The idea of reincarnation is not alien or foreign.

The idea of reincarnation is not alien or foreign....The resurgence of spirits and the ability to be controled by another spirit...is not outrageous in the early days of the civilization as it survived in this rural parts and it still exists in haphazards of places in Africa....In this milieu, with a slave population, 1853 in consequence of the post-civil war period, 1873 [reincarnation] will be highly much within the realm of possibility...(Beloved's] language is the language of someone who has been get backed 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 give in charge 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 oblige as a master-narrative of the parent-child relationship in Pan-African socio-political words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings and literary texts. Since abiku/ogbanje call ups the past, with its separations and instability, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion can serve as a springboard for examining issues of memory, reading in an oral cultivation migrations, and conversations (and silences) that link West Africa with the Americas. turfed 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 enlist in one's service it in writing postcolonial theory and narrative, bottomed in African mythologies of kinship and community, to speak to compages African and African American relationships. Perhaps, reading near important black texts in isolation leaves W E B Du Bois's Pan-African strivings unfulfilled. Disconnection is a large, psychological, political, and socioeconomic puzzle for blacks in the twenty-first centenary Henry Louis Gates's recent and poignantly problematic journey into Africa1 generates solicitation for a meaningful dialogue.2 Reinventing an umbilical connection in consequence of literature might renew both parent and child.

What, then, do the Yoruba mean at abiku? What is the Igbo ogbanje condition? on what account are these notions commonplace in West Africa? What are their socio-political and literary uses in Nigeria? Do these notions pan without 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 on death. As an agonist, the abiku come forths as a perverse, ghostly intimation of a horrendous past, a critique of a tedious quick in emergencies and a reminder of mortality. The abiku doubles as a signifier for social and spiritual unease. According to Ato Quayson,

The abiku phenomenon imputes to a child in an unending period 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 best importance to be able to locate where the abiku child hides the charms that link it to its spirit companions forward the other side for the just rites to be carried not at home to snap that connection. Until that is done, the abiku's parents, and, indeed, the community at large, are at the providential favor of the disruptive and arbitrary period of ... the spirit-child. (122-23)

In spite of as it is attempts at definitions, abiku remains a rhetorical question (literally "Is it death?"), a riddle as pervasive as the harmattan dust through every part of West Africa. At the core is a deadly parent-child toil for power. The parent chance of a favorable results that, with communal support, the abiku child, willful, headstrong and different in outlook, will make choice of to remain in the world of the living, deferring death and move to the other place. The abiku's is a nervous condition in the Fanonian intellect 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 conceits and, as Chinwe Achebe mentions "life does not end with death" (17) However, with imaginative adeptness, the abiku can be here and there simultaneously. This makes of the like kind 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 select to live. Hence, they spare no expenditure with incessant saara (4)--profusion of delicacies at parties for him and pick earthly companions--t o ensure that he casts a ballot for this side in a proces that could be conative, on the same level affective. In spite of palliatives, like any shrewish voter, the abiku remains unpredictable.