Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

153 and the local experiences conglomerate. We see Odenigbo in many arguments using the knowledge of global struggles to understand the fractious, newly independent Nigerian state. There is a vernacular cosmopolitanism that not only expresses the possibilities of the coexistence of the dominant nationalisms of Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani but also the chasms arising out of the “tripartitioning” (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2007) of Nigeria in which ethnicities are defined as synonymous with regionalism and religionism. In Ugwu is the narratives development of a budding consciousness that should signify the future of the project of nation-state building after the ruins of war. Through Ugwu is a traceable trajectory of the naivety, bucolic, unconscious of an emergent nation-state struggling with the collective angst of a modernisation process and lost in the struggle fora unitary language to express the diverse nations that predate the colonial occupation project. In Ugwu‟s emergent childhood is the embodiment of a vernacular logic and a cosmopolitan, multinational one that is in the throes of a painful birth. While Ugwu does not in anyway represent the entire Igbo nation, he is metonymic, even synecdochic of the past, the struggles of the present and an envisaged future. All of these make him an embodiment of this emergent nation-state. By placing Ugwu in the space of a middle class family at Nsukka, his position as a houseboy gives a detached narrative, crafted in the marginal spaces of this household. His narrative is to be constructed, inmost cases, with his ears on his Masters bedroom door, or at the living room door adjacent to the kitchen. He is fiercely protective of his kitchen and loyal to his designated duties, sometimes with a humorous enthusiasm that surpasses his capacity to cook. His narrative competes with the dominant one provided by Olanna and Richard, as the plot shifts alternately from the early sixties to the late sixties.
Adichie, like she does in Purple Hibiscus, shifts time back and forth, taking the reader back to the relatively tranquil early sixties and then to the chaotic period of the Biafran war in the late sixties. The construction of the temporal space is not just as an undivided entity but a divided and dialogic positioning in which two separate periods are alternated and contrasted to each other. In this strategy we can plot shifting subjectivities as the idea

154 of the nation-state is (de)territorialised and the idea of an imagined community Benedict Anderson, 1991) changes demographically and geographically. By the power of a print economy (the book) mediated by their imagination, Odenigbo and his colleagues relate the political situation of Nigeria to other global situations within the continent and beyond its shores. Nsukka‟s academic cosmopolitan space allows the work of imagination which defines the social space hereto carve out a postnational order which ironically engages in an act of territorialisation and deterritorialisation of ethnic, tribal, regional, national and nation-state spaces.
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Ugwu‟s stream of consciousness, essentially the work of his now transforming rustic imagination tries to process the protracted spaces of experience in this modern house, in this modern university town. The protraction of spatial experience, through imagination and thought, occurs to him as essential to mediating this new world. Ugwu therefore has to exploit his imaginative potential and his engagement with poetry and the text becomes important. In this sense, an authorial self is in the offing for Ugwu. The poetic text unfortunately does not offer an organic unity of images as he expects of it (84). As we witness later however, Ugwu‟s authorial capabilities mature with his authoring of the supplementary narrative, the book within this novel The World Was Silent When We Died The temporal patterns where the narratives) are set have an interesting pattern. They alternate between the period early sixties and late sixties, moving back and forth these two temporal planes. This gives a sense of narrative unity through juxtaposing different times. It is interesting that the pattern of narrative voices is another level at which structural unity is achieved, in tandem with both a tranquil early sixties and a turbulent late sixties. The three narrative voices of Ugwu, Olanna and Richard take up an interesting position along the two temporal planes. There is a uniform, almost teleological I use the term “postnational order after Appadurai‟s (1995) idea of an order created by mass mediation within the diasporic public spheres. Appadurai argues that imagination defines this postnational order in the sense that it has become itself social practice and the imaginative space, as Lefevbre (1991) before him argues, becomes an extension of concrete spatial practice.

155 positioning of the voices in the temporal plane of the tranquil early sixties in which the narrative of Ugwu is followed by Olanna then by Richard. This structural consistency is broken when turbulence comes and narrative voices do not take on the uniform preset hierarchy. Narrative structure and voice in the The late sixties becomes fragmented as we even lose clarity of the authorship of The Book The World Was Silent When We Died The para-narrative book, The World Was Silent When We Died is a deliberate intertextual attempt by Adichie at representing the testimonies of victims of war. It is scattered intermittently in the text of Half of a Yellow Sun, acting as an independent narrative device and voice, trying to order the inchoate nature of a polyglot narrative landscape. As a narrative device, it is a literal attempt at intertextuality, often breaking the pattern of mainstream narrative voices. Occasionally occurring at the end of some chapters, it acts as a vignette, standing out to constantly bring the reader back to memories of war. It is in this way a mnemonic device, functioning as an archive, which is being constructed at first by Richard, the Englishman who has come to do research on
Igbo-ukwu art. Yet for its intermittent positioning within the narrative of the novel, between the tranquil early sand turbulent late s, the narrative is a point of intersection, collapsing the temporal difference between the two tranquil and turbulent periods by destroying the illusion created by positioning these two periods as almost mutually exclusive to each other. There is also within this vignette a historical dimension as portrayed on page 115. Because war is the subject, the vignette presents an illustrative supplement, as an independent historical voice, giving the reader a background of the ethno-religious scapes that predate colonialism (The onset of the war translates to Ugwu‟s literary consciousness developing significantly and the world of imagination becoming familiar, through his engagement with texts. This particular piece on page 115 is like a racialised historical voice, delineating the ethno-cultural landscape, ascribing bio-cultural differences to ethnicities while at the same time hierarchising them. This particular historico-anthropological piece however seems to sketch the colonial cartographic history of the independent republic of Nigeria in a sardonic distant tone. It is one of the many narratives from history that compete with others in this context of war. It can be interpreted as a strategy for authenticity on the part of the author, in view of this very controversial narrative landscape of the war.

156 Forms of mass media (the radio) and the print media become extensions for the imaginative and informative landscape for Ugwu. His position in the household is not just as voyeuristic as it was initially. His increasing command of the English language has created a conscious coordination of languages characteristic of bilingual subjectivity. In
Ugwu is the development of the Bakhtinian “novelistic word There is now a dialogic coordination in which there is an interanimation of languages aided by forms of mass media accessible to him – in particular, his access to the print media of newspapers and novels but politicians were not like normal people, they were politicians. He read about them in the Renaissance and

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