ABSTRACT
Diasporic literature centres on the experiences of people all around the world who leave their homelands in search of ―greener pastures‖ or are forced out of such homelands for various reasons. As a neo-colonialist tendency, the search for greener pastures is often perceived as the way out of the socio-political dilemma of 21st century Nigeria. To repudiate this ―green pasture‖ façade therefore, this dissertation explores issues of identity formation and the crisis of belonging in order to show that the Diasporic experience is a complex reality that amounts to double consciousness and/or identity crisis. In discussing Buchi Emecheta‘s Second Class Citizen (1974) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s Americanah (2013) as Nigerian Diasporic Literature, this study adopts postcolonialism as the theoretical basis for the assessment of how the characters in the selected texts grapple with issues of race, identity, nostalgia and alienation in their new homes. The study proceeds on the assumption that Nigerian Diasporic Literature deserves critical attention since it expresses the relationship between literature and discourses like political instability, poverty, unemployment and other societal issues in Nigeria and the Diaspora where the various characters emigrate to. In this regard, the study examines the cause and effect relations of the diaspora experience in the texts under study and finds that immigrants who leave their country of origin in search of greener pastures are confronted and disillusioned by issues of racial discrimination and culture difference in the Western societies that they relocate to. The study also finds out that their experiences alienate them as the ‗other‘ and deprives them of a sense of belonging.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i
Declaration ------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------- ii
Certification -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iii
Dedication ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv
Acknowledgements ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- v
Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vi
Table of Contents--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vii
CHAPTER ONE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1.0 Background of Study ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 1.1 Statement of the Research Problem-------------------------------------------------------------- 5
1.2 Aim and Objectives of the Study---------------------------------------------------------------- 6
1.3 Significance of Study------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7
1.4 Scope and Delimitation of Study----------------------------------------------------------------- 8
1.5 Methodology---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8
1.6 Organization of Chapter--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9
1.7 About the Authors: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-------------------- 9
1.8 Historicising the Nigerian Diasporic Literature----------------------------------------------- 13
1.9 Postcolonial Theory as Theoretical Framework----------------------------------------------- 22
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.0 Literature Review --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 36
2.1 Features of Diasporic Literature ---------------------------------------------------------------- 54
2.2 African Diaspora and Literature ----------------------------------------------------------------- 57
CHAPTER THREE
3.0 The Representation of Nigerian Diasporic Experiences in Second Class Citizen ------ 62
3.1 Nigerian Diasporic Experience----------------------------------------------------------------- 64
CHAPTER FOUR
4.0 Adichie‘s Americanah as Diasporic Literature----------------------------------------------- 89
4.1 Fantasy versus Reality: Exploring the Grounds that Necessitated Some Nigerian Diasporas‘ Migration to the West--------------------------------------------------------------- 93
CHAPTER FIVE:
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
5.0 Summary and Conclusion----------------------------------------------------------------------- 117 References-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------121
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION 1.0 Background to the Study The term diaspora is found in the Greek translation of the Bible and originates in the words ‗to sow widely‘. For the Greeks, the expression was used to describe the colonisation of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean in the archaic period (800–600 BC).Although there was some displacement of the ancient Greeks to Asia Minor as a result of poverty, over-population and inter-state war, diaspora essentially had a positive connotation. Expansion through plunder, military conquest, colonisation and migration were the predominant features of the Greek diaspora (Cohen 1996, p.1).However, diaspora has overtime gained wider usage referring to ―the migration of people from their place or countries of origin to other parts of the world‖ (Okpeh 1999). Brubaker (2005, p.3) also notes that the use of the term diaspora has been widening and suggests that one element of this expansion in use ―involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space‖,hence, the need to focus on Nigerian diaspora. All the definitions of diaspora, whether it is dispersion of people from their homeland, or voluntary migration, or attachment to multiple nations, signify that diaspora involves concepts of identity and belonging. And the belongingness becomes a vehicle for people to share their connections, kinship, shared values, cultural heritage, their similarities and differences – the important elements in identity formation (Guragaini 2014, p.4)
