When it no longer matters whom you love: the politics of love and identity in Nigerian migrant fiction (original) (raw)
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REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE MIGRANTS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN MIGRANT NARRATIVES
Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on Orality, Literary and Gender Studies: A Celebration of Oluwatoyin Jegede @ 60, 2018
In the Nigerian literary landscape of the twenty-first century, the preoccupation with migration and its attendant impacts is dominant. This study examines the literary representations of migration in four texts by Nigerian writers, to engage the effects of migrancy on female characters. While Nigerian literary texts have often been examined to unearth the representations of the experience of migration, inadequate attention has been paid to female migrant characters and the end to which Nigerian migrant writers have presented the realities of gender and migration in diasporic spaces. A studied engagement with the representations of the experiences of female migrants in Chris Abani's Becoming Abigail, Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah, Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street and The Phoenix through the Postcolonial Feminist lens reveals that female migrant characters are often at a point zero-a point that presents a plethora of possibilities for growth and for fixation, for life as well as death. All the female migrant characters experience life at point zero at one time or the other during their stay in the West. The protagonists are triply oppressed as a result of their being blacks, women and migrants. The three migrant writers all present female migrants' unpleasant experiences in the diaspora to demystify Westward migration as always a positive, beneficial and fulfilling one. The four texts record diverse dimensions to the narration of migration-forced, voluntary, rural-to-urban, South-South and South-North; and spatial, temporal and psychical. The texts reveal the migrant writers' postcolonial mission through fiction; affirm the preponderance of Nigerian youths' obsession with Westward migration and "dismantle" age-long prejudiced depictions of the West as a land of bliss and prosperity and the Third World as a place of malaise and tragedies.
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Adichie's Americanah is one of the African novels whose characters and settings traverse cultures. The author herself is a product of trans-cultural education and uses this medium to draw global attention to the difficulty faced by migrants. Most of the African diaspora characters work hard to gain visibility in a culture that obliterates the personality of migrants irrespective of gender and academic achievements. Adichie's representation of the characters captures much of the realities told by migrants navigating and negotiating life outside their countries of origin. Through personal will to get a better life outside their home countries, the characters engage in some self-effacing work to acquire permanent residency so that they can return home for acclaim. The author uses local colour and synaesthesia to remind the characters of their roots and the rhetorics of scatology to portray the hostility of the receiving country.
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The scholarship of cosmopolitanism and migrations, in many forms, narrative, artistic, and cultural continues to influence and inform our experiences as global citizens navigating an increasingly complicated global environment. This paper aims to re(map) these notions, which calls for reconsideration, re-evaluation, and emphasizing the importance of cosmopolitanism as reflected in literature. There has been an exponential increase in studies on cosmopolitanism in literature during the last two decades. This tendency is directly tied with transnational interconnection and experiences with a difference in a way that has never been seen before as a result of cross-border commerce, migration, mobility, media, and consumption. This paper interrogates Open City by Teju Cole; We Need New Names by No Violet Bulawayo, Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasie and Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego to underscore how they use cosmopolitanism as the main idea.
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Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary criticism lately. Scholarship on African migration to the developed world has mainly focused on migrants' experience in the West with regards to race and identity and a continual propensity towards criticizing Western border closing policies. This paper, in a close reading and critical discourse analysis maneuver, explores two new generation Nigerian writers namely Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa within postcolonial theoretical framework. It purports to examine new immigration narratives in which migrants return 'home' to write about their place of origin as they have become transnationals calling attention on mayhem that this place experiences as opposed to nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideologies, of bygone era, expressed primarily in Negritude writings. Both considered narratives show that Cole and Saro-Wiwa use magical realism and travelogue form to depict the starkly mundane life condition in Nigeria with failed transportation system, socio-political corruption, and overwhelming fatalism due to not only the ruled but the ruler's failure to change their living conditions. Rather, they tend to surrender and participate in 'mutual zombification.' These writers' thematic inclination displays their pessimism and skepticism regarding Nigeria's improvement to become a place with acceptable living standards as they leave their readers to hopelessly contemplate the mess that the narratives aesthetically depict.
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This interview with Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe addresses the ethics and aesthetics of representing sex trafficking and transnational migration in her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and her latest short story collection Better Never Than Late (2019). The author discusses the discourse on migration and trafficking in both works, bringing much-needed nuance to the conversation. She pays particular attention to issues of “agency” and “vulnerability,” as well as authenticity, stereotyping, the “white gaze,” the publishing industry, and the recent controversy on Jeanine Cummin’s American Dirt (2020). Drawing from her own personal story, Unigwe also talks in depth about the stylistic choices she made in depicting the immigrant experience in the global north and the difficulty of representing rape and trauma in fiction.
Transnational Migration, Identity, and the African Literary Experience Volume 43 Issue 1
Ufahamu:A Journal of African Studies, 2022
This essay seeks to examine transnational migration by looking primarily at 20 th- century writers historicizing the concept of the ‘post-colonial’ and pointing to its development as captured in their writing. In the paper, transnational migration is viewed as the movement of persons across national boundaries where the migrants live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state, and in which there is a process by which such immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Going by this definition, all major African writers (such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the like), with the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, are transmigrants. This is because their migration took place—is taking place—within fluid social spaces and identity-forming contexts, which are constantly reworked through their simultaneous connectedness to more than one society. In this case, the term that better expresses this situation is ‘post-colonial’. Although there is a growing community of African writers and artists living in the West, it is uncertain how they might influence the events, politics, and cultural discussions within their original homeland. The conclusion is that it is not clear how the transmigration of African intellectuals could help shape the identity and tenor of the post-colonial African literary experience, which has been historically and culturally shaped by the impact of the African colonial experience. In this sense, then, recent migration by the African literati (specifically novelists) to the West is only the latest version of the pull that Europe and the United States of America exert on African post-colonial identity. This is not likely to slow down in the foreseeable future.