Abstract
This chapter reads Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place as narratives that construct alternative temporalities, particularly of the 70s and 80s. They do this through a tactical selection of particular events where the life-world of childhood is constructed through the “ordinary” temporal landscape that operates below and besides an adult worldview. While the 70s and 80s were historical periods dominated by authoritarian governments—civilian and military—these texts mobilize, through the sensibility of childhood, micro-political regimes that reflect deeply on not just the obvious entanglement between the family and the nation, but other greyer areas within these conjunctures. The effect of privileging the ordinary for both Adichie and Wainaina allows their narratives to not only reflect a different class dimension of the period (as opposed to the “single story”), but also generate alternative temporalities, which allow the chapter to invoke both Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of “futures past” and Peter Osbourne’s conceptualization of the “politics of time”.
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Notes
- 1.
See Haines, “Literary networks”.
- 2.
Lefevre, The Critique.
- 3.
I borrow this formulation from Edward Soja (Postmodern Geographies, 58) to illustrate how childhood’s temporality invokes spatialization as a key analytical rubric—more on this in the next chapter.
- 4.
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.
- 5.
Gardiner, Critiques, 204.
- 6.
Highmore, The Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 26, 8; The Everyday Life Reader, 223.
- 7.
Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 1.
- 8.
Cooper, New Generation, 6.
- 9.
I use the formulation “[r]ediscovery of the ordinary” from Njabulo Ndebele’s (“Rediscovery”) important essay in the context of South Africa’s black literary histories and their relationship to the overdetermining temporalities of Apartheid.
- 10.
Cooper, New Generation, 134, 8, 7.
- 11.
Moretti, The Way, 5.
- 12.
Austen, “Struggling with the African Bildungsroman”; Amoko, “Autobiography and Bildungsroman”; and Okuyade, “Trying to Survive”.
- 13.
Ender, The Architexts of Memory.
- 14.
King, Memory, Narrative and Identity, 13–14.
- 15.
Hamilton et al.’s Refiguring the Archive, although set in South Africa, opens up interesting arguments about post-conflict societies like South Africa after 1994, with regard to contested official sites of memory and therefore the need for going back to unofficial sites—the everyday, relatively informal platforms. Both narratives of Wainaina and Adichie are set in light of similar post-military, post-dictatorial regimes as well.
- 16.
Hamilton et al., Refiguring, 10.
- 17.
Hamilton et al., Refiguring, 11.
- 18.
Hamilton, Historicism.
- 19.
LaCapra, History and Criticism.
- 20.
Koselleck, Futures Past, 3.
- 21.
Koselleck, Futures Past, 11, 12.
- 22.
Woods and Middleton, Literatures of Memory, 9.
- 23.
Cooper, New Generation.
- 24.
Woods, African Pasts, 1, 3, 13.
- 25.
Hamilton et al., Refiguring, 10.
- 26.
Featherstone, Undoing Culture, 55.
- 27.
Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 23.
- 28.
Adéèkó, “Power Shift”, 26.
- 29.
de Certeau, The Practice, xix.
- 30.
de Certeau, The Practice, xix.
- 31.
Ade Cocker’s character in Purple Hibiscus is modelled after an actual editor of Nigeria’s Newswatch magazine, Dele Giwa, who was killed by the Babangida regime, through a parcel bomb that was delivered to his house, allegedly bearing a State House seal.
- 32.
Okri, Famished, 478.
- 33.
Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism”, 265.
- 34.
Mabura, “Breaking Gods”.
- 35.
Chennells, “Inculturated Catholicisms”.
- 36.
See Hewett, “Coming of Age”, as well as Sandwith, “Frailties of the Flesh”.
- 37.
Edensor, National Identity, 60.
- 38.
Caruth, “Introduction” in Trauma, 4–5.
- 39.
Hobsbawm, Invention.
- 40.
I am referring to essays and stories such as “The Writing Life”, “Heart Is Where Home Was” and “Diary”.
- 41.
de Certeau, The Practice, 105.
- 42.
Heaney, The Place of Writing.
- 43.
Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 6.
- 44.
Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 7.
- 45.
Coe, The Grass Was Taller.
- 46.
Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 23.
- 47.
Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 27.
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
- 51.
Osbourne, The Politics of Time, ix.
- 52.
Knighton, “Refracting the Political”, 34.
- 53.
Knighton, “Refracting the Political”, 34.
- 54.
Amoko, “Autobiography and Bildungsroman”.
- 55.
Osbourne, The Politics of Time.
- 56.
Sujala, “Postcolonial Children”, 15.
- 57.
Coetzee, Accented Futures.
- 58.
de Certeau, The Practice, xiii.
- 59.
Newell and Okoome, Episteme.
- 60.
Bhabha, Location, 143.
- 61.
Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa”.
- 62.
Scott, Weapons.
- 63.
Musila, A Death.
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Ouma, C.E.W. (2020). “We Are Children of the Cold War”: Childhood Times as Alternative. In: Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36256-0_2
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