Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

260 always hiding from people and watching them and feeling jealous because they were healthy and she wasn‟t. But this was all wrong. Beth was the one whose words and character Jess held closest to herself, the one who broke Jess‟s heart by dying as bravely as Jo had lived. Jess began to think that maybe she wasn‟t reading Little Women but another story altogether and it wasn‟t a very good story. (97) Indeed, Beth‟s demure and precocious deportment is something that one can draw parallels, with Jess‟s own deportment in The Icarus Girl, best brought out in the syzygy of character creation between Beth and Jo, parallels with Jess and TillyTilly. The simultaneity of similarities and contrasts can be drawn in the character-creation process. This is part of a strategy that collapses and draws boundaries at the same time in The
Icarus Girl. Meta-fiction therefore allows for the process of writing, on the part of
Oyeyemi, to be a self-reflexive process, on the influences of her imaginations and thoughts. At the same time, it is part of a postmodern strategy of fragmenting the narrative structure of the text by creating layers of fictional worlds imbricately positioned
– fiction within fiction. The language and style of representation uses an animist, magical realist and postmodern narrative style that not only places the real and the imagined in contiguity with each other but also blurs the lines between them. In The Icarus Girl, images metamorphose into reality, imagination into reality and vice versa. Indeed, even bodies metamorphose into other bodies, as with Jess becoming
TillyTilly and vice versa towards the end of the text. Moreover, Jess‟s mothers vocation, immerses her into a world of imagination most of the time. She is wont to be found in her bedroom, staring into her computer or typing away. Jess‟s mothers sense of herself is defined by narratives and stories, and the world of imagination is part of the process of dealing with her sense of nomadic identity. Writing, for her, is a practical process of seeking answers, self-reflecting and reconciling scattered senses of identity. Imagination is therefore a notion that defines the characters worlds, and it comes in variations of myths, legends, dreams and works of fiction among others. Jess is constantly haunted by

261 images, teleported into worlds, in which these images become actual beings reaching out to her. In the instance mentioned above, where Jess is involved in self-reflective reading of the book Little Women, we are instantly teleported into some kind of a dreamworld. Jess herself is teleported into a magical world, with images of a man trapped in a bottle and the other more conspicuous one, of the charcoal-drawn woman, reaching out from the Boys Quarters with her grotesque hands. The image drawn here is akin to the buoyancy of the flying saucer, flying carpet, or broom that can be connected to Latin American magical realism. The feeling of flight and teleportation recurs as Jess moves closer to a tougher battle with her multiple selves and as she struggles with the process of individuation. Flight, buoyancy and motion here also relate to the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus. Hence we can ask ourselves whether there is hubris to Jess flights, buoyancies of imagination, and the simultaneity of multiple self-hoods, and whether, like Icarus she becomes a tragic hero, by flying too high to her death. Imagination is the means through which flight takes place in The Icarus Girl. But the worlds of imagination and reality coexist through the presence of TillyTilly, Jess‟s double, who seems to embody the “Pandora‟s box of Jess‟s Nigerian connections. TillyTilly is the embodiment and the gateway to the myths, legends and narratives of twins and doubles, the stages of life and death, of what could be and could not be, what is and what is not, in the immediate context of Jess‟s late Twin sister Fern, and the apparently unfinished Yoruba customs and rituals that haunt Jess‟s life. She is the medium that blurs what is magical, animist and realist in Jess‟s life. As she carries Jess into magical feats, including invisibly spying on Jess‟s classmate Colleen McLain, the world of imagination, magic and realism crumbles. There is a process of “intertrasmutation”
165
beginning to happen as Jess acquires these magical traits, further blurring the perceived boundaries between herself and TillyTilly. This process reaches a climax at the end of the text, when This is a term I borrow from Wole Soyinka‟s Myth, Literature and the African World (1976). Soyinka uses it to examine the process in which myth and reality interchange in the narratives and legends of the celestial and terrestrial, specifically how the Yoruba pantheon found a metaphysical connection with human beings.

