Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

252 religion. For example, Santeria religion practised by Chabella in The Opposite House is a pastiche of cultural practice that connects together the disparate histories of her diasporic family. The other narrative of the somewhere house is a mythopoetic attempt by
Oyeyemi, juxtaposed as a magical reality of simultaneously coexisting histories and myths, with one door facing Lagos and the other opening up to London. The Opposite
House portrays the complex narratives of diasporic histories. The genealogies of the family of Maja are constellated, via different continents with different histories. The predominant history is that of slavery as it is a point of confluence for all the other narratives that leads us to the recent history in this narrative of the sugarcane plantations of Cuba. In light of the complexity of genealogies and histories, the narrative in The
Opposite House is mythopoetic: a constellation of mythical worlds and genealogical strands that makeup the history of Maja‟s diasporic familial lines. The myth and magic of the somewhere house is made to coexist with the reality of Maja‟s family living in London. The somewhere house is portrayed as a home that is neither here nor there, its precariousness, as part celestial, part terrestrial, portrays the fragility of a diasporic sense of belonging and identity. Its mythical portrayals, with characters that can be recognised from a variety of pantheons and religious myths presents a mythopoetic narrative structure that works like a syzygy.
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5.4 The Racialised Abiku in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl
Helen Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl uses doppelgangers to create a twinning motif, by contrasting the main protagonist Jessamy Harrison with her alter ego TillyTilly. At the same time, the alter ego is contrasted to the abiku identity of Jess, one that is later revealed to be maternally linked to the death, at birth, of her twin sister named Fern. As an abiku, Jess is said to live in the real world, the bush and the spiritual world. Her precocious demeanour is defined by her uncanny silence. She keeps to herself, hiding in cupboards and writing haiku poetry.
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Her preference for enclosed spaces embodies her In using the word syzygy, I echo Gerald Gaylard‟s description of African postcolonialism, in terms of how it is a practice in syzygy – where writers and critics constantly engage with the notions of similarities and differences and the thin lines separating them. They use the devices of postmodernism, where those similar or dissimilar are always read as seemingly connected in one way or the other. Haiku is originally a form of Japanese poetry adapted in English and consisting of three lines and seventeen syllables.

253 feeling of self-containment: Jess preferred cupboards and enclosed spaces to gardens
(4). She lives in her imagination, and the novel mostly delves into her stream of consciousness. Her imagination is presented as what defines how she subjectively apprehends the world around her. Indeed her imagination soars, Icarus-like, with disregard for what people around her think of it. Reclusive and hermitic, she shies away from places outside cupboards, choosing to remain morosely silent Outside the cupboard, Jess felt as if she was in a place where everything moved past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say things. So she kept her eyes to the ground, which pretty much stayed the same. (4) In her flights of imagination, she writes Haiku for hours (6-7). Jess‟s unusual deportment is further complicated by an impending trip to Nigeria, the land of her maternal genealogy, which haunts her imagination. We are quickly warned that it her identity struggles as we witness later all STARTED in Nigeria
(6) Emphasis retained. As she makes the physical journey with her parents to where it all started it is like a date with destiny – she is journeying to face that “Pandora‟s box of fears, repressions and anxieties. Nigeria in the distance that she can imagine it is a dark, hydra-headed monster that looms out from across all the water and land and with animist ascriptions reaching out for her with spindly arms [...] wanting to pull her down against its beating heart, to the centre of the heat, so she would pop and crackle like marshmallow (9). Having done some research on her own about Nigeria, its reality in her imagination becomes magical. It acquires a personified monstrosity that is about to catch up with her. Her sense of the self becomes multiple in recognition of the (inter)subjectivity that defines her abiku-ness, her practico-sensory self, as well as her alter ego. She throws a tantrum, screaming at the leering idea of her mothers country (9) and therefore causing a public spectacle in the plane. The complexity of this (inter)subjectivity is captured however in the statement that some part of her was sitting hunched up small, faraway, thinking scared thoughts, surprised at what was happening, although this was not new
(9). Jess‟s alter ego is portrayed, within herself as that haven that is self-contained,

