Introduction: The Invalid, Dea(r)th, and the Author: The Case of Flora Nwapa, aka Professor (Mrs.) Flora Nwanzuruahu Nwakuche
[In the following essay, Ogunyemi analyzes the place of life, death, and the Lady of the Lake in Nwapa's work.]
I. HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING
In introducing this Festschrift to commemorate the crucial first anniversary of Flora Nwapa's passing to join her ancestors, I wish, first and foremost, to reiterate the Igbo adage Egbe belu, ugo belu. Indeed, “may the kite perch; may the eagle perch,” in spite of their divergent interests. This innate democratic spirit seeks to dispel injurious hierarchization, an agenda that can stultify the essence of the literary project and the critical endeavor. Roland Barthes has played games in these fields; he displays fascinating moves (no doubt complicated through translation) in “The Death of the Author.” And Michel Foucault counters him (also through translation) with “What Is an Author?” in addition to his Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Though I do not have the emotional facility with the English language to play the games which the French writer, theorist, and critic play with each other in their language, let us, somehow, celebrate the passing of Author Flora Nwapa. The implications of her passage might emerge in the ensuing game conveniently placing English, as usual, to referee in the spaceless babel of the African linguistic crossroads.
As Barthes indicates throughout his text and Foucault affirms in Death and the Labyrinth, death and life are intimately connected. In pinpointing the intricacies of the relationship, Foucault states the case quite succinctly: “And the nature of the labyrinth comes infinitely close to the metamorphosis resulting in the passage from life to death, and in the maintenance of life in death” (94). In his theoretical elimination of the “Author” from the text, Barthes gives birth to or resurrects a subdued entity already there. For convenience, one can refer to the instating of this replacement as the new, a notion that renders the “Author” homeless, sans text. By instituting the deadly grip of a tradition of the new, he attempts to erase the past and primary relationship between the Author and the text. In thus shaking the position of the Author in the “ordinary culture” (143), reducing her, whom he forgot, to a ghostly presence, Barthes generated, in 1968, a model which elevates the reader-theorist-critic. One can now conveniently bury this new-already-old theoretical stand, though it will remain to haunt us.
Replacing Barthes's model with another which is already there in the original is inevitable, as the frenetic scramble for the African theoretical space continues. Such a move upholds the evolutionary process and maintains the order of things, especially the link between life and death, as the absence of one masks the presence of the other. In the cult of Foucault, “The work is more than the work; the subject who is writing is part of the work” (Death 184), and, in an ever-changing sense, so is the critic/reader/teacher who talismanically brings something special to the understanding of the work. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., conceptualizes such collaborative root-working in words that strike the core of Nwapa's Nigerian spiritual and metaphysical authority: “Two Ogboni, it becomes three accounts for the curious process by which author, text, and criticism interact” (38). The serendipitous convergence of the mystical (stemming from the mysteries of the Masonic Ogboni cult) and the commonplace as essential to the literary project I posit against Barthes's clincher: “the birth of the reader must be at the death of the Author” (148). Somehow, Harold Bloom continues Barthes's project by selectively killing some writers in The Western Canon: Books and Schools of the Ages. His dismissive treatment of recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature and of writers who generated articles he compiled into books is part of a telling history. These intricately linked agendas engender hostile reactions. Barbara Christian had earlier cried out in dismay at the critical turn of theoretical events in her “Race for Theory.” Why do theorists of one school play the deadly, eliminating game of subtractions when we can all easily toy with the healthier, inclusionary notion of addition? Moving from the world of abstractions to “reality,” Barthes's statement killing the “Author” and Bloom's dissn' some writers cannot but boomerang. Meanwhile, their ancestral voices continue to confer authority to others echoing them.
But what do Barthes and Foucault have to do with Flora Nwapa? In spite of their deaths, the two men continue to colonize literary theory from the other world, thereby disenfranchising many writers. By practicing their craft which is osmotically transmitted through ancestral worship as their texts are read as Revelations, part of the literary community has helped to put them magisterially in control. Nwapa's lucid, profound, and spiritually charged writing, like that of her many sisters with their different ancestors, has been one attempt to free ourselves from such intellectual and literary tyranny. If their Author is dead or dying, or they no longer know who the author is, Nwapa escaped from that intense, self-absorbed, claustrophobic labyrinth. In spite of her brave attempt, she is grimly connected with them, tangentially, in a very human way. One needs to pause to consider the following uncanny coincidences. The link between Foucault and Barthes sets off what Gates would have referred to as “a chain of significations,” if life were literature. The former had seen the professorial Barthes in a jolly mood, as he interacted with his students. A few days later, however, Foucault was also to witness a contrasting and devastating moment: the accident which caused Barthes's death (Foucault, Death 185–86). The link between Foucault and Charles Ruas duplicates and refines the earlier incident. Ruas had interviewed Foucault. He recalls that he was going to mail the interview to Foucault for editing when he read of his “premature death caused by cancer” in the newspapers (Death 170). Curiously, late in 1992, Nwapa had visited relatives and friends in the United States, and I relished the camaraderie and especially her gentle spirit, as I drove with her from Tess Onwueme's at Vassar to Sarah Lawrence College. In 1993, we were anxiously looking forward to her return to the United States from Nigeria to take up a professorial position when we were stunned by her “untimely death caused by pneumonia.” These meeting points in the death of these authors provide an anecdotal dimension to our commemoration of Nwapa. Life goes on while death carries on its tireless dance, invigorated by accident and illness. Sardonically, Barthes's abstract play with death turns into a veritable danse macabre, or, as Ama Ata Aidoo declares of our postcolonial neurosis in Our Sister Killjoy, the “dance of the masquerades” is being performed with a vengeance.
