Stories of Women and Mothers: Gender and Nationalism in the Early Fiction of Flora Nwapa
[In the following essay, Boehmer analyzes the effect of nationalist symbolism on women's identity and writing in Africa.]
She is there at the beginning of the lives of individuals and of nations. In various nationalist mythologies and, more recently, in the matriarchal yearnings of dispossessed women seeking their own place in nations and in history, mother figures cradle their children in comforting and capacious laps. (Before her recent troubles), Winnie Mandela was given the title ‘Mother of the Nation’.
The West Indian poet and historian, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, has addressed his home island of Barbados as mother, the matrix of his connection with the past, the source of meaning and identity.1 Nuruddin Farah has commented that referring to a nation as a father-(rather than as a mother-) land is to him an absurd idea.2 Many male writers from Africa—Camara Laye, Kofi Awoonor and Wole Soyinka among them—speaking from various historical and geographical perspectives, have seen the image writ larger: Africa, the continent whole and full-bellied, is both the beloved land and mother. In 1988, when making a call to Africans to stand together not on the basis of colour but on that of Africanness, Jesse Jackson adopted this grand trope, urging that African people everywhere ‘identify with Africa as … mother continent.’ His conviction was that ‘the blood that unites us is stronger than the water that divides us’,3 a metaphor knitting together images of common womb and origin, and of shared birth-ground.
Although they perhaps hold different sentiments and ideals, the figure of the common African mother is one to which African women and women of African origin have also made obeisance. Buchi Emecheta, the London-based Nigerian novelist, for example, is of the opinion that ‘the white female intellectual may still have to come to the womb of Mother Africa to re-learn how to be a woman.’4 For the Zimbabwean poet and former guerrilla fighter, Freedom Nyamubaya, to speak of the free Zimbabwean nation is to speak of the motherland. The concepts are so closely associated that Nyamubaya bestows upon the concept of freedom the same honorific title: ‘mother freedom’.5 Aneb Kgotsile, poet and activist, speaking from an Afro-American perspective, observes: ‘Mother Africa is of great importance … Through our study of African history the motherland was unearthed to us and we reclaimed Africa.’6 In her recent novel, The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker also sings threnodies over the destruction of the ancient matriarchal worship of Africa: history in Walker's representation achieves meaning in so far as her characters become either avatars or acolytes of the composite, omnibenevolent ‘Africa/Mother/Goddess’.7
But to what sort of mother image is it that women writers appeal when they speak in this way? Is their gaze fixed longingly on the same object as their male counterparts? Does the icon represent for them a more or less direct transposition within the forms of language of male-dominated nationalism and, if so, what does this transfer mean for their own strategies of self- retrieval? Do nationalist vocabularies not implicate women in certain paradoxes of identity and affiliation? Such questions point to the main concern of this essay, which will explore what an investment in the doctrines and symbolism of a typically ‘masculine’ nationalism entails—firstly for women's politics of identity and then also for women's writing.8
The dilemma is that where male nationalists have claimed, won and ruled the ‘motherland’, this same motherland may not signify ‘home’ and ‘source’ to women. To ‘Third World’ women and women of colour these concerns speak with particular urgency, not only because of their need to resist the triple oppression or marginalisation that the effects of colonialism, gender and a male-dominated language create, but also because their own tactics of self-representation are often usefully adopted from the older and more established nationalist politics of ‘their men’.
Mariamma Bâ once said that:
We [women] no longer accept the nostalgic praise to the African mother whom, in his anxiety, man confuses with Mother Africa.9
Though she was here keeping hold of the image of Mother Africa, Bâ shows herself to be uncomfortable about the male glorification of African women as national and continental mothers. Lauretta Ngcobo addresses this discomfort when she observes:
Africa holds two contradictory views of woman—the idealised, if not the idolised mother, and the female reality of woman as wife.10
These two quotations can be set alongside a comment made by Virginia Woolf on the subject of nationalism and women. In her anti-patriarchal pacifist manifesto Three Guineas, Woolf is moved to assert that ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.’11
Because men have drawn up, defined and directed national boundaries and national affairs, Woolf suggests, women cannot legitimately lay claim either to a national territory or to their own national mythology and history. Thus, the lap of the Mother Nation may not be as soft and capacious for women as it is for men.
