the death and falsity of fatherhood

211 possibilities become stark at this juncture and the need for self-affirmation grows stronger in Kambili. Her brother Jaja subsequently questions the belief system his father had built his identity upon – the logic of the trinity and the relations between God the father and the son. Ina telling moment, in reference to the idea that the script of human lives has been ordained and written by God the father Jaja sarcastically says that Of course God does. Look what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to his own son. But have you wondered why Why did He have to murder His own son so we could be saved Why didn‟t He just go ahead and save us. (289) Emphasis mine What Jaja says is prophetic, for in the symbolic sacrificial story of the son, lies Jaja‟s own story as the son in this household – he sacrifices himself, by admitting to have killed his father and is taken to jail in an effort to protect his mother, who committed the actual crime of poisoning her husband. There is, of course, something Oedipal about this self- sacrificial act. It is a time of reckoning, a generational shift akin to the ending of Chinua
Achebe‟s Arrow of God (230). The scenario at the end of Purple Hibiscus allows us to draw conclusions about the death of fatherhood which signals the increasing agency of sonhood and daughterhood. It is also symbolic of the crisis of legitimacy in fatherhood. In light of the postcolonial contexts of the texts here, one is bound to draw conclusions about the patri-centric frameworks, the paternal genealogies that influence postcolonial subjectivity. Mudimbe‟s (1994) notion of the death of imaginary, symbolic and real fathers can help us see these connections. Mudimbe‟s notion of the death of false fathers therefore raises interesting conclusions there is the fear of death (symbolic or real, expressing itself in a wish for the disappearance of the father after all, what does he really know of my problems What is he still doing around The fathers discourse does not really address my real experience, seems completely nonsensical, and I cannot submit

212 to it. (183) There is a crisis of subjectivity that underscores the idea of false fathers Mudimbe implies that tradition, symbolised by the father at the moment of his death seems invented for the child. Upon the death of her father, Kambili realises the mortality and limitations of his authority, as well as how his power is constructed through religious ritual condoned by a male dominated society. As Kambili has experienced, and as she realises upon his death, the power of the father is one constructed inline with the tradition of Catholic ritual and Jaja is hereto remind her of the biblically symbolic death of sons at the hands of fathers. Papa Eugene‟s death means the real and symbolic death of tradition, which as Eric Hobsbawn (1983) reminds us, is “invented.”
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“Invented tradition is embodied in the father, as Kambili reckons at the end of the text. The death of the father would therefore seem to signal the falsity of his invented tradition as well as of his illusive immortality, omnipotence and omniscience. The invention which takes on a falsity upon the death of the father underlies the crisis of subjectivity and identity on the part of daughterhood and sonhood. The activity of invention, as with Papa Eugene‟s rituals, seems to be ruptured at his death, exposing to the daughter that her sentimental disposition, which was a strategy of dealing with her dilemma as a temporary sojourner was in fact as Mudimbe has pointed out a “make-believe” world of filiation
(1994:190). Indeed, the pre-determinative conditions that come with the discourse of the father, the codes and most of all the sentiment is used as a weapon to unearth these codes and to unmask the inventions that substantiate paternal authority. Kambili lives each day in her fathers house with a suffering that allows an opening out onto make-believe”
(Mudimbe, 1994:190); a world in which her father is immortal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. The rupture of this make-believe comes with her experience of alternative fatherhood in Nsukka. Most significantly, the grand paternal link, of Papa
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Hobsbawn (1983:1) proffers that tradition is substantially constructed through invention of ritual. He speaks of tradition as a a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”

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Nnukwu, that had been severed, for religious reasons, is re-inscribed as anew level of biological fatherhood, represented by history and culture which has previously excluded the daughter in her fathers house.
Mudimbe (1994:192) therefore posits that the complexities of the child‟s relations with its father come with the father who in the name of privileges of the blood, seniority, tradition summons the child and establishes [...] an order of duties and ambitions conceived by an ancient memory that he represents The father in this light incarnates the law of survival and the sign of the future There is something burdensome, Mudimbe infers, in the statement I am your father To quote Mudimbe (1994:192) at length The fathers autobiography here becomes a kind of history. His word is accorded a permanence that follows us from place to place and across the years. It becomes the memory of the world […] the child, crushed by such authority, withdraws into a position of weakness while, at the same time, the child would like to affirm anew authority and the voice of new ways to come. But a sovereign discourse, that of the father, clearly signifies a mortal refusal to the child‟s desire for power. I am going to look elsewhere the child thinks, and thus arouses suspicions that dictate a rereading of the familial memory) Indeed, Kambili‟s awakening during her stay in Nsukka consisted in looking elsewhere for sources of authority and identity, for alternative figures of authority – for other fathers. Enitan‟s dilemma, much simpler than Kambili‟s, allows her more choice and agency. She is confronted by a battle for filial loyalty in her familial space, staying with her father and even training, like her father, to be a lawyer. She is however also confronted with the falsity of his genealogical authority when she stumbles upon a brother she never knew.

214 The daughters, as this study demonstrates, engage not primarily with the person but the idea of the father. They become, unlike the sons, temporary sojourners with a vantage status of problematising genealogy and identity. For the daughter, the father therefore represents a critical memory to be reexamined and problematised. As she questions her role within the family, the daughter asks herself crucial questions that can relate to her status as a postcolonial subject. The texts discussed here, have been examined within the context of postcolonial imagination, with an aim of using the indeterminate and unhomely life of the daughter as represented in the texts, as part of understanding postcolonial identities in contemporary Nigerian writing. This fiction can be considered familial fiction as a sub-genre. There is, as we have witnessed with the daughter-father dyad‟s representation in fiction, the confrontation, by the daughter, of the idea of knowledge, memory and identity represented by paternity and embodied by the father. As authors, Adichie and Atta confront a complex reality of identity as Africans in diaspora. More significantly, they make their contribution through literary and literal fatherhood(s). These fatherhoods, as it were, have shaped the imagination and experience of identity, in the narratives of Purple
Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. In shifting attention now to the sons in Chris Abani‟s works, perhaps we would pose the question are the sons, as a priori, inheritors of genealogy facing a different challenge all together Do they, in their predetermined roles as heirs of genealogy, find their positions as indeterminate and unhomely within familial genealogy like the daughters I would like to return to the question Mudimbe (1994:192) raises on the nature of father-son relationships. Mudimbe asks What if the father to which you have subjected yourself is an imposter a false father who wrongly usurped the position of authority What happens then to the son What about the status of memory if I‟m confronting a false father who has imposed a false word on me, what sort of memory am I rejecting (192)

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