Introduction: Everything Good Is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third

Generation
Author(s): Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 39, No. 2, Nigeria's Third-Generation Novel:
Preliminary Theoretical Engagements (Summer, 2008), pp. VII-XII
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20109574
Accessed: 16-03-2015 14:07 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Research in African
Literatures.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Introduction

Everything Good Is Raining:

Provisional Notes on the

Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation

PIUS ADESANMI AND CHRIS DUNTON, GUEST EDITORS

The origins of this special issue of Research inAfrican Literatures date back to
1998 when the guest editors, Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton, drew up
to assemble a collection of essays on what we referred to as
plans "third-gen
eration" Nigerian writing. This resulted in a special issue of the South Africa-based
journal English inAfrica, titled "New Nigerian Writing" and published in 2005. The
essays and reviews collected in that volume focused on writers who
"emergent
had acquired a creative identity markedly different from that of second genera
tion writers [such as Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan,
Zainab Alkali, Tess Onwueme and Bode Sowande]" (Adesanmi and Dunton 7).
An stimulus for the exercise was the that while the work of
important recognition
authors was considerable
third-generation receiving journalistic coverage?within
and to some extent any sustained attention
Nigeria elsewhere?hardly scholarly
had yet been to this corpus.
paid
In to the work of a third
generation of writers, we were in
referring engaging
an exercise in system case a
in this of that demarcates
description, type description
a field. Clearly the question then arises, where to the field posts, and
literary place
on this rest others, such as "When is a Garuba
question generation?" Harry ably
addressed these matters in his contribution to the volume.
As noted at the time by the editors and by several contributors, in Nigeria
there has been amarked ebb and flow in the relative rates of production?and of
perceived prestige?of poetry, fiction, and drama, the
English-medium through
1980s and '90s and the early years of the twenty-first century. Most recently, the
novel has been at the forefront, with the appearance of highly acclaimed works
by such emerging novelists as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Sen*
Atta, Chris Abani, and others. While the four authors listed here have all enjoyed
enthusiastic recognition outside Nigeria, with their work first published in the
USA or UK and with (variously) Nigerian and South African editions published
thereafter, we wish to also the of novelists whose work
emphasize importance

* RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2008). ?2008 #

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
VIII RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2

has not had such wide dissemination, for example, Akin Adesokan, Jude Dibia,
and Maik Nwosu.

By the time the English inAfrica volume appeared, itwas clear that this fresh
and upsurge in novelistic was not to in the fore
vigorous creativity going dissipate
seeable future. An of this was very apparent in the contents of a
acknowledgment
seminar in Lagos in September 2005, organized by CORA (Committee for Relevant
Art) and titled "Lagos in the Imagination." With presentations by scholars Wumi
and novelist Toni and interventions
Raji, Chris Dunton, Kan, vigorous by writers
such as Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, and others, much of the discussion focused
on the phenomenal revival of the Nigerian novel. Since 2005, Adichie, Habila, and
Abani have produced second novels that in no way belie the promise of their debut
works. Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is perhaps one of the richest creative works yet
to appear on the subject of the Nigerian Civil War, eliciting unstinted praise from
Chinua Achebe, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edmund White. Adichie's novel, which
won the 2007 Orange Prize, marks, as for now, the culminating achieve
recently
ment in a resuscitation of the Nigerian Civil War novel in recent years. In 2005,
two novels that examine the role and experiences of soldiers in the
appeared boy
war: Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts No Nation and Dulue Mbachu's War Games. A year
of
earlier, Nigerian author Philip Begho had published Jelly Baby, a novel for young
readers that recounts the experiences of a group of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone's
war. In the realm of nonnction, events
fratricidal fresh
insights
into
leading up to
the war and into its aftermath are offered inWole memoir You Must Set
Soyinka's
Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House, 2006); although it is farmore concerned
with the mapping of individual consciousness, Soyinka's earlier memoir, The Man

Died, can be read as embedded between the relevant of this work.

