Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| The Icarus Girl is therefore a product of a medley of influences which include myths, traditions, narratives, poetry and legends that explain the authors sense of her genealogy in her new diasporic world. Cooper refers to this as part of the imagination of a New Diaspora that collapses boundaries between Black British writing and writings of the Black Diaspora in the new world For Cooper, the sense of identity for writers like Oyeyemi is signified by things such as the texture of their hair as well as their skin colour, which connects them to the diasporic blackscape, despite its differentiated histories, myths, legends and narratives. Hence, Coopers (a) earlier argument about material cultures in postcolonial migrant writing is extended further. 164 For Jess therefore, her multiple genealogies of history, time and place, provide a variation of narrative, myth and the influence of legend, hence her familiarity with a medley of literary, intellectual, mythical and historical narratives. The Icarus Girl delineates the agony of defining herself, indeed her multiple selves, and her first voyage to Nigeria starts as a process of self-immolation, towards a rediscovery of herself. The idea of temporality, as it stands now is complicated. Jess‟s life at the moment, as we realise at the end of the text, is already determined and influenced at the point of her birth, when her twin sister Fern dies. As she realises later, her life is scattered before and afterbirth. She occupies multiple worlds defined by an abiku identity vicariously lived through the shadow of her dead twin sister Fern and the other magical realist world brought to her by TillyTilly. TillyTilly is a syzygy-like persona who has much in common and also in contrast with Jess, but who provides her with the necessary flights of imagination. Jess‟s multiple personality therefore foregrounds simultaneous spatio-temporalities, defined by myths, legends and narratives of death and life as well as her racial extraction as a half- and-half child Her sojourn through the abandoned Boys Quarters (68-71), portrays gothic-style narrative, as she tries to uncover the grotesque and haunted architecture. The Boys Cooper (a) extends her examination of diasporic writing from an earlier position about material cultures by linking anew generation of African writers to an earlier tradition of diasporic writing that is informed by major dispersal events in history like the slave trade. 257 Quarters is portrayed as an architectural synechdoche of Jess‟s sense of the self abandonment, haunted emptiness, as well as an autotelic hunger to explore the mysteries of its silenced, dark, dank and cobwebbed corridors. Opening each door seems like a journey into discovering the inner terrains of her hidden past (69). Her discovery of the shrine with candles, as well as the charcoal-drawn image of the grotesque-looking black woman with thick, glossy hair (70), is one that is to have far-reaching consequences in her psyche during the moments of her flights of imagination. The shrine represents material cultures of worship, and towards the end of the text, images, figures and statues collapse into each other as this particular image in the shrine takes centre stage in Jess‟s battles with her multiple personalities. Her multiple worlds and genealogies are inconstant battles with each other while her flights of imagination make her reach a state of delirium that affects her physical state of health. A return to England after discovering TillyTilly and her magical worlds and capabilities results in a state of delirium, fevers and the expectancy of TillyTilly‟s imminent magical arrival. The indeterminacy of this strange illness as discovered by her doctor (76), is the portrayal, of an indeterminate psychosomatic state. It is temporarily remedied by “pepe soup with digestible specks of ground beef in it by her mother, and chicken soup with barley by her English grandmother and she began to sleep properly again (76) – A soothing mixture of food from both cultures. Indeed, she is a “half-and- half child of multiple culinary cultures and whose sense of wholeness means a simultaneous and strategic imbibing of these cultures. In her classroom, the image of Miss Patel reading a passage about Sir Francis Drakes travels from a thin hardback book (77) portrays the hybridity of her world of mixed narratives, legends and practitioners (Miss Patel) of a New Diaspora Jess‟s world ranges from the faraway narratives of her Nigerian maternal forefathers, the legends of their existence in the nineteenth century, including the relations that had all scattered across Nigeria, some as far as Minna and Abuja, others to Benin, Ife, Port Harcourt” (31), to the legendary narratives of Sir Francis Drakes oceanic escapades. Myths, legends and narratives are the genealogical legacies that contextualise her sense of identity in this 258 new world These diverse worlds however bring out a violent disposition in Jess‟s many selves in the form of panic attacks accompanied by bouts of screaming. They seem to create intense feelings of isolation on her part, aggravated by a comment from a classmate, Colleen McLain that Maybe Jessamy has all these attacks because she cant makeup her mind whether shes black or white (82). Her perpetual state of tension, nervousness, precocity and hermitic disposition culminates into these attacks as she struggles to reconcile her culturally fragmented selves. When TillyTilly shows up in London, the magical world opens up, as she is once again teleported to houses, in an invisible state. The line, for Jess, between what is real and magical is very thin. Images and reality have a thin line separating them. The world of imagination, particularly in the fiction works referenced, present interesting parallels narratives from diverse worlds recreate Jess‟s worldview and her sense of the self. The imaginative landscape in her life can also be likened to her mothers vocation as a writer who spends hours on her computer, isolated from her family and in her own imaginative world. The power of narrative, in proffering a sense of the self, is found in the many stories her mother reads for her, including the sessions where she reads the stories she writes to Jess. Jess lives in her imagination, the power of it allowing her to traverse TillyTilly‟s magical world, to experiment with reality and blur the lines between the terrestrial and celestial, the real and unreal, the dead and the living, the fictional and nonfictional. It is these stories which construct a landscape of imagination, that define her childhood. That she precociously lives in her imagination also reflects the thin line between her own imaginative subjectivity and, as explained earlier, authorial subjectivity and experience. Her hermitic, precocious and magical world of childhood reflects the authors own struggles to live in a self-sufficient imaginative world, having faced anew and radically different cultural reality in Lewisham London, after only arriving at the tender age of four. The (inter)textualities we find in The Icarus Girl, which occur allusively in the form of legends, myths and historical narratives, reflect authorial influences – portraying Oyeyemi‟s diverse intellectual influences – a product of not only wandering imagination but also a nomadic identity. 259 The process of writing, portraying Jess‟s childhood life, is therefore one that Oyeyemi navigates, portraying the diverse narratives and storylines that influenced and affected her own childhood. These are stories and narratives of identification that portray the disjuncture and difference of diasporic identity process formation. The centrality of fiction, indeed the meta-fictional structure of The Icarus Girl, which is found in the numerous allusions to imagination, to varied fictions and narrative formations, reflects the importance of imaginative subjectivity on the part of the author and indeed as definitive of diasporic identity formation. To find stories and narrative formations that one can relate to, that in ones childhood, as in the case of Oyeyemi, defined its identity, that helped in ways to reconcile a scattered self and that allowed fora self-contained identity formation is a central concern of The Icarus Girl. Through meta-fiction, the characters indifferent books and stories that Jess interacts with seem to transmute into her real world. Indeed her imaginative world is central to the worldliness of the social formations that define her life. She seems to move in and out of imagination, living in and out of stories and works of fiction. Characters in these works jump out of the page and into her life, recreating and reforming her subjectivities. Parallels can be drawn sometimes between the meta-fictional allusions of The Icarus Girl and authorial experiences. In examining the diverse fictional allusions and storylines that can be drawn in The Icarus Girl, Jess‟s imaginative world and sense of subjectivity is influenced by such characters as Beth in Louisa May Alcott‟s Little Women. This text, a mid-nineteenth century publication, set in a house in Concord, Massachusetts in America, has striking autobiographical childhood experiences influencing it, much like The Icarus Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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