Moving from the international scene to an African, gender-specific concern about Barthes's Author, what happens when there is no reader, or the writer is practically her only reader? In short, what happens when there is a dea(r)th of readers? What happens if only a few people (mis)read Nwapa's works? What happens when a writer is not recognized as an author especially by her own child? For example, Nwapa's son, Uzoma Nwakuche, considered her only as a mother rather than a woman with numerous roles, including that of writer. Her death and people's response to it brought home to him the incongruity of his assessment.1 Thus, the invalidation of the African woman as novelist, the birth of a certain type of theory, as well as the dearth of scholarship on African women's writing are chronic, petty warfare that kill her as Author.
In this commemorative volume, we will pay homage to Nwapa through the exhilarating interaction of author, text, and critic. Certain aspects of her texts validate such a collaborative effort. I will explore the movement from birth to death and the interstitial spaces occupied by health, illness, and recovery to see how they impact on her writing. Since the most chronic maladies chronicled by Nwapa are childlessness and madness, I will dwell on their figurative uses because they in/validate three vital aspects of the body politic—Law, Religion, and Medicine.
II. BUILDING UP THE CASE: A DIAGNOSIS
In the midst of preparing for a big move from Nigeria to the United States to take up a professorial appointment, Flora Nwapa, according to information from Nwakuche, was first struck down by arthritis, then pneumonia. Successfully retreating from the arthritic zone, she, unfortunately, succumbed to the attack by pneumococci, to employ the commonplace “military metaphor in medicine” (Sontag 65). At this twist of events, one is tempted to draw a Nigerian, juju conclusion in an attempt to grapple with trauma. Apparently, her ogbanje2 companions in the other world, with their inveterate tendency to meddle with the world of the living, did not approve of her imminent exile, however temporary. They claimed her for their own, keeping her permanently for communion in her natal Ugwuta, in Nigeria, where she lies buried. Though Nwapa died at the age of 62, her death is “untimely,” since she preceded her mother. In this final venture, she definitively affirms her precocity as an ogbanje.
She reminds me of Christopher Okigbo—the artist as an ogbanje—as constructed by Catherine Acholonu. As writers, Nwapa and Okigbo were inevitably ensnared in the “Labyrinths” of an ogbanje existence, living in and writing from an Igbo, juju imaginary. For the ogbanje, birth/life is death and death is life/birth, depending on the cycle in this world or the other. Ahead of her time and deconstructing the works of her male contemporaries, Nwapa carved a feminine space out of this cultural imaginary with her novels. She placed Uhamiri, the female water deity known as the Woman of the Lake or Mammywata, at its center. By problematizing Uhamiri's mythical and tumultuous relationship with her irascible husband, Urashi, the male river god, Nwapa introduced the controversy around gender relationships formally into the national discourse. Thus, she locates for women the site of their disenchantment which they personally feel, privately discuss, but do not openly name. Her subtext is the fate of a nation with her women absent: the result is a babel, with Nigeria mired in a chaotic crossroads. The present absence of Mammywata as an inspiriting resource to resolve these troubling issues echoes through her texts. Performing a balancing act in a pluralistic Nigeria, Nwapa uses the Mammywata figure for psychosocial ends. The call to return to a maternal source seems heartwarming in cultures that practice polygyny.
When people fail to acquiesce with her resolution in the enervating power struggles, like an ogbanje, she opts out through an early departure for a more amenable other place. Death plays that inevitable role in Nwapa's personal drama. In text after text, her writings emanate from her life, even as her life seems uncannily modeled after her writings. As an ogbanje, her displeasure with gender and other inequities that cause Nigeria to flounder is manifest in her subtle and mischievous attempts to destabilize the status quo in her texts. The quiet rebel, charmingly self-effacing, had completed her duty as a daughter.
Shifting from the mystical in celebrating Nwapa's passing, I cannot help pondering on death in literal terms, particularly those troops that attack the body to precipitate the (un)desirable outcome. This naturally arouses curiosity about the literal and figurative uses of illness and death in her texts. Whether the writer writes her life and/or lives her writing, Nwapa's relationship to her first novel, Efuru, is fascinating. Like Efuru, Nwapa, a first in so many ways,3 was an illustrious woman. It comes as no surprise that, in the majority of her writings, she harps on the fates of the successful woman and the nation in a place with little faith in its women. Nwapa, like Efuru, or Efuru, like Nwapa, learns the secret of genuine harmony by developing an intense relationship with the Lady of the Lake, the Mother who controls the destiny of Ugwuta, a microcosmic Nigeria. Nwapa empties Efuru of all concerns about marriage, so that Efuru can finally immerse herself in worshipping Uhamiri, thereby uncovering a new vista away from the debilitating warfare of the marital zone as presently constituted. Nwapa thus accommodates the childless, the husbandless, the educated, and the distinguished woman, forced to make do with the limiting spaces allotted them in society. She magically transforms these outcasts into the category of the new woman who can help to reconstruct the community. Nwapa, herself, shrouded in Uhamiri's mysteries, bequeaths us4 with yet another manuscript, The Lake Goddess,5 as if she were an ecofeminist. Its title indicates Nwapa's continued fascination with the maternal and cleansing agency emanating from the metaphysical dimension of a body of water as a holistic, ecological system. With her fierce independence and tender female caring as signs of her authority, Uhamiri furnishes the new woman with a deeply sustaining and insightfully spiritual model.