Despite professed ideals, nationalisms do not address all individuals equally: significant distinctions and discriminations are made along gendered (and also class and racial) lines. Such distinctions are not mere decoration; on the contrary, nationalism relies heavily on gendered languages to imagine itself.12Gender informs nationalism and nationalism in its turn consolidates and legitimates itself through a variety of gendered structures and shapes which, either as ideologies or as political movements, are clearly tagged: the idea of nationhood bears a masculine identity though national ideals may wear a feminine face.13
The gender specifics of nationalism are clearly illustrated in the iconographies held dear by nations. In the literature, rhetoric and pageantry of nations, as in nationalist politics and political structures, it is a male figure who is cast as the author and subject of the nation—as faithful soldier, citizen-hero or statesman. In the national family drama that has the achievement of selfhood as its denouement, it is he who is chief actor and hero; the mother figure in this drama may be his mentor, fetish or talisman, but advice and example are taken from a heritage of fathers. Typically, then, the male role in the nationalist scenario may be characterised as metonymic. Male figures are brothers and equals, or fathers and sons and thus rivals; but in both cases their roles are specific and contiguous with one another. The ‘female’, in contrast, puts in an appearance chiefly in a metaphoric or symbolic role. She is the strength or virtue of the nation incarnate, its fecund first matriarch, but it is a role which excludes her from the sphere of public national life. Figures of mothers of the nation are everywhere emblazoned but the presence of women in the nation is officially marginalised and generally ignored.14
I will attempt to ground these contentions a little more firmly. Two mutually reinforcing cases can be made for the relationship between patriarchy and nationalism. The first identifies in both a unitary, monologic vision, a tendency to authorise homogenising perceptions and social structures and to suppress plurality.15 Nationalism, like patriarchy, favours singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all. Though this interpretation relies a little uncomfortably on ideas of immanence, the claim is therefore that nationalism, like patriarchy, will promote specifically unitary or ‘one-eyed’ forms of consciousness.
The second case is based on more historical grounds. The emergence of nationalism was characterised by a co-operation between patriarchies in the nation-state and in the household, a development that coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of the middle-class family unit within it.16 Nationalism, then, found in existing social patterns the models for hierarchical authority and control.
The interleaving of gender and nationalism was clearly demonstrated in the national movements which arose in Europe's former colonies, shaped by the history of intersecting patriarchies that was part of colonialism. At all points in the long process of decolonisation and national reconstitution, male power elites were operative, their authority having been already endorsed and blessed by earlier colonial and indigenous patriarchies.17 With a dominant male presence rooted in the state, it was predictable that a gender bias would persist in neo-colonial nationalisms well beyond the time of independence. Whether in literature or in law, the national subject was in most cases either implicitly or explicitly designated as male. Despite the promises of national freedom, women were therefore excluded from full national participation on an equal footing with men. Even where women, as in Algeria or Zimbabwe, fought for freedom alongside men, national consciousness was composed by male leaders. Mother Africa may have been declared free, but the mothers of Africa remained manifestly oppressed.
Little resistance to such processes of patrimonial designation could be expected from within the ranks of the newly empowered. In the Manichean allegory that typified the colonial power struggle,18 dominant, ‘true’ power—that of the coloniser—had been characterised as rational, disciplined, assertive, masculine; while inertia, weakness, the disorderly, was represented as feminine. Where nationalists were committed to rebuild their shattered self-esteem, to ‘selving’, images signifying autonomy, force, will—and, by implication, masculinity—would be avidly promoted.19 So the new rulers might portray themselves as a rising strength, as self-determining, as powerful—and also as patriarchal and/or as one another's brothers. Thus, though seeking to step out of inherited allegorical roles, they would try as far as possible to avoid ‘negative’—that is feminine—meanings. Underlying gendered values remained intact.
