Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
Download 1.93 Mb. View original pdf
|
| zeal, they will cool our feet as we climb. Now though, it made him teary. (174-175 Emphasis retained) Ugwu, as we see, apprehends the spirit within this imagined community, one that as he understands, is built through the print media. This is all within the process of creating not just a narrative voice out of him but also an authorial one. As we shift between the two temporal planes, Ugwu‟s consciousness rises, and as a speaking voice, he begins to claim an authorial stake in the narrative. Upon forceful conscription to the Biafra military, he begins to claim a stake in the Biafran war, making use of his literacy skills from the moment of conscription I do rayconzar meechon,‟ High-Tech announced, speaking English for the first time. Ugwu wanted to correct his pronunciation of reconnaissance mission; the boy certainly would benefit from Olanna‟s class (358 Emphasis retained) Upon conscription, construction of Ugwu‟s authorial self begins. As a boy soldier, the only way he can make sense of the conditions of the ragged military camp, the emaciated soldiers, lack of ammunition, food and less than basic training facilities is to write, as he has learned at Nsukka. Ugwu‟s position as a narrator has strategically changed to give the narrative of Half of a Yellow Sun afresh subjectivity, of being in an actual battlefield. It is at this camp that he comes across the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself. Ugwu reads this book time and again, to maintain his sanity and nurture an authorial subjectivity. His excitement about the book leads to an angry outburst with High-Tech, the thirteen-year-old fellow soldier when he discovers High-Tech using a page of his book for wrapping some drugs into a roll for smoking. Later, Ugwu earns himself the title Target Destroyer for his precision at 160 detonating the Ogbunigwe, a Biafran handmade grenade. 102 Despite Ugwu‟s forthrightness, humility and self-discipline, the conditions of war, as we find later, numb his senses. He is surrounded by blood, shelling and death. When some of his battalion stumble into a bar, Ugwu becomes an accomplice to rape, in what the narrator describes as a “self-loathing” feeling (365). For Ugwu, writing brings a sense of expiation and healing. For instance, after a near-fatal mission, he is taken to the hospital and Richard visits him. Ugwu explains his empathy for Frederick Douglass anger in his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself. Upon hearing the title of Richards book The World Was Silent When We Died Later, Ugwu murmured the title to himself The World Was Silent When We Died. It haunted him, filled him with shame. It made him think about that girl in the bar, her pinched face and the hate in her eyes as she lay on her back on the dirty floor. (397. Emphasis retained) Ugwu‟s healing, emotionally and physically, is aided by his continuous writing after he leaves the hospital (397-399). He writes, from the power of memory, referencing the poet Okeoma, recording the conversations he overhears between Odenigbo, Olanna and friends who come to visit them. After the travails of war, Ugwu has achieved an authentic subject position, in which he has respect for his combatant status in the Biafran war and his survival. Later, when the war is over and they move back to Nsukka, Richard says to him that the war isn‟t his (Richard) story to tell and it is at this point at the end of Half of a Yellow Sun, that Ugwu takes on the mantle of telling this story Ugwu writes his dedication last For Master, my good man (433). The Ogbunigwe was perhaps a symbol of Biafra‟s scientific ingenuity and invention. As a Biafran made weapon, it was metonymic of the scientific prowess of Biafran soldiery. It took on a mythic, even motific importance in Biafran tales (see Emecheta,1994) and was synecdochic of the biological warfare that marked the historical capture of the Midwest region by Biafran soldiers which coincided with the recognition of Biafra by Tanzania (Raph Uwechue, 1969). During this capture of the Midwest, some hundreds of Nigerian soldiers were said to have died because of the Ogbunigwe – a weapon that was said to kill without firing a single shot”. 161 It is through the narrative voice of the teenager Ugwu that Half of a Yellow Sun demonstrates strategic positioning in this highly-charged topic of the Biafran war. Narrative voices have been constructed through (Inter)textuality in Half of a Yellow Sun and have involved multi-generic, multi-voiced consciousness. Ugwu‟s narrative voice is the product of a dialogic process of writing. Through his voice, the text is foregrounded as a coordination of the ethno and verbal-ideological components that define his immediate environment. The text has produced its own space (Lefebvre, 1991) from within which Ugwu‟s subjectivity is held, examined and transformed sufficiently for him to occupy a central narrative role, perhaps more authentic than the rest. Once again Nsukka emerges as an ideological toponym that provides a resource for meaning within and without the text. Nsukka also becomes a metonym of authorial childhood, from where the nostalgia of a diasporic consciousness is played out. Yet Nsukka is also a chronotope which signifies an intersection of the axes of time and space. The impact of a diasporic consciousness allows for Nsukka, through the print media to cross boundaries, mediated by the power of imagination and thought. Half of a Yellow Sun comes to occupy, what (Adesanmi & Dunton, ix) refer to as a borderless, global textual topography Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|