Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

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Jessamy Harrison in The Icarus Girl (2005) and the images and memories of the childhood of Maja in The Opposite House (2007). The novels present childhoods whose physical locations of experience is London, while their mythical and psychic locations of experience is Africa. The idea of childhood depicted in these novels, in its memories, images and figures reflects Oyeyemi‟s mythic and ideational relation to Africa, having migrated to London with her parents at the age of four. Unlike Adichie, Abani and Atta,
Oyeyemi‟s experience and relationship to Africa is a consciousness found in the stories, myths and legends that connect her to her parents as first generation migrants in her familial genealogy in London. Moreover this relationship is also informed by the generations of black British people who form a black diaspora that traces its genealogy in the multi-continental slave trade. The childhoods of Jess and Maja are engaged in an identity struggle that not only reflects
Oyeyemi‟s experience of a diasporic childhood, but also the tensions of worlds and cultures in conflict. This chapter firstly examines Jess‟s psychosomatic identity struggles in light of the Yoruba mythology of twinning and abiku childhoods, which are in conflict with interpretations of an alter ego in Jess‟s London milieu. Yoruba mythology, from
Jess‟s maternal genealogy is portrayed as a framework of identity in conflict with an English world in which Jess‟s weird demeanor is not only interpreted as the psychological effects of an alter ego but also as ontological of Jess‟s “half-and-half,” mixed racial confusion. Ina sense, the idea of an abiku childhood is complicated by racialised frameworks of interpretation and difference. Secondly, Maja‟s images and memories of childhood in The Opposite House are examined as part of an identity discourse that is going on within Maja‟s presently adult self. These images and memories which she identifies with Cuba and her childhood are historiographic talking points about
Maja‟s sense of black subjectivity. This subjectivity is linked to black Atlantic slave history, cultural practices, customs and rituals like Santeria, which connect Maja to along maternal genealogy. Maja realises that her sense of identity in London, can only be understood through journeying back to the history of the black Atlantic and the of diasporicity is linked or akin to that loss of memory that Cooper says she only partially shares with slave descendants and which spanned the triangular space of trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean.”

236 middle passage This journey involves navigating legends, myths, customs, practices and rituals that carry the texture of a mestizo Afrocubanismo. Thirdly, in light of the competing frameworks of identity in The Icarus Girl and the tensions of black subjectivity in The Opposite House, the chapter foregrounds the mythopoetic narrative structure which Oyeyemi uses, as appropriate in reflecting the multiple heritages, influences and traditions of not only the protagonists, but also of Oyeyemi‟s imaginative subjectivity. In foregrounding this notion of mythopoeia, the chapter finds that Oyeyemi borrows from Yoruba and Greco-Roman mythology, Dickinsonian poetry, English fairy tales, legends and myths to create a meta-fictional structure that presents these childhoods as postmodern identities of anew world and new Diaspora
Oyeyemi‟s writing reflects the tensions of embodying a diasporic identity. There is a multiplicity of consciousness always at play in her novels, explored through twins, doppelgangers and variant physical and magical worlds. Having moved to London at the age of four, Oyeyemi was thrown into a world she needed to assimilate immediately and she says in interviews that she spent a big part of elementary schooling without friends, reading, writing and inhabiting a silent, hermitic world of imagination that felt self- contained. Oyeyemi kept indoors most of her childhood, living in a council house in
Lewisham, London. I grew up doing lots of reading, writing and watching television she says, adding that I never saw friends outside school. I had an imaginary friend called chimmy and all sorts of imaginary things going on.”
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This hermitic period resulted in flights of imagination reflected in the characters of Jess in the Icarus Girl, Maja in the
Opposite House and Miranda in White is for Witching (2009). These figures, images and memories of childhood are living in interstices of magical, spiritual and physical worlds that reflect tensions of identity and personality. Oyeyemi‟s writing therefore allows her to deal with the anxieties of growing up in a liminal state between belonging and non- belonging, a tension inscribed in her characters anxieties of belonging to different worlds, places, spaces and zones of imagination and experience. These characters carry residual and emergent worlds portrayed in the palpable tension of their identity crises. Refer to http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-8587015-heartache-of-a-real-sensation.do
(accessed 24th February, 2010)

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Appiah (1992) puts it well in his idea of old gods and new worlds reminding us of Raymond Williams (1977) ideas about residual and emergent cultures and the tensions as they intersect with each other.
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