Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

275 lines of her wardrobe. (190) Emphasis retained This process of intertransmutation, triggered by the fragmentation of the self, is also one of sublimation and transfiguration, in which solid turns into air and vice versa. Spatiality acquires new dimensions, too big and broad a space, too full and the nature and texture of things becomes apart of herself as she could sense the edges, the corners of her desk Oyeyemi takes liberties in creating neologisms of nomenclatures, describing them as “Jess-who-wasn‟t-Jess” and “Tilly-who-was-Jess.” The playful and frolicsome manner of events has a deconstructive attitude to it. The switching of personalities, the morphing of the magical into the real, the solid into air and vice versa, underlines the protean nature of subjectivity, personality and therefore of identity in this diasporic context.
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Oyeyemi creates a matrix of narrative discourses, where the notion of multiple personality disorder is alternatively explained by that of Yoruba twinning and abiku childhood. These two worldviews feed off each other, at the expense of the scattered subjectivity of the protagonist Jess. What is poignant though in this battle of worlds and personalities, is
Jess‟s struggle to define her identity. Her introverted and precocious deportment is a veneer inside her, in her stream of (unconsciousness, she battles with TillyTilly who liberally morphs into the long-armed woman, who in turn becomes her dead twin Fern. These personalities interchange in her dreams, visions and nightmares – they intertransmute, including the reality of Jess intertransmuting with TillyTilly. The more Jess opens up to friendship from Shivs and her cousin Dulcie, the more intense her own internal battles get. TillyTilly, who is now symbolic of the twinning and abiku childhood narrative, starts to become visible to her parents and her friends, and in moments of self-reflexivity, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening (222). She is caught in these lacunae of perception, imagination and reality. There is something conscious on her part that has to do with these realisations, and she catches herself realising when she is slipping in and out of these perceptions. This Indeed the frolicsome play with nomenclature, with personality, subjectivity, the magical and the real has an Alison in Wonderland tone to it – one of the influences of Oyeyemi‟s works.

276 internal conflict begins to manifest into a violent disposition, as TillyTilly increasingly assaults her, destroying and blurring further the line between her perceptions and imaginations, leading her to break her mothers computer, and shatter bathroom mirrors in a demented fashion (228-229).
TillyTilly represents a silenced, hidden and traumatic pasta heritage that haunts Jess from a life before birth – in fact, at the margin between birth and death of her fellow twin Fern. At the same time, she carries the burden of a racialised diaspora in Europe, the
“Afrosporic” community that seeks to belong in Europe in general and in Britain in particular. The battle to belong, which in abiku mythology usually pits the child against multiple forces on earth, in the bush and in the spirit world, is transposed into the realities of Jess‟s diasporic space, which is pervaded by the feeling of not belonging. The idea of diaspora space explored by Brah (1996:178-208), makes these tensions salient, where histories and genealogies collide and compete for that elusive notion of homing As
TillyTilly tells Jess There is no homeland – there is nowhere where there are people who will not get you (236, emphasis retained. In furthering Jess‟s agony, she adds Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child. Stop (236). The words capture Jess‟s condition. As an abiku and twin child, she is not only at war with her spiritual companion, in this case TillyTilly, but also with the imbalance in her soul, because her dead twin has not been appeased by the ibeji statue ritual. At the same time, the forces of modern psychology, which represent the worldview of her paternity in England area cultural burden to bear, because she is perceived as weird in her actions and as also suffering from a schizophrenic multiple personality disorder. Jess therefore simultaneously experiences these worlds and selves but achieving cosmological balance is elusive – her spiritual world threatens the balance of her Yoruba cosmology whilst her unconscious threatens the balance of her English world. She struggles with her multinational heritage, split between whether to be or not to be – she occupies a space of potency. The ontology of her childhood is potentially malleable, for she occupies a space of hybridity, which is defined by possibilities and resistances (Hron, 2008). Herself has been multiplied into genealogies and histories of

