Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| weltanschauung, for instance, is constructed though a television and video experience. In his childhood, his mother inducts him into this world and his teacher encourages him to learn from representations of extraneous realities. This experience and worldview has created a landscape of desires that is in conflict with these protagonists immediate realities. Moreover, this worldview is directly in opposition to the teleology represented, for Elvis, by his father Sunday Oke. Furthermore Elvis‟s activity of impersonation is itself a form of resistance to the economic reality he is living in as well as to fatherhood and all it represents – origins, authority and legitimacy. The impersonation involves a dance act, expressive of Elvis‟s desire for freedom, of the creative energy of the world he inhabits, of resistance to forces that create the same world and yet a tribute to maternal memory which represents an alternative sense of identity and genealogy to that of his father, Sunday Oke. Blacks painting expresses his obsession with the idea of image. We could say this about Elvis‟s impersonation and its goal of simulating – which is a representation of the image of Elvis Presley. Black impersonates models for economic convenience he cannot afford to pay models to pose for his paintings. Both protagonists occupy what Frosh (1991) refers to as postmodern states of mind which characterise contemporary cultures that are fragmented, ontologically defined by surface meanings – what Jameson (1991) calls a “depthlessness” – which only processes the image which has become a pervasive metaphor in contemporary culture. Both protagonists experience their self through interaction with images, in painting and in what Frosh (1991:31) refers to as “communicational and computational networks. They both consume (or are they consumed by) the process of postmodernisation. There is an absence of teleology or closure in the narratives of their experience. An open consciousness exists and an inchoate sense of “selfhood” into which the absence and illegitimacy of the biological father is played out, including the core concern of a problematic masculine perception of the world. 230 The sons in Abani‟s works negotiate their relationship with their fathers through the idea of masculinity. In this struggle is also an attempt to deal with forces of contemporary culture. Theirs, in Lyotardian terms is a postmodern condition (1984) that provides fora postmodern state of mind (Frosh, 1991). It is a struggle with the idea of origins and teleology, against a dominant narrative of masculine identity. In this struggle is the relationship with the father figure. As sons, they live in a symbolic and arguably, for Black, an imaginary order of fatherhood, either in memory, reality or both. This order as it turns out is defined by their biological inheritance – maleness –, which is an apriori signifier to specific goals and attitudes of socialisation. Elvis‟s father Sunday Oke makes it clear for instance that Elvis is my son. Not my daughter (62), and uses violence against Elvis to make this point clear. But for Elvis this goes beyond biology, for in the same biology does he feel the deficiency of his identity, which is aggravated by the presence and actions of his father. Yet in the same biology, there exists infinite possibilities that for Elvis will provide an exit out of the claustrophobic world he presently lives in. In Elvis‟s impersonation of Elvis Presley is his destiny Graceland His impersonation activity underpins the creativity and resistance, definitive of the world he is living in a world he shares across the continental shores with Black, his older contemporary, who is caught up in the puzzle of a troubled childhood in the form of a critical memory of his parentage. Through his impersonation, Elvis gets to mirror a different self and occupy a transcendental world, similar to the masquerade world in Achebe‟s Umuofia and Umuaro societies. Indeed, he uses the image of a mask dancing, in his escapades at the beaches in front of tourists. Eze Chielozona (2005) posits that the movement in space and time between Afikpo and Lagos is informed by Abani‟s goal to represent a multifaceted reality, one similar to Achebe‟s concept of the mask dancing. 147 Elvis also experiences the same reality, by virtue of his sonhood, through the aspects of masculinity and femininity. Yet these realities are not mutually exclusive as they may appear they The metaphor of the dancing mask in Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart is in fact reflective of the complexity of the philosophy of binaries in Umuofia, including the masculine-feminine one that Okonkwo fails to moderate in his perception of the world. 231 confront each other and collapse into each other, blurring space and time, making them “unpresentable” (Lyotard, 1984) in a manner that represents a postmodern condition With Black is also an intricate psychological battle arising from the physical understanding of his self, and from a temporal dimension – the memory of his childhood. The landscape of (East) Los Angeles, the city of angels,” 148 is Blacks canvas. Considered the centre of Television and Film, it is a suitable location for Blacks creativity and resistance. In many ways Los Angeles and Lagos share the condition of multiculturalism. They are both migrant cities that provide discourse for resistance from normativity and yet space fora creative self to flourish. They provide, for both protagonists, a culture of survival liberating their socialised senses of genealogy, allowing them to, through performance, critique the assumptions behind sonhood and articulate creative resistance congruous to their postmodern conditions. Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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