CRISES OF IDENTITY OFTHE NIGERIAN BORN MULATTO: A POST COLONIALINTERTEXTUALREADING OFTHREE NIGERIAN NOVELS

Abstract

With its emergence in the eighteenth century age of empirical realism, the novel has consistently maintained its reputation as a vehicle for the realistic portrayal of everyday life experiences of ordinary men and women in lived human communities. This verisimilitude of real life experiences to issues portrayed in the novel is also encapsulated in the scholarship of the Nigerian Novel. The Nigerian novel has recently begun to focus its attention on the challenges of Nigerian born biracial children. This paper examines the manifestations of crises of identity in the lives of three biracial female children, popularly known as mulatto, half caste, Yellow or African profit, as portrayed in three Nigerian novels namely Chukwuemeka Ike's Our Children Are Coming, Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come, and KaineAgary's Yellow-Yellow. Through the portrayal of everyday life experiences of this growing population of race with half Nigerian parents, who are domiciled in Nigeria, these three novelists have not only raised our consciousness on their membership of our shared identity in the Nigerian nation, but also, given an accurate insight to their birth circumstances, frustrations and bleak future.Using the postcolonial theoretical framework, as well as the qualitative research methodology, this paper brings to the fore, issues of cultural contacts, conjugal liaisons betweenNigerians and Europeans, as well as the fate of the products of these inter-racial intimate relationships.