Deemed childless, Uhamiri, or Mammywata,6 as a religious construct, embodies the contradictions in our elemental biological and social realities, since she is simultaneously a deity and a body of water teeming with marine life and people incessantly using her. But she who is called Mother is also referred to as childless, shifts that are bafflingly self-negating. The unconscious undercutting of female agency speaks to the complex relationship between Nwapa, whom scholars glibly refer to as the Mother of the African novel by women, and the critic who (mis)reads her or reads her too narrowly. Nwapa's limiting and limited reception ultimately impacts on our critical lives. In spite of us, Nwapa-Uhamiri's tough strength exemplifies female authority. In affirming the female principle, Nwapa reminds us that Uhamiri never wants to and can never be Urashi, as she claims a domain for herself to escape the geopolitical dislocation7 inherent in woman's lot in attaining certain types of success.
The interplay between author and character speaks to the two most important things that we do in life—being born, that is, coming into life, a drama enacted with our mother in the lead role, since the father is inevitably absent or acts as audience in this initiative process, and dying, that is, leaving life, a drama accomplished alone. Birth and death are intricately connected with Medicine, Law, and Religion. Malady, malignancy, maladministration, malaise are crucial areas that speak to the living of a life and the leaving it. These issues intensely impact on Nwapa's life and writing. Her novels—Efuru, Idu, Never Again, One Is Enough, Women Are Different, and the unpublished manuscript, The Lake Goddess—short stories, poetry, and children's books are, in miniature, representations of Nigeria in different (post)colonial phases. They direct and enhance our reading of the African world as they help to shape and identify quality circles within it. Each of the novels diagnoses the signs and symptoms of the characters and the community/country, all suffering from maladies whose prognoses she articulates. Since the outcome of every illness is wellness or fatality (Sontag 72), Nwapa, in a precautionary or apocalyptic mood, inscribes in each novel recovery, stasis, decadence, or death, as the individual's destiny is figuratively entwined with the community's.
Illnesses, mental and physical, with or without visible pain, therefore, abound in the novels. Without gender specificity, infertility and madness (conflating with spirit possession in The Lake Goddess) recur so often that Nwapa is clearly using them figuratively to identify the communal crises. Ulcerous sores and eating disorder in both men and women in Efuru and Idu, malaria in Efuru, rabies and a doglike existence in Idu, craw-craw, leprosy, and kwashiorkor in Never Again, plus unnamed and psychosomatic illnesses are part of a discourse on societal disintegration. The sickest community is the war-torn Ugwuta in Never Again. Located between the spaces occupied by Nigeria and Biafra, Ugwuta, as a fledgling entity, degenerates into an amorphous mortuary. Since, geographically and psychologically, Ugwuta is simultaneously part of Biafra and Nigeria, its stench emanates from these countries and signals their demise as we know them. Nwapa had prepared us for this tragic turn in her two preceding novels with the general ennui in Efuru and Idu. Appearing in mid-career as a novelist, Nwapa sandwiches Never Again between the first and last two novels. In her saga of the disruptive forces in Nigerian social history, its ambience prepares us for the decadence in One Is Enough and Women Are Different. Nwapa, as well as her female characters, as “daughters-of-the-soil” (and water), put up some resistance. Her clarion call is for action among the rulers and the ruled and among men and women to heal the sick society; or, to continue the mortuary metaphor, she wants the treacherous old ways buried to make possible the rebirth of the country and its peoples.
Communities emerging from Fanonic, colonial violence suffer withdrawal symptoms, the characteristic postcolonial traumatic syndrome. Inertia, chaos, and disorientation set in, and these ephemeral, disruptive forces must run their course for healing and progress to take place. Conscious that we must tackle the disquieting syndrome in order to move on, Nwapa battles with these dispiriting phases in Nigeria in her last two published novels, resalting a sore. Many readers find her construction of the nation's excruciating dilemma so traumatizing that they protect themselves by dismissing the novels.
But all is not hopeless in Nwapa's oeuvres. The oxymoronic concept of a creative war is embedded in them. Marital war forms the core of Efuru (1966). In this context, marriage as the site for contest(e)s in the creating of life is important as her version of the marital war focuses on the issue of childlessness. Her concern is with couples who cannot fulfill their potential, with special interest on the scapegoating of women. Her procreative ambition thwarted, Efuru broadens the scope of motherhood by adopting a spiritually creative model that is beneficial to the entire community, including herself. Only a childless female like Uhamiri, who has become the mistress of a creative situation by emerging as the mother of a whole town, can heal a woman such as Efuru. Hence, Uhamiri's commandment of celibacy for her devotees, particularly Efuru, shifts the discourse on the void implicit in barrenness to the concreteness of the rituals that spiritualize a new type of parenthood in communal responsibility. Celibacy also speaks to a traditional construction of wifehood. In an Amadiumean move, Efuru worships Uhamiri not only as daughter but also as Uhamiri's wife. This marital connection addresses the problem of childlessness while upholding the ideal, Igbo, celibate marriage between two women which the British in their terror of lesbianism precipitately abolished.
