Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Hibiscus was crafted out of a sense of nostalgia. Secondly, the memories, and images of childhood provide us with an alternative experiencing of time and history. The worldview of childhood, as portrayed in the lives of Kambili, Ugwu and Elvis bring us back to the mundane and the ordinary. In this way, and in the words of Njabulo Ndebele (1991), childhood rediscovers the ordinary The works of Adichie and Abani therefore depart from the overdetermination of nation-state time and history. This is especially interesting, considering that these works are set at a time of military governance and moments of intense political crisis in Nigeria. Child characters, figures, images and memories provide us with an alternative experience of this unsettled time. While, for instance in Purple Hibiscus, we get the undertones of the military regimes through the radio and the sight of soldiers in the street, the discourse of freedom, liberty and agency is personalised and localised in the everyday struggles of Kambili, who seeks to get out of the patriarchal and silenced familial spaces of her own household. Kambili‟s account presents alternative memories of this time, which defamiliarise the ordinary by making us experience decentred forms of psychosomatic violence while seeing the monotony, as Kambili says, of the crowd waving green leaves chanted at government square after the coup (16). Kambili‟s project of memory therefore presents interrogative memory connected to that of the child protagonist Ugwu, in Adichie‟s second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Ugwu‟s houseboy status, presents an interesting parody and subjective consciousness in relation to that of the other voices of Richard and Olanna in the novel. Ugwu‟s childhood and houseboy status brings us 305 back to the domesticated experience of the Biafran war. More importantly, the meta- fictional and historiographic structure of the text, inscribes Ugwu into the bigger memory project, as he becomes an authorial voice, for reasons of expiation and healing borne of traumatic memory. In this meta-fictive and historiographic structure, Adichie problematises historical knowledge, while presenting alternative yet composite memories of the Biafran war through the houseboy Ugwu. Adichie‟s project of memory in Half of a Yellow Sun therefore cuts across the collective, cultural and traumatic, while at the same time presenting alternative spaces via that space of connection between the individual and the collective. On the other hand, Chris Abani‟s Graceland, through the teenage protagonist Elvis, presents an alternative experiencing of time and history through popular cultural memory. The popular cultural landscape of Lagos creates another landscape of desire for flight and escape, allowing the protagonist to live a fantastic and alternative existence mediated by television and video. This existence, defined by what Bhabha (1994) has called vernacular cosmopolitanism is a material culture of survival, on the margins of the city, but which problematises the “homogenous empty time ascribed to nation-state temporality. Thirdly, the narrative memory project, inscribed in the novel of childhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction, leads us to the notion of the archive. This study realises that the narrative memory form in the novel of childhood, while presenting alternative historical accounts through the world of childhood, also “refigures the archive Hamilton et al, 2002) in relation to its normative record-keeping processes. This argument is delineated at two levels. The first one is related to the role of the novel of childhood as a “self-archive” (Roberts, 2002), especially in relation to the postcolonial migrant writer (Cooper b. As a self-archivist, the novelist explores history and time from his/her subjective experience, but which is imbricated in complex ways, in that of the societal and collective. Ina sense then, the self-archive while connected to the orthodox archive by virtue of the novelist being apart of society, simultaneously problematises it. An example in this study is Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun, which, by reconstructing the narrative of the Biafran war at this point in time, complicates the literary historiography of the war. It does this by its temporal position of enunciation – 306 almost four decades since the event happened. 178 In this way, the text refigures this archive, by problematising spatio-temporal cartographies in not only the literary historiography of the war, but also of how Nigeria as a nation might want to map itself out at this point in time. This leads us to the second level, which realises the role of the novel in (re)narrating the nation-state by the power of reconstructed literary cartographies. Indeed, by reprising the theme of the Biafran war at this point in time Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun signals to a re-excavation of this traumatic memory and archive, while re-inscribing the memory as a cicatrix (Soyinka, 1996) in the contemporary Nigerian nation-state. 179 Adichie‟s novel signals to the “contemporaneousness” of this issue, which as we know in Nigeria today has a relatively residual presence in such civil society organisations as the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND. Perhaps further studies could be done on the relationship between the literature of the Biafran war and social movements such as the ones mentioned above. 180 It would be interesting for instance to seethe texts reception in relation to these social movements. In this way, interesting conclusions could be drawn about the contemporary Nigerian novel in relation to ethics, aesthetics and politics. In talking about the aesthetic and the political, this study posits that childhood is a site of experimentation. Because of its processual nature – as becoming it is a site for aesthetic experimentation. Chapter three particularly looked at the notion of the literary chronotope, in examining, through the ideas of Bakhtin, the relevance of space and place as toponyms of meaning in the narrative of childhood. The narrative of childhood is examined as a “storyscape,” as a country of the mind from which a dialogic activity, through the intersections of the axes of space, place and time is played out. Childhood 178 Adichie‟s work comes as a temporal disjuncture, since the subject of Biafra in Nigerian literary historiography has been largely confined to the sands. Seethe bibliographies of Chidi Amuta (1982) and Craig McLuckie (Soyinka uses this term to refer to the Nigerian Civil war as an unhealed open sore that problematises the temporal cartographies of the Nigerian nation-state. Some work that might lead to this direction has been done. See Ken Saro-Wiwa‟s Art and the Aesthetics of non-silence,” an unpublished dissertation by George Austin Tamuno-Opubo, University of the Witwatersrand 2006. 307 becomes a literary topography, where cartographies of meaning are mapped out, in the protagonists quest for constructing their identities. Place and space are therefore significant markers that define childhood subjectivity, agency and sense of identification. Adichie‟s portrayal of Nsukka as a toponym, strategically plays out diasporic anxieties and nostalgias as well as in her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, reconstruct them as residual texts of traumatic memory for the Biafran war. At the same time specific places and spaces in the narrative of childhood can be seen as metonymic of a sense of belonging, as well as of collective and cultural memory, as in the case of Nsukka in Half Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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