An abiku-ogbanje Atlas: a pre-text for rereading Soyinka's Ake and Morrison's Beloved

The idea of reincarnation is not alien or foreign....The resurgence of spirits and the ability to be possessed by another spirit...is not outrageous in the early days of the culture as it survived in this country, and it still exists in lots of places in Africa....In this milieu, with a slave population, 1853, through the post-civil war period, 1873, [reincarnation] will be very much within the realm of possibility...(Beloved's] language is the language of someone who has been returned from the other side. (Toni Morrison, Bragg interview)

In her revealing statement to Melvyn Bragg, echoing age-old West African social memory, Toni Morrison revisits reincarnation. The Yoruba refer to the denizen, back from the chthonic region and born again, as abiku; the Igbo call the living icon ogbanje. The metaphysical idea of abiku/ogbanje and the notion of a rebirth serve as a master-narrative of the parent-child relationship in Pan-African socio-political contexts and literary texts. Since abiku/ogbanje evokes the past, with its separations and instability, the concept can serve as a springboard for examining issues of memory, reading in an oral culture, migrations, and conversations (and silences) that link West Africa with the Americas. Grounded in orality, abiku/ogbanje keeps shifting, thus enabling rereadings of texts.

Wole Soyinka in Ake: The Years of Childhood and Toni Morrison in Beloved exploit the abiku/ogbanje phenomenon. They employ it in writing postcolonial theory and narrative, rooted in African mythologies of kinship and community, to speak to complex African and African American relationships. Perhaps, reading some important black texts in isolation leaves W. E. B. Du Bois's Pan-African strivings unfulfilled. Disconnection is a large, psychological, political, and socioeconomic problem for blacks in the twenty-first century. Henry Louis Gates's recent and poignantly problematic journey into Africa1 generates urgency for a meaningful dialogue.2 Reinventing an umbilical connection through literature might renew both parent and child.

What, then, do the Yoruba mean by abiku? What is the Igbo ogbanje condition? Why are these notions commonplace in West Africa? What are their socio-political and literary uses in Nigeria? Do these notions pan out in diasporan socio-political and literary contexts? Are they viable for reading Ake and Beloved?

Politicizing Mythology

Abiku is a Yoruba state of consciousness regarded with trepidation because of its links with death. (The Yoruba verb ku is 'to die'; iku is 'death.') Having been to the other side and back, thereby commingling death and life, the abiku child is no longer held in thrall by death. As an agonist, the abiku emerges as a perverse, ghostly intimation of a horrendous past, a critique of a tedious present, and a reminder of mortality. The abiku doubles as a signifier for social and spiritual unease. According to Ato Quayson,

The abiku phenomenon refers to a child in an unending cycle of births, deaths, and re-births. ... The concept of abiku is what may be described as a "constellar concept" because it embraces various beliefs about predestination, reincarnation and the relationship between the real world and that of spirits. ... It is of the utmost importance to be able to locate where the abiku child hides the charms that link it to its spirit companions on the other side for the proper rites to be carried out to snap that connection. Until that is done, the abiku's parents, and, indeed, the community at large, are at the mercy of the disruptive and arbitrary cycle of ... the spirit-child. (122-23)

In spite of such attempts at definitions, abiku remains a rhetorical question (literally "Is it death?"), a riddle as pervasive as the harmattan dust throughout West Africa. At the core is a deadly parent-child struggle for power. The parent hopes that, with communal support, the abiku child, willful, unruly, and different in outlook, will choose to remain in the world of the living, deferring death and movement to the other place. The abiku's is a nervous condition in the Fanonian sense, as he (3) flirts with multiple worlds.

The abiku remains an elusive child who disorients his parents and the community because of his many incarnations and cultural pluralism. The child underscores the terror and despair that are concomitant with colonialism, with the human condition--the fear and fascination of that other place linked with difference and death. As a form of departure, death leaves business unfinished and lives untidy, since the dead remain in human thoughts, and, as Chinwe Achebe observes, "life does not end with death" (17). However, with imaginative adeptness, the abiku can be here and there simultaneously. This makes such a child extraordinary, though people's discomfort about the unnerving state of affairs necessitates exorcist rituals to force the child to make a choice. Like astute politicians, desperate parents resort to bribery in an attempt at a democratic solution--for him to choose to live. Hence, they spare no expense with incessant saara (4)--profusion of delicacies at parties for him and select earthly companions--t o ensure that he casts a vote for this side in a process that could be conative, even affective. In spite of palliatives, like any shrewd voter, the abiku remains unpredictable.