being chapters
In a similar vein, Habila's Time and Abani's both
Measuring Becoming Abigail
extend the boundaries of the Nigerian novel: the former in that it is set in the north
of the in
country?still relatively unexplored territory English-medium Nigerian
fiction?the latter in respect of its unsparing account of the extremes of sexual
abuse. At the same time, further new authors have on the local scene,
emerged
to take two Jude Dibia and Dulue Mbachu. The latter's War Games
just examples,
marks a further contribution to Civil War fiction. To some extent it is a
Nigerian
novel redolent of earlier work?the or, as itwas somewhat
anthropological snidely
termed, "New Year Yam Festival" novel of the 1960s. As it progresses, however,
War Games comes to focus on the
impact of the war on its child narrator.
largely
contrast, Dibia's first two novels, with Shadows and Unbridled,
By Walking explore
subject matter that has previously been marginal to, or absent from, Nigerian
fiction. The first of these novels with candor and sym
explores homosexuality
the second addresses the issue of incest and, at the same time,
pathetic insight;
readdresses issues that have become to the new novel, for
paradigmatic Nigerian
example, migrancy. Unbridled is notable, too, on other counts: its narrative struc
ture flashbacks with remarkable and
employs multiple, interlocking dexterity,
the novel is a rare example of male-authored Nigerian fiction written the
through
female voice.
first-person
Hence our decision to assemble a second collection of essays, this time
devoted to the work of novelists. As our comments
third-generation Nigerian
above make clear, this work constitutes a corpus in the making and there are evi
dent risks involved in devoting a large-scale critical project to a field (or subfield)

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 PIUS ADESANMI AND CHRIS DUNTON, GUEST EDITORS IX

that is still and sometimes unforeseen goods. Nonetheless, for

producing prolific
all its diversity, the new Nigerian novel does exhibit distinctive features, in terms
of scope of characterization, thematic and formal characteristics, and so on. Our
wish has been to encourage the construction of a preliminary record of the nature
of this work.
One immediate we faced?as more novels were in Nige
problem published
ria and abroad and the corpus very the of
kept expanding rapidly?was question
which would guarantee the most expansive coverage of
methodologies possible
the texts without the need to underscore the gradual emergence of
compromising
certain "leading lights" among the writers producing the new Nigerian novel. Do
we encourage contributors to broad, of
privilege panoramic engagements multiple
works authors in order to guarantee the broadest canvass
by multiple possible
within the necessarily limited space of a special issue? Or do we privilege single
author and run the risk of reinforcing the generalized
approaches perception?in
Nigeria?that the third generation novel, like its predecessors, has been hijacked
conse
by Western mechanisms legitimation of and validation, with the attendant
of a new canon formed and consolidated
quence being by Euro-America around
the works of writers such as Habila, Adichie, Abani, Atta, and Iweala?
The bulk of the responses we received were a sufficient to the fact
pointer
that potential contributors were the same concerns as
seemingly interpellated by
the editors. Submission after submission a clear for com
betrayed predilection
parative, panoramic to issues of theme, textual and
approaches plot, strategies,
the discernible patterns of generational discourse thrown up by the novels. A few
contributors a thus us to harmonize
preferred single-author perspective, enabling
both strategies into the present effort.
The idea of a special issue on an emergent of writers the most vis
generation
ible and celebrated of whom now reside in Euro-America, and whose forms
corpus
part of a borderless, global, textual that Rebecca Walkowitz refers to as
topography
"the transnational book," invites on the relation
immediately questions bordering
between the text and the nation-space, or the of nation and narration
ship dynamics
as ithas been so famously phrased for postcolonial criticism by Homi Bhabha.
Obi Nwakanma's the Narra
essay, "Metonymie Eruptions: Igbo Novelists,
tive of the Nation, and New in the Novel,"
Developments Contemporary Nigerian
ambitious in its characterization of the Igbo novel as a transcendental
although
metonym for the entire spectrum of novelistic in
third-generation production
sets the tone of the discussion how the novels authored
Nigeria, by examining
new
by Igbo members of the generation negotiate the affiliative processes of
ethnic and national in the contested site of Nigerian nationhood. Two
identity
issues are crucial for the thrust of Nwakanma's
background understanding argu
ment. First is the question of (dislocation. Of the Igbo novelists who have come
into their own, Jude Dibia, Promise Okekwe, Toni Kan, Ike Oguine, and Dulue
Mbachu reside inNigeria?but none of them in Igboland. Adichie, Abani, Iweala,
Azuah, and Nenadi Okoroafor all reside in the United States. Second is the ques
tion of filiation. In their engagements with the contested and intertwined terrains
of the ethnic and the national within the postcolonial dynamics of the Nigerian
nation-space, do the texts of the new writers form an intertextual continuum with

Igbo creative antecedents dating back to the

early nationalist-propaganda poetry
of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dennis In answers to these
Osadebay? attempting posers,