At the level of national symbolism, colonial images of the land or nation as invincible protectress or progenitress were assimilated to local conventions of respect for the earth or for mothers, ensuring that national leaders granted some sort of compensatory iconic recognition to the ‘mothers of the nation’ while at the same time vouching for the cultural integrity of the whole national entity. Observe once again however that it is the sons who are the authors of meaning: whether of ‘tradition’, or of present social realities; whether of their own self-image as national representatives or of the women they would presume to represent.20
So the glad achievement of nationhood presented women with a conundrum. For women such selving, with its emphasis on the male personality, only confirmed a lack of self, their difference from national wholeness. This alienation represented, and still represents, an especially serious problem for the new nationalisms of the South or ‘Third World’. For where, in nationalist rhetoric, as in the official discourse of the state, masculine identity is normative, and where the female is addressed in the main as idealised bearer of nationalist sons, woman as such, in herself, has no valuable place.
But, if nationalism does not see women as nationals, then a woman seeking to claim a place or identity in any field of national activity faces multiple perils of self-contradiction. Literature as a medium of self-expression offers a representative case. In African nationalism, especially that of the immediately pre-and post-independence periods, writing was an important source of national myth-making and dreaming. For a writer to be nationalist, was to be that much more a worthy writer, as well as that much more a loyal nationalist. It was also, by implication, to be that much more male. The circle of mutually reinforcing identities shut—and still shuts—women out.
A woman might choose to crack this ring of identity by attempting to repossess matriarchal myths. For some women the reclaimed myth of an age-old, long-suffering Afrika—Walker's Africa/Goddess/Mother, for example—might continue to hold out much promise of communion and liberation. Yet how are such myths, such apparently redemptive symbols, to be separated from those which continue to shore up patriarchal desire and a system of gendered national authority? To compound these difficulties, the idealisation and possible fetishisation of single mother figures bears an uncanny resemblance to the monolithic aspects of male-centred nationalism. Subscribing to the unitary icon threatens to defeat the women's objective of affirming their own particular mode of being. Given that men have monopolised the field of nationalist identity and self-image, women may thus have to evolve other strategies of selving—perhaps less unitary; perhaps more dispersed and multifarious. It is not only that the patriarchal sources which inform nationalist images must in some way be confronted. It is also necessary to explore forms of women's self-representation that would counterpose inherited symbolic languages of gender. Here, despite existing traditions of male authorship, writing holds out fruitful possibilities of redress.
If African literature in the past has constituted a nationalist and patriarchal preserve, then, simply by writing, women may begin directly to challenge the male prerogative. In writing, women express their own reality and so question received notions of national character and experience. But writing is also more than this. To write is not only to speak for one's place in the world. It is also to make one's own place or narrative, to tell the story of oneself, to create an identity. It is in effect to deploy what might be called a typically nationalist strategy. As Simon Gikandi has put it:
To write is to claim a text of one's own; textuality is an instrument of territorial possession; because the other confers on us an identity that alienates us from ourselves, narrative is crucial to the discovery of our selfhood.21
This idea of self-creation through narrative connects with the Kristevan concept of excess in writing. Kristeva observes, à propos of Barthes's criticism, that writing is ‘transformative’, operating through the displacement of what is already signified, bringing forth the not-yet-imagined and the transgressive.22 Through writing, then, through claiming a text—or a narrative territory—women sign into and at the same time subvert a nationalist narrative that excluded them as negativity, as corporeal and unclean.
Possibilities for the disruption and/or transformation of a patriarchal nationalist text can be seen to operate in two main ways in women's writing: the ‘textual’ and the (broadly) ‘temporal/territorial’. The first occurs through the medium of the text, in the substance of the writing, and involves, quite simply, interrupting the language of official nationalist discourse and literature with a women's vocality. Nationhood is so bound up in textuality, in ‘definitive’ histories and official languages and mythologies, that to compose a substantially different kind of text, using vernacular forms that are part of people's experience, is already to challenge normative discourses of nationhood.
Yet because national identity rests on received images of national history and topography, the second method of transformation is as important. It involves changing the subjects that dominated the nationalist text. Where women tell of their own experience, they map their own geography, scry their own history and so, necessarily, contest official representations of a nationalist reality. They implicitly challenge the nation's definition of itself through territorial claims, through the reclamation of the past and the canonisation of heroes.
