Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

194 plead for mercy. They flogged him with horsewhips and left him there. (EGWC, 69) In the scenes above, the whip in the air, which can be read as a phallic symbol, is meant to conquer and force subjection out of the market women and the man. The military regimes persona is hyper-masculine and the flagrant abuse of power upon the women in the market is similar to that of other marginalised masculinities represented in Enitan‟s context.
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Kambili later (de)familiarises the incident above in an interesting way she localises it in her childhood world, reading it through that space in which she plays the role of a daughter I thought about the woman lying in the dirt as we drove home. I had not seen her face, but I felt that I knew her, that I had always known her […] I thought about her too on Monday as Papa drove me to school. He slowed down on Ogui road to fling some crisp naira notes at a beggar sprawled by the roadside. (PH, 44) The above represents Kambili‟s reflection and domestication of the national political canvas. She is physically removed by virtue of living in an upper middle class home yet she can relate to it – she feels that she has always known this woman.
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In this way,
Kambili delineates a vision for the reader. The reader is drawn to closely connect
Kambili‟s visceral knowledge of what is going on outside to what for her feels like what is happening at home. It is not a coincidence that Kambili later thinks about this woman while driving with her father to school – these thoughts have invoked the figure of her father and what he represents. He is the central problematic in Kambili‟s life throughout the text. He is an overbearing and sadistic father, whose violent disposition echoes the militarised masculinities on public display by the soldiers. One can, as Muchemwa and Muponde (xv) point out, seethe existence in this society of marginalised and emerging masculinities that also seek to unmask the strategies of domination employed by hegemonic masculinity – hegemonic masculinity in this context is represented by the soldiers. What we find inmost cases with Kambili is not simply an allegorical reflection of the nation but a domestication of it, creating a much more nuanced reading of the text.

195 In Everything Good Will Come, Enitan‟s knowledge of the political landscape is portrayed through the arguments her father and uncles have on the veranda of their house as well as the daily radio broadcasts that make her conscious of the fact that she is a Yoruba and that the advent of the civil war was pitting “Igbos” versus the rest of the Nigerians As the coups led to counter-coups, curfews became Enitan‟s experience of the political atmosphere. Unlike Kambili, Enitan‟s childhood was not cloistered by high walls and coiled electric wires. But, like Kambili, the curfews and political atmosphere area background to her central concerns. Enitan says, There was a dusk to dawn curfew in Lagos and I wanted it to end so I could have the house to myself. I was not interested in the political overhaul in our country (EGWC, 67). Both Enitan and Kambili delineate boundaries of experience that are most important to their narratives. The delineation of protagonists concerns, their marking of boundaries lies in a constant attempt at reevaluating their positions as daughters and how their sense of daughterhood grapples with the authoritarian father figure at home and in politics. These daughters maintain an ambivalent relationship with the father as reflected in the way they relate to him. For them, the figure of the father is traditionally mapped out because of its centrality in familial genealogy. The daughter, unlike the son, is as Boose and Flowers (1989) postulate, conspicuously absent from the discourse of familial genealogy and traditions.
Boose traces a genealogy of daughterhood in familial history and points out that While yet within her fathers house, a daughter is set apart from the other three members as the only one who does not participate in extending its integrity into history. When her patronymic identity as daughter is exchanged for one that marks her as wife, she is still the alien until she has once again changed her sign to mother of new members of the lineage which by implication means mother to a son)
Boose (1989) concludes that daughters, unlike sons, are temporary sojourners within the family who seek legitimation outside familial boundaries. This idea is important in examining how daughters, by seeking external legitimation, actually decentre the figure

196 of the father as authority, lineage and as genealogy. They set the discourse beyond the familial space it is anchored, in their search for alternative affirmations to their biological fathers. It is this idea that is significant in underlining their relationship with the father as appropriate to opening up an extensive discussion on the representation of postcolonial identities, which seem to enable alternative spaces for fatherhood.
Boose (1989:33) also mentions that the daughters struggle with the father is about separation and not displacement This separation is explained by David Wilbern
(1989:96) as Together yet apart, their ambivalent bond blends conflict and comfort, rejection and identification, seduction and betrayal. It persists indelibly in memory, dream, theory and practice The textualising of the daughters struggle with the father figure creates possibilities of imagination and criticism at the centre of the struggles ambivalence and dilemma. This relationship exposes the slippages of affection and disdain, love and hate, belonging and non-belonging. Ina sense they position the daughter at an anti-foundational, anti-genealogical vantage within the familial space. The daughters ambivalent position, as a temporary sojouner, is the kind of atmosphere which
Kambili presents and deals within Purple Hibiscus. Kambili delineates for the reader her boundaries of experience and concerns. To say that an examination of this experience is simply allegorical of the bigger experience of the Nigerian nation is potentially limiting. The representation of the daughter-father dyad in Purple Hibiscus is derived from
Adichie‟s sense of historical and experiential continuities with an aim of delineating them within the familial and national spaces. While the daughter-father dyad is informed by sociopolitical experiences specific to Nigeria, the daughters constant hankering to get beyond high walls and barbed wire fences locates her concerns out of this limiting familial and national experience. Hence for Enitan, everything goodwill come with freedom out of her limiting marital space.
Adichie constructs the narrative structure of Purple Hibiscus around Kambili‟s experience with the father figure. She orders the different sections of the narrative with liturgical grammar from the catholic calendar, around the ceremony of the Palm

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Sunday.”
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This symbolic structure built around the Palm Sunday ceremony has led some critics to classify Purple Hibiscus as an overtly Catholic novel.”
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The idea of the father as a Subject in this religious structure is significant. The father is the centre of the structure, holding it together and as Kambili suggests to us at the beginning, when the father breaks down, it signals a collapse of the entire legitimacy and relevance of the structure

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