262
TillyTilly and Jess morph into each other, in an attempted reconciliation of Jess‟s multiple selves. The idea of intertransmutation can be related to that of (inter)subjectivity. As in the case of the abiku figure, subjectivity appears informs that are both terrestrial and celestial. When diverse worlds are traversed, worlds that are associated with different senses of materiality, then the process of intertransmutation occurs. Abiku children for instance have lives before and afterbirth, they inhabit not only these multiple worlds, but also, as we realise with Jess, the world of the bush and the wild as castaways. The bush is associated with ghosts and djinns;
166
it is a world of spirits inhabiting the materiality of a human world. This indeed is the animist realism that Garuba (2003) refers to. For Jess, materiality is imbued with the spiritual, as her double TillyTilly makes her realise, that she can be invisible, that she can be magically teleported from one place to another. When Jess is taken to the psychologist Dr McKenzie, the notion of subjectivity takes on psychoanalytic dimensions, while returning us to the significance of imagination. What is important to see here is the ways in which the notion of subjectivity is treated to a clash between the legends, myths and narratives of a Yoruba cosmological world and the modern scientific form of psychoanalytic observation through Dr McKenzie. As a half- and-half” child, Jess‟s worlds are separated by cultural gulfs in the process of understanding subjectivity. However, the instructive thing here is the role of narrative in the case of psychoanalytic observation, and that of legend and myth in Yoruba cosmology that both forms of practice are underscored by the importance of storytelling. Moreover, Jess‟s multiple personality or abiku status as a child of many worlds, with many personalities, and subjectivities is a common denominator underlying these diverse interpretative systems. The multiple worlds, selves or subjectivities, however, can only be understood through the notion of imagination. Imagination takes on several forms on the legends and myths that implicitly underlie Jess‟s genealogical histories, and the stories and narrative acts that come out in her conversation with Dr McKenzie. The bush in Nigerian literature has also previously carried similar symbolic significance in the fiction of Amos Tutuola.

263 The portrayal of Dr McKenzie‟s first session with Jess (123-124) foregrounds the process of imagination and storytelling, as central to psychological analysis. The role of narrative is foregrounded in Dr McKenzie‟s attempts at locating The Position of the
Unconscious.”
167
Indeed this psychoanalytical sessions delving into the realm of imagination through narrative and storytelling is an act of transference in which the reality of Jess‟s unconscious, according to Dr McKenzie is being unfolded. It is an enactment of Lacanian (1978) ideas on the fundamentals of the psychoanalytical process. Jess and Dr McKenzie are involved in the process of analysis through what Lacan refers to as the free association of speech between the analyst and analysand. This process results in the production of the subjective division of Jess. Lacan ascribes to this subjective division, the name unconscious – that indeed the analysands unconscious has been accessed through the actor ritual of transference via the free association of speech through narrative and imagination, between the analyst and analysand. In this case
Lacan observes the loss of being of the central focus of analysis – their being escapes them, as with Jess Mummy Um. Big. No – ‟ Daddy Small. Smaller, I mean. Than – ‟ School Nobody Jess Gone Where have you gone, Jess She had no idea, That was surprising, too. (124) I am referring to Lacan‟s seminal essay Position of the Unconscious remarks made at the 1960
Bonneval colloquium rewritten in 1964,” which for Lacan defines the aim of a psychoanalytical session.

264 At the heart of Lacan‟s (1978) ideas on the unconscious, is the importance of language as an organising principle of mental schema. His meta-theories on the psychoanalytical process underscore the significance of language through imagination and narrative as central to the process of transference and therefore access to the unconscious. As a post-
Freudian psychoanalyst, he used language to delve into the unconscious, to derive the notion of subjective division and to come up with his seminal tenets on The Position of the Unconscious At the centre of these modern forms of psychoanalysis is language, which is explored through the process of narrative, storytelling, and is guided by an imaginative process similar to the legends and myths that help understand the histories and genealogies of abiku children, dead twins and other celestial beings in Yoruba cosmology. Myths and legends are part of an essential narrative makeup that defines the phenomenon of spirituality. They are also part of the oral histories of communities
(Quayson, 1997), and points at which pan-ethnicity and collective senses of identity can be derived. The ontology of Jess‟s childhood is therefore defined by the simultaneity of the animist, magical and realist. Her double, TillyTilly, is the visibility of a magical worldview. She mediates the two worlds for Jess, appearing and disappearing at will. She is a haunting presence in Jess‟s childhood, while at the same time, an invisible and friendly companion. In Jess, we see Oyeyemi‟s own childhood, when she had to create an imaginary friend, playing with her in closed doors, after the culture shock of anew environment in Lewisham London. Jess‟s loneliness and feeling of difference and alienation makes her childhood similarly imaginative in character. While TillyTilly can be considered a figment of her imagination, the reality of her for Jess, is tangible, creating at most times an illusion between what is real and what is imagined or perceived. Inmost cases, the gothic nature of the houses or circumstances when TillyTilly appears, allows space for suspension of disbelief. Horrific silences, darkness and sharp staircases create flights of imagination and fear on the part of not only Jess but those around her (135-
141). TillyTilly becomes real yet imagined as she appears, isolating Jess from the rest, making her actually disappear. Ina Harry Potter like scenario, Jess travels down, and through the staircase, the carpet and the actual stair falling away beneath her feet as if she

