Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| lebenswelt. The trope of the abiku child opens up grounds for the exploration of psycho- spiritual frontiers of existence that define these childhoods, in a manner that allows us to map childhood discourse into the micro and macro aspects of identity formation being discoursed in Oyeyemi‟s fiction. The child figure in The Icarus Girl is the site of an identity process, of reconciliation, simultaneity, experimentation and multiple consciousnesses. This figure is at the centre of a debate on the frontier of frameworks that define identity. It is at the centre of a project of imagination, in which its engagement with postcolonial terms of reference and identification are ruptured by the attitude and the feeling of an embodied postmodern experience, and borne of diasporic identification. It is on this complicated and polemic note that Oyeyemi‟s The Opposite House is located. The Opposite House takes on the idea of myth and identity. It portrays the lives of a Black Cuban immigrant family in London, taking us through the annals of diasporic history. The protagonist of the story, Maja, is brought by her parents to London from Cuba at the age of five. Cuba and its childhood memories haunt the adult Maja. Moreover, Cuba is where she can trace her genealogy to various continents, places and spaces In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos – the Cuban Lebanese (98). This statement captures Maja‟s sense of identity and history. Traced back to West Africa, Maja‟s family, descendants of Cuban sugar plantation slaves are presented as having traversed a triangular spatio-temporal map of slavery – Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. They are products of a tri-continental history. Moreover, The Opposite House reflects on the entanglement of spatio-temporal maps, embodied in the identity angst of Maja and her family, through an intermeshing of mythical tales, multilingual subjectivities and the pastiche of multiple beliefs, customs and religious rituals made visible through material cultures and practices. Pantheons that cut across Africa, the Caribbean and Europe are 243 blended together in an effort to live across eons, oceans and continents. The narrative structure of The Opposite House reflects the angst and the entanglement of identity practices, customs, rituals and material cultures. This is achieved through a mythopoetic narrative structure that involves the magical realist narrative of the somewhere house of multiple gods with multiple origins, and the story of Maja and her family living in London. These worlds are juxtaposed against each other as part of a mythopoetic narrative structure that sustains the different worlds, cultures, spaces and places that they explore. Maja‟s mother Chabella‟s altars for the hybrid pantheons of Afro-Cuban and European gods is the visibility of material cultures synecdochic of the hybrid, pastiche and multiple beliefs, customs and rituals that explain the variant genealogies of identities being discoursed in the novel. Maja, the female protagonist in The Opposite House is therefore a product of multinational histories, which converge in Cuba, the place that haunts her present existence, as she says, I close my eyes, and my Cuba comes […]” (106). Myths and realities of origin are therefore separated by a thin line, as is the physical and spiritual world of humans, gods and deities. The narrative also weaves in and out of these worlds, hinting at multiple influences in history, mythology, legends and tales. The Opposite House stretches the frontiers of historico-mythical experience and consciousness, heralding the New Diaspora that enacts multiple selfhoods, acquired in the actual migration of bodies, histories and mythologies across different continents. Maja‟s mother Chabella, for example, demonstrates this through her multilingual subjectivity. She speaks English, French, German and Spanish while she also practices Santeria religion – an Afro-Cuban hybrid religion that merges the worship of Yoruba deities with the veneration of Roman Catholic saints. These syncretic sacred practices foreground religious histories that reflect migrant cultures, portrayed in what Appiah (1992) refers to as old gods, new worlds The notion of syncretism can be found in the idea of religious belief in the Opposite House. Religious practice, performed by Maja‟s mother, is associated with the notion of transient identity construction, in which hybrid and syncretic gods become a metonymic reflection of movement of history, myth, belief and bodies, from one continent to another. Santeria religion here is not only symbolic and 244 metonymic of diasporic identity, but also a visible product of a fusion of mythologies and histories of identity. This apparent syncretic logic of religious practices has been examined by Appiah‟s (1992) discussion on religious beliefs, rituals and practices, which are aimed at problematising notions of rationality, theory, tradition and modernity. Appiah uses specific case studies, to push fora syncretic logic of coexistence that is found in the enactment of religious rituals, beliefs and customs by human and nonhuman actors. Appiah‟s symbolic use of the biblical phrase in my Fathers house allows him to construct an argument about the complex ontology of the diasporic subject whose antecedents are African in genealogy, culture and mythology. He maps out the numerous tributaries that constellate at that space between the postcolonial and postmodern.” 157 Appiah discusses religion, its rituals, customs and practices as an essential part of identity formation, or as part of the process of formulating converging strands of identity. It is interesting to therefore see how religion in Oyeyemi‟s The Opposite House is a marker of how Maja‟s mother identifies herself. Indeed religious artifacts reflect residual cultures that have a mobile history and are therefore metonymic of contemporary migrant and diasporic identities portrayed in the novel. Religion on the other hand, introduces another notion of spirituality, where ways of identification are related to otherworlds. In fact, the tyranny caused by the mobility of childhoods, cultures, histories, legends and mythologies creates possibilities of imagination that transcend the fixity of place, history, culture and senses of identification. Imagination becomes an act of rupturing the boundaries of realism and grappling with fractured and fragmented histories, culture and identity. Imagination here is a process of identity formation, and of finding coherence out of fragmentation. The notion of spirituality allows for imagination to process itself in a specific direction, as part of away of identification, of a history or mythology of identity, as in the case of Chabella. The notion of spirituality in Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl, is also pursued through the identity 157 Appiah‟s own experience of his childhood in the Ashanti region of Ghana, his biracial status and life in Europe and America allows him to present interesting experiential arguments about the syncretic nature of diasporic subjectivity. 245 struggle of the protagonist Jess. She is possessed with an abiku spirit of her dead twin and therefore haunted by her maternal Nigerian antecedents. A trip to Nigeria foregrounds this possession, as her body and soul fight to maintain an organic whole and find coherence within their discourse of identity formation. Another trip to Nigeria at the end of the text becomes one of self-exorcism. Oyeyemi‟s works therefore explore psycho- spiritual worlds, as part of a process of identity formation for the protagonists, whose physical worlds area product of the mobility of bodies, myths of identity and history. At the present, these worlds are haunted by not only the childhood places they have come from, but also the histories, legends and mythologies of these places. Africa is an idea, a myth and history that can be traced through actual bloodlines in The Icarus Girl and through myths, legends and transnational historical events in The Opposite House. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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