Divergences, commonalities and convergences: Nationalism and the poetics of identity in Nigerian fiction

Abstract

With more than 200 nations yoked together by the British solely for the purpose of colonialism in Nigeria, little wonder that questions bordering on lack of converging ideologies have consistently informed the nation’s narrative. If what unite the several ethnicities are paradigms that are vestiges of colonialism, and other scaffolding commonalities that necessitate the creation of a new identity, the question then is are these constructs synergistic enough to smoothen over the differing schisms and create long-lasting unifying parameters that moderate true nationalism? Using sections from selected novels, this article attempts to appraise the nebulous narratives that connect Nigeria’s various ethnicities, despite the presence of seemingly irreconcilable ethnic divergences. The study traces the manifestation of ethnicity in Nigerian fiction from the biased presentation by the first generation of writers to the ‘national’ fictionalization by contemporary writers. It discovers that though there is improvement in the presentation of multiculturalism and ethnicity in contemporary Nigerian fiction, there is still much to be written about the multicultural aspect of Nigeria’s postcolonial experience. The article concludes by theorizing that failure to harness the merits of the commonalities has been the bane of Nigeria since independence and proposes a re-engineering of multicultural ethics and also admonishes for a reconstruction of a new national character.