Diasporic Childhoods Worlds against interpretation

238 strategically.”
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Hence the simultaneity of experience, realities and non-realities, magic and spirit is the conceptual ground in which these childhoods find a critical discourse. The realities and experiences of diasporic existence provide childhoods that strive to live simultaneously and strategically, in worlds from which they were unrooted and uprooted before sensory consciousness, and which they were transposed to, for the development of their consciousness. These childhoods are essentially divided entities already, defined by disjuncture and difference, across landscapes of imagination and senses of identity. Split and multiple personality disorders are perhaps products and modes of apprehension for sensibilities that have been ruptured and redistributed across spaces, places and worlds associated with the process of growing up. Oyeyemi presents childhoods, or vignettes of childhood figures, images and memories that resistor in borrowing the words of Susan Sontag (1992) are against interpretation They rupture schemas and programmatic attempts associated with aesthetic regimes of interpretation and discourse.
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To bracket or decide her work as either black British or Nigerian diasporic writing is perhaps problematic in itself, by virtue of the authors divided and double, even multiple consciousness, as well as the autotelic consumption of a diasporic perspective and subjective position that transcends just a consciousness.
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Oyeyemi‟s dynamic of childhood is therefore postmodern in discourse, in feeling and in representation. The principal aim for this chapter, and indeed this study, is not to reclaim a provincial category of writing or discourse, but to draw connections across spaces, places and worlds far apart (discontinuities within the discourse of childhood that push it to new frontiers of experience and therefore new meanings and aesthetics that bring the idea of childhood to greater significance in the discourse of the postcolonial and the postmodern. Disconnections are therefore to be drawn between postcolonial and postmodern ways of reading Oyeyemi‟s texts. These reading practices are related to the idea of the diasporic as a space of discontinuities, difference, divergence and convergence of worlds, spaces, places and Brenda Cooper (a) Diaspora, gender and identity Twinning in three diasporic novels p. Susan Sontag (1992) Against Interpretation p. 48-55. The category Black British has been problematically used as a conceptual category for these writers, see Mark Stein (2004) and Kadija Sessay (2005).

239 times. Inhabiting this space, as Oyeyemi does is to face both a pressured hybridity”
(Gaylard, 2005) of postcolonial imagination and the structure of feeling of a postmodern dispensation. It is therefore a highly imaginative space, with subjectivity negotiated through imaginative processes. In this sense then the project of identifying oneself becomes a negotiated one, with the tensions arising from the subjects awareness and experience of different spaces, places and worldviews attempting to find cohesion. The tyranny that physical movement does to the diasporic subject is remedied by flights of imagination, in Sisyphean attempts at reconciling these diverse worlds into an organic whole. In Oyeyemi‟s case, time and space in childhood represents a phase of experimentation with imaginative possibilities and hence new subjectivities, obviously inspired by her state of mind at the time of writing. Oyeyemi‟s childhood was defined by the process of imagination hence one could argue that her experience of childhood influences her imaginative subjectivity. For Oyeyemi, imagination is a process of subjective identification, largely inspired and reflective of childhood space and time. It is a process that allows transition from one world to the other and from one identity to another, while confronting the limitations of anthropocentric frameworks of identity construction. Hence, imagination becomes a process for shamanism, and for reaching out to a universal consciousness of postmodernism (Ihab Hassan)
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that Gaylard (2005) has stated, opens up a “Pandora‟s box of childhood fears, repressions, social taboos, secrets, neuroses, traumas, and the repository of wishes, dreams, the fantastic, the fabulous, and the transcendent (The childhood that Gaylard privileges in this statement becomes the space for the transcendent, for experimentation with alternative forms and discourses that constitute postcolonial and postmodern forms of imagination, towards what he calls an African postmodernity.” Childhood is therefore a space of imaginative experimentation in the continuum of the spiritual and physical, and their slippages and combinations, a process that puts the discourse of childhood at the centre of postcolonial and postmodern forms of identity construction, formation and consciousness. The being of childhood, its potency, one could argue, is its symbolic capital in the dialectics of identity formation and how the
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Ihab Hassan The New Gnosticism Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind p. 60-77.

