Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

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6.0 CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION
The child who was born, grew up, lived, and died in the same village or hamlet was less able to distance his adult from his immature self than the child who, having passed his early years on some remote farm, estate, or sheep station unidentifiable from the atlas, came later to roam among the great cities and capitals of the world. (Richard Coe, 1984:17) The most recent writers of childhoods appear to be addressing a concern that a shift has taken place, that instead of living in a multicultural world made up of easily identifiable cultures, we are living in a more fluid transcultural or even transnational world. Richard Priebe, 2006:50-51)
6.1 Identity and Childhood Negotiating the Postcolonial and Postmodern
The epigraphs above capture the theoretical framework and thematic concerns that this study has grappled within relation to the discourse of childhood. The discourse, as Coe points out is contextualised in the idea of mobility – the movement in time and space of the material – bodies and cultural artefacts – and metaphysical – histories, memories, images, myths, legends, aspects that are elemental in the construction of identity. Coe foregrounds the centrality of childhood in defining the diasporic adult self and its sense of identity. The notion of distance between an adult and its childhood self is mediated by the process of mobility and is therefore related to the idea of diasporicity. Mobility is a crucial analytic in this discourse of childhood, which in contemporary Nigerian fiction is defined by mobile memories, images and figures of childhood. Childhood in

299 contemporary Nigerian fiction is therefore a site where identity is negotiated for the contemporary diasporic Nigerian writer. The notion of identity, when influenced by mobility, has been referred to as nomadic Richard Priebe refers to the shift and fluid in relation to worlds of experience and cultures related to recent writers of childhood Therefore the nomadic, shifting and fluid world of childhood has the effect of redefining the notion of identity for the diasporic subject. While the idea of shifting, fluid and nomadic identities delineates diasporic subjectivity, it is also definitive of the ontology of childhood as a process. This ontology of childhood as a process points to it as a site for what Priebe refers to as the multicultural and “transcultural.” This means that childhood is a site where culture in its multiple and transient dimensions is negotiated, and therefore always in a process.
Priebe implies that recent writers of childhood are alive to the ways in which contemporary identities are constructed via shifting and fluid multicultural and transcultural worlds. It means also that these childhoods represented in fiction are at the pulse of recent and contemporary forms of identity. Therefore, they are part of the discourse that grapples with constructing contemporary identities. And thus childhood connects the diasporic to the ideas of the multicultural and transcultural, because it is mobile, shifting and fluid in its memories, images and figures. This study, while alive to the concept of diaspora, is positioned at a methodological confluence of reading the postcolonial and the postmodern. In fact, to ascribe the fiction understudy here as Nigerian, endows it with postcolonial frameworks of reference. I am aware of the problematic implications that this comes with, particularly with the danger of being labelled provincial, regional or even peddling the exotic (Huggan, 2001). Indeed the fiction itself, particularly Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun, which deals with the Nigerian civil war, seems to question the very entity called Nigeria. However, while the term is largely nominal and definitive, I use it whilst being aware of the anxieties of categorisation and the limitations that can arise out of it, while exploiting the notion of a particular experience related to a specific geography. The notion of experience is perhaps a prerequisite that specifies and particularises, without limiting interpretive frameworks

300 and the meanings that might come out of it. In specifying a Nigerian experience, the study invites postcolonial frameworks of reference and reading practices. This notion of experience refers firstly to the autobiographical, in relation to the authors of the fiction in this study living their childhoods in Nigeria before migrating abroad. This autobiographical element is reflected in the setting of their fiction in Nigeria. Chapters two and three focused on the autobiographical nature of memory, place and space in relation to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‟s fiction. Nsukka stands out as a country of the mind in this fiction, as well as a memory-place of Adichie‟s childhood. Secondly, the notion of experience is explored in its ideational and mythical dimensions in the fiction of
Oyeyemi, where Africa in general and Nigeria in particular form a mythic locus of
Oyeyemi‟s narrative, foregrounding Africa as a space and place to negotiate diasporic identities. In light of the foregoing, the ascription Nigerian in reference to these writers goes a little further than just being nominal, to carry some weight of specific experience. This regionally specific experience justifies the theoretical framework postcolonial in connecting this experience to a historical context of particular discursive practices. These discursive practices, traced back from the engagement with the notion of colonialism, are, in relation to this study, and in the words of Moore-Gilbert (1997:12) a set of reading practices [...] preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination This is the theoretical context, at a macro-level, of the experience of Nigeria. However, this experience and the history of its discourse, as chapter one delineates, follow not only the notion of colonialism, but also other macro-categories of class, race and gender. Moreover, these concepts have been mostly read in Nigerian fiction, in relation to the nation-state. Nevertheless, the nation-state produces what Richard Priebe reminds us – the multicultural and transcultural experience of other worlds occasioned by mobile childhoods. In other words, the specific experience of Nigeria is transcended, leading to a rupture of not only spatio-temporal boundaries but also of reading practices that go with it. In this way the postcolonial set of reading practices as discussed by Moore-Gilbert,

301 takes on the dimensions of the “creolised” or hybrid as Robert Young discusses
(2001). The childhoods represented in the works examined in this study become therefore sites of

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