Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Half of a Yellow Sun. In this way, Nsukka becomes Adichie‟s country of the mind (Tindall, 1991) – a textual mindscape where she negotiates spatial and temporal planes of existence. Nsukka is therefore read as not only a toponym that maps out a particular textual topography, but as a literary chronotope – a stylistic engagement with the notions of space and time as planes of meaning in the text. Furthermore, residual and emergent cultures (Williams, 1977 38 ; Jameson, 1991) are also found in the Yoruba shrine that Maja‟s mother in The Opposite House builds. Moreover, at the level of the mythology, there is a syncretism portrayed in the contrast of the Yoruba pantheon that Maja‟s mother believes in and the Cuban mythology that derails the family‟s attempts at settling in London. Maja‟s familial genealogy is contextualised in the black diaspora that spread allover Europe through dispersal and the long history of slave trade. 39 In this mixture of nationalities and languages, the subject positions of characters are fragmented. These positions are problematised by the way that subjects area composite of multiple times and multiple places. For instance, the characters in Oyeyemi‟s works do not just speak or write with what Du Bois (1994), Paul Gilroy (1993), Gates Jr (1984), Quayson (2000) and Cudar-Dominguez (2009) refer to as a “double-voiced consciousness. Instead, they speak in a multiple-voiced consciousness as an attempt to transcend the politics of race. This transcendence is reflected in the multiple histories which do not only stop at slavery but through other aspects of dispersal in the twentieth century that are triggered by global forces and politico-cultural movements of revolution like the one in Cuba that forces Maja‟s family out. These characters are faced with a multifaceted reality which is complexly engrained in the forces of history and transient material conditions that are triggered by the need to deal with diasporic identity. It is this fragmented context that is used by these writers as they attempt at finding a narrative with which to order reality. Therefore, because centres and 38 Raymond‟s Marxist dialectic of residuality and emergence presents the point that the residual and the emergent form a synthesis of something new without the residual just being obsolete as is always thought. 39 It is important to note that the African and black diaspora in Europe and the Americas has continuously generated scholarship on cultural politics into the Euro-American academy. Multiculturalism as afield of study has historically grappled with an increasing non-European and non-American diaspora and a shifting of perception of identity that previously defined nation-state culture even in Europe and North America. Ronald Segal (1995) for instance does a detailed study of the formation of the black diaspora in Europe and the Americas through the idea of dispersal, ranging from the time of slave trade to the present. 34 the ideas that underpin them are being unmasked by manifest experiences of migration and the possibilities of multiple consciousness, multiple realities and multiple identities, a style of representation that allows for the possibilities of hyper-realities is used. The world of childhood offers possibilities for the use of animist and magical realism through the abiku, as in the case of Ben Okri‟s trilogy and Oyeyemi‟s works, and fantasy through the image of the popular video portrayed through Elvis Oke in Abani‟s Graceland. Thus, childhood offers possibilities for dealing and ordering these multiple consciousnesses and multi-facetted realities. It is indicative of a kind of childhood that is inconstant flux between fact and fiction, spirituality and mortality. It is a childhood that is in the words of Faith Edise and Nina Sichel (2004) “unrooted,” which, according to them is defined by estrangement and rootlessness in the search for identity. To deal with this sense of rootlessness, fantasy, animist and magical realism create space for the mixing of physical, spiritual reality and material and imaginative conditions. Brenda Cooper (1998) demonstrates in her concept of seeing with a third eye" that magical realism captures the interstices between the boundaries of time and space, while Harry Garuba (2003) provides a metacritic of magical realism by constructing a more encompassing term, animist materialism Ina global world, where through the hyper- reality of imagery one can access images from allover the world through the press of a button, these images eventually substitute reality for the subject who then thrives on the possibility, through fantasy, of living as an avatar. Elvis Oke in Abani‟s Graceland for instance lives a virtual reality by impersonating the legendary American pop icon Elvis Presley. Indeed, the condition of childhood is convenient for belief in avatars and Elvis and his friends demonstrate this for us. In fact, we can go back to Cooper, who makes a significant point by connecting magical realism, fantasy, postcolonial discourse and postmodernism Magical realists are postcolonials who avail themselves most forcefully of the devices of postmodernism, of pastiche, irony, parody and intertextuality; they are alternatively recognized as oppositional to cultural imperialism […] In other words, magical 35 realism and its associated styles and devices is alternatively characterized as a transgressive mechanism that parodies Authority, the Establishment and the Law, and also as the opposite of all these, as a domain of play, desire and fantasy. (1998:29) In agreement, Gerald Gaylard (2005) writes that the postcolonial condition is about imaginative activities because it is difficult to point out a specific time when there is a cessation of the effects of empires, nations and colonies. Hence the condition of postcoloniality for its subjects, is highly influenced by imagination, and therefore reflected in their deepest fears and dreams, giving it postmodern dimension. This postcolonial context, Gaylard writes, is rife with childhood fears, repressions, social taboos, secrets, neuroses, traumas and the repositories of wishes, dreams, the fantastic, the fabulous and the transcendent (2005:3). Gaylard concludes that postcolonial time is a pressured hybridity” containing elements of the postmodern which leads to a rupturing of monochromatic visions of reality. The ideas of Gaylard (2005), Cooper (1998) and Garuba (2003) will be important for this study in charting out an argument on postmodernism through the elements of the fantastic, fabulous magical and animist realism that are found in the works of Oyeyemi. However, as we will see with these works, the diasporic childhoods portrayed in Oyeyemi‟s works seem to problematise the assumptions of magical realism as espoused by Gaylard and Cooper, enabling us to interrogate further, the new critical tools provided by Harry Garuba (2003) on animist materialism. As the postcolonial and postmodern interact through elements of the fabulous, animist and magical realism, the interaction is also characterised by a mixture of the residual and the emergent. Ina chapter titled old gods and new worlds in Appiah In my Fathers House, he posits that elements of what is perceived as traditional always reside in the emergent forms as a marker of continuity. Indeed, the adult self experiences childhood as a residual element carried into adulthood. Childhood as we will see is also a set of ideas that uses the symbol of the abiku as an allegory of the postcolonial condition. Another 36 reason why childhood is important in this study is because of the canonical debates on generations of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi &Dunton, 2005; 2008). In fact, for the writers in this study to be labeled as coming of age assumes a connection with previous generation from which particular ages are set as a background for the emerging writers selected in this study. The rupture of time and space which is represented in the stylistic choices of the fantastic world of animist and magical realism is also largely contextualised and realised in the notion of intertextuality. The concept of intertextuality is broad-based in this study, and will certainly have far reaching implications at different levels of interpretation. When time and space cross each other through imaginative activities and a diasporic context, they engage in what Julia Kristeva (1974:59-60) refers to as transpositions of one or more systems of signs into another”. 40 The system of signs that creates meaning through the concept of time is transposed by that of space and the boundaries for these two become fluid and endless spirituality and mortality intermingle as well as the real and the imagined. The idea of childhood comes to embody all these imaginations and experiments. Since these writers can be examined as “coming-of-age,” Adichie, Abani, Oyeyemi and Atta are preceded by literary forefathers and foremothers – Achebe, Soyinka, Ekwensi, Emecheta among others. Indeed, as Worton and Still (1990:1) point out, writers are readers of texts before they create new ones. For instance, Adichie makes explicit her acknowledgement of Achebe as her literary progenitor, which she demonstrates in the striking dialogue between her text Purple Hibiscus and Achebe‟s Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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