Both these methods obviously correspond closely to techniques of literary subversion in which women writers have long been engaged. Yet where African literary narratives, like those of the fifties and the sixties, depend on nationalist ideas and themes—and so on gendered interpretations of social reality—such methods will have particular relevance.
The second part of this essay will demonstrate how such techniques could work in practice in a discussion of two early novels by Flora Nwapa, Efuru (1966) and Idu (1970). Published during the first decade of Nigerian independence, a time featuring robust and cocksure, if also embattled nationalisms, Nwapa's novels represent the first narrative appearance from a woman on the broader African literary stage. This in itself was a significant voicing, yet added to this was Nwapa's specific focus on women's community and colloquy in Igbo culture.
FLORA NWAPA
Like Elechi Amadi or Nkem Nwankwo, her male counterparts of the first post-independence decade, Flora Nwapa has written ‘after Achebe’, both chronologically and in terms of literary influence. Nwapa's narratives, like Amadi's and Achebe's, remember and recreate the Igbo village past in the colonial period. Period generalisations, however, tend to obscure the significant differences that exist between Nwapa and her male cohorts.
Her writing is situated outside of conventional male narrative history; she chooses to engage neither with the manly adventures and public displays of patriarchal authority described by male writers from her community nor with the narrative conventions of their accounts. Instead she concentrates, and at length, on what was incidental or simply contextual to male action—domestic matters, politics of intimacy.
In both Efuru and Idu, Nwapa's interest is in the routines and rituals of everyday life specifically within women's compounds. Women press into Nwapa's narrative as speakers, actors, decision-makers, brokers of opinion and market prices and unofficial jurors in their communities. But Nwapa's specific intervention as a writer goes beyond her interest in women subjects. What also distinguishes her writing from others in the ‘Igbo school’ are the ways in which she has used choric language to enable and to empower her representation, creating the effect of a women's verbal presence within her text,23 while bringing home her subject matter by evoking the vocality of women's everyday existence.
Though it may have attracted a certain amount of negative comment,24 the apparent lack of conventional novelistic complexity in Efuru and Idu, I would argue, far from being a deficiency, instead clears the space for the elaboration of another kind of narrative entirely—a highly verbalised collective women's biography—'transsubjective, anonymous’, transgressive,25 a narrative method which bears comparison with Zora Neale Hurston's recreation of porch-side comment and of gossip on the road.26
The precise contribution represented by Nwapa's writing can perhaps be more clearly demonstrated when set in contrast on the one side with a historical narrative by Elechi Amadi, and on the other with an anthropological account of a Nigerian Igbo community by a woman researcher, Ifi Amadiume. In his novel The Great Ponds, written in 1969,27 Elechi Amadi has depicted the life of an Igbo village as strongly determined by the forces of war, rumour and disease. Over war and rumour, it soon becomes clear, men hold undisputed sway; of disease, the gods decide, but they, like the village leaders, are all male. As with Achebe's writing, The Great Ponds is not uncritical of the ‘masculine’ social values which may contribute to and exacerbate community crises. Yet, unlike in Achebe, no locus of value is suggested which might form the rallying point of a new order: the male characters represent different types and degrees of manliness, but their actual position of authority is not called into question. It is thus quite within the terms laid down by the novel that the women in the community form a completely marginal and passive group. Their existence is affirmed by male subjects—they are desired, taken in marriage, captured as booty in male wars and are heard speaking when spoken to. For the rest, they are ignored.
Superficially this arrangement would seem hardly to differ from conventional gender divisions of power and cultural space. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it would appear that in Amadi the gender separation is perhaps more pronounced. The physical distance of the gender groups and their extreme social and political non-equivalence both suggest that they may well be independently reproduced and regulated. It is this view of a society radically split by gender that allows Amadi in The Great Ponds to represent the male side of Igbo life as though it were not only normative and authoritative, but self-sufficient and entire.
Yet, the writer's individual bias aside, it does not necessarily follow that this sort of exclusivity is the sign of a lack of power or self-determination on the part of women. It may just as well be the case that the distance between genders signifies and allows an autonomy and also a social validity for women. The women possess jurisdiction and authority over an area of village life which, though separate, is only apparently marginal; women conduct the business of their lives convinced of the validity of their activity.