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
X M RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2

circumstances
Nwakanma navigates certain historical that predispose Igbo writ
ers successive
of to an "obsessive with the nation." This
generations engagement
engagement, overdetermined by the trauma of the Nigerian Civil War, thus cre
ates "the sense of an unfinished nation" that the new texts must in a
negotiate
manner.
quasi-Sisyphean
Nwakanma's idea of the unfinished nation, still tethered to the equally
unfinished question of Igbo trauma, as evidenced by the Civil War, morphs
easily into the preoccupations of John Hawley in his contribution, "Biafra as
and Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala." The urge to re-narrativize
Heritage Symbol:
Biafra writers who either "witnessed" the war as toddlers or were born
by long
after the war had ended is in itself one of the most remarkable characteristics
of the new Nigerian novel. Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, Mbachu's War Games,
and Iweala's Beast No Nation are in this hence,
of especially significant respect;
Hawley's probing of the three texts for insights into the travails of the subject
when his/her context of "creation" is "irrational, premature, violent, homicidal."
is to historicize creative engagements of Biafra within the
Hawley's strategy
Nigerian literary space in order to determine the shifts that the three novels
under examination represent in the context of antecedents narrativizations by
Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Eddie Iroh, Buchi Emecheta, and a host of oth
ers. The distance that these new writers from Biafra,
temporal separates Hawley
accounts for in which art and memory are not of
posits, imaginings prisoners
history, hence the transformation of the Biafra template into broader philo
sophical of the travails of the subject in the context of war and trauma,
probings
especially by Adichie and Iweala.
Madelaine Hron's "Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Gen
eration Novels" addresses the preponderance of the child or the
Nigerian figure
of the in The presence
figure youth third-generation production. overwhelming
of child or adolescent Hron argues, is not a fortuitous
protagonists, development,
as the authors are themselves "children of the postcolony," as novelist
Djiboutian
Abdourahman Ali Waberi has argued. Against the backdrop of a rash of early
North American critical commentaries that were too some
to dismiss
of
quick
the new novels as "children's stories" or School fiction" that such
Nigerian "High
critics then recommend "for adult libraries," Hron a way out of
young proposes
this incipient Western critical reductionism by exploring the hybrid spaces of
childhood in Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl, and Iweala's
Beast ofNo Nation. Asserting that third-generation Nigerian writers who employ
the trope of the child or adolescent protagonist enjoy a rich African antecedence
in works such as C?mara noir, Ferdinand Une vie de boy,
Laye's L'enfant Oyono's
and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not Child, Hron examines how the innocent prob
become acts of resistance, of unmasking the
ing of such young characters capable
sociocultural strictures of the postcolonial space.
If Nwakanma a of writers of extraction among
signals preponderance Igbo
the new Jane for her focuses on the seeming numerical
generation, Bryce, part,
of women writers in the same Her contribution, "Half
superiority generation.
and Half Children: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian
Novel," offers a overview of "the new directions that fictional accounts
panoramic
of women's identities are in A seasoned in African
taking Nigeria." participant
feminist of women's situates her own in a
engagements writing, Bryce trajectory

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 PIUS ADESANMI AND CHRIS DUNTON, GUEST EDITORS ? XI

discursive process energized by the likes ofMolara Ogundipe, Chikwenye Okonjo,

and Oyewumi. she detects that the new female authors write
Oyeronke Although
in the realist mode, antecedents nar
mostly they break with by employing "realist
rative that "may be read ambivalently, as
strategies" simultaneously performing
new identities and revisioning old ones."
Chris Dunton's and Energy: as a of Words" ends the
"Entropy Lagos City
of panoramic analyses the argument away from nation, identity,
cycle by shifting
trauma, and gender, as treated in the and towards His
preceding essays, setting.
the analysis allows Dunton to trace certain constructions of "cityness" in
toricizing
the Nigerian creative text all the way back to Cyprian Ekwensi's People of theCity.
Dunton thus delineates the contours of "the novel" that existed as
Lagos mainly
"chronicle" because "the fictional text" served as an avenue "to explore the social