265 and Tilly were going underground in a lift that would never stop descending (139). The feeling of buoyancy and a spiralling downwards, the dizziness, as well as the descent into a bottomless abyss is a leitmotif that characterises the precariousness of Jess‟s childhood its sense of spatio-temporality and therefore of identity. She is at a continuum, a point of intertransmutation and intersubjectivity, as Ever since she had comeback from Nigeria, she felt as if she was becoming different, becoming stronger, becoming more like Tilly”
(143). Nigeria in this sense becomes a transformative experience of self-recovery for Jess. To become more like Tilly” means to assume an imaginative and magical subjectivity. Perhaps it also means to approach the climax of personality (disorder. For her to imagine herself her double (TillyTilly), she seems to be approaching a form of reconciliation of herself, but at the same time morphing into or even being consumed by this new personality. But TillyTilly is an embodiment of her Nigerian fears, as we realise later.
TillyTilly carries with her the myth and legend of a life before birth, a spirit childhood which will soon dawn on Jess and whose reality has always seemed implicit in the many chidings about her uncanny comportment at school and at home. Jess has therefore, after her first visit to Nigeria, been possessed or embraced by the reality of her spirit childhood. Her experience in London however introduces the dynamic of race and therefore of a different sense of intersubjectivity through the practice of psychology, portrayed in her sessions with Dr McKenzie. The cultural differences in practices, through varied customs and rituals split her world into two. Indeed, her psychic troubles are made complex by different cultural positions in relation to the idea of multiple subjectivity. Ina sense, the ideas of culture and subjectivity are important in reading Jess‟s predicament in interesting ways. The different cultures and colours that define her genealogy are in a struggle for coexistence. Her genealogically diasporic context of identification is located in a space of increasing senses of disjuncture – she is haunted and possessed by a mosaic of mythologies, legends, stories and narratives which fragment her sense of identification with any particular culture. As a psychic subject, she is defined by

266 multiple structures of feeling at the outset, by her mixed race biology and essentially by the genealogies of varied parentage, which come with different histories and cultural baggage. This places her at the centre of the tension between the diasporic persons psychic subjectivity and the forces of culture already in tension in that diasporic space. The diasporic space is one of creative tension, where imagination reigns, through a deliberate process of recreating myths, legends and other narratives related to the identification process. There is a creative tension in this space, redolent, as in Jess‟s case, with the fantastic and the fabulous. Examinations of where the discourses of psychoanalysis and cultural theory meet discuss them as thresholds (Donald, 1991) of psycho-social experience and identity. Donald for instance, points to the irreconcilable tension between psychic subjectivity and cultural determinism. He insists that there is no seamless fit between the subject, their sense of psychic identity and the socio-cultural dimensions they derive from, despite these dimensions being their locus of existence.
168
The more reason, as Robert Young (1991) points out there is the notion of the unconscious as a concept that defines the interminable tension and the incompatibility between psychic identity and social frameworks of identity.
169
The diasporic space however complicates the matter further, by virtue of increasing the feeling of fragmentation for the psychic subject.
Diasporic subjectivity is hence characterised by the ceaseless struggle for reconciliation and conjuncture. It is defined by imagination, because the process of trying to reconcile fragmentation requires imagining connections that would otherwise never bethought of.
Diasporic subjectivity occupies a space of fluctuation that requires a constant process of imagination. This is similar to what Fanon (1967) says about the colonised zone of occult instability in which there is fluctuating movement being constantly shaped by imagination. Imagination gives shape to this flux, aiding in the process of dealing with the psychic fragmentation. Imagination seeks coherence and conjuncture it seeks to find a connection that would suture fragmented selves and personalities. As in the case of Jess, imagination allows her to create fantasies that deal with the tension between her James Donald (1991) On the Threshold Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies p. 1-10.
169 Robert Young (1991) Psychoanalysis and Political Literary Theories p. 139-157.

