SELF-INSCRIPTION AND THE INTERSECTION OF GENDER AND CULTURE

Metafiction has become popular with women writers because it highlights the struggles and the painful process of recreating oneself. The struggle to be a writer carries a special burden for the African woman who tries to negotiate a space in a hostile environment as she tries to tread on a male domain (modern literature has been a male domain for a long time). Nonetheless metafiction is a popular tool of women's self-expression. Gayle Greene explains this:

It is a powerful tool of feminist critique, for, to draw attention to the structures of fiction is also to draw attention to the conventionality of the codes that govern human behaviour.

Metafiction as the device that draws attention to the process of fiction enables African writers to recreate the way certain values have been deployed to promote or delimit gender roles. Patricia Waugh observes that metafiction unveils “how the meanings and values of the world have been constructed and how, therefore, they can be challenged or changed.” These writers are therefore not interested in Joycean self-effacement, nor are they keen on standing outside the work biting their fingernails. Disinterestedness is not a feature of the biographical works by these African writers.

Gendered literature is an aspect of the constant search for African aesthetics that fosters self-knowledge without indiscriminate separatism. To borrow Maya Angelou's words, “image-making is very important for every human being.” It is even more so for African women writers who need to confront multiple levels of otherness … racial, cultural, regional, religious, third world, and post-colonial. Like other Black writers, to change her world is an imperative. Toni Morrison's view supports this:

We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and in no way coincidentally, in the experiences of those with whom we have come in contact. … And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the ‘raceless’ one with which we are all of us, most familiar.

The process of writing oneself is also the process of re-writing the collective self. So, the communal values that inform the unconscious also emerge in the literary production. This is true of the works of Buchi Emecheta. This writer, like Ama Ata Aidoo, has rejected the tag, ‘feminist writer.’ Yet, personal experience, which is at the center of her story, is a redemptive act. In Emecheta's novel Second-Class Citizen, dream and memory play important roles in the world of the heroines, both as vision and as hope. Emecheta's protagonist, Adah, is representative of the author's experience, personal and communal. Her birth at a time when a baby boy is expected is considered a personal, familial, and collective tragedy. It highlights the way traditional attitude entrenched into the society encourages gender differentiation.

One clear demographic indicator of the relative value placed on males and females in a society is the extent to which parents show a marked preference for children of a particular sex.

This profound cultural world-view forms the foundation of the heroine's tragic life and experience:

She was a girl who arrived when everyone was expecting and predicting a boy. So since she was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family, to her tribe, nobody thought of recording her birth.

This story is one of the most profound depictions of gender bias in African societies in the fictional production of African women. Emecheta shows with a keen sense of familiarity how this often has a devastating effect in psychological and practical terms on the growing consciousness of young girls. Consequently, the heroine's life is predicated on this archetypal disadvantaged status cut out for women in the Igbo society that she grew up to know, a paradigm of the experience of girls in many other parts of Africa. Adah becomes disobedient, rebellious and despondent as the reality is presented to her, that although education is of a paramount importance among the Ibos, she is to be excluded from it because she happens to belong to the wrong gender: “School—the Ibos never played with that! They were realising that one's saviour from poverty and disease was education. Every Ibo family saw to it that their children attended school. Boys were usually given preference, though.” This directly threatens Adah's dreams. She is presented as a determined ambitious girl whose consciousness is advanced for her age. One might even call her a genius, as we see later in the story. The family can not afford to send two children to school and their decision to send Boy to school as the wise solution to the problem elicits fundamental gender problems: “Even if she went to school, it was very doubtful whether it would be wise to let her stay long. A year or two would do, as long as she can write her name and count. Then she will learn to sew.”

Adah refuses to be daunted and forces her agenda on the family blueprint by running off to school and forcing her parents to keep her there with the help of a neighbor who teaches in a nearby school, Mr. Cole. Adah's dream is aborted by her father's death, her mother's leviratic marriage to her late husband's brother, and the family's decision to send Adah to a maternal uncle to be the latter's servant. Subsequent decisions and the reasons motivating them are equally important in revealing the heroine's gender humiliation and degradation:

It was decided that the money in the family, a hundred pounds or two, would be spent on Boy's education. So Boy was cut out for a bright future, with grammar school education and all that. Adah's schooling would have been stopped, but somebody pointed out that the longer she stayed in school, the bigger the dowry her future husband would pay for her. After all she was too young for marriage at the age of nine or so and moreover, the extra money she would fetch would tide Boy over.

Adah is allowed to stay in school for such an absurd reason but she takes advantage, excels, and forces her way into the secondary school, earning a full scholarship by her exceptional performance. The rest of Adah's story is a reiteration of a self-made woman struggling against ethnic, gender, and race bigotry. What is so spectacular about Adah's story is the close affinity between the heroine's experience and Emecheta's own background, life, and experience. In spite of some fictional devices that mediate the story initially, there is a keen resemblance to Emecheta's childhood in Lagos until her departure for England. Adah's unhappy marriage to Francis, his wickedness, indolence, as well as his callous treatment, sadistic brutalization, and abuse of his wife bear a closer link between the author's life and the protagonist's.