Nonetheless, the most distressing and pervasive malady in Nwapa's oeuvres is childlessness. Paradoxically, it is fecund, generating text after text, even as Nwapa employs it figuratively to lament the lack of a fertile, Nigerian, female, writing tradition in English and participation in Nigerian sociopolitical reconstruction. Infertility engenders the ultimate anxiety of a void—the end of a lineage and a legacy; unfortunately, this remains unrefuted or tragically refuted, as we shall see later in Idu. In woman, infertility speaks to an unoccupied or wasted body space, while in man it conjures up wasted or unviable seeds, an intriguing farming turn to human reproduction. Not having a child seems to limit one's access to the profound secret of the future. As a metaphor, it concerns a lack of foresight.
Little Ogonim's death in Efuru can be read in this context. Her convulsion shakes Efuru's very being, disturbing her mothering to its foundation. After the collapse and her tedious journey through secondary infertility, she has to rebuild by conceiving a different form of mothering with her new spiritual role. Though death at an early age destabilizes patriarchy, childlessness is turned around for religious service to the self and the needy in the community.
The case of the suicide, Amarajeme, in Idu (1970) is not as penetrating as Efuru's. Being male, his virility is supremely important, for he never appeals to Uhamiri, though he could have. Rather, he is part of the cosmic mysteries manifested in the eclipse of the sun, a sign of the dislocation and disorientation of the entire body politic. As the bloody Nigerian civil war was coming to its end in 1970 when the novel appeared, Idu reminds us of the collapse of the ancient Bini Kingdom, referred to as Idu in Igbo folktale repertoire. Idu, the titular female protagonist, lives in an equally vertiginous community. She decides to end her life through starvation, thereby resisting the role of the disenfranchised widow who must submit to levirate. Since she is pregnant when she dies, this Uhamiri devotee, with her primary and secondary infertility crises already resolved, problematizes the issue of childlessness only to turn it on its head. Women's needs, Nwapa seems to be stating, go beyond the child-childless horizontal axis. Intersecting it is the vertical axis along which woman must be credited as a decision-making personality, not just a vessel, empty or filled. In other words, Nwapa appeals against the death sentence implicitly passed on daughters through Nigeria's misusing or failing to use their know-how. Her stance appears insurrectionary in giving woman visibility by pleading her case. She deliberately names this novel, like her first, after a woman, to make a political statement, cleverly linking it with the pidgin E do (the pronunciation of Idu) ‘cut the nonsense,’ with reference to the civil wars—gender and ethnic—and the pervasive corrupting system. The curt wordplay exemplifies her benignant power and accentuates her role as disciplinarian teacher and materfamilias, and is obviously on the warpath to inform in order to effect peace and justice. Through Idu as symbol, Nwapa addresses the man-made hazards that destabilize the society. In the event that the problems enunciated in Idu go unnoticed, Nwapa zeroes in directly on the civil war in Never Again (1975) to drive home her point.
This war novella focuses on the numerous signs of a dysfunctional society. For example, craw-craw's eternal itch, a sign of filth and a felt but unseen evil, afflicts the narrator in Never Again: “I felt some thing crawling on my hands. When I examined them closely I found swellings from almost invisible insects. I slapped promptly, killing several of them. There were swellings all over my hands. In a short time I would suffer from craw-craw. My God! Craw-craw! I, suffer from craw-craw” (67). That embarrassing, private itch of the only female narrator to write herself into Nwapa's novels indicates a pervasive communal discomfort. It not only reminds the elite of their inescapability from the human condition and mortality, it also demonstrates the difficulties experienced by woman in creating history. Little details personalize the telling to authenticate the outcome. Like ephemeral arthritis, craw-craw temporarily incapacitates the hands vital for writing the tale. Nonetheless, the tale about the horrendous civil war, the craw-craw with which Nigeria infected itself, must be told from a woman's perspective. On looking back, this female telling is the only progeny from the scabious water-landscape of Ugwuta-Nigeria, pockmarked by constant eruptions.
As we have seen, with the death of the pregnant Idu, Nwapa insists that having a child is not necessarily fulfilling, hence Idu's deadly eating disorder. The deaths of Idu's unborn child and the unnamed woman's in Never Again allude to the waste of Nigeria's human and material potential, especially the death of the newborn nation, Biafra, an extension or replica of Nigeria. In the face of the decimation of women and their children in war, it is absurd to expect pregnant women to readily provide truculent men with future cannon fodder. In peace time when woman is objectified like the widowed Idu or in war time when woman labors in the open, literally sowing her seed by the wayside, pregnancy degenerates into zero power.
Those women who do not resist by dying are virilized, the so-called “he” women like Efuru or Ojiugo, Idu's friend. When men fail or are unable to reproduce patriarchy, out of choice like the priest Father McLaid in One Is Enough or through infertility like Amarajeme, Ojiugo's husband in Idu, there are far-reaching consequences in a culture obsessed with having children. The infertile Amarajeme commits suicide in the mistaken notion that every man must reproduce patriarchy. As a husband in love with his wife, he appears feminized by the intensity of such a relationship, and, consequently, he has no place in the community.