economy of the city." City novels such as Maik Nwosu's Invisible Chapters, Akin
Adesokan's Roots in the and Chris Abani's Graceland, however, "new
Sky, project
and "new and "a very different kind of novel"
energies" emphases," consequently
has emerged with the new generation.
Biyi Bandele is not only one of the most prolific members of the third gen
eration of Nigerian writers, he is the first to serious international
arguably enjoy
attention after relocating to London in the 1990s and publishing some remarkable
work in the African Writers Series. Curiously, he has been largely ignored in the
critical maelstrom that has engulfed the works of those such as Adichie, Abani,
Habila, and Iweala, who all came on the scene after him. One
Oyeyemi, possible
reason for this may be his with drama, radio
greater preoccupation especially
drama. As we have noted in our introduction to the English inAfrica special issue,
drama has been a major casualty of the predilection for poetry and the novel by
third writers. In his contribution, "The of the
Nigeria's generation Deep Stirring
'Unhomely': African Diaspora on Biyi B?ndele's The Street," Chukwuma Okoye fills
an critical one of the most ignored
important gap by engaging curiously critically
novels Bandele, The Street. In Okoye's estimation, Bandele's situation as a
by Biyi
writer and a of the transnational book allows him to
migrant producer privilege
"the of home and its discontinuous in the construction
problematics implications
of the colonized/marginalized subject."
Chantal Zabus the picture of single-author, single-novel engage
completes
ments in this issue a close look Unoma Azuah's of
special by taking exploration

gender bending in her novel SkyHigh Flames. Zabus's essay, "Of Female Husbands
and Boarding School Girls: Gender Bending inUnoma Azuah's Fiction," explores
a welter of and discursive which Azuah's writing
imagery strategies through
in as an "les
inflects the ideoscape of women's writing Nigeria part of emergent
texts Promise and
bian continuum" that also includes by Lola Shoneyin, Okekwe,
Temilade Abioye, all contemporaries of Azuah. Sky High Flames achieves distinc
tion in this context by fashioning novel and interesting ways of undermining the
monolithic heteronormativity of the Nigerian nation-space.
We
close this special issue with a roundtable three female writers
involving
of the new generation:
Unoma Azuah, Sefi Atta, and Chika Unigwe. Apart from

the fact that we want writers and critics to inhabit the same of reflection on
space
the Nigerian novel of the third generation, it is also evidence of the guest editors'
of the presence of key female actors in the scheme of
recognition overwhelming
things, a first in the historical progression of Nigerian fiction. Cyprian Ekwensi,

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 XII # RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES -VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2

Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola were all key members of a largely male-dominated
first of novelists, which had Flora Nwapa and Mabel as lone
generation Segun
voices. The same masculine domination of the novelistic space is observable with
the generation of Festus Iyayi, Ben Okri, and Eddie Iroh. The situation has changed
markedly with the third generation and we thought we should allow the women
writers to account for this scenario in a roundtable format rather than
interesting
have men seize the word and account for it!

WORKS CITED
Abani, Chris. Graceland. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004.
-. New York: Akashic, 2006.
Becoming Abigail.
Adesanmi, Pius, and Chris Dunton. "Nigeria's Third Generation Writing: Historiog
and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations." in Africa 32.1 (2005):
raphy English
7-19.

Adesokan, Akin. Roots in the Sky. Lagos: Festac, 2004.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. New York: Anchor, 2004.

-. a 2007.
Half of Yellow Sun. UK: HarperCollins

Azuah, Unoma. Sky High Flames. Baltimore: Publish America, 2005

Bandele, The Street. London: Picador, 1999.

Biyi.

Jelly Baby. Lagos: Monarch, 2004.

Begho, Philip.
Dibia, Jude. Walking with Shadows. Lagos: Blacksands, 2006.
-. Unbridled. Blacksands, 2007.
Lagos:
Ekwensi, Cyprian. People of the City. London: Heinemann, 1954.

Garuba, "The Unbearable of Being: Trends in Recent

Harry. Lightness Re-Figuring
Nigerian English in Africa 32.1 (2005): 51-72.
Poetry."
Habila, Helon. Measuring Time. UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2007.

Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

C?mara. L'enfant noir. Paris: Pion, 1953.

Laye,
Mbachu, Dulue. War Games. Lagos: The New Gong, 2005.
wa Not Child. London: Heinemann, 1964.
Ngugi Thiong'o. Weep
Nwosu, Maik. Invisible Chapters. Lagos: Malaika and Hybun, 2001.

Helen. The Icarus Girl. London: 2005.

Oyeyemi, Bloomsbury,

Oyono, Ferdinand. Une vie de boy. Paris: Pocket, 1970.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. "The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the
Writer." Literature 47A (2006): 527-45.
Migrant Contemporary

This content downloaded from 132.187.247.196 on Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:07:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions