The Coming-of-Age Novel as a Portrait of Nigeria
The bildungsroman is the novel of Nigeria. No other kind of novel captures completely what it means to be Nigerian in the volatile, high-velocity, interconnected world of the twenty-first century.
In his infinitely ranging and cerebral essay, ‘The French and Moslem Backgrounds of The Radiance of the King’, famed Nigerian critic, Ben Obumselu, performs an utterly engrossing exegesis of the political, linguistic, and religious impetus behind Guinean novelist Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King. He makes instructive observations about the novel’s protagonist, Clarence, at different points in the essay. Obumselu tells us that there is an ‘idea implicit in the pattern of his development’; in another instance, he observes that the ‘story begins with the hero’s spiritual awakening’; in another, he conjectures that the hero feels ‘a morbid sense of a divided nature.’ These descriptions can also be applied to Laye’s first novel, the autobiographical The African Child, which details the author’s own coming of age. In such narratives, the focus is always on a young person’s development through a period of conflict of nature or place, which leads to an awakening, an epiphany, or an understanding, out of which experience the hero attains maturity.
These observations are true of the literature that has emerged from Nigeria in the past 24 years. The most important words that have become very important in any reading of Nigerian novels since the turn of this century are ‘age’, ‘maturity’, ‘development’, ‘awakening’, the oft-used phrase ‘coming to terms’ and their synonyms. All these morphemic liberties, it must be noted, are connected to the main characters’ relationships with their environments and their active or inactive confrontations with them. Many of the Nigerian novels produced from 1999 till date seem to proceed from a recognizable logic: that a person growing up in a particular place gradually finds that their life and destiny become intertwined with, or at least heavily influenced by, everything happening around them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, is a good example of that story where the main character’s development, maturity, and understanding of the world are enhanced and heavily affected by the goings-on in the background. In short, that one’s social identity is a product of one’s society is very evident here and Adichie makes this obvious to us in literal and metaphorical terms...
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