The sex-role reversal of the feminized Amarajeme and his wife, the virilized Ojiugo, is crucial in dismantling patriarchal marriage while playing the game of stereotypicity. Ojiugo ventures to have an outside child like a man; Amarajeme sits at home like a woman, humiliated, suffering from an eating disorder which culminates in his suicide. By becoming an invalid, he invalidates himself, erroneously seeking control and legitimization by mistreating his body as women often do in anorexia nervosa. Unfortunately, by taking his life, he further devalues himself in a community where suicide is a taboo and the corpse is trash. His is the ultimate catch-22 in this cultural maze.
Nwapa returns to issues of gender to address the rabid sexism of the society and the Roman Catholic Church in One Is Enough (1981). Female resistance takes the form of a dare, knocking out the husband in a serendipitous victory in the marital zone, only to advance to profane the priestly space. Miraculously for the erstwhile childless Amaka, the protagonist, her invasive actions turn her into a mother. Turning around the idea of invasion as destructive and ironizing the notion of the childless priest as Father, Nwapa transforms the Reverend McLaid into the father of Amaka's twin sons. The virilized Amaka, a revised version of Efuru in modern day discourse, thus challenges the priest's abnormal choice and tempts him to break his vows of celibacy. Their twins are a sign of repetition, doubling, and seeing double, as Foucault puts it in a different context (Death 90); with the two boys Nwapa doubly affirms the male. Interestingly, McLaid goes on to study clitoridectomy as one of his people's backward practices that must be eradicated. It takes a fallen priest to stand up for female sexuality.
This post-war novel explores marital war to establish the need for a truce. Amaka retreats from the war zone, and, like any resourceful Uhamiri's daughter, she finds wealth and children to boot through exploiting her erotic power. The blessing of the twin sons nullifies the necessity for marriage, since the writer reserves a space for the male in the emerging schema. Amaka represents the new mother. Ex-wife (or part-time wife, as is increasingly becoming the case), single, wealthy, and independent, the new mother prominently occupies the contemporary national space which delegitimizes the notion of illegitimacy. With female independence thus instituted, one husband is not just enough. Indeed, one might be too much. This pill is difficult for male critics to swallow as birth control gives way to husband control or the death of the husband.
The next stage of Nwapa's saga plays out in Women Are Different (1986). She continues to chronicle the alarmingly anomic and decadent phenomena of contemporary urban Nigeria. As marriages teeter and men fail to live up to their self-appointed leadership role, the nation moves inevitably toward a dystopia. With the repercussions apparent within and beyond Nigeria's borders, Nwapa, again as teacher and mother, is telling a cautionary tale in the oral tradition. In Women Are Different, women's participation in formal, Western education is not wasted. However, it takes a toll on the Nigerian marriage as women become feminazified, assertively claiming equal, polygamous rights like men rather than passively accepting polygyny only to anguish privately as their mothers do or did. The failed marriages and the resultant dysfunctional families are signifiers of the disruptive conditions of a nation that can be categorized as critically ill. We will soon know whether it is terminal or whether Nigeria can miraculously recover as she has stubbornly done in the past. Since the choric protagonists named the Three Musketeers are not armed in the nuclear fashion of twentieth-century warriors, Nwapa leaves us with some hope of picking up the pieces.
As Uhamiri's daughter, Nwapa serendipitously ends her writing career, which has taken sacredly profane turns, by dutifully returning to her religious beginnings with The Lake Goddess. This almost sacred text, a voice from beyond the grave, as it were, is apocalyptic and oracular. Its insights encourage us to explore our roots for learning and healing, her objective in her poetry, children's stories, and short fiction.
Thus, central to Nwapa's works is the need to access some intercessory force for recovery. The recuperation of the invalid(ated), who, metaphorically, represents our humanity, our country, shows her far-reaching vision. Efuru recovers from burying her dead (her daughter and her father), the trauma of separation from her two husbands, the tragedy of her childless state, and her enervating, psychosomatic illness. She emerges after her deep sleep healed, to philosophize on a puzzle. Why do women worship a childless deity? Though this question is problematic since men also worship Uhamiri, Efuru worships her to gain peace of mind. However, by posing this abstruse question at the end of the novel, Nwapa offers no closure. Instead, she opens an opportunity for (wo)men to respond to her. They have generated texts, dwelling on the child(lessness) and rarely producing adult texts where children feature in their own right.8 Perhaps people worship a childless deity because they want recovery by shifting the discourse on success and childlessness to institute a dialogue on a new style of mothering or rather parenting. This will demonstrate Nigeria's primary commitment to her children's welfare rather than privileging success from a Nigerian military perspective. Childlessness emerges as a state of mind, not a condition: Idu ends cataclysmically with the suicides of an infertile man and a pregnant woman. With the cessation of war in Never Again, there are prospects for reconstruction. Childlessness, the troubled marriage, and the spiritual void experienced in Christianity as an imposed religion are revisited in One Is Enough. In Women Are Different, the deracinated elite in Nigeria continue to corrupt the body politic.