277 both English and Yoruba worlds. The space she occupies is fraught, fractured and defined by the disjuncture of postmodern selves fragmentation and multiplication of the margins of identity. The notion of the rupture of senses of identity is captured in the multiplicity of choices, where margins have become centres and vice versa. The philosophy of being, ceases to be a principle, and fora moment the lines separating being and nothingness as Jean Paul Sartre (2003) would have it, become blurred. Jess finds herself in existential dilemma, facing worlds in contrast and opposition to each other and yet without realising herself in these worlds she is associated with Ashes and witnesses, homelands chopped into little pieces – shed be English. No – she couldn‟t, though. Shed be Nigerian. No –” (243). Her homing desire (Brah, 1996) is destroyed, as she is caught in the middle of English and Nigerian genealogical antecedents and allegiances. The ontology of Jess‟s childhood is therefore defined by this persistent struggle to reconcile her scattered and fragmented self. As a diasporic subject, her consciousness is not just double, as WEB Dubois (1903) or Paul Gilroy (1993) explains of the black diaspora, it is a multiple consciousness. Indeed, the idea of homeland in The Icarus Girl, as explored in the psychic struggles of Jess is fluid and mobile. Because the heritages that define Jess‟s identities are themselves peripatetic, moving from Nigeria to Europe and back, her consciousness is equally unrooted. She finds it impossible to root herself to any of her heritages because her racial identity is itself a “half-and-half.” Rootedness becomes a mirage, and indeed, Gilroy‟s (1993) postulation about the homonym route in reference to the black diasporas in Europe and America is conceptually important in not only explaining this identity struggle, but in also defining what these diasporic identities entail. The fluid, shifting, mobile and transient consciousnesses are the foundation of these identities they are always conscious of movement, mobility and worlds that follow and haunt them. Jess‟s psychosomatic struggles are symptomatic of this nagging consciousness of belonging to different places, with different cosmologies and therefore different identity. This indeed is the plight of diasporic subjectivity the homing desire
(Brah, 1996), and the disjuncture and difference (Appadurai, 1995). The “routedness‟ examined by Gilroy (1993) is found in the metaphors of movement, exemplified in his idea of the ship in the middle passage This metaphor of travelling which is extended

278 into the idea of travelling identities and cultures is the ontology of diasporic childhoods like Jess‟s. In The Icarus Girl, there is the cartography of a journey, traced through the different sections of the book with Book One exploring the journey to Nigeria, Book Two exclusively set in the conflictual terrain of England and Book Three taking us back to Nigeria. However, there is the constant journeying, up and down spiritual worlds and wildernesses of the mind on the part of Jess, through her dreams, visions and imaginations. The constant blurring of perception, imagination and being exemplifies her psycho-spiritual journeys. The materiality of this psycho-spiritual journeying is portrayed in the inexorable morphing of images, statues and figures into each other. For example, the charcoal drawing of the long-armed woman becomes a figure in her dreams, which becomes TillyTilly and vice versa.
Jess‟s constant states of delirium, fits of screaming and flights of imagination provide a dizzying narrative pattern which is staccato-like, constantly refusing coherence and attempts to create an organic plot. She is destined to exist as a “half-and-half child who lives in the three worlds ascribed to her abiku and twin childhood. While these worlds, like the worlds of the abiku child, for instance in Okri‟s works are in continuous conflict with each other, the task will be to find a cosmological balance. For Jess, it will involve the unfinished ritual of the ibeji statue, to appease her dead twin and therefore reconcile her Nigerian heritage. This will involve a journey, back to Bodija, Nigeria, the place of the birth of her soul and the context of her abiku childhood. A second trip to Nigeria becomes a motif fora return to self-discovery for Jess. It signifies a cyclical pattern, perhaps dialectical, in the search fora synthesis of not only her diverse worlds, but also her fragmented subjectivity. This journey coincides with her ninth birthday, here symbolic of a rebirth in her land – of mythological conception, as an

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