Contrary to appearances, then, the representations of writers such as Amadi and Achebe, rather than defining the whole compass of the Igbo world, describe only one section of it. That another independent sphere of social existence exists is intimated only once, and then very briefly, in the Amadi text. It does, however, represent a significant break in the narrative when, in confrontational tones reminiscent of some of Nwapa's speakers, a senior wife, though nameless, comments on the folly of the protracted war and its goals:
Why can't men take advice? … They think they are wise but they are as foolish as a baby in arms. Look at all the suffering of the past month. What good will that pond [the site of the contention] do us? (p. 72)28
Ifi Amadiume offers a corroborative perspective on the self-reliance of Igbo women, and on one of the chief conditions of that self-reliance—what might be called the mutual exclusivity of gender groups. In her study Male Daughters, Female Husbands, she shows that women obtain a great deal of power in Igbo—and specifically Nnobi—society because of the separation of gender from sex roles.29 Amadiume does not always deal satisfactorily with the continuing predominance of de facto patriarchal authority in the community, and the status commanded by the roles of son and husband. Yet she does present evidence not simply for the existence of a clearly demarcated women's ‘sphere’ (which in itself says relatively little), but also for the independence and self-coherence of women's lives within that ‘sphere’. She indicates that in precolonial times political and economic roles, as well as compound space and village ground, were divided according to the conventional sex dualities, with family units being matricentric. She argues, however, that these socially constructed dualities were mediated by the cross-gender roles available to women. Women were thus granted a range of powers with the appeal to Idemili, the water goddess, as offering the highest sanction of their authority.
It is the autonomous women's world delineated by Amadiume which Nwapa embodies in Efuru and Idu: Nwapa thus extends the boundaries of the African novel to include the women's side of the compound, a domain of village life which writers like Amadi have neglected for reasons not only of patriarchal lack of interest but also perhaps (a fact not given sufficient attention) of ignorance. Nwapa refracts a women's presence into her text through creating the conceit of women representing themselves in voice. Dialogue dominates in both novels, especially in Idu, as numbers of partly curious, partly phatic and frequently anonymous women's voices meet, interact with and interpolate one another. This vocality, rambling and seemingly unstoppable, pulls against the confinements of the women's lives—their market rivalries, their anxieties about husbands, families and children. Therefore, if, as Nwapa portrays it, though not always overtly, male values in the society remain normative,30 women's talk can be interpreted not only as a way of life but as a mode of self-making. The impression of the fullness and autonomy of women's lives which Nwapa creates must remain partially qualified by their acquiescence in patriarchal views and values. Yet, at the same time, in their discourse, even as they speak, not only do the village women share their woes and confirm female bonds, they also transpose their lives into a medium which they control. The reader is made privy to the women representing and so, in effect, recreating their lives in speech. The narrative result is that most of the (non-discursive) action in Idu and Efuru happens off-stage and is more or less incidental to the ‘spoken’ text. Nwapa's writing is thus a decisive vindication of that congenital fault of garrulousness often attributed to ‘the sex’ (for example, in The Great Ponds pp. 23, 42 and 45). As Idu bemusedly observes: ‘You know women's conversation never ends.’ (p. 97)
How does this method of verbal self-representation work in practice? Efuru and Idu unfold as conversations; both are loosely chronological and markedly lacking in the temporal framework of conventional narrative. Efuru begins at the time that the heroine marries Adizua without parental consent: ‘one moonlit night’ they make plans; the next Nkwo (market) day she moves to his house (p. 7). With this information in hand the gossip-mongers can have their say, and, sure enough, by the second page of the novel speculations are afoot regarding Efuru's movements. These form the first soundings of that hum of conjecture that will run throughout the novel, commenting on Efuru's fortunes, her barrenness, her second marriage, her second barrenness. Against the background of this flow, trade seasons, other moonlit nights, gestation periods come and go with their accustomed regularity, but have significance in the conversational narrative largely as arbitrary starting points for new fragments of chatter. In Idu the verbal presence of the community would seem to be even more pervasive. Of the novel's 22 chapters, 14 including the first begin in mid-dialogue, and then usually à propos of events mentioned in some earlier conversation, the dialogue thus propagating itself across the pages of the novel.
