Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| hybridity. They become grounds for experimentation and syncretism, mixing and rupturing boundaries by the movement both across and along markers and boundaries of identification. Transcending their familial, ethnic, national and continental zones of identification, these childhoods of contemporary Nigerian fiction are markers of the contemporary In ascribing to them the label contemporary this study is, first of all informed by their temporal coevality in relation to publication, but also in the spatio- temporal locations of the narratives themselves. Secondly, this study is informed by a problematic sense of the notion of generation As pointed out in chapter one, this study does not set out deliberately to characterise or substantiate the notion of a generation In fact, the activity of categorisation is an uneasy one, in light of how tracing the trajectories of continuities can displace basic assumptions of exclusivity. However, the examination of the notion of genealogies in chapter four is more important in drawing our attention to not only contemporary Nigerian fictions role in the family of African literature but also to the specifics of identity formation through the micro-relationships of fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. In this way, the chapter delineates alternative androgynous genealogies by signaling connections in the fiction of Chimamanda Adichie to both masculine and feminine strands of Nigerian and African literature. In this sense, the notion of genealogies is a more substantive concept for defining contemporary childhoods sense of identity as represented in the works studied here. It is the term preferred in this study to the more conventional yet controversial one generation Indeed, Garuba (2005:51) warns us of the pitfalls of categorisation and periodizing. 177 Thirdly, this study is also informed by the notion of the contemporary in the Bakhtinian (1981) sense, of the novel as something of our time but which as Bakhtin points out is defined by the notion of process, with the novel or the new as something related to For further details see Harry Garuba (2005) The unbearable lightness of being Re-figuring trends in recent Nigerian Poetry pp. 51-72. 302 becoming In this case Bakhtin defines the novel as a “genre-in-the-making.” In this study‟s context of the novel of childhood, Bakhtin‟s idea of the contemporary applies therefore to the processual nature of childhood, as a time of becoming Indeed, the experimental, the mobile, the shifting and nomadic, attributes defining not only childhood but also the diasporic Nigerian writers portrayal of childhood images, figures and memories, is the ideational continuum within which we can plot our notion of the contemporary The notion of the contemporary therefore, in referring to temporal coevality, to the tracing of genealogies through micro-relationships, and in signifying the ontology of childhood as experimental, mobile and shifting, points to complex identity-making processes reflected in the fiction studied here. The notion of the contemporary extends conceptual frameworks and reading practices in this study. While it might from the outset carry nominal significance, it signals to the present this moment or the recent and therefore raises questions about substantiating what is novel or recent about it. In pointing out diasporic contexts, consciousnesses and subjectivities as informing these works, this study foregrounds the postcolonial diasporic experience as definitive of this present, recent time of childhood as portrayed in contemporary Nigerian fiction. In this way, the postcolonial experience is extended into the framework of the postmodern. In delineating conceptual frameworks for what they calla new generation of Nigerian writing, Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton (2005) aptly say The first obvious theoretical implication is that we are dealing essentially with texts born into the scopic regime of the postcolonial and the postmodern, an order of knowledge in which questions of subjecthood and agency are not only massively overdetermined by the politics of identity in a multicultural and transitional frame but in which the tropes of Otherness and subalternity are being remapped by questioning erstwhile totalities such as history, nation, gender 303 and their respective symbologies. (15) Adesanmi and Dunton point to a synergy of the postcolonial and postmodern as a regime that can conceptualise and foreground ideas on subjecthood and agency. Indeed, the discourse of identity continuously grapples with subjecthood and agency. In contemporary Nigerian fiction, the question of identity is grappled with through the subjectivity and agency of childhood. Childhood is portrayed in the micro-politics of images, memories and figures. It finds its agency in these elements, helping it define a discourse of its own, which questions what Dunton and Adesanmi call totalities such as history, nation, gender and their respective symbologies.” In this way, childhood is examined as a quest for agency and its subjectivity is foregrounded through the memories, images and figures found in the works studied here. In this study, childhood is conceptualised as mediating the postcolonial and the postmodern. Located in between these two conceptual frameworks, it shares the discursive vision of postcolonial discourse by foregrounding regimes of totality and domination, and the attitude of postmodern aesthetics by remapping the totalities, collapsing boundaries of exclusivity and enacting what Appiah (1992:235) calls the multiplications of distinctions Therefore, childhood shares the marginality of postcolonial subjectivity in discursive practices and the subjective attitude of the postmodern – as the “ex-centric,” in Linda Hutcheon‟s (1988) words. Linda Hutcheon puts it succinctly by pointing out postmodernism‟s vision of questioning autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalization, system, universalization, center, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness, origin (57). The micro-politics of childhood as examined in this study therefore produce the alternative through a subversive logic of dialogue with spaces, places, memories, histories and times of growth which are defined by the normative micro-relationships with fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and extended family members. In engaging with the normative read “adultist”), childhood provides a subversive subjectivity, an interrogative memory, an alternative archive and creates alternative genealogies that therefore place it within the postmodern position of constructing identities. 304 In examining childhood in relation to the notions of time and history, this study realises that the time and space of childhood, as explored in the fiction of Adichie and Abani fulfils several goals. Firstly, going back to childhood times is conditioned by the diasporic locations and consciousnesses of the writers, who as this study examines in chapter three, reconstruct their countries of the mind as places, spaces and times of their own childhood. Going back to childhood times and histories – to geographical times, reflects the need for the postcolonial migrant writer to begin reconstructing their sense of dasporic identity. Indeed, the nostalgia fora geographical time of childhood is revealed in Adichie‟s experience of not being home for five years, and how Purple Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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