The Joys of Daughterhood: Gender, Nationalism, and the Making of Literary Tradition(s)
[In the following essay, Andrade asserts that Buchi Emecheta's “The Joys of Motherhood establishes an explicitly intertextual relationship with [Nwapa's] Efuru, one that acknowledges Nwapa's historical status and secures the earlier novel a place in literary history—while indirectly exposing the older novelist's ambivalent representation of female independence.”]
Novel writing from Francophone and Anglophone Africa exploded in the 1950s and early 1960s, coinciding with African agitation for independence, contributing to the birth of most of the continent's nation-states, and prefiguring Benedict Anderson's thesis (1983) that the origins of nationalism are bound up with those of the novel. Colonial triumphalism had represented Africa as a sign without a history, as an absence, or, occasionally, as the fertile ground of European subject consolidation. In response, the writers whom Anthony Appiah (1992) calls “the first wave” of modern African novelists wrote anticolonial realist narratives that articulated and celebrated a communal history. Appropriating the language and symbolic systems of the colonizers, writers such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe, and Mongo Beti reinvented themselves and their communities in narrative, partly in response to colonial silencing, and partly because it seemed an ideal means by which to consolidate racial, religious, ethnic, and class differences into a single national identity.
According to Mary Layoun, this narrative of nationalism not only “privileges its own narrative perspective” but postulates a narrative past and “constructs a telos, presumably one deriving from the structure and content of the narrative—and the nation—itself” (1992, 411). The national allegories of this first wave, however, narrated only male stories, because, in the words of Jean Franco, male authors “psychoanalyzed the nation” in terms of masculine identity (1989, 131). The results of colonial violence, both physical and epistemological, were and have continued to be signified as masculine impotence. As Abdul JanMohamed (1985) and others have argued, the relations of power between colonizer and colonized took on a Manichean form: within the implied gender dynamics, the colonizer always occupied the masculine position, the colonized always the feminine.1 Franco has suggested that “women became the territory over which the quest for (male) national identity passed, or, at best, … the space of loss of all that lies outside the male games of rivalry and revenge” (1989, 131).
From its inception, then, discourses of gender and sexuality have been imbricated in the African novel. Feminists, particularly those committed to African feminism, have been unable to ignore this logic and have begun to explore its implications in the work of male and female writers alike. My concern here is to trace a particular narration of the African literary tradition that corresponds to and underwrites the plotting of the anticolonial struggle. The two narratives in question efface female agency, featuring women primarily as forms of coinage or exchange between men. Intentionally or not, the historiographic tradition has suppressed the feminine in its writing or telling of history, much as literary history has failed to comprehend women's novels that did not explicitly inscribe themselves within the nationalist text. These (invented) traditions have been unable to account either for the female anticolonial uprisings that predated nationalism or for women's novels, because neither feminine discourse participated in the nationalist story as so named.
One means by which the erasure of women as subjects can be made visible is through an examination of Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Reading this most canonic of African novels and its reception through the critical lens of gender offers a view of male anxieties manifested in nationalism. Reading it along with current feminist analyses of an indigenous women's uprising, the Igbo Women's War of 1929, to which it has a complex and vexed relation, and also next to two later Igbo women's novels, illustrates nationalism's tendentious and gender-marked schemes for regulating the field of postcolonial African writing and for distributing cultural capital within it. Achebe's fellow Igbo writers Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta must, according to hegemonic understandings of African literary production, either plot themselves into a nationalist literary history whose outlines are masculinist or be consigned to the heap of marginal writers.
Nwapa is the classic example. Patently lacking the power to change the nationalist story or to enter into a dialogue with it, Nwapa, the first Nigerian woman novelist, seemingly refuses engagement with national politics. Her Efuru, published in 1966, captures Nwapa's imaginary resolution of a contradiction in the male-dominated, nationalist ideology of the writers of her generation and employs a self-consciously feminine style and domestic subject matter to do so. It is only with the 1979 publication of The Joys of Motherhood by the more assertively feminist and openly nationalist Emecheta, and with the advent of both another literary generation and the outlines of a counterdiscourse in the African literary tradition, that Nwapa's imaginary resolution of the contradictions of male-dominated nationalist ideology is made visible. The Joys of Motherhood establishes an explicitly intertextual relationship with Efuru, one that acknowledges Nwapa's historical status and secures the earlier novel a place in literary history—while indirectly exposing the older novelist's ambivalent representation of female independence.
