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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Nigeria's postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as "arrested decolonization"--the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evolution is to be found in its literature, particularly in poetry, that most nationalist of genres, but significantly also, in the form of the novel, which constitutes much of the narrative of nation. Modern Nigerian literature can now be categorized in three to four movements, or generations, starting with the Azikiwe/ Osadebe generation of nationalist poets, to the late modernists Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka, etc., to the current generation or category of writer whose writings encompass the new attitudes, desires, values, and anxieties of the postcolonial nation. In this paper, I specifically examine the intriguing presence or overwhelming prominence of Igbo novelists writing in the English language, whose works, I argue, are currently defining the canon of contemporary Nigerian national literature. I claim the implicit value of Igbo traveling identity in the formation of the modern state as providing the cultural and historical factors, stimulus or circumstances that animate this literature. The nature of the Igbo traveling identity--its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes--permits us therefore to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its implication or significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation.
If we are to believe Timothy Brennan, the architecture of the postcolonial novel is defined demonstrably by an "obsessive nation-centeredness" (64), meaning in large part, that the postcolonial novel formalizes the search for, and maintenance of, the idea and meaning of the nation in postcolonial culture. Brennan is not alone in formulating this perspective. Homi Bhabha has equally shown, by reflecting considerably on the work of Benedict Anderson, that the narrative of the postcolonial nation, in his words, owes something to what Bhabha terms "DissemiNation"--the scattering of people, who bear their metaphors across and beyond frontiers and boundaries of experience and cultures, towards an ingathering, "in the ghettoes or cafes of city centers."(291). The modern postcolonial novel is in that sense the product of the dispersal or migration of memory, and its reshaping of the "meaning of home"(Bhabha 291) consecrated in the new metropoles of national culture. Indeed, the migrations of peoples and memory extend beyond the "locality of culture" into what Bhabha perceives as the "temporality" of the "cultural construction of nationness as a form of textual affiliation" (Bhabha 292). Thus, the novel encloses the space-time idea or construct of the postcolonial nation as both an unstable and ambivalent domain of affiliation or belonging, a relationship modulated by the slippages in the meaning of nation. In an important sense, the ambivalent nature of the new postcolonial societies is evident in its traveling identities. For example, in the specific context of Nigeria, the idea of the "Nigerian citizen" is quite often modulated by its embodying of competing or multiple identities of the "nation"--the complex ethnic mix that defines, and complicates, the terrain of nation. It is thus possible to be more Igbo, or Yoruba, or Berom than Nigerian, or vice-versa. The conditions that define the complexities of national identities can also be glimpsed in the idea of the "Sabon garis"--the strangers quarters, the segregated ghettoes that wall off the lives of "nonindigenes" against mingling with the "indigenous" communities in Northern cities like Kano; or the "Takwas" in western Nigerian cities like Ibadan, where Hausa and other "stranger elements" are confined; or in Eastern metropolises like Aba or Port-Harcourt, with their "Ama-Hausa"--the Hausa quarters, removed from the epicenter of "indigenous" life. This stranger-indigene binary reflects the deep fissions and the ambiguities in the meaning of a nation, formalized or willed into being in 1914 by colonial fiat, and sacralized with the amalgamation of Southern and Northern Nigeria by the colonial agent Lord Lugard. The complexities of these identities also throw up the important question: what is the identity of highly urbanized children of say Igbo parents, dispersed and living in the cities of contemporary Nigeria, epicenters of hybrid cultures, who have deep roots neither in Igbo culture, nor in the cultures of the immediate localities of their sojourning? To what nation--given the complexity of the nationality question in Nigeria--can they belong? Nigeria's political history reflects a deep search for the coherent meaning of nation, and its context of affiliation or belonging, has been characterized by the demands to construct a coherent narrative to reflect this aspiration. The Nigerian novel thus exemplifies this construction of the nation as "textual affiliation"--the product of an intense interrogation of its social and mythical meaning, as well as the attempt to apprehend the historical forces that have confluenced to shape, and continues to shape the idea of Nigeria as a product of modernity, and its inheritance of the conditions of postcoloniality.
By the uniqueness of their involvement with the Nigerian nation, Igbo novelists have shown, and continue to grapple with, the search for a coherent meaning of the idea of nation and national belonging. They seem, perhaps, far more compelled by the inexorable conditions of their location within Nigeria's national history, and by the reality of their experience as the most dispersed and most migrant group of Nigerians across and within the space of the nation, willing to engage the phenomenon of nation. This obsessive engagement with nation possibly accounts for the overt numerical prominence of Igbo novelists within the Nigerian canon. I will attempt in this paper to examine and reflect on the potential conditions that may account for the rise of the Nigerian novelist of what is now known as the "Igbo extraction," and locate the phenomenon of the Igbo voice as the significant voice of Nigerian national literature, in the era between 1945 to the present. What factors constitute, or account for, this significant presence or tradition of what Ernest Emeyonu has called the Igbo novel, and what does it signify, in the long run, in determining the texture of the Nigerian imagination?
In his expose on the themes of modern African literature, Abiola Irele contends that "the most striking aspect of African discourse is its character as a movement of contestation" (68). He locates this movement, starting with the work of black writers from the eighteenth century, whose work constitutes the significant transactions of the African imagination from its critique of slavery to its resistance against colonialism. In the interwar years, and the height of the anticolonial movement marked especially by the end of the Second World War in 1945, the nationalist poetry of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dennis Osadebe predicates a tradition of Nigerian writing, the full range of which is beyond the purview of this paper. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the specific...
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