For renewal, Nwapa returns to the indigenous, religious source Uhamiri in The Lake Goddess. With the quest for spiritual strength in the return to African traditional religions in times of great stress and uncertainty, she comes full circle to the concerns that gripped her at the beginning of her writing career, when Nigeria's newborn independence was fragile. Ogbanje that she is, she leaves behind an unpublished manuscript dramatizing the battle between Christianity and indigenous religions for the souls of the people. Tellingly, she entrusts this final manuscript to the Jamaican professor, Chester Mills, to father, as she had trusted Chinua Achebe with her first. Her friend, the Ethiopian Kassahun Checole of Africa World Press, will midwife the production as her life's work continues in spite of her death. The womanist in her leads her to these gestures of goodwill with men at home and abroad, thereby paving the way for collaboration (inter)nationally across the gender divide. Since as woman her work is never done, she freely joins Mother-Husband Uhamiri, both talking to us through her texts as they play the teasing games of present-absence and absent-presence.
III. FURTHER TEXTUAL EVIDENCE AND A PROGNOSIS
Sontag asserts that
Illness expands by means of two hypotheses. The first is that every form of social deviation can be considered an illness. … The second is that every illness can be considered psychologically. … The two hypotheses are complementary. As the first seems to relieve guilt, the second reinstates it. Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill.
(56–57)
This postulate helps to illuminate our reading of gender divisions in Nwapa's works. The de facto end of Efuru's first marriage is the moment when her husband fails to return home to attend the funeral of their only child Ogonim or to mourn with his wife. His abnormal response to the painful turn of events is a symptom of the chronic condition of marriage and the family. Quite tellingly also, Efuru's second marriage ends equally bizarrely in relation with another death. When her mediocre husband, Eneberi, serving time for an undisclosed crime, commits a terrible faux pas by not participating in his father-in-law's funeral and without proffering an excuse, he has coffined their marriage. He seems to have the power of self-definition by renaming himself Gilbert. However, the subordination of this superordinate male is marked by his jail term. As neo-natives, these men dwell in no man's land. In spite of the husbands' reduced status, on each deviant occasion, women readily replace Efuru to nurture the husband's bruised and guilty ego back to health. The lack of female solidarity turns Efuru into the castrating female, though she vainly waited for the first husband and stood loyally by the second in spite of his crime and imprisonment.
Yet, when Efuru is prostrate from an illness without a name, presumably patriarchal marriage, Eneberi's reaction is to read “disease as a punishment for wickedness,” as Sontag explains another aspect of her hypotheses (41). Eneberi projects his guilt about his adultery and outside child by falsely accusing Efuru of adultery in an insidious attempt to control her. Incensed by his lack of reciprocity, Ajanupu, one of Efuru's communal mothers, prostrates Enebiri by knocking him down symbolically with a pestle. Moving from the gender wars to the spiritual plane, Efuru's illness can be read psychologically. Its psychosomatic presentation is Uhamiri's divine prodding for Efuru to leave patriarchal marriage with its distractions behind her. Thus untrammeled, she can carry out her religious functions in a more committed fashion, and the community can then recognize her as Mother and mediatrix. Uhamiri's presence upholds justice and restores equilibrium.
In a contrasting development, Uhamiri's absence in Never Again precipitates madness. The chaos in war-torn Ugwuta, the narrator Kate's disorientation (an example of the mad leading the mad), and Ezekoro's dislocation are riveting case histories. Ezekoro “was a mad man. For several years, he was deaf and dumb. Then miraculously he regained his speech, and he talked and talked and talked” (62). To be afflicted with madness, deafness, dumbness, and to recover only to be plagued by garrulousness in the midst of war suggest serious self-limiting problems and challenges in interpersonal communications. This is orature gone amok. Ezekoro as a monomaniac is, in microcosm, the nation at war with itself; he represents the breakdown of communication between the author and the audience. With combatants failing to heed one another, unrelenting propaganda exacerbates the bloody war. Ezekoro mindlessly heads for his demise as he returns to the besieged Ugwuta, ostensibly to defend her. This is the death of the unheeded Author.
Another graphic scene involving madness occurs in The Lake Goddess in the marketplace. A naked, violent madman, potent with his erection, throws the market into disarray. Arrested at a moment of possibility, this madman will never find fulfillment nor will he sow his seed, for the market women prevent the madwoman who is able to communicate with him from teaching him “the art of madness.” This grotesque vignette is reminiscent of the Nietzschean madman who shatters his lantern in the marketplace only to declare, “God is dead” (Kaufmann 95). The silencing of the artist and the lack of response by his/her audience drive all involved in the literary project to a dead-end. With our giddy reception, we extinguish the artist's creative spark. In addition to these metaphorical implications, the handling of the mentally ill epitomizes the country's haphazard governmental system. The manuscript ends with the protagonist, the priestess of the Lake Goddess, the spirit-possessed Ona-Ezemiri, practicing her “mad” art in a climactic outpouring. Its lyricism renews the troubled clients before whom she performs. Homeopathically, the “madness” of traditional religious inspiration ensures homeostasis, but men need to be healers also, not disruptive elements.