In this essay I examine the differing ways in which these novels, Things Fall Apart, Efuru, and The Joys of Motherhood, participate in the genealogy of an (Igbo) African literature, as well as in its putative “master” discourse, nationalism. The manner in which feminist anthropologists, historians, and now literary critics have reread the 1929 Igbo Women's War, rescuing it from semiobscurity and reinscribing it as an indigenous feminist challenge to colonialism, serves as a metaphor for my readings of these two women-authored novels. For if the act of writing is one of the most powerful means by which women can inscribe themselves into history, then the acts of African women writers inscribing themselves and (re)inscribing their precursors into literary history function as a powerful response to Hegel's infamous dictum on the exclusion of Africans from history. Moreover, when juxtaposed against the canonical Things Fall Apart, the popular rebellion of the Women's War invites an alternative reading of African literary historiography, by pointing to the convergence of gendered and nationalist politics, and by offering a lens through which to view both male anxieties about gender and female silences about nationalism.
Historians and anthropologists generally agree that the decentralized polities that constituted nineteenth-and twentieth-century Igboland in Nigeria afforded significant economic and social mobility to their people, particularly to their women. Two Igbo social institutions that helped protect women from patriarchal excesses were the inyemedi (wives of the clan) and the more influential umuaada (daughters of the clan) (Van Allen 1976; Amadiume 1987). Although most women could not own land, they could and were expected to make money in trade and, moreover, could exert economic and political pressure if they had prospered.
The 1929 Igbo Women's War, called in Igbo Ogu Umunwanyi, constitutes one such instance of pressure. Archivally recorded by the British as the “Aba Riots,” this uprising may be read as the violent culmination of traditional manifestations of Igbo women's power.2 In her essay on the Women's War, Judith Van Allen explains some of the mechanisms of precolonial Igbo women's power:
To “sit on” or “make war on” a man involved gathering at his compound at a previously agreed-upon time, dancing, singing scurrilous songs detailing the women's grievances against him (and often insulting him along the way by calling his manhood into question), banging on his hut with the pestles used for pounding yams, and, in extreme cases, tearing up his hut (which usually meant pulling the roof off). This might be done to a man who particularly mistreated his wife, who violated the women's market rules, or who persistently let his cows eat the women's crops.
(1976, 61)
This raucous and destructive behavior on the part of women was usually directed at men who were perceived to threaten their personal or economic security.
Contrary to what the name implies, the British system of Indirect Rule under which these women lived did not retain traditional forms of government. The British established a system of Native Courts and designated Africans to serve on them. Called Warrant Chiefs, these men rarely held traditional positions of respect, were ultimately beholden only to the British, and were, because of their linguistic abilities, powerful intermediaries between colonizer and colonized. British reliance on these intermediaries was compounded by the fact that the British rarely spoke the Igbo language. Under these conditions, the colonial juridical system soon became hopelessly corrupt.
With the onset of world economic depression in 1929, and the resulting fall in the price of palm oil, a crucial resource in the women's economy, the political scenery was complete. When the British indicated that they would extend direct taxation to the eastern provinces, the women took collective action. In November-December of 1929, tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women from the Calabar and Owerri provinces “made war on” the Warrant Chiefs as well as on the British overlords. They originally mobilized around the issue of women's taxation, but their demands soon included abolition of the Native Courts (or the inclusion of women on them) and the return of all white men to their own country. Information and money for the uprising had been conveyed through an elaborate system of women's market networks.
These uprisings were conducted in a manner consonant with women's traditional exercise of power in the village setting. Van Allen describes the Women's War in the following manner:
Traditional dress, rituals and “weapons” for “sitting on” were used: the women wreathed their heads with young ferns symbolizing war, and sticks, bound with ferns or young palms, were used to invoke the powers of the female ancestors. The women's behavior also followed traditional patterns: much noise, stamping, preposterous threats and a general raucous atmosphere, all part of the institution of “sitting on” a man.
(1972, 175)
The war ended violently, however; approximately fifty women were killed and another fifty were wounded by the gunfire of police and soldiers. According to Van Allen, “the lives taken were those of women only—no men, Igbo or British, were even seriously injured” (174). Significantly, the women did not believe that they would be hurt, so culturally appropriate were their actions.
