribes the metaphor of the scalding oil of a pan (12). These histories, of her blighted Cuban memory of childhood, of the slave genealogy she descends from become intrusive of her present. These become contents of intense self reflection, because present day London does not allow her to deal with where she comes from. And so there is the constant self-reflection. Up to that point, her narrative seems to be stagnantly stuck at a present that is still grappling with the past. The present seems depthless and incoherent. Maja‟s present day London is therefore stuck in the past of
Habana, of her childhood. The present is precarious and superficial, its emptiness is avoid filled with Maja‟s constant self-reflection. Cuba and Habana are very much alive in the Santeria her mother practices, in the stories her father tells her about the illusions of Cuban revolution (206-
7). In fact, the history of Santeria religion and its practice in Cuba has been at the heart of the evolution of the notions of race, culture and nation and their isms – racism and nationalism. Christine Ayorinde (2004) traces the emergence and submergence of Santeria religion in Cuba‟s socio-cultural and political history as it was marginalised and then centralised at different points of political and cultural revolution in Cuba.
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Cuba comes to Maja in disjointed pieces of memories, embodied in the constant sobbing of her mother and the sudden appearance of Magalys, a childhood friend who apparently witnesses Maja‟s hysterical moment under the table during her family‟s going away party
(167-169). Maja therefore hankers fora childhood she does not remember coherently, it comes to her in fragments of memory. Therefore, she seems to live in the struggle against the amnesia of her Cuban memory and the reality of present day London. Yet her sense of self is also portrayed as anchored and scattered in black Atlantic slave history which For further details, see Christine Ayorinde (2004) Santeria in Cuba Tradition and Transformation pp.
209-230.

295 converges at Cuba, the country of her birth. Childhood for Maja becomes a stubborn and interrogative memory that invades her mental schema, wanting to be resolved. She hankers to get this memory back, I need my Cuba memory back, or something just as small, just as rich, to replace it (169). At the end of the text, Maja prepares to go back to Cuba, much to her fathers exasperation. While Maja is engaged in a process of self-discovery, her mother holds onto her practice of Santeria religion as a process of self-identification. Her father on the other hand detests this religiosity, preferring an intellectual secularism and a distance away from his experience of Cuba. For Maja, Cuba is a ghost that haunts her, in her redefined senses of black subjectivity in anew country – in the practice of Santeria religion by her mother and the slave history that is suddenly foregrounded not only through the practice of Santeria religion, but also through anew sense of black subjectivity specific to her new home in London. Her sense of the self is fragmented as that of Jess in The Icarus Girl. Both Jess and Maja construct themselves through meta-fictional narratives that engage the constructed-ness of historical genealogies, with the ultimate aim of living simultaneously multiple lives and occupying multiple spaces and times. These mythopoetics underline the multiple narratives at play, allowing Oyeyemi to draw from diverse cultural worlds – myths, legends, poetry, fiction and history. Mythopoetics, allow Oyeyemi‟s narrative to be self-reflective, to question the “meta-narratives‟
(Lyotard, 1984) of identity, by providing alternative narratives that displace, fragment and transgress boundaries of identification. These narratives parody the meta-narratives that essentialise identities. To understand Maja‟s fragmented self, we have to engage with the mythopoetics of the somewhere house in which an intra-deity mythological discourse is going on and which mirrors, as the term opposite implies, Maja‟s complex sense of genealogy and identity. Oyeyemi portrays diasporic childhoods as fragmented narratives of the figures (Jess, memories and images (Maja). These childhoods seem to take on postmodern attitudes, outlooks and experiences because they are self-conscious and self-reflective of the pluri-dimensionality of their genealogies and histories. Indeed,
Oyeyemi‟s fiction questions coherence, linearity and teleology. It defies attempts at

296 classification as it borrows from Oyeyemi‟s own multidimensional, experiential, mythic, ideational and historical heritages.

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