The social setting Nwapa has chosen for her novels enables this self-generating orality. In each, the women occupy a self-enclosed, stable domestic domain—custom and environment are known to all the speakers and few characters are unfamiliar. Where these may be physically gestured at or taken as understood, reference to external objects or to habitual activity is elided or abbreviated. From the non-Igbo reader's point of view, this is emphasised when in both novels Igbo words and concepts are left unexplained and cannot always be elucidated by context—ganashi, obo, nsala soup. Within the community, the meanings of such words would not require elucidation. The insularity of the community is also suggested by the frequent repetitiveness of the conversation: comments are echoed, opinions reiterated, events retold, and it would appear that the point of talking is often simply the interaction, confirming contact, and not an exchange of information. Or as Uzoechi in Idu says, ‘Sometimes, after discussing something, I like to come back to it and talk it over again’ (p. 29).
So much is action a function of what is spoken that, especially in Idu, ‘plot’ developments take place off-stage as the conversation passes. At one moment in Idu, for example, Adiewere and Idu think of sending their new wife away; within a few paragraphs it is said that ‘Adiewere had already sent her away’ (pp. 43, 44). In chapter 13 of Efuru, Eneberi, Efuru's husband, expresses interest in taking a new wife; in the next chapter, during a chat between his mother and her friends, we learn that she (the mother) has a new daughter-in-law (p. 195). Thus a particular state of affairs may change into its opposite after a few pages, almost in the course of a few fragments of dialogue: here Idu observes that market is bad, there that it is good (pp. 45 and 47, 121 and 131). With dialogue constituting the main action and medium of community life, narrated or conversational time predominates over chronological time. Gossips summarise changes that have taken place over a span of years while also running through community opinion of those changes. One of the clearest examples of this occurs in Efuru when the heroine hears of her husband's desertion through overhearing gossip at market (p. 54–55).31
Though Nwapa's dialogic approach appears as the dominant feature of her narrative, its prominence should not detract from that other important aspect of her writing which in fact enables the vocality of her style—her focus on women's affairs. Nwapa's women represent themselves in voice, yet their spirit of pride and self-reliance is manifested also in the relative diversity of their quotidian activity.32
Efuru and Idu document in some detail women's customs, business preoccupations and worries: certain sections, in particular the chapter on childbirth in Efuru (chapter 2), read like extracts from an almanac of women's simples. Through recreating a sense of the fullness of Igbo women's lives during the time of colonisation, Nwapa thus begins to chart out the neglected gender dimension in the grand narrative of nationalist historical literature as told by male writers. She questions, if only implicitly, the gender-bound space-time co-ordinates of that narrative. More specifically even than this, however, she delivers her riposte to a male-dominated nationalist tradition and its iconography of womanhood by making available for her women characters roles and symbols of identity which diverge from the mother stereotype. Nwapa's women characters are concerned about bearing children and being good mothers, yet their lives are not defined solely through their maternal function. Especially in Efuru Nwapa delineates the ‘clearly expressed female principle’ in Igbo life where ‘fecundity [is] important, not entire’.33
Efuru opens with the heroine marrying without parental consent, defiant and unafraid. Later, when her husband proves unworthy, she leaves, just as defiant. Though her action is more problematic, Idu ends with the heroine willing her own death so as to join her husband: she resolves that the relationship provided by the marriage was more important to her than bearing children. Both heroines are admittedly exceptional figures, yet it is important to note that they are not unique. Characters like the older woman, Ajanupu, in Efuru and Ojiugo in Idu exemplify comparable qualities of decisiveness, outspokenness and self-sufficiency.