Of the archival (mis)representations of the Women's War as the “Aba Riots,” a name that limits the scope of the action and depoliticizes its feminist impetus, Van Allen notes that the control of language means the control of history, saying that
the British “won,” and they have imposed their terminology on history. Only a very few scholars have recorded that the Igbo called this the “Women's War.” And in most histories of Nigeria today one looks in vain for any mention that women were even involved. “Riots,” the term used by the British, conveys a picture of uncontrolled irrational action. … “Aba Riots,” in addition, neatly removes women from the picture. What we are left with is “some riots at Aba”—not by women, not involving complex organization, and not ranging over most of southeastern Nigeria.
(1972, 60–61)
These uprisings can more usefully be read as one of the many blows dealt the colonial state by the natives than as a devastating political reverse. The women succeeded in toppling the corrupt system of the Warrant Chiefs, though none of their other demands were met. As a result of the women's efforts, the British attempted to emulate the precolonial Igbo model through a new system of administration.
Though other Africans had published novels before Things Fall Apart, it is generally accepted that, as C. L. Innes puts it, Achebe “may be deemed the father of the African novel in English” (1992, 19). Simon Gikandi suggests that Achebe was unique in his ability to recognize the function of the novel both as a depiction of reality and as a vehicle of limitless possibility for constructing and representing a new national identity:
Achebe's seminal status in the history of African literature lies precisely in his ability to have realized that the novel provided new ways of reorganizing African cultures, especially in the crucial juncture of transition from colonialism to national independence, and his fundamental belief that narrative can indeed propose an alternative world beyond the realities imprisoned in colonial and post-colonial relations of power.
(1991, 3)
Gikandi insightfully reads Achebe's contradictions as inherent to the anxieties of an early anticolonial nationalist. Nevertheless, like Achebe, he too accepts unchallenged the idea that nationalism consolidates itself through gendered formations. I would like first to read the gendered inflection of those relations and then to reexamine some of the relations of production—relations in which the Women's War plays a crucial role—that constitute the cultural history of Things Fall Apart.
Feminist readers of the novel have long noted that female characters are generally absent from—and when they do appear, silent in—this novel.3 Okonkwo's mother, whose lineage affords the novel's hero seven years of protection, is unnamed, as are his senior wife and almost all of his daughters.4 This is more than a simple inattention to women, for the absent presence of women is necessary to the construction of the novel's nationalist ideology. While women are not represented in any significant numbers, anticolonial nationalist subjectivity operates in a gendered social space defined by male bodies.
Igbo women's social organizations and their “war-making” are effaced in official anticolonial history, in order that masculine anticolonial rebellion might avoid occupying the role of female to the colonizing male. Achebe's novel is structured by erasures in a roughly analogous manner and attempts to avoid the representation of colonial relations in gendered terms by inscribing an excessively masculine Igbo man. Moreover, the category of the masculine, namely Okonkwo's hypermasculinity, is outlined not against the femininity of women but against that of other men, particularly against his own father and son, Unoka and Nwoye. Both Unoka and Nwoye prefer the “womanish” activities of storytelling and/or playing the flute. Neither is particularly interested in the warlike exploits that move Okonkwo. It is generally recognized that Okonkwo, the “tragic hero,” is tragic precisely because his life is driven by the obsessive fear of becoming his feminine father. The irony of Okonkwo's anxious reaction to his paternal inheritance is that the violent masculinity of Okonkwo's life path leads to a death equally as shameful as that of the lazy and effeminate Unoka. Neither can be given a proper burial, and instead both father and son are cast into the Evil Forest. Moreover, Okonkwo's tendency toward violence and rigidity is juxtaposed against the more “gender-balanced” characteristics of his best friend, Obierika. Though a great warrior like Okonkwo, Obierika also resembles the inexorably feminized Nwoye in his pity for the sacrifice victim Ikemefuna and in his critique of some violent Igbo customs, particularly that of the infanticide of twins.
In the Manichean allegory of anticolonial struggle that I outlined earlier, the colonial/European side is characterized as masculine, while the weak and disorderly native/African side is necessarily feminine. Achebe thus confronts a dilemma: how to narrate the brutality of imperialism without reifying the model that inscribes African men as submissive or “feminine.” The result is his hypermasculine protagonist Okonkwo, a character who is violent and inflexible in his relations with others. In diametrical opposition, son Nwoye, who, as Biodun Jeyifo points out, has the most affinity for the “feminine” arts of storytelling, is also the one who “goes over to the colonizers and more or less embraces the colonialist ideology of the ‘civilizing mission’” (1993, 855). Paradoxically, Achebe's preoccupation with the implicitly gendered pattern of colonial relations means that he can only imagine a negative masculinity; he has no room for a celebratory femininity.
