Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Graceland. The claustrophobic environment that Elvis feels (3), allows for imagination as the only available space of freedom. There is, in this condition, a thin line between what is material and metaphysical. Indeed, the narrator describes the infrastructural wastage in Elvis‟s neighbourhood Between the pillars, a woman had erected a buka, no more than a rickety lean-to made of sheets of corrugated iron roofing and plastic held together by hope (3). A further atmosphere and image of discordance and dissonance is described thus Water, thick with sediment, ran down the rust-coloured iron roofs, overflowing basins and drums set out to collect it. Taps stood in yards, forlorn and lonely, their curved spouts, like metal beaks, dripping rainwater. Naked children exploded out of grey, wet houses, slipping and splaying in the mud, chased by shouts of parents trying to get them ready for school. (3-4) Maroko is represented as an image of abandonment, yet there is on the part of the authorial voice a tactical selection of adjectives, through the personification of objects and animism in a world in which children seem to explode out of houses. Nature and For other work on Lagos the city see Obiechina (1973) and Echeruo (1977). Chris Dunton‟s article Energy and Entropy City of words traces the historiography of the Lagos novel from the sand examines the idea of positive energy in contemporary novels set in Lagos. 165 nurture collide in a chaotic way, and as the rain washed down in a cleansing fashion there is still an overhanging smell of garbage from refuse dumps, unflushed toilets and stale bodies (4). Despite this fetid material world in the margins, there exists multiple cultural worlds in a rich and hybrid musical symphony. For the despondency that is provided by the ocular sense, there is richness and diversity in the auditory sense as Elvis gets up to listen to the city waking up. Besides the tin buckets scraping, the sound of babies crying, infants yelling for food and people hurrying but getting nowhere there is the tune of Bob Marley‟s Natural Mystic playing and the “highlife music a “faster-tempoed” one by Celestine Ukwu also playing next door. These cacophony of aural signals begin to paint a picture of the culturally diverse landscape that is Maroko and hence of the multiple worlds in existence within the cultural imagination of this society. Using Highmore‟s postulations, such acoustic cacophony reveals a different idea of movement and rhythm of the city that policymakers and urban planners of cities can never make intelligible. According to him, the advent of modernity meant the illusion of order created within cities (2005:8-16). In this sense, and as Watson seems to advocate, there exists in such marginal and illegitimate sections of the city, sites of magical urban encounters, hidden in the interstices of planned and monumental, divided and segregated, or privatised and thematised, spaces that more usually capture public attention (2006:5). For Watson, the enchantments found in the politics of difference find a nuanced encounter in the marginal “micro-publics” that are normatively illegible in the mainstream planning of the city. Maroko is culturally cosmopolitan, consuming global cultural products in an inventive and creative way – a manner best described by Bhabha (1990) as vernacular cosmopolitanism by Ashcroft‟s (2005) concept of “transformation” 106 , by Roland Robertson‟s (1995) idea of “glocalization,” 107 or by Arjun Appadurai‟s idea of grassroots globalization. The Lagos cityscape is therefore a terrain of worlds Ashcroft Bill (2005) Global Culture, Local Identity and Transformation pp. Robertson, Rolland (1995) “Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity,” pp. 25-44, in Global Modernities 108 Arjun Appadurai, Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination in Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000) 166 simultaneously in dialogue and conflict. Elvis‟s growth as a teenager is located in this transformative, creative yet materially deprived environment. His earlier childhood in Afikpo comprised a fairly homogenous and stable sense of the world he lived in a neat nuclear household, regularly visited the bioscope and had mastered the popular modes of expression. Now sixteen, Elvis confronts at the end of his childhood, a frenzied cultural space that plunges him into unstable material life and accelerated expectations of growth and responsibility. Creativity becomes the substance of existence and Elvis embraces the pastiche and hybrid practice and form of existence found in the multicultural worlds created by the power of utopian imagination Elvis looked around his room. Jesus Can Save and Nigerian Eagles almanacs hung from stained walls that had not seen a coat of paint in years. A magazine cutting of a BMW was coming off the far wall, its end flapping mockingly. Apiece of wood, supported at both ends by cinder blocks, served as a bookshelf. (4-5. Emphasis retained) Elvis‟s reading tastes, Ralph Ellison‟s Invisible Man and Rilke‟s Letters to a Young Poet, reflect the significance of not only imagination as away to navigate the deprived socioeconomic landscape but also the therapeutic or corrective power of published knowledge (Dunton, 2008:74). 109 Dunton discusses the importance of the text in the Lagos Novel of this century as central to the positive and creative energy that is a counterpoint to the entropy often associated with the African city (Enwezor, et.al 2002; Freund, 2007). In Graceland, Elvis‟s avid reading practices are part of an authorial strategy of not only constructing an epistemological self out of his childhood but also of intertextuality, reflecting the multiple texts that inform this novel. Elvis‟s existential crisis is therefore textually constructed and related to that of the invisible man in Ralph Ellison‟s work, allowing the astute reader to make their own assumptions from Elvis 109 Dunton‟s idea of the text and published knowledge as a definitive feature of the contemporary Lagos novel is illustrated in Abani‟s referencing of a variety of texts, which include the pharmacopeia and recipes that are relevant within the structural organisation of the central narrative (as material culture of memory sourced from the protagonist Elvis Oke‟s late mother) as well as the strategic referencing of Onitsha market literature as an authentic textual product of the popular urban Lagos space. 167 reading texts about his marginal material existence, but his imaginative and creative power as (re)inscribing a sense of agency. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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