Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| which they are destinations. Actual countries become countries of the mind, their topography transformed into psychological maps, private worlds. Emphasis mine Tindall‟s project is a stylistic foregrounding of places as chronotopes of meaning in fictional works. Moreover, to posit that places are sometimes destinations for psychological journeys is pertinent. Tindall seems to imply not only the tensions found in the individual project of writing in which a particular place is infused with meaning from a subjective perspective, but also the peculiar tension between the timeless and the specific of place and space. For example, fora postcolonial migrant writer like Adichie, Nsukka embodies familial and literary genealogy, as well as ethnic identity found in the controversial history of the Biafran war which is the subject of Half of a Yellow Sun. Place-attachment therefore portrays the significance of Nsukka as a literary chronotope in her novels. In Adichie‟s first novel Purple Hibiscus, the child protagonist Kambili presents a first person point of view of the minutiae of the architecture of the house she dwells in. The various rooms are portrayed in her own architectural perspective of the interior and exterior design of the house. Moreover, when we move beyond the compound walls, we come across Nsukka, the University town of Adichie‟s childhood, which Adichie describes as A quaint university town in eastern Nigeria […] its a description that does nothing to capture 130 the potholes, the people I cannot wait to seethe market that spreads its zinc sheds across the road, the fragrant dust, the fat mosquitoes. I am back after five years. I am re-seeing Nsukka With my Americanized eyes. And I am remembering 81 In Adichie‟s interviews, short stories, essays and opinion pieces, Nsukka features conspicuously, as the place of good memories. The description of Nsukka is tinged with nostalgia, now that it can only be seen through Americanized eyes Nsukka occupies a tangible, reified, metonymic and metaphoric existence in the countries of Adichie‟s mind. The process of remembering Nsukka is portrayed through material cultures of memory, as explored in chapter two, as well as the tangible objects that define places, houses and their interior, compounds and other concrete objects. Cooper (2008) discusses how language mediates the material cultures in these narratives. This mediation is done through the deliberate use of untranslated words, and the attention to the definition and naming of concrete objects like figurines, hibiscus flowers, roped pots, ingredients for food among others – this indeed is metonymic of particular spaces and places in Adichie‟s fiction. Adichie‟s consciousness of space and place in her writing, informed by her reminiscent time of childhood, allows her to represent childhood figures in her works as a psychological journey towards grappling with contemporary migrant identities. These childhood figures are constructed in a matrix of concrete memories, spaces, places and times that play a significant role in the production of meaning, and in making sense of Adichie‟s own migrant self. In foregrounding the significance of space, place and time as chronotopes of meaning in Adichie‟s fiction, this section aims to establish how the textual space is a reenactment of the dialogical world of childhood. The art of writing, for Adichie, is a return to a childhood world, blurring the boundary between an adult authorial self to a childhood See Adichie‟s essay Heart is where the Home was.” 131 memory, figure and image. In this sense, the authorial self is seen as one divided entity, moving back and forth the places and spaces of growth, enriching the senses of identity at the present. Hence, when we meet Kambili in Purple Hibiscus and Ugwu in Half of a Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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