Gender is represented exclusively through the relations of exchange between men, thus providing an African example of Eve Sedgwick's paradigm of homosocial relations (1985). With the exception of the priestess Chielo, all the women in Things Fall Apart function as objects of exchange in this homosocial yet rigorously heterosexual system. While women serve to maintain the institution of heterosexuality, gendered identity, spanning the excessively masculine to the excessively feminine, is embodied only by men.
While, as I have noted, the Igbo Women's War might have significance as a metaphor for a hidden Igbo women's literary tradition, I would like to suggest at this point that the uprising has a more direct—and problematic—significance for a masculine genealogy. Although the war ended violently, its scope and radical potential nevertheless posed a sweeping challenge to British authority and might well have been etched in the memory of the Igbo still living during the period when Achebe authored his first novel. Testifying to the link between colonial power and knowledge, Igbo historian S. N. Nwabara declares that “the revolt was therefore a major factor that led the government to encourage the study of Ibo indigenous society” (1978, 201).5 In fact, anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross, who in the 1930s formed part of the British group sent down to study Igbo culture in the service of the colonial state, indicates that she was particularly interested in “how much the Riots were still remembered and what shape they took”: “I believe that as palm-oil dominates the economic-social situation, so do the Aba riots still dominate the psychological situation” (1939, 174).
In a reading of the impact of Westernization on Things Fall Apart, Rhonda Cobham (1991) suggests that Achebe's investment in a type of Victorian ideal of feminine decorum makes it possible for him to elide not only the Women's War but feminine Igbo institutional structures such as the umuaada that helped give rise to it. Because in his nonfiction prose Achebe has named Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary as significant (negative) literary influences, much has been made of his response to the racism of European realism and modernism. Extending the work done by Cobham, I suggest that a literary influence on Things Fall Apart at least as telling as that of the English novelists can be found in the anthropological texts generated by Leith-Ross and others—which, themselves constitute a discursive action to the Igbo Women's War.6Nowhere is the response to colonial self-consolidation in Things Fall Apart more trenchant than in Achebe's description of the District Commissioner, whose projected book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, reduces Okonkwo's tragic story to “a reasonable paragraph” (Achebe 1969, 191). The novel's closure, then, in this way overtly sets itself against the discourse of Leith-Ross and other anthropologists.
Things Fall Apart offers a history, a subjectivity, and a narrative voice that have been excluded from or misprized in imperial history. This male voice speaks, however, albeit unwittingly, over the silenced voices of the raucous Igbo women who came before. Within the reframed literary history I suggest here, the absence of a novelistic trace either of the Women's War or even of the women's organizations that facilitated it becomes glaring.7
Sociologist Ifi Amadiume, who comes from and did her field work in Nnobi, Achebe's home town, points out, for instance, how Achebe rewrites gendered behavior as he transposes it from history to literature, always obscuring the “feminine.” One example involves his making a local water goddess—the same divinity that Efuru worships and that, in turn, gives her license to remain unmarried and childless—into a water god in Things Fall Apart (Amadiume 1987, 121). By investigating the local history that Achebe used as a source for the novel, Amadiume illustrates other elisions of the feminine. In the course of representing the Umuofian response to the imported religion that threatens to envelop them, the novel recounts the story of a fanatical Christian who kills a python, a sacred Igbo totem, then narrates the community's violent response to the incident. According to the village annals Amadiume consults, that particular historical event was very specifically gendered as feminine. It was the women who had been affronted by the killing of the python: their response was to “sit on” the man.8 In Things Fall Apart, by contrast, the transgression is answered violently by the entire village (147–50).
Despite its paradigmatic status as the first Nigerian women's novel and as one of the first African women's novels, relatively little critical attention has been paid to Efuru.9 Critics, most of them male, have dismissed Nwapa's writing as trivial, useful only for an understanding of domestic village life. Conversely, defenders of Nwapa, most of them female or feminist, argue that it is precisely because she offers a narrative of Igbo domesticity that she deserves her place in the African canon.10 My interest here lies less in the authenticity of Nwapa's representation of village life than in the tensions that a woman-authored novel—in this case the first one—must confront when written in a colonial or neocolonial situation. Nwapa manipulates the language and narrative form of the colonizer while narrating the story of an “authentic” and independent female character against the backdrop of frequently pejorative representations of female characters by male authors.