The debilitating effect of their actions on the quality of life is cause for alarm about Nigeria's social condition which often appears suicidal. Sontag's comments on a different text might enhance our reading of the situation of Nigeria as pariah: “In the Middle Ages, the leper was a social text in which corruption was made visible, an exemplum, an emblem of decay. Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one” (58). The social disease spreads as fast as AIDS on the pages of Women Are Different. In Efuru, Eneberi metamorphoses into Gilbert, a colonial creation marked for his cultural move toward whiteness. Paradoxically, whiteness is the sign of social advancement as well as the condition of the leper. Following his stint in jail, he becomes a pariah. For black men, imprisonment is like leprosy, a white scourge, a badge of shame. To cope with the contagion, Eneberi-Gilbert resorts to woman-bashing. He has the gall to deliberately misread Efuru as adulteress while failing to read himself. His ultimate invalidation becomes located in his meaningless English name which his wife cannot pronounce. As gibberish, he seems to be a lost cause. Of course, it is more interesting to read Nigeria as a postcolonial Frankenstein, let loose on the free-trading world. Her metier is drug trafficking in Women Are Different, which speaks to the slave trade in Efuru, and conning the first world in an exchange resembling the spread of the dreaded consumption.
With time, however, people sometimes lose their dread for certain diseases and overlook delinquents. In a calculated move, Nwapa links another disease with leprosy: “Kwashiorkor was a deadly disease of children, more deadly in Biafra than leprosy. Leprosy was not feared any more. Lepers mingled with people these days” (Never Again 25). When an infectious disease is accepted and displaced by something more deadly that attacks the future generation, the moral and spiritual harm in the society spreads. Since kwashiorkor is preventable with a balanced diet, Nwapa problematizes parental and national irresponsibility toward children. Adult delinquency in peace and wartime generates a careless attitude and unpreparedness for the future of the country.
In the political confusion, death is the most democratic factor in life, because each person dies of some malady. Rigor mortis, the rigor of life, and the rigor of the completed text are inflexible. Nwapa manages to turn the cessation of activity in the deceased into a catalyst, forcing us continuously to (re)assess the text(s) of a life bequeathed to us. While we are still alive, we foolishly flee from death, though we do not know where it is lurking at any one moment. Yet, every move we make inevitably leads us toward it since we must meet death down the road of life. Nwapa recognizes such behavior in a world gone awry. The restlessness becomes more pronounced in a war as Kate, the narrator in Never Again, so poignantly describes:
After fleeing from Enugu, Onitsha, Port Harcourt and Elele, I was thoroughly tired of life. Yet how tenaciously could one hold on to life when death was around the corner! Death was too near for comfort in Biafra. And for us who had known no danger of this kind before, it was hell on earth. I meant to live at all costs. I meant to see the end of the war. Dying was terrible. I wanted to live so that I could tell my friends on the other side what it meant to be at war—a civil war at that, a war that was to end all wars. I wanted to tell them that reading it in books was nothing at all; they just would not understand it. I understood it. I heard the deadly whine of shells. No books taught us this. And no teachers made us hear shells when they taught us about the numerous wars staged in Western Europe and America. But they couldn't have made us hear shelling. They had not heard it themselves. Their teachers had not heard it either.
(1)
But Nwapa had. For self-preservation, the civilian in a war instinctively travels like the ogbanje, always searching for safe havens that inevitably turn to warring zones. Thus is instituted the eternal longing for the other place. However, the secret for survival is to know when and how to move before a haven becomes a hell. This is the maze of life and the meaning of our constant quest and striving. Vodka, the only drink available in Biafra briefly basking under USSR support, transports the civilian through Russian waters to imaginary heights to enable him to endure the birth-death throes of a Biafra. This paradox and its oxymoronic counterpart, the stillborn state, capture the factor of life and death as coterminous states. Sudden death is, indeed, disorienting. “The woman who had spoken a few minutes ago was a corpse. Was death so quick? Was it as quick as it was cruel? What was the cause of death?” asks the distraught narrator (Never Again 58). Obviously, there are no clear boundaries between birth, life, and death. However, in spite of war and death being commonplace, the reader receives reassurance of recovery. At least, one person will survive the holocaust to tell the story—the maddened woman whose narrative in the open confessional of the autobiographical mode disseminates knowledge of the bloodiness and wastefulness of war. She heals herself magically by dissociating herself from lying propaganda and telling her war story—a female version which has hitherto gone unheard—that more women and children die or are injured in wars than male soldiers. Telling her story generates hearing voices.
On the spiritual level, God the Christian father suffers a displacement. His gender betrays him as a warlord whom the women gradually replace with the more amenable mater, Uhamiri. She delivers the town from the throes of war. In the crises of life, the Nigerian secretly seeks and finds women who lead the devotee to traditional sources. This mystical business contrasts with the open flirting with the Christian God during the good times. Geography and spiritual mysteries conjoin in the realm of metaphysics. Uhamiri's stolidity as represented by the still lake waters insures Ugwuta's defense. Thus, the connectedness of birth and death which runs through Barthes's text and Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth as the most basic link is also inherent in Nwapa's texts. Nwapa's distinctive contribution in representing the interrelatedness between life and death has an ogbanje mark that is memorably coded in the themes of childlessness, the birth of madness, and the deaths of pregnant women.
