Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, an impressive body of work by Nigerian novelists has emerged. The most prominent among them is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose work has found considerable success and whose novel Americanah (2013) created a stir in Anglo-American literary circles. At the same time, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi published their novels, Open City (2012) and Ghana Must Go (2013), to great acclaim and attention, while Helen Oyeyemi has made a name for herself by publishing one popular novel after the other. The ground for what can be seen as a resurgence of Nigerian literature was prepared in the early 2000s, when novelists such as Helon Habila (Waiting for an Angel, 2002; Measuring Time, 2007), Chris Abani (GraceLand, 2004), Sefi Atta (Everything Good Will Come, 2005; Swallow, 2010; News from Home, 2010; A Bit of Difference, 2013), and Adichie (Purple Hibiscus, 2003; Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006; The Thing Around Your Neck, 2009) wrote a number of remarkable books.
These writers represent a generation of Nigerian novelists that has achieved “near instant canonization” (Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 11), and with other Nigerian authors, including Ike Oguine, Chika Unigwe, Okey Ndibe, and Segun Afolabi, they have contributed to what critics Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton (2008, viii) call a “phenomenal revival of the Nigerian novel”. There are no signs that this trend of internationally visible Nigerian literature is going to abate any time soon. On the contrary, several young Nigerian novelists have published notable novels since 2015, such as Chigozie Obioma ( The Fishermen , 2015; shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize), Chinelo Okparanta (Under the Udala Trees, 2015), A. Igoni Barrett ( Blackass , 2015), and Chibundu Onuzo ( Welcome to Lagos , 2017). Together, these writers represent one of the most vital and interesting forces of contemporary literature production.
Living in Europe and the United States while retaining strong connections to Nigeria, these novelists are members of the new African diaspora. They can therefore be subsumed under the heading of ‘Nigerian diaspora literature’. At the heart of this literature lies the fundamental tension of living abroad while being drawn back to Nigeria. This tension is made explicit in a passage from Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2014), in which the protagonist thinks about returning from New York to Lagos. He decides against the return, only to immediately contradict himself, claiming that he needs to move to Lagos:
In his indecision and inability to commit himself to one of the two options, the protagonist expresses a dilemma that, albeit usually not this explicitly, informs much of his peers’ work. Nigeria exerts an undeniable gravitational pull on their characters, a pull that is offset by their difficulties and struggles of actually living in the country. The resulting tension is a typical, perhaps even constitutive, feature of contemporary Nigerian literature.1 The novelists of the Nigerian diaspora divide their time and storytelling attention between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria. Accordingly, it is not surprising that two dominant areas of concern in their literature are experiences of migration and diaspora, on the one hand, and representations of Nigeria, on the other.I decide that I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people’s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories, I don’t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender. I am going to move back to Lagos. I must. (69)
Nigerian diaspora literature is therefore positioned in a field of tension whose outer poles can be described as transnational/transcultural hybridity and national identity. Never reaching any of these endpoints, the novels are productively placed between them. They are more or less attracted to one side or the other and together cover most of the spectrum between the poles. Pursuing an analysis along two interlinked lines of inquiry—expressions of migratory and diasporic experiences in the literature and the varied forms of literary engagement with Nigeria—this study attempts to map the literature of the Nigerian diaspora. After placing this literature in its socio-political, historical, and discursive contexts, the study will present a literary analysis of representative novels and short stories, considering their central literary and aesthetic features as well as their narrative strategies.
The discussion of the selected texts will explore distinct positions between the two poles. It starts in Nigeria in the late 1960s, analysing the way Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) deals with the Biafran War. Then it moves on to literary representations of Lagos in the 1980s, specifically in Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) and Sefi Atta’s Swallow (2010), before analysing the depiction of the oppressive military regimes in 1990s Nigeria in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002). Leaving Nigeria, the study looks at how the experience of immigrating to the United States is depicted in Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000) and short stories by Adichie and Sefi Atta. The following chapter on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) examines ‘Afropolitanism’, ostensibly a successful form of African transnationalism. It shows that the hybridity of migrants’ children can lead to fragmented and disconnected identities, an insight that is confirmed and further explored by Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005). Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005) then depict the return to Nigeria. The concerns addressed in all these novels culminate in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), a novel that exemplifies the transnational shuttling between different countries, usually Nigeria, the United States, and England, that is characteristic of the diasporic and migratory movements in Nigerian diaspora literature. Americanah is also a typical example for this literature’s engagement with Nigeria, portraying the country and contributing to its imaginary in a detailed and complex manner.
In this sense, the novelists of the Nigerian diaspora and many of their characters are representatives of what Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007, 213) calls “rooted cosmopolitanism ”, a cosmopolitanism that is partial and attached to narrower and more local communities. Thus, they fit into the pattern described by Akin Adesokan (2011, 179) for postcolonial African artists today. They may live in Paris or New York but are also “engaged with the ‘old home’, out of a sense both of personal or political moralism and of realism”. Toyin Falola (2014, 11) similarly notes the influence Africa has on the members of the diaspora:
The writers have left Nigeria to live abroad, and yet they remain attached to the country, often returning home permanently or for visits. Novels written abroad engage with Nigeria but, due to the authors’ international experiences and transcultural perspectives, their stories avoid parochialism and aggressive patriotism. They are marked by a combination of expressing a devotion to Nigeria without unduly idealizing it and highlighting its faults and problems while explaining and contextualizing them. Like other African artists, this generation of Nigerian writers is therefore “comfortable being both local and global at the same time” (Gikandi 2014, 243).Located in other parts of the world, Africa creates a meaning for their existence as a cultural source to draw on in order to live and survive, or even as a point of reference to compare and contrast their new places of abode with their places of origins, their successes and failures, the meaning of life, and the understanding of their destinies.
This duality is also inscribed in the term ‘Nigerian diaspora literature’, which combines the aspect of this literature’s Nigerianness and the tendency towards migratory, diasporic, or cosmopolitan transnationalism. One advantage of placing the focus on Nigerian diaspora literature is that it connects the relatively straightforward national frame as a selection criterion (novelists from Nigeria) with a transnational perspective. This avoids the parochialism ...