The concept of diaspora has also been examined in relation to cultural, political, social, educational and literary representations, among others. Some examples are Hall‘s (1990) Culture, Identity and Diaspora, Vertovec‘s The Political Importance of Diaspora anPanossian‘s Between Ambivalence and Intrusion: Politics and Identity in Armenia (1998) to mention a few. Although each one of them has adopted different historical and theoretical modalities, they have a common denominator: the opening of the term that once had been thought of as embodying a specific referent. This primary concern of these revisionist projects has been paralleled with the conjunction of the emergent schools of thought which includes post-structuralism, deconstructionism and post-colonialism, among others. They experimented with the creation of theoretical possibilities towards a proliferation of meanings and usages of the term in many aspects of human life. Such attraction also reflects the enigmatic power of the term as a constitutive aspect of human life. Fernandez (2009), for example, perceives diaspora as a notion that stimulates research in all directions as well as having a power to discover gaps and interrogates the nexus necessary between theory and practice. She believes that the: ―diaspora can be managed meaningfully if we understand that it is in itself an open-source and that any attempt to limit its scope or its definition transgresses the boundaries of both its conceptual and epistemological framing. Diaspora is derived from the idea of scattering of seeds. As such the concept must be allowed to take root, transplant, cross-fertilise, rather than fossilise.‖ (p.7)
To show the connection between postcolonialism, diaspora and the literary text therefore, the theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent years bolstered postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we understand culture and developing new ways of thinking beyond the boundaries of the nation state. The notion of diasporic literature has been productive in giving attention to new forms of knowledge and discourse, whether these discourses are produced in the host-land, in the transitional spaces of cultures or absorbed by people at home. Thus, in literary and cultural studies, diasporic works have been a well-established paradigm as appears the extensive writings of famous cultural and literary theorists such as Bhabha‘s „Hybridity‟ and „Thirds Space‟ (1994, 1996); Hall (1996) and Gilory‘s (1997) „Hybrid identities‟, among others. As a common theme, the aforementioned critics share in the exploration of the complex fabric of diaspora within the notions of Hybridity, ‗culture-in-between,‘ cultural difference and multiculturalism. Reflecting on the role of those border-crossing theorists and artists who write outside the ‗nation-state‘ borders, Azade (2001, p.36) observes that ―every theory of postcolonial, transitional, or diasporic literature and art is most convincingly articulate and performed by works of literature and art themselves‖. With the emergence of literature as social practice the role of readers who engage with literary meanings and interpretation has become very much like agents who rely on literature to help them in larger purposes in life. Thus, in considering the history of diasporic literature, Abu-Shomar (2013, p.1) in Critical Spaces of Diaspora for LiquidPost-Modernity is of the view that: Literature of diasporas is an offshoot of diasporic experience. The assumption is that, for long, literature has been an integral part of postcolonial and diasporic experience which appears to be instrumental to our study of societies, cultures, historical momentum, and above all the critical discourses we sanctify to understand the human conditions.
In other words, the way the authors in this collection engage with the diasporic text might be broadly understood as an attempt to take in hand a revisionary approach to the stance of knowledge production and meaning-making in contemporary times. As Maniam (qtd in Dalai 2008, p.8) declares: ―to understand the symbiosis between diasporic experience and the literature that grows in it, literature becomes a ‗device to decode the epistemology of diaspora.‖ Diasporic literary experience appropriates reality not as an authoritative end, but rather as an ongoing process with heteroglossic and polyphonic implications and intentions (Dalai, 2008). As the influence of diasporic literature is growing, it is pertinent to examine the contributions of diasporic writers not only to the literature of their homeland but also in the global context. In this age and time, shifting one‘s root has become a normal happening. It is on the basis of this that several studies have emerged, and chief among them is diasporic literary studies. Diasporic writers register their everyday experiences and plights in their works. In general, their writings talk more about the isolation in the new land, the problems they face in their new society and their ‗in-betweeness.‘ In spite of the basic similarities in their experiences/expression, diasporic writing cannot be homogenised. As Brah (2003, p.616) states in her article “Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities”, diaspora experience differ according to ―when, how, and under what circumstance one has settled in a new society‖. Even though the works of diasporic writers differ according to the reason of their movement, the common ground in their writing is their deliberate attempt to strike a balance in their search for identity in both societies. With such feelings, their mind swings between the home country and the new settlement. The tension of living in-between the two worlds is often reflected in their works. Rushdie (1983, p.76) in his essay ‗The Indian Writer in England‘ describes the recollection of the diaspora communities about their homeland and its culture as, ―that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India of the mind‖.
