Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| 5.0 CHAPTER FIVE CHILDHOODS AS POSTMODERN IDENTITIES. 5.1 Introduction Childhood as Embodiment of Diaspora Having explored childhood in view of the micro-relationships of familial genealogies in the previous chapter, this chapter presents a more complex cultural milieu with multiple genealogies. In chapter four, the notion of genealogies is examined in relation to an arborescent family structure that is organised by a patriarchal framework. They are gendered versions of familial genealogies. In this chapter, the notion of genealogies is complicated by multiple heritages and legacies that underline a diasporic childhood experience. Here, genealogies transcend the binaries of the paternal and maternal. In this chapter, genealogies are complicated by a history of multi-continental cultural mobility and therefore multinational, even transnational family histories that point to multiple genealogical frameworks of identification. Childhoods here are seen through ruptured continental boundaries, and by problematising definitions of a specific racialised and geographical framework of identification. The childhoods) open up new and complex vistas of experience, and present analytical challenges, by their embodiment and consumption of a diasporic weltanschauung. As the preceding chapters have constantly invoked, authorial diasporic anxieties and consciousnesses still form an influential context. The discussion turns to the idea of diaspora as embodied in childhood and to the idea of childhood as a multicultural and transcultural theme and discourse. The type of childhood here is multiracial, multinational and multi-continental, and therefore the product of multiple genealogies. Sometimes these types of childhood could adopt the other prefix trans in theoretical talking points where they transgress and violate boundaries of experience – seeking what Deleuze and Guattari (1988:7) call lines of flight In other words, these childhoods present a rhizomatic plane of discourse on identity because of their disruption of arborescent frameworks of genealogical identification. 234 Moreover, while this study has been engaged in examining childhood in the context of postcolonial terms of reference and experience, in terms of worlds) that are substantially rooted in a practico-sensory experience that is geographically located in Africa and specifically Nigeria, what happens when this experience shifts to a consciousness Mudimbe (1994) must have had this in mind when he talked about Africa as an idea In this case childhood is a discourse and a product of a specific consciousness. The shift to the notion of diasporic consciousness as an experience of childhood is in this chapter contextualised in physically uprooted childhoods that are constructions of memory. As image and figure, they embody the idea of diaspora. In this way childhood is useful in problematising the distinctive Nigerian or even African experiences. However, the diasporic childhoods allow us to extend and disrupt categories of classification, locations of generations, provinces of writing and distinctions of experience. In this way, these childhoods literally transcend familial, ethnic, national and continental boundaries, classifications, categories and all those regimes that seek to define distinct spaces of experience. This chapter therefore examines childhood from the perspective of the postmodern. Childhood is read here using the tenets of postmodernism. The term postmodernism is used herein line with Patricia Waugh‟s (1992) definition of it as a structure of feeling which is implicated in the regimes it wants to disrupt. 149 The childhoods to be studied here are the product of an embodiment of diasporic sentiment, torn between the prevalent myth and idea of Africa and the reality and experience of Europe. Hence, the dynamics of diasporicity shift between the notions of “experience/embodiment” and idea In other words, childhood in this chapter is examined as the product of a mythical experience of Africa and a practico-sensory experience of Europe. In this chapter, the works of Helen Oyeyemi will be examined as presenting childhoods that portray what Brenda Cooper (2009) has called New Diaspora.” 150 This chapter examines the identity struggles of the child protagonist Patricia Waugh (1992) Introduction p. See Brenda Cooper (2009) The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora Helen Oyeyemi‟s Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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