Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| of a Yellow Sun. Such places as Nsukka are toponyms that use autobiographical detail to deal with diasporic anxieties and nostalgia, while connecting these to wider interrogations of history through the memory of the Biafran war. In this way, places and spaces of childhood serve as toponyms, even metonyms of meaning. The figures, memories and images of childhood are plotted in places and spaces of growth as signifiers of meaning in the discourse of identity. The subjecthood and agency of childhood is negotiated around the topoi of houses, compounds, streets and cities – which are cartographies for the aesthetic in the “storyscape” of childhood. Ina sense therefore, literary cartographies are influential in the process of identification in the representation of childhood. We see Adiche map out cartographies in Kambili‟s quest for freedom by juxtaposing the places Enugu and Nsukka, and contrasting the notions of silence for the latter to laughter for the former as what populates these places and spaces, and therefore what provides trajectories of identification, freedom and liberty for Kambili. In Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie remaps Biafran spatio-temporal cartographies, plotting Ugwu‟s epistemological story of growth within the larger problematic of the wars historiography. The novels meta-fictive structure combines the aesthetic and the political, using postmodernist historiographic metafiction to inscribe the history of the Biafran war while contesting it, using the houseboy Ugwu as a composite consciousness. In this way, the aesthetic and the political, allow the discourse of childhood to be provisional, paradoxical and give a critique of authority and normativity. In this way the discourse of childhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction is able to simultaneously portray postcolonial experience, while adopting a postmodernist aesthetic. 308 However, the spaces, places and times of childhood, are identified with the micro- relationships that child figures have with fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and extended family members. These relationships bring childhood to the basic notion of genealogies and traditions. Genealogies and traditions come with norms, customs and rituals that define normativity and authority. Childhood is therefore defined by these elements, which are the basic tenets of identification for the child figure. In contemporary Nigerian fiction, these relationships are portrayed as grounds of conflict, particularly with the patriarchal configurations of the family setups in these works. In another sense, the father figure, portrayed as synonymous to the notion of genealogy and tradition becomes a significant antagonist to the already mobile, fluid, shifting, multicultural and transcultural texture of the childhood world. In this way, childhood is portrayed as problematising the notions of genealogy and tradition, signified and embodied in the figure of the father. In fact, the notion of identity in relation to memory as well as in relation to place, space, time and history, portrayed in patriarchal configurations is contested in the narrative of childhood. Specifically, the dyadic relationships between fathers and daughters in Purple Hibiscus and Everything Goodwill Come and fathers and sons in Chris Abani‟s Graceland and The Virgin of Flames are at the centre of childhoods contestation of normative genealogies and traditions. The figure of the father therefore embodies tradition, genealogy and identity. The father, in this particular discourse of childhood carries the symbolic importance that Lacan ascribes to the father figure – the law, letter, tradition, genealogy, identity, authority, certainty and legitimacy of and within the family and society. In Purple Hibiscus and Everything Good Will Come, these relationships are portrayed through the sentimental disposition between the father and the daughter. The daughters, defined outside of a patriarchal and masculine genealogy exploit the sentiment that exists between them and their fathers to reconstruct an alternative genealogy that is androgynous. For instance, Kambili in Purple Hibiscus becomes a symbolic link between her severed paternal and grand-paternal genealogy. She is heir to both the patriarchal sentiment of her grandfather Papa Nnukwu and the liberty, freedom and independence of a maternal genealogy through Aunty Ifeoma. This notion of an androgynous genealogy is 309 also reflected in Adichie‟s own literary forebears – her work, as examined by Heather Hewett (2005) has the texture of a transnational intertextuality” which is informed by both masculine and feminine literary traditions. Indeed, the historical connection between her and Achebe reflects the sentiment between them as father and daughter. In providing an androgynous genealogy, these micro-relationships between fathers and daughters problematise normative genealogical traditions and therefore the legitimacy, certainty and authority of patriarchal (read also adultist) frameworks of identity. On the other hand, the sons, as portrayed in Chris Abani‟s Graceland and The Virgin of Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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