Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| The Opposite House is therefore contextualised within transnational slave histories, the discourse of the black Atlantic and its diasporic peoples, as well as the specificities of Afro-Cuban experience, where the discourse of identity for the protagonist converges spatio-temporally. In light of the syncretic ontology of the histories and cultures we are dealing with here, Oyeyemi embarks on mythology, as she does in The Icarus Girl, to explore the identity struggles of the protagonist Maja, whose sense of diaspora is far more historically complex compared to Jess. This complex history is portrayed by the diversity of myths that inform the narrative structure of the novel, described by Cooper (2009:109) as am lange of travelling gods, slavery and an American poet, among other mingling myths and mutations Oyeyemi draws once again from Greek and Yoruba Pantheons, giving them a conspicuous narrative structure where they coexist in the somewhere house Apart from these mythological signifiers, her title is drawn from the poem by Emily Dickinson titled “There‟s been a Death in the Opposite House This intertextuality informs the emptiness and eschatological outlook given to the text by the mythopoeia of the somewhere house.” 175 Perhaps this eschatological outlook itself reflects the social death (Patterson, 1982) ascription to slave identity that generations of black expressive countercultures have continuously dealt with, and which Maja‟s family Most of the titles that precede different sections of The Opposite House are also drawn from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. 285 can draw its inspiration from. The gothic house is used in Dickinson‟s poem, as symbol and metaphor that elicits eschatological imagery. We have examined the house in chapter three as a chronotope, as topography where meanings are mapped in Adichie‟s fiction. While in Adichie‟s fiction it represents a diasporic consciousness, its explicitly gothic nature in Oyeyemi‟s fiction, especially in her latest novel White is for Witching, makes it a distinct subject, characterised by the animism it is portrayed in – the appropriately haunted topography of its architecture. The emptiness and grotesqueness of the house symbolises the silenced histories and heritages waiting to be excavated. The narrative of the somewhere house in The Opposite House, runs parallel, and sometimes mythically opposite the one Maja the protagonist and her family live. Situated in a mythological spatio-temporality, it is anchored somewhere – as an ethereal chronotope of space and time. Yemaya Saragua (referred to subsequently as Aya), one of the occupants of this somewhere house is in fact a goddess, whose cultural value has had a highly mobile history, in the new world and the new diaspora Originating in the Yoruba pantheon, she is associated with the ocean, which in the context of The Opposite House, is a signifier of mobility in the context of slave history. Indeed the somewhere house is positioned between two continents and specifically two cities, London and Lagos One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and the ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out into the stripped flag and cooking- smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos – always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day (1). This mythic and magical architectural positioning begins to portray the transitional gulf that characterises not only childhood in The Opposite House, but also the diasporic consciousness of the Afro-Cuban family in the text. It is interesting that the protagonists name, Maja, is a derivative of the goddess Yemaya, who in other cases is referred to as Yemaja. Yemaya, the goddess symbolised by the ocean is also the symbol of motherhood and is the protector of children. Having been carried to the shores of slavery, Yemaya is symbolic of a transnational religiosity that cuts across Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Indeed her oceanic essence, dating back to her place of origin, has the appeal of a mythical symbol of travel, mobility, transition but also a gendered genealogy, by virtue of it being an embodiment of motherhood. Indeed one cannot fail to see her association with 286 motherhood in relation to the mother Africa pedestal that has been much of African postcolonial feminist criticism (Nnaemeka, 1997; 1998). In The Opposite House, the idea of genealogy is foregrounded in the mytho-symbolic importance of Yemaya, through Chabella‟s practice of Santeria religion and the protagonists continued references to her maternal genealogy in Cuba. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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