In Igbo society, as Amadiume shows, it is in trade as much as in marriage and childbirth that women obtain power. Accordingly, both novels focus on marketing as the chief dynamic of women's lives and the means whereby they obtain status.34 Attracted by the lure of a good business reputation, women like Idu and Efuru structure their lives around market days and keep out a vigilant eye for profit. In this way, as well as through sheer audacity and hard labour, they develop the trading prowess for which the community respects them. Two important qualifications should perhaps be made here. One, that the economic abilities shown by Nwapa's women characters are compromised in her later writing when, in a capitalist cash system, marketing heroines turn exploitative and conspicuously consumerist. And two, that, even while women command power through economic means, patriarchal law is never challenged, even in matters of trade.35
It is therefore only when women take on spiritual power, thus discarding their sex roles, that they are able to enter a sphere where male authority has little effect. Nwapa's Woman of the Lake deity in Idu and especially Efuru bears a strong resemblance to the water goddess, Idemili, described by Amadiume. In Amadiume's account, women wield considerable power as the worshippers and representatives of this water spirit: ritual elites develop from groups who worship her; successful market women are seen to be blessed by her.36 So too, in Nwapa, Uhamiri, the Woman of the Lake, is held in high regard, as are her followers. At the end of Efuru, the heroine is chosen to represent the deity in recognition of her status in the community. As infertility is a necessary condition of the goddess' chosen followers, Uhamiri's intercession gives Efuru's barrenness new meaning—in a way, makes it fruitful.
Where Amadi recognised only male deities, Nwapa thus puts the community's shrines in order, setting the female goddess back in her rightful place. This readjustment reflects on what I have argued is the more general effect of her writing—that of counterbalancing both in language and in character iconography a post-colonial literary patriarchy and a matrifocal nationalism. In the crucial decade of the sixties, Nwapa in Idu and Efuru re-angled the perspective set by male writing, showing where and in what ways women wield verbal and actual power. If nationalism has typically been embodied in patriarchal formations and fraternal bonding, and involves the exclusion of women from public political life, then Nwapa, in choosing not to engage with ‘big’ national themes, dealt with the exclusion first by reproducing it—by situating her narratives in another place entirely—and then by making of that occlusion a richness. By allowing a women's discourse apparently to articulate itself in her writing, she elaborates the text of national experience. Yet even more importantly than this perhaps, Nwapa also uncovers the practical, lived reality of motherhood—she digs into the muddy, grainy underside of nationalism's privileged icon. The mothers of Africa, Nwapa shows, also have voices, anger, rival aspirations, their own lives. Most of all, they are as much the subjects of communal history as their nationalist sons.
Notes
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See Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Mother Poem, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977. The other two parts of the trilogy, as their titles suggest, are also relevant: Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1986), also published by OUP.
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Nuruddin Farah, ‘A Combining of Gifts: An Interview’, Third World Quarterly 11.3, (July 1989), p. 180.
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West Africa 3729, (January 16–22 1989), pp. 59–60.
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Buchi Emecheta, New Society, 4 September 1984; quoted by Kathleen McLuskie and C L Innes in ‘Women in African Literature’, Wasafiri 8, (January 1988), p. 4.
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Freedom TV Nyamubaya, On the Road Again, Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1986, pp. 3–4, 10–11.
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West Africa 3721, December 12–18 1988, p. 2324. The Afro-American critic, Barbara Christian, has also projected an expression of nationalist sentiment on to her interpretation of images of Afro-American and African motherhood in Alice Walker and Buchi Emecheta. Stressing the importance of the institution of African motherhood for cultural regeneration, she observes: ‘Motherhood provides an insight into the preciousness, the value of life, which is the cornerstone of the value of freedom.’ Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, Pergamon, Oxford, 1987, p. 247.
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Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar, The Women's Press, London, 1989. The quotation is from p. 63, but the remythologising continues throughout.
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As will later be more fully described, the idea is that writing involves the creation and assertion of identity.
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Quoted in Unheard Words, ed. Mineke Schipper, trans. Barbara Potter Fasting, Allison & Busby, London, 1985, p. 50.
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Lauretta Ngcobo, ‘The African Woman Writer’, A Double Colonisation: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women's Writing, eds. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, Dangeroo, Oxford, 1986, p. 81.
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Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, The Hogarth Press, London, 1986, p. 125.
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The concept of the imagined or invented nation is advanced by Benedict Anderson in his compact and well-known book on the subject, Imagining Nations, Verso, London, 1983.
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For reasons of brevity, these statements must here remain at the level of assertion. However, for a compelling argument that ‘gender is implicated in the conception and construction of power’ and so also of politics, see Joan W Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91, (1986), pp. 1053–1075.