In addition, such diasporic writers as Buchi Emecheta,Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Vidiadhar Naipual, Krishnan Maniam, and Salman Rushdie and others have pointed out the complexity of meanings in their diasporic texts, for example, in his „ImaginaryHomelands: Essays and Criticism‟, Rushdie (1991, p.73) perceives meaning as ―a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death‖. Maniam (1987, p.218) perceives the intersection of diaspora and literature as a powerful apparatus in discovering the power of the text to decode the epistemology of diaspora. For him, fiction has been the exploration of the past, present, psychology, conflicts and ambitions of Indian diaspora. Similarly, Nadan (2000, p.101) perceives diaspora writing as a venture not only to understand but also to survive: ―it has become… not only the enigma of survival, but a way into the world... writing, though fragile and vulnerable, is the only home possible‖ (qtd in Abu-Shomar 2013).
1.1 Statement of the Research Problem
Millions of Nigerians have emigrated and a good number of others are still migrating to other parts of the world. These migrants and their descendants living in countries outside Nigeria make up the Nigerian diaspora. Early approaches to Nigerian diaspora were mainly focused on involuntary diaspora which deals with forceful ―uprootment‖ of Nigerians to serve as slaves in the West. This is illustrated in the autobiography of Olauda Equaino titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olauda Equaino (1789)and in the historical narrative of Bishop Ajayi Crowther. The account of their lives is imbued with a sharp critique of slavery and its effect on the individual.
However, this study focuses on the recent studies on diaspora, particularly the prose narratives of Emecheta andAdichie centering on the voluntary type of migration. It also evaluates diaspora in terms of adaptation and construction- adaptation to change, dislocation and transformation, the construction of new forms of knowledge and new ways of seeing the world. This work also provides a veritable historical platform for studying the Nigerian diaspora against the background that its study has largely been subsumed under the rubrics of the broad historiography on the African diaspora. Not only that, literary works on Nigerian diaspora have dwelt so much on remittance, how Nigerians in diaspora can help better their home country and the brain-gain factor of coming home to establish themselves. Asseffa (2013) in his thesis, The Assessement of Nigerian Diaspora in the USA and Exploring its Potential Contribution to Sustainable Development, shows that the Nigerian diaspora plays a major role in the development of their country of origin through remittance and engaging in different development programs. This study therefore advocates for an in-depth focus on country specific diaspora in order to make room for specificity. Thus, this study is premised on the propositions that:
i. Nigerian diasporic literature deserves critical attention and study.
ii. There is a correlation between Nigerian diasporic literature and other discourses of political instability, poverty, unemployment and other societal issues in Nigeria that are behind the mass migration of young Nigerians to other countries of the world.
iii. Nigerian diasporic literature is more than a celebration of wholesale migration. It gives in-depth description of issues of racism, cultural hybridity, hopelessness, depression, nostalgia etc. that the migrant faces in the new settlement and how it shapes their identity.
iv. Postcolonial theory is a viable platform for the evaluation of Nigerian diasporic literature.
1.2 Aim and Objectives
This study examines through the poetidepicted in Emecheta‘s Second Class Citizen and Adichie‘s Americanah to debunk the illusion of a waiting goldmine that awaits the Nigerian diaspora in the host land. In this context, the objectives are to show that:
i. Diasporic literature explores the contingent relationships between diasporic subjects and their homelands/ host lands.
ii. Prose narrative is a significant literary discursive form for signifying Nigerian diasporic experience and how these experiences lead them into creating new identities for themselves.
iii. Nigerian diasporic literature depicts a people who are socially and economically discontented with the situations back home and migrate out in search of better opportunities abroad but end up disappointed.
iv. Postcolonial theory is an appropriate tool for analysing the texts of the aforementioned authors.
1.3 Significance of the Study
Diaspora is a field of study that has continued to grow over time. There are different types of diaspora: the African, Asian, Chinese, Indian, Jewish, Caribbean diasporas and lots more. These types have all been examined in different fields of cultural, political, social, educational and literary studies. However, owing to the fact that most countries of the world have their own specific diaspora story, this study provides an avenue for studying the Nigerian Diasporic literature as a specific field of study which deserves critical attention in its own right because its study has largely been accounted under works dealing with African Diaspora as a whole. This is due to the fact that those from the West collectively tag any occurrence specific to any ‗black‘ country an African situation. By using the works of the aforementioned authors (who are from the second and third generation of writers) that bestcs of postcolonial discourse the different challenges that Nigerians in diaspora experience in their host countries and how these problems are
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