Other deaths in Nwapa's oeuvres are valid inferences of a collapsing system. The death of the genuine dibia in Efuru is equivalent to the closing of a clinic or hospital, the loss of an encyclopedia of traditional medicine, the death of a way of life geared toward recovery. When the authentic healer dies or the Western-trained doctor goes on exile leaving quacks or neophytes behind in ill-equipped hospitals, who will heal the sick? This is the African dilemma; this was Nwapa's final problem. Furthermore, the death of the aged results conveniently in communal amnesia. The death of Efuru's father has a historical resonance. The old man dies with the secret surrounding the amassing of wealth through dealing in slaves in the past, a horrendous history which Nigerians ignore. The consequences of denial haunt us. In contemporary times, the elite's continued wheeling and dealing with the West and its tragic results, as depicted in Women Are Different, date back to the sins of the fathers. The death of the aged is Nwapa's metaphor concerning the values of hindsight. The questionable basis of Western- style capitalism as manifested in the corrupt amassing of wealth by the nouveaux riches in Nigeria based on the dea(r)th endured by others continues to plague the country. The decadence captured in Nwapa's last two published novels, One Is Enough and Women Are Different, are clarion calls for Nigerians to redefine how men and women should live. If we fail to heed her, we will hear more than the deadly whine of shells.
IV. CLOSING THE CASE?
Is this then “Apocalypse Now”? Nwapa's final vision in Women Are Different is meant to orient in spite of its disorientation. Leaving this calamitous milieu to return to the soothing influence of Uhamiri in The Lake Goddess reassures and revitalizes. The rehabilitative agenda of Uhamiri is crucial in all the texts. As a female, she speaks to woman's traditional, salvationary role. As a deity, she performs a spiritual function. As a body of water, the lake itself serves a domestic need, suffusing Nwapa's writings with a cleansing and healing aura. Without water there can be no birth or life; Uhamiri's presence affirms both. But one can drown in her waters if one is not careful. Therefore birth and death are associated with her. As she is indispensable in Ugwuta life, so she is deeply connected with our reading of Nwapa's fiction, for she provides the essentials for understanding its spiritual and national subtexts. Uhamiri's role is therefore recuperative, because water aids recovery. As her votaress, Nwapa remains as invigorating as her deity. Reading her resurrects Uhamiri even as the lake remains perpetually in place.
Ultimately, Nwapa's narrativity skillfully negotiates between competing worlds—life and death, health and illness, reality and fiction, the current world and the ogbanje's male and female spaces, the West and Africa, the oral and the written modes with their endless reinterpretations. In obliterating the antithesis implicit in these conflicting categories, her art catalyzes our being with its oracular and spiritually charged ambience. What difference, then, does knowing and loving an author in life make to our reading of her text, especially after her death, when that is all that remains as a sign of our connection, of her continued talking to us? Being in touch with her engenders insights and incites the shaman in us: three ogboni, it becomes multiple is my proselytizing conclusion. When numerous pneumococci are on the warpath and there are no seasoned doctors or genuine drugs to stay their course, or Uhamiri invites her daughter-wife to come to the other place, what else can one say? “Sweet” Flora Nwapa has died; long live the other, Author Flora Nwapa.
Notes
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Information from Marie Umeh's interview with Uzoma Nwakuche.
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Acholunu, in her development of the Igbo concept of ogbanje as a (w)reckless spirit, and Niyi Osundare, in the Yoruba parallel abiku, emphasize the centrality of a premature death in the struggle which is concomitant with the phenomenon. Also located in the discourse is the ogbanje's precocity. The troubling issue of his/her ambiguity Osundare epitomizes in the concept of the “living dead.” From all angles, the ogbanje/abiku as a restless, discontented traveler is a disturber of the peace. Our contradictory impulses show love and hate in the attempts to let the creature go and the desperation in wanting the beloved to stay.
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For example, Nwapa was the first African woman to publish a full-length novel in English in England. She was the first woman publisher, the first woman to juggle the political role of commissioner with the artistic one of writer. The first of Ugwuta women, she continues to be a model, opening the way to the production of more texts.
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Pursuing the ogbanje analogy, one can read Nwapa's texts as her iyi uwa. This is the buried treasure or essence of the ogbanje. The dibia (“traditional doctor”) must help to unearth this treasure during an open exorcism to keep the patient on earth and stem the longing for the other place. In carrying out our critical project on Nwapa, we continue the dibia's enigmatic function, thereby managing to keep her with us even as she dwells in the other place.
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The novel will be published posthumously by Africa World Press, according to its spokesperson, Kassahun Checole.
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The notion of Mother as Mammy or the commonly used Mummy indicates both a death wish on woman and, paradoxically, the need for her preservation by mummifying her. This tension exists in her hateful role as wife and the glorified one of the eternal mother.
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To be successful as wife, for example, the woman has to negotiate her space for her husband to accommodate her. This almost inevitably cramps her. Further, when women are successful in Nwapa's oeuvres, they are read politically as men, a transformative jump that oftentimes makes them inaccessible to other women and further objectifies them as they become placed on a pedestal to share in the power system.
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Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Eno Obong's Garden House are two such responses with clear umbilical ties to Efuru. However, in both, there is no space, from the children's perspectives, for the reader to view children as children as one can in a text like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. (Though Emecheta's The Family comes later, it is hardly a response to Nwapa with its different agenda.) This gap in the cultural imaginary represents the notion that the child is to be seen silently.
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