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In African novels and poems of the forties, fifties and sixties, especially, writers cast themselves or their heroes as sons singing in praise of the African Mother. Or, in the case of Irish nationalism, a rhetoric of martyrdom encourages son-sacrifice to the Mother who is the land and the Church. See Richard Kearney, Myth and Motherland, Field Day Theatre Company, Belfast, 1984.
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These assertions are influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of polyphony. Bakhtin has spoken of the coincidence of unisonance and patriarchal motifs in national ‘epic’ art forms. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas, Austin, 1986, pp. 3–40 and especially pp. 13–15.
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See Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985, pp. 1–13, for a discussion of the familial affinities of nation-states.
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For evidence of the intersection of colonial and indigenous patriarchies, a wide range of work might be cited. With reference to Africa, see, for example, Marjorie Mbilinyi, ‘Runaway Wives in Colonial Tanganika: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage in Rungwe District 1919–1961’, The International Journal for the Sociology of Law 16.1 (February 1988), pp. 1–29; Christine Obbo, ‘Sexuality and Economic Domination in Uganda’, Woman—Nation-State, eds. Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias, Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 79–91; and Terence Ranger's discussion of the transference of kingly motifs in the colonial appointment and interpolation of chiefs in ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 211–262.
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See Abdul R JanMohammed's reading of the Fanonist concept in his essay ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1986, pp. 78–106.
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Consider, for example, the dominant characterisation of the alienated, self-hating colonised in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. CL Markmann, Paladin, London, 1970; or Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. SW Allen, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1976.
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To take the words of Simone de Beauvoir somewhat out of context, replacing her term ‘world’ with that of ‘nation’:
Representation of the [nation], like the [nation] itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 175.
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Simon Gikandi, ‘The Politics and Poetics of National Formation: Recent African Writing’, conference paper, ACLALS Conference, Canterbury, 24–31 August 1989, pp. 1–20.
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Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1987: in particular the essay, ‘How Does One Speak to Literature?’ pp. 92–123.
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See Bernth Lindfors, ‘Introduction’, in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, eds. Bernth Lindfors and CL Innes, Heinemann, London, 1979, pp. 5–6, for further comment on the ‘School of Achebe’.
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For criticism of Nwapa's narrative approach see James Booth, Writers and Politics in Nigeria, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1981, pp. 80–81; Eustace Palmer, review, ‘Elechi Amadi, The Concubine and Flora Nwapa, Efuru’, ALT 1 (1969), pp. 56—58; Adiola A James, review, ‘Idu, Flora Nwapa’, ALT 5 (1971), pp. 150—153; Kirsten Holst Petersen, ‘Unpopular Opinions: Some African Woman Writers’, A Double Colonisation 112–113; Oladele Taiwo, Female Novelists of Modern Africa, Macmillan, London, 1984, p. 47.
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See Kristeva pp. 104–106.
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Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Virago, London, 1987.
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Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds, Heinemann, London, 1982.
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Similarly, Carole Boyce Davies finds in the Chielo-Ezinma episode in Things Fall Apart the traces of a ‘suppressed larger story’. Carole Boyce Davies, ‘Motherhood in the Works of Male and Female Igbo Writers: Achebe, Emecheta, Nwapa and Nzekwu’, Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, eds. Carole Boyce Davis and Anne Adams Graves, Africa World Press, New York, 1986, pp. 241–256.
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Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society, Zed, London, 1987.
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Thus we find Nwapa's central women characters submitting to the rule of callow husbands and to the circumcision knife and, in every case, taking responsibility for barrenness. See Efuru pp. 53, 55, 63; Idu p. 91.
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Refer also to p. 209 for a similar example.
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As Amadiume's account suggests, Nwapa could have gone even further in representing the range of roles and social positions open to women. In the event, we assume, inherited novelistic conventions, a colonial education, patriarchal strictures, any one or all of these, continue to set limits on her narrative.
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Boyce Davies pp. 243, 249; Amadiume p. 29.
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Idu p. 29; Efuru p. 125.
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The buying expedition in Efuru pp. 140–141 is a representative incident.
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Amadiume, pp. 42, 53–55, 102–103.
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