Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

39 In view of the above, Freudian psychoanalysis is therefore informative in analysing the creation of the unconscious at the time of childhood, relating it to the object relations theories of critics like Melanie Klein (1949), Ronald Fairbairn (1962) and the structural theory that divides the mind into the id, ego and superego. However, and as post-
Freudian psychoanalysis has come to argue, there are certain changes in the formation of societal institutions that challenge some of Freud‟s earlier conceptions newer familial setups like the ones mentioned earlier are an example, notwithstanding other strata like class. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis in the works of Stephen Frosh (1987; 1991; 1994) will be relevant in understanding how the evolution of childhood now works to challenge genealogies, traditions and normative gender constructs, within specifically postcolonial and postmodern contexts in the fiction to be studied. The alternative histories (to adultist, regime-centred ones) provided by childhood, intertextuality and alternative genealogies pursued through the relations of fathers and sons and fathers and daughters point to postcolonial discourse, criticism and identity formation in interesting synergy with aspects of postmodern theory. Childhood itself as represented in these works, continuously grapples with (re)definitions of cultures, races, ethnicities, nationalities, families, genders and histories in the quest for identity formation. These identities are postmodern in representation in the works to be studied. Implied in examining childhood is also the notion of cultural politics. The connection between childhood and diaspora is through the broad idea of multi/transculturalism. It is ironical as well that while multiculturalism is a point of connection it is itself one of difference by virtue of eliciting a mapping of boundaries between the multi-cultures: this is through the prefix multi. As broad as the concept is, it challenges the concept of nativity, particularly after the resurgence of migrants in the metropolitan Europe and America. This is important in historicising the emergence of postcolonial studies in the Western academy, of black intellectualism and the burgeoning scholarship on residual subaltern alternative marginalised and “other(ed)” ethnicities and cultures.

40 The conceptual contexts delineated above therefore form an interpretative framework for examining childhood. Indeed by their density, they reflect the notion of childhood as as a process as well as a set of ideas that forms a discourse for the analysis of contemporary forms of identity as reflected in contemporary Nigerian fiction. The chapters of the study therefore foreground childhood as a set of ideas that reflect on the images, memories and figures of childhood set in spaces, places, times which are influenced (but which in turn problematise) by specific people – fathers, mothers and other family members, who embody genealogical, traditional, heritage and frameworks of identification for the child. The frameworks set by these people remain adultist, a perspective that is problematised by the marginalised one of childhood that seeks agency. The next chapter therefore foregrounds childhood time and memory as constructing an alternative time, history and therefore an archive. In examining the childhoods of Kambili in Purple Hibiscus, Ugwu in Half of a Yellow Sun and Elvis in Abani‟s Graceland, the chapter foregrounds the ordinary and daily lives of these child protagonists as presenting nostalgic, traumatic and popular memories. These dimensions of memory, grounded in the everyday routine of childhood life seem to signal to an alternative experience of time and history in the turbulent socioeconomic, political and cultural period of military governance in Nigeria. Having foregrounded the “memoryscape” of the different childhoods in chapter two, chapter three moves onto examine the memory places and spaces of the childhoods of
Kambili, Ugwu and Elvis. This notion of space and place is read through Bakhtin‟s
(1981) notion of the literary chronotope. The reading foregrounds spatio-temporal elements in the novel as grounds fora dialogic discourse. Bakhtin‟s conceptual framework allows us to seethe dialogism immanent in the world of childhood, which the novelistic text of childhood aids in foregrounding because of its equally dialogic structure. Chapter four deals with a crucial aspect that builds on from the “memoryscape” and memory place of childhood the people who influence and define these memories and

41 places. Here, the chapter foregrounds the discourse of (the) fatherhood) as a central problematic in the childhoods of Kambili in Purple Hibiscus, Enitan in Everything Good
Will Come, Elvis in Graceland and Black in The Virgin of Flames. These various childhoods, examined as “daughterhoods” and “sonhoods” in relation to the discourse of the father, seem to challenge paternal and false genealogical frameworks by the sentimental disposition of the daughter towards her father and the construction and performance of sexuality and gender by the son. These daughterhoods and sonhoods would seem to create alternative genealogies that are foregrounded by an agency- enhancing postcolonial and postmodern environment which avails more choices to construct alternative heritages, in the form of symbolic and imaginary fathers. Chapter five attempts to interrogate the notions of time, history, archive, space, place, time and genealogies that the previous chapters have explored through diasporic childhoods in Helen Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House. This chapter presents classification and analytical challenges by examining childhoods that have actually transcended continental boundaries of identification but which simultaneously and strategically enact and identify with multiple traditions, heritages, legacies and therefore genealogies through their occupation with multiple times, spaces and places. These “diasporic childhoods are constructed through mythological histories that bring together abiku and twinning mythologies of Yoruba cosmology, multiple personality disorder discourses of European modernity, and Santeria mythology and ritual practices of Afrocubanismo origin. These childhoods, are presented as postmodern in how they are constructed and therefore in how they construct ways of identification with the multiple worlds they inhabit. In light of the previous chapters, chapter six concludes that childhood, in view of how it has been represented in the texts studied, is developing as a significant discourse in contemporary Nigerian fiction and criticism. Through the aspects of alternative memories, times, histories and archives defining the everyday life of childhood the spaces, places and times defining a childhood world the people (fathers) whose genealogical legacies are problematised; as well as the diasporic childhoods which embody multinational, transnational and therefore multicultural and transcultural

42 intertextualities and its engagement with the image of the father, childhood is profoundly dealing with new forms of contemporary identities at the intersection of the postcolonial context and postmodern experience, attitude and consciousness.

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