In the account of Adah's tortuous marital relationship, the veil of fiction is removed. Auteurist mediation becomes maximal and Emecheta's biography melts into Adah's story with an almost one-to-one correlation. Autobiography is often the most effective way of presenting the author's voice and many African women writers are not apologetic about this dispensation. It is a deliberate attempt to inscribe the writer's experience as a mode of collective writing or re-writing of African women's reality. One can clearly see Emecheta's story intruding on the fiction, and in this process she highlights issues of collective concern, as we see in the question of exploitative bride price. This is a recurrent theme in Igbo women's literature because, in reality, it is a major problem in this part of Nigeria. The attitude to women and child-bearing is also prominent. Being prolific in child-bearing is so highly valued that the woman can easily be reduced to this worth. Among the Ibos Emecheta observes that it is “the greatest asset a woman can have. A woman can be forgiven everything as long as she produced children.”

The interference of relatives in the affairs of a family and the devastating effects on a young family occupies a central place in Emecheta's pre-occupations. In this we see Francis reduced to a puppet, “most of the decisions about their own lives had to be referred to Big Pa, Francis's father, then to his mother, then discussed among the brothers of the family, before Adah was referred to.” Yet Adah is to finance such plans and when Francis is far apart from these family consultants, the Nigerian neighbors become his consultants and counsellors. In all these, personal experience is inseparable from larger problems confronting African women and in particular the peculiar problems of second-class citizens in Britain. The intersection of personal problems, communal dilemmas, ethnicity, race, class, and gender problems is remarkably underscored in this novel.

Second-Class Citizen as an autobiographical novel comes out most vividly as a metafiction and this unfolds the self-conscious self-inscription of Emecheta in an incontrovertible way. Any mask that the writer may have put on the real identity of Francis, the leech and indolent oppressive opportunist, is unveiled through metafiction. Adah becomes totally effaced and Buchi Emecheta comes out visibly and audibly in the last part of this novel. Emecheta's comment on the very process of fiction, the search for reviewers and the search for a publisher become overtly autobiographical. The turning point in Adah's ordeal is the possibility of working at home and writing the book, The Bride Price. The problems confronting Black women writers are unfolded here and Emecheta has reiterated these problems in interviews and in several of her writings. To Emecheta, like Adah, the most painful aspect is the rejection by her husband, who believes that a Black woman's dream of becoming a writer is a false dream. His narrow-minded and jaundiced vision is heightened by his reason for burning her manuscript: “… my family would never be happy if a wife of mine was permitted to write a book like that.”

The details may vary but many African women writers have admitted facing similar obstacles and rejection by individuals or publishers. Adah's comments on the process of writing are profound; it is the first thing that brings a glimmer of hope and happiness into her bleak life:

It was in that mood that she went. … and started to scribble down The Bride Price. The more she wrote, the more she knew she could write and the more she enjoyed writing. She was feeling this urge: Write; go on and do it, you can write. When she finished it and read it all through, she knew she had no message with a capital ‘M’ to tell the world. … The story was over-romanticized. Adah had put everything lacking in her marriage into it.

To Emecheta and to several African women writers, writing as the brainchild of the author entails self-inscription as well as writing the collective identity for self-fulfillment. Memory and dream therefore play central roles in the process of fiction as recollection and as an idealization of the collective consciousness. In the Ditch takes off the story line from the end of Second-Class Citizen in a similar autobiographical and partly metafictional mode. Like Tsitsi Dangarembga's heroine, the sense of gender injustice motivates and validates the heroine's sense of inequality and gendered consciousness. One can therefore not separate Adah's primary experience from the collective consciousness. It is the second half of the novel that brings out more vividly a direct link between the fictional process and reality. Adah is unmistakably the auterist mouthpiece and a living proof of Emecheta's predicament and how she confronts the problem. The metafictional aspect reinforces Emecheta's real-life experience. Adah's attempt to write creative work is consistently thwarted by her irresponsible, indolent, and parasitic husband, Francis. The destruction of Adah's manuscript unveils reality and merges it with fiction. Her experience is a replica of the experience of Emecheta and many female writers. Some experience a psychological or sociological, even political opposition and/or censorship. Ama Ata Aidoo is an exile from her country, Ghana, like Micere Mugo. Nawal El Saadawi is a permanent political suspect in her own country too. They are victims of politics and exiles of conscience.

Emecheta is obviously speaking for several African women, and others like Ama Ata Aidoo have a similar song to sing. Aidoo confesses, “while all African writers have many constraints to deal with, African women writers have a double problem of being women and being African.” The portrait of many of the fictional heroines is therefore a portrait of the artist as a woman of Africa trying to unload the double, often multiple yoke on her back. Through the artistic medium, she cries out for help. Like the average African woman whose dilemma she often fictionalizes, she is calling for help to balance her load, like her rural or traditional sister. Apart from domestic discouragement, Emecheta confesses the rejection of her manuscripts many times:

… we marry very early in my own area, so by the time I was 22 I already had five children and the marriage had broken up [sic] … the only thing I could do was to write. After several years of failure and rejections my work was accepted for publication. …