240 practices of reading it can be approached. As being, childhood is potent – it is an evolution and a process. This does not mean it is amorphous or nebulous, but rather that despite it being within structures of living and feeling that are adultist in orientation, its ontology is irruptive of the structures that shackle it. The repressions, fears, social taboos, neuroses and traumas of being, place childhood within the domain of imaginative subjectivity. Oyeyemi‟s fiction demonstrates the project of imaginative subjectivity, through several talking points. Having established the salience of childhood as a space, place and time of imaginative subjectivity and creativity in Oyeyemi‟s fiction – also arising from autobiographical experiences – it follows that the tropes of meaning in her works are related to the experience of migration, the embodiment of diasporic identity and therefore the tensions that arise from the constant possession of her characters by ghosts of diverse places, spaces and times related to their childhood. In Helen Oyeyemi‟s the Icarus Girl, the trope of the Yoruba abiku child is explored, albeit through a doppelganger and twin motif. The protagonist, eight year old Jess is possessed by a spirit twin by the name Titiola (Jess, for the inability to pronounce this name, gives her the nickname TillyTilly), who is presented as an alter-ego, of Jess‟s Nigerian genealogy. TillyTilly is the result of the actual death of Jess‟s twin called Fern, at birth. The trope of the abiku, famously portrayed by the Nigerian author Benjamin
Okri, is in this case complicated by a racial dynamic, as well as a crossing of geographical and cultural borders – across continental barriers. It is pitted therefore against such things as modern forms of psychology, themselves scientific myths of postmodern dilemmas of identity. Hence in this tale of twin childhoods and doppelgangers is the tension of myths at the centre of childhoods struggle with diverse and divergent belongings and genealogies. These can be referred to as diasporic abiku childhoods. However, the power of the abiku motif is to allow worlds and identities to intermingle and to take us away from exclusively anthropocentric identity frameworks. In fact, the power of imagination is explored in the abiku‟s ability to switch worlds, places, spaces and times, stretching childhoods economy of imagination to elastic ends. Ethereal and celestial worlds, products of this imagination reflect on the decentred subjectivity of the protagonists in Oyeyemi‟s novels, and also (re)centre childhood as a discourse of

241 influence in contemporary forms of processing and forming identities. Childhood is therefore deployed to draw trajectories on multinational and multiracial senses of identity that are rampant in diasporic experiences. The abiku motif becomes part of the process of mediation that allows the protagonists in Oyeyemi‟s work to live at the intersection of different continents, cultures, places and spaces and therefore simultaneously claim multiple histories, genealogies and therefore identities. But living in a world of multiple identities, histories, genealogies, spaces, places and times comes with the experience of being a decentred subject, and therefore the site of a vicious identity struggle. It could well be argued that the quest for simultaneously living and embodying various identities signals the anguish for the lack of a definitive space of enunciation. Oyeyemi‟s works dramatise the anguish and anxiety through the split personalities of her protagonists, the alter egos, the warring doppelgangers and twins. At a macro-level, racial, national and ethnic identities clash, each with their varying spatio- temporal genealogies and histories competing for visibility. At a micro-level, the politics of identity involving the individual self, and that sense of the selfhood, as a cogito ergo
sum is under intense scrutiny. Rationality, thought and the individual senses of identity which Appiah (2005) ascribes to the elements of wit, intelligence, among others, become crucial elements of critique in the everyday world of existence. They are the ethics of identity which according to Appiah provide a deontological framework of identity being problematised. These micro-aspects of individuality are the site for an intense battle of the self for the childhoods in Oyeyemi‟s works. Jess struggles with trying to decipher who she is, oftentimes keeping to the safety of her mind and thoughts and locking herself in cupboards. She is engaged in a struggle to reconcile her split psyche, and this gets complicated when she travels to Nigeria where she faces the psycho- spiritual realities of her maternal genealogy, in the form of a twin spirit, apparently her spiritual and magical double.
Jess‟s trip to Nigeria unearths the mythologies of her maternal genealogy and her return to London is affected by her being possessed with her double TillyTilly and therefore haunted by the place whose only link through her maternal genealogy is the dead twin

242 Fern. Hence the magic of places and spaces becomes important in understanding Jess‟s split personalities spread over the two continents and accessed through her stream of consciousness. The way to present the idea of living in two continents and cultures simultaneously is through a psycho-spiritual existence of childhood, which finds its affirmation in Gaylard‟s “Pandora‟s box of the fears and repressions of childhoods

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