254 cloistered from the chaotic self and cocooned from the destructive tantrum-throwing self that exposed itself ignominiously to the aeroplane public.
Jess‟s sense of oddity, at the airport, which is reflected in her stream of consciousness with the reference “half-and-half child (13), seems to position her in the grey area between her mothers Yoruba linguistic fluency and her fathers white statue-like out-of- place demeanour (12). The similarities and contrasts of place, space, smells and colours, with people walking around her makes her imagination fly, increasing her sense of schizophrenia and paranoia about her idea of belonging in these two seemingly disparate physical and cultural worlds of London and Lagos. Her maternal grandfathers home becomes the place of genealogical discovery, as well as the recovery of her Nigerian roots. Arrival in Nigeria opens up a different reality, as new cultural names from maternal genealogies are found for her. Her Nigerian name, Wuraola, is recovered for her by grandfather Gbenga Oyegbebi. Interestingly, grandfather Oyegbebi‟s name, means kingship lives here (27). Hence, the signifiers of genealogical history are embodied not only in this maternal patriarch of Jess but also in the spatio-temporal history of the Oyegbebi compound. The tales of lineage-retention and extension are passed down to Jess by Aunty Funke (31). The material cultures portrayed in the built environment and their genealogies, as explained by Aunty Funke, represent an anchoring of the genealogy of the Oyegbebi household, as it is traced from the s for Jess‟s benefit. The contrast, of course is found in Jess‟s paternal genealogy, which is of a different mould – of individualism, of a non-spatial order and not determined by the extended familial ones that she finds in her Nigerian one. Considering her status as an abiku, this genealogical history foreshadows Jess‟s tensions about her sense of place in the world. As an abiku, her place in the world is one of unrootedness, what to borrow McCabe (2002) words can be called vagrancy and errancy.”
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McCabe provides a detailed examination of the concept of abiku in the Yoruba cosmological history, outlining etymologies of the term as well as delineating how as a term, its meanings are layered and how this concept not only has mytho-
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McCabe, D. ( 2002) Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka‟s „Abiku,‟” p. 45-74.

255 symbolic capital, but also material dimensions reflected in rituals, customs and practices. Therefore, in grandfather Oyegbebi, Jess is pitted against the forces of lineage retention and perpetuation, for he embodies in the cosmological realm, forces that will soon destabilise her existence. McCabe calls these forces the ile – cosmological forces that work towards fettering the abiku child into an exclusively terrestrial existence. Byre- naming her Wuraola, Grandfather Oyegbebi symbolically retrieves Jess, appropriating her into a Yoruba worldview, and in a sense interpellating her into the same world. Things get complicated when Jess discovers the presence of another person, who knows her by name and who lives in the abandoned Boys Quarters When TillyTilly appears to Jess, it occurs as an innocuous event, the uncanny nature of it l hidden in Jess‟s need to find a friend, in this strange and alien environment. TillyTilly, as Jess names her, appears at first, as a local girl, shaped and dressed like a destitute girl. While Jess could make out her age, she ignores some of her physical oddities her strange dark eyes and disproportionate physical features. Like a phantom, she appears out of nowhere and fora moment, Jess feels as though this has been her shadow, something familiar – perhaps the figment of her own imagination TillyTilly echoes Jess‟s voice, making it seem like Jess was dealing with a doppelganger (42-43). TillyTilly‟s magical abilities, including her omniscience, represent the wild side of magic that at first seems real for Jess, who thrives in this wild, magical world she is being driven into. Taken by the hand, Jess is led to experience magical feats, as TillyTilly opens the padlocks of the amusement park and seems to have access to Jess‟s grandfathers study. The reader is awed by the two girls seemingly effortless access to the knowledge of varied intellectual traditions including the poetry of Coleridge, Anglo-Arthurian legends, the Bible, among other forms of knowledge that Brenda Cooper (2009) attributes to Oyeyemi‟s sense of herself as a product of multiple narratives, worldviews and cultures. Indeed, as Cooper (b) also observes, the title of the text emerges from Greek mythology, while the consciousness and attitude of imagination is influenced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Certainly, the eccentricity of Dickinson‟s poetry, its examination of death and immortality, draws parallels with Jess‟s precocious demeanour, her affinity to closeted spaces, her flights of imagination and the magical realism that underlies her alter ego and abiku personalities.

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