Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Childhoods: Memoirs of growing up Global (2004) accounts are given about female and male childhoods. Another anthology edited by Franklin Abbott (1998) Boyhood: Growing up Male is important in representing gendered childhoods. I am aware of pointed attempts by some scholars at examining childhood at critical levels in African literary criticism and even as they are available, they are not sustained examinations but rather related examinations within other larger concerns. Ikonne, C, Oko, E, & Onwudinjo, P (1992) for example, edited a book titled Children and Literature in Africa. Apart from the concerns of children‟s literature and its criticism, there are essays in this volume that attempt at foregrounding childhood. In this book, Oguike examines the power of childhood in Francophone West African novels and points out initiation and the other totalising discourse of colonialism as markers defining childhood. Agbasiere examines childhood in the works of Buchi Emecheta with the aim of arguing a case for societal integration while pointing that the child is important in the continuity of the group […] the link between the past, the present and the future (127). Okereke looks at children in light of motherhood in a telling title Children in the Nigerian Feminist Novel. This criticism echoes Ezeulu‟s idea of the mask dancing where the child is used as a figure of transition but within bi-cultural and at best tri-cultural worlds that are characterised by colonialism as an overdetermining meta-narrative. Yet the overriding 18 concern for most of this criticism remains the representation of colonialism, feminism – in its debunking of patriarchy – and nationhood. The representation of childhood in Nigerian fiction can also be examined through the genre of the autobiography. An example is Wole Soyinka‟s Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981). The young Wole presents a more complex image of the child. Being the son of a headmaster, he gets education earlier than children his age. His exposure to the international media through, for instance, news about the Second World War and his initial movement out of the parsonages walls are important in helping him develop a mind of his own. Through the media, cultures acquire easy mobility, creating a transcultural world for the young Wole. It is the same movement from the city to the village that makes Achebe‟s childhood memorable in Home and Exile (2000) – that helps him rationalise the difference between tribe and nation. The years of military governance in Nigeria are significant in contributing to newer and interesting dimensions of childhood in Nigerian literature. During this time, the concept of the Nigerian nation took centre stage. Childhood is made an allegory of the growth, innocence, struggles for independence and fragmentation of the Nigerian nation. Therefore, the abiku/ogbanje (spirit-child) is reinvented to symbolise the fragmentation of this time. Ina special edition of African Literature Today (1988) themed Childhood in African Literature Jones traces the abiku/ogbanje motif from Ezinma the ogbanje in Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart, through the poems of JP Clark and Soyinka, to Ben Okri‟s Trilogy The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. Even though Jones‟s historiography of the child before and afterbirth is important in pointing to anew image of childhood, it does not dwell on childhood as an alternative and independent discourse other than an allegory of the nation, with the conclusion that the portrayal of childhood is ultimately about social responsibility. The other articles in this edition, pointed as they seem in discussing the notion of childhood, still construct it under the category of feminism (Uwakeh, 1998; Alabi, 1998). For others like Okolie, Inyama, 26 Abanime and Marete childhood is discussed under the notion of negritude. 26 Inyama, NF Beloved Pawns The Childhood Experience in the Novels of Chinua Achebe & Mongo Beti,” pp. 36-43. 19 Nonetheless, the abiku child as represented by Ben Okri heralds an important rupture of time and space in which the child is not the usual cultural icon, or merely a subject of cultural transition but an iconoclast. Azaro, the abiku child in Okri‟s much acclaimed The Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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