267 psychic self and her already fraught diasporic subjectivity. How others perceive her, as a
“half-and-half child who is torn between racial identities, foregrounds the incompatibility of the social identity frameworks or structures of feeling with her own psychic subjectivity and sense of identification. Indeed her feelings of alienation draw her further away from herself, as she constantly deals with the paranoia of being called weird. Living at the edge of multiracial and multicultural genealogies, her imagination is influenced by legends, myths and narratives from the multiple genealogical frameworks of identity. The narrative, through legends and myths is one way in which Jess tries to reconcile the syzygy that defines her sense of herself. The incompatibility of her multiple selves, of her racial genealogies and the cultural worlds that come with them demands for imagination, for fantasies, informed by the myths and legends that cut across the histories of England and Nigeria. Indeed, one could see a clash of cultural subjectivities, portrayed through the different ways in which the abiku child becomes a condition that is diagnosed as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), or some kind of schizophrenia that needs the intervention of the psychologist Dr McKenzie. The process of psychologising is defined by free association, hypnosis and narrative processes, as Dr Mckenzie tries to unravel Jess‟s unconscious. This underscores the importance of narrative and imagination, components which are central to how Lacanian psychoanalysis defines the unconscious – as structured like and through a language. The metaphors and metonyms that construct the symbolic order in Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen as part of the process of imagining connections from incompatible elements. Indeed, metaphors provide for us the problematic relationship between the signifier and signified – the arbitrariness of their ascriptions. Metonyms on the other hand, ascribe apart to a whole, as representative of a whole. Both metaphors and metonyms function within the symbolic order and structure of language. Indeed metaphors and metonyms portray the images of contiguity and mutual exclusiveness. The psychic subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis is therefore defined by language, while their unconscious is accessed through the activities of free association and transference, mediated by language. The unconscious, visible through dreams, parataxis, jokes and slips of tongue exposes the tensions of individual psychic

268 subjectivity and normative forms of cultural subjectivity in a larger societal framework of relations.
Jess‟s sense of the self is wholly immersed in her psychic state. There is a thin line between her conscious and unconscious. As demonstrated earlier, these states fluidly morph into each other as we see her move from the imaginative world of fiction into dreamland. These fluid movements between different states of mind even problematise her sense of the boundaries between imagination and reality. She only comes to terms later, with the notion that TillyTilly is a figment of her imagination, even though her status as an abiku provides an alternative view. In her actual states of psychosomatic delirium, she has visions and images that haunt her. The grotesque looking charcoal- drawn image of the woman with long arms becomes areal manifestation, allowing us to seethe thin line between images, dreams and reality in The Icarus Girl. These states of delirium seem to be borderline nodes of intertransmutation and intersubjectivity on the part of Jess. She wrestles with otherworldly images, feelings and realities, stuck in between these multiple worlds tagging from varied directions. Distinctions between dreams and visions are blurred, as she is possessed by TillyTilly, whose features have since become more ghoulish, while she tries to reconcile the fact that she might be a figment of Jess imagination
“[...] Jessy, you guessed without me explaining, that
I‟m ... that I‟m not really here. I mean, of course I‟m Really here, just not really really here, if you see what I mean ... Most of the time I‟m somewhere else, but I Can appear, and you haven‟t imagined me (156) The long-armed woman seems to suddenly merge with the evanescing image of
TillyTilly. It is always interesting, the way images, states of mind and worlds in The

Download 1.93 Mb.

Share with your friends: