Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

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Purple Hibiscus is characterised by transnational intertextuality,” something which for
Hewett and which is important for this study suggests the presence of a heterogenous, diasporic dimension within contemporary Nigerian literature (2005:75). In this edition of English in Africa, Eze Chielozona makes a case for these writers enacting what he calls (in his title) cosmopolitan solidarity. For Eze, these writers symbolically experience Ezeulu‟s notion of the mask dancing. Eze demonstrates this using Chris Abani‟s alternation of the past and present time in his text Graceland. For
Eze these writers are the products of an embodied transculturality. Eze points out that
“transculturality implies the existence of interstices, or the state of endless crossing of boundaries (100). What underpins this transculturality, according to Eze, is the the process of migration and its consequences. He says Migratory process involves not only the movement of people from one place to another, but also their being brought into contact with knowledge, ideas, and material cultures of other places through the instrumentality of the principle vectors of the information age, notably cable television and the internet. (2005:102) Migration and other processes of mobility are influential contexts for these texts and particularly for contemporary childhood. In fact, as Richard Coe (1984) points out The coming of the railways, the motorcar, and the airplane-even the intervention of wars, persecutions, and exiles have made it easier to conceive of childhood as a separate, autonomous state of being. 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. (17)

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Transculturality is characterised by mobility and therefore by (re)definitions of concepts of space, place and time. Adichie, Abani, Atta and Oyeyemi write from the diaspora, a space that is far removed from their places of birth, therefore providing impetus for distinguishing their childhood from their adult lives at present. Moreover, when we talk about childhood we are talking about time, what Okolie (1998:31) refers to as one undivided entity across time and space. For instance, a scholar like Phillipe Aries (1960) examines childhood across centuries pointing out that the idea of childhood has evolved across art and culture and that it has always been defined through chronology. He points out that this chronology is represented in aspects like dates of birth and biographical timelines, where for instance, pictures or paintings were always dated. Alison James and Allan Prout‟s (1990) idea of the construction and reconstruction of childhood also emphasises the significance of time in childhood. Hence childhood, an embodiment of transculturality becomes a shifting set of ideas Cunningham, 1995:1). The idea of shift connected to the process of migration and mobility is crucial in understanding the concept of childhood in the imaginative representations of this century. What this special edition of English in Africa that deals with the writing from diaspora does is to give conceptual contexts for reading these works. Even though their main purpose was to argue a case for the emergence of anew generation of Nigerian writing, their idea of the coming of age of childhood calls the reader to recognise the need for more emphasis on the materiality of childhood in these selected works. For them, the idea of a child is used as a means to achieving a categorical and generic end – to systematise these writing for curricular reasons. This strand of analysis is extended in the other special issue of Research in African Literature by
Adesanmi and Dunton (2008), also dedicated to a third generation of Nigerian writing.
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As an emerging discourse, childhood has not received sustained examination in the criticism of Nigerian fiction. However, as pointed in the earlier sections, while In this edition, Madeleine Hron‟s article Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third- Generation Nigerian Novels pp. 27-48 can be singled out as directly dealing with the notion of
“transcultural” childhoods which occupy liminal cultural spaces that allow them to be creative and to enact what Hron calls possibility and most importantly resistance.”

24 representations remained present in African fiction, the criticism of childhood has subsumed it into other larger and totalising categories. In more recent scholarship in other parts of Africa though, it is emerging as a significant discourse. In Zimbabwe, Robert
Muponde (2005) does an interesting study of Childhood, History and Resistance looking at the Images of Children and Childhood in Zimbabwean Literature in English
Muponde‟s (2005) work examines Zimbabwean fiction through a period of three decades while tracing the evolution of the image of the child and the idea of childhood through this period. This study is significant in pointing out how the worldviews of childhood rupture singular and “adultist” perspectives and therefore provide an alternative order of things. Muponde interrogates aspects of history and resistance in the long process of Zimbabwean journeys to independence, using the representation of the child and childhood in Zimbabwean fiction. As incisive and pointed as this study is, there is a sense in which the ideas of childhood as represented by the writers he examines are still shackled by the concerns of colonial and anti-colonial discourse. Muponde‟s study however aims to foreground the evolving representation of the child in Zimbabwean fiction since 1972, in reflecting the intricacies of what he constantly refers to as the
“nation-family”. Muponde‟s study is significant as not only underlining the relevance of sustained work on childhood criticism in Zimbabwean literature, but also in giving the concept a practically dynamic background by being sensitive to its multi-facetted nature. Indeed, while he examines childhood as a site for the alternative, subversive and negotiable, he pays heed to Oakley‟s (1994) ideas about the danger of treating children as a homogenous group and therefore creating childhood as a totalising discourse.
Muponde‟s examination of girlhoods and “dystopic childhoods for instance, portrays a deeper insight into the theoretical examination of dimensions of represented childhood.
Muponde‟s work is an important and sustained study that is based on the proposition that childhood provides groundwork for an alternative order of things and therefore making it possible to think of the constructedness of place and belonging, and the tactical selection of options and items that signify belonging to a place, where no absolute stability and identity is possible (2005:92). This means that childhood as a set of ideas is also about the imaginative possibilities. In fact, in a seminal study in African Literature Today,

25 Richard Priebe (2006:41) makes the point that In writing about children, no less than in having them, we think about possibility.
Priebe‟s article is an examination of “Transcultural Identity in African Narratives of Childhood. He attributes transculturality to the nomadic nature of the family today, which constructs childhood as increasingly affected towards the discourse of identity formation. The kernel of Priebe‟s argument lies in this statement The earliest works of childhood were addressing concerns about new bi- or even tri-cultural identities against an emergent print culture. 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. (That there has been a rupture of worlds for the child is crucial. Contemporary childhoods are therefore beyond nationalisms because a rupture has occurred due to conditions of exile and increasing migration. Hence, childhood has become a transnational theme, defying geographical boundaries and as Priebe says The genre continues to be written by writers who come from almost every geographical area in Africa, a fact that likely reflects an increasing presence of the transcultural theme and the likelihood that we will see an increasing number of works written in this genre well into our new century (50).

A general caveat for Priebe‟s argument about transcultural and transnational childhoods is in the idea that regional, territorial and even geographical locations of childhood act as
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Priebe “Transcultural Identity in African Narratives of Childhood p. 41-52. This study recognises, as
Priebe does that multiculturality implies some distinction while transculturality signals to more fluidity, indeed as childhood itself is a mobile, shifting world especially in the context of diaspora.

26 an axis for different childhoods – as in the case of Nigeria as a distinct geographical identity with a potentially different experience of childhood compared to other regions. What I hope to have demonstrated from the above discussion is that the examination of contemporary childhood has to be located in a variety of conceptual contexts. Initial debates, as examined, about the group of writers selected for this study, point at
“transculturality,” transnational intertextuality” and cosmopolitan solidarity as preliminary critical contexts and conceptual backgrounds. Influential resources have been drawn from the childhoods of the writers this study examines. Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie is categorical about her childhood influences. Having grownup in the same house that Achebe lived, at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, she has followed in the footsteps of Achebe implying that she is his protégée. Achebe‟s reciprocal statement that she came almost fully made”
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lends some meaning to the idea of an alternative genealogy of the father and daughter they have created. Chris Abani is also categorical about the childhood influences from television and video that influence his text

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