Over the years, African literature has portrayed the intergenerational relationship between “child” and “parent” in ways that highlight the friction between cultural inheritance and socio-political transitions. Mid-twentieth-century works by Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, for example, feature representations of intergenerational conflict that capture the shifting forms of African identity and self-perception during and directly after decolonization. More recently—in 1998—Abdourhaman Waberi called his generation of writers “children of the postcolony,” drawing attention to their connection to the independence struggles of their parents, while emphasizing their coming of age outside colonial time. Focusing on a slightly younger group of African-born writers who live and work in the United States and Europe in the twenty-first century, Christopher E. W. Ouma, in Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past, examines the impact of diaspora experience on how they remember and reimagine postcolonial childhood as an orientation to their future selves.

Representations of childhood in this body of literature speak significantly to memories of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, of post-Independence African nationhood, Biafra, the Cold War, and so on. By remembering childhood in these contexts, this generation of writers emphasizes a link to the Africa of their parents’ adulthoods. However, childhood also functions as a discursive tool to consider postcolonial history through a fresh and imaginative lens, one that anticipates their “future” selves in the present. Ouma uses the phrase “postcolonial unconscious” to refer to this alternative archive of childhood (surplus) experience, which illustrates how reimagined childhood exceeds the normative frameworks used to build post-independence national communities and speaks to present-day diaspora identities.

Ouma draws on a range of childhood experiences to illustrate how this generation of writers reimagines the past’s role in their identity formation. For example, his readings of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus and Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place locate the “everyday” as a lens through which to focus on the “ordinary abnormality” of childhood, a view from “below” that gives voice to otherwise overlooked experiences. In his discussion of Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, we see childhood become a set of ideas used to reevaluate African identity formation from an adult diasporic positionality. Childhood, here, acts as a site of memory “mediated by dislocations, displacements and migrations of authorial selves” and speaks to Ouma’s strategy of highlighting a relationship between texts’ portrayals of childhood and authors’ lived experiences (71). It is for this latter reason that I was puzzled by his omission of Wainaina’s essay “I am a Homosexual, Mum” in his analysis of One Day I Will Write About This Place. Wainaina published the essay a year after the memoir and called it a “lost chapter.” In it, he claims to have known that he was a homosexual ever since he was a child. This information undoubtedly impacts how we interpret the “ordinary” and “everyday” of Wainaina’s childhood in the memoir. Unfortunately, Ouma mentions the essay only in passing in a later chapter.

This book’s strength lies in its discussion of texts about war, queerness, and diaspora, where representations of childhood subvert the heteronormativity tied to the postcolonial nation-state. Ouma correlates diaspora imagination with a sense of freedom that allows these writers to disrupt the African canon’s “novelization of citizenship.” He shows us that in Songs for Night, Chris Abani offers a child-soldier narrative that “blurs possibilities of a coherent geography or temporality of identity and foregrounds death as the foundational basis for … ontological redemption” (115). And how in GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames, Abani juxtaposes the queer male subject against the cityscape (which, according to Ouma, represents the structural logic of identity) in order to revise how we read the African canon and its impulse toward “collective citizenship.” With Helen Oyeyemi’s novels The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House, Ouma provides examples of diaspora childhood that highlight the fragmented possibilities of a transnational identity formation across diverse histories of colonialism and slavery. In his discussion of Oyeyemi, he draws on the scholarship of Michelle Wright to suggest that we “understand … Blackness as ‘the intersection of constructs’ that can locate collective Blackness historically as well as in the moment in which it is being imagined” (144). These diaspora childhoods, then, represent the relevance of time and space for interpreting contemporary African identity in a constant process of becoming.

Although Ouma focuses on a particular group of African writers in this book—those who came of age in the postcolony and who, as adults, live or have lived in the diaspora in the new millennium—his theorization of childhood offers a foundational framework for interpreting the evolution of African identities on intergenerational and transnational axes. At times, Ouma’s writing is overly comprehensive, especially his references to secondary scholarship in the book’s main text (some of these would have been better saved for the endnotes). That being said, I anticipate that this ambitious book would become a classic of African literary scholarship, lasting beyond the “contemporary” moment it is from and about.