Efuru tells the story of a woman notable for her noble birth, beauty, and poise as well as her remarkable skill in trading and making money. The novel's eponymous protagonist is also distinguished for her inability to bear children. (Though she does in fact give birth to a daughter who dies in infancy, Efuru is consistently characterized as barren.) Moreover, each of the men she marries lets her down at some crucial moment in her life, and it is the female village community that sustains her. Efuru's marriage to Adizua, with which the novel opens, is not initially sanctioned, so she helps her new husband earn the bride-price that will satisfy her father and tradition. While she becomes increasingly more successful at trading, then gives birth to their daughter, he spends increasingly less time at home, then disappears altogether. Shortly afterward, their daughter dies; Adizua does not return for the burial. Nor does he return later for the more important burial of Efuru's father. Later, Efuru takes up with and marries Gilbert. Though this marriage initially appears more promising and is accorded more space within the narrative, Gilbert also reveals himself to be an irresponsible husband by staying away from home, fathering a child without informing Efuru, even believing the unsubstantiated rumors of Efuru's adultery. For her part, Efuru devotes increasingly more time to the worship of the female/feminist water goddess Uhamiri, as she continues to prosper. Instead of celebrating her apotheosis, however, the novel ends ambivalently, juxtaposing her economic and social success to her failure at motherhood.
Efuru's entry into the male-dominated canon of African texts marks the beginning of an Igbo dialogue on gender, one in which Emecheta will later participate. The male-authored text that Nwapa appears most obviously to interrogate is Cyprian Ekwensi's extremely popular Onitsha market novel of a middle-aged prostitute, Jagua Nana, published in 1961. Lloyd Brown called Jagua “one of the most frequently discussed heroines of African fiction.”11 Ekwensi depicts a deracinated and narcissistic—if personable—woman, whose economic independence derives from her physical desirability and her constant search for sexual gratification. Despite her unorthodox success, Jagua yearns for a conventional married life. She attempts to bribe Freddie, her young lover, into marrying her by financing his college education abroad. Moreover, Jagua's economic independence is explicitly interwoven with her rejection of ethnic identity and her embrace of the vices of urban living: she and Freddie“always used pidgin English, because living in Lagos City they did not want too many embarrassing reminders of clan or custom” (Ekwensi 1961, 5).12 Efuru and Jagua both become quite wealthy, but there the comparison ends. Efuru stays in the village, acquiring economic and social success through the traditional—and sanctioned—method of trading. She is untainted by employment or location and so is of commanding moral stature. And unlike Jagua, who uses her male partners for economic gain, Efuru is deserted by hers, though she accepts this abuse with dignity.13
In that it is a historical novel set in a rural rather than urban environment, and in that it is published after Things Fall Apart, Efuru does conform to the “Achebe school.”14 Unlike most of its male counterparts, however, it does not openly address what C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors consider a defining characteristic of that school, “the conflict between old and new values in Iboland” (1978, 5–6). The dialectic of tradition and modernity and its relation to both the new state and European colonialism is emblematic of nationalist discourse. But because nationalism is such a problematic terrain for women writers, neither it nor any of its avatars (the tradition-modernity opposition) are openly engaged in Efuru. The patriarchal narrative of nationalist literary history has ignored altogether the gendered logic according to which it operates. As Franco notes, much less was it able to acknowledge differently emplotted women's narratives:
Without the power to change the story or to enter into dialogue, [early women writers] have resorted to subterfuge, digression, disguise, or deathly interruption. [These situations are prefeminist] insofar as feminism presupposes that women are already participants in the public sphere of debate. This makes it all the more important to trace the hidden connections and continuities, the apparently isolated challenges and disruptions of the social narrative which testify to a history of struggle and disruption, though not necessarily of defeat.
(1989, xxiii)
Franco exposes the gendered logic that undergirds much nationalism and perceptively points out that though masculinism merely “invents” traditions, masculinist discourse nevertheless functions to circumscribe much of women's literary response. By rereading Efuru as Nwapa's initial and imaginary resolution of contradictions in the masculine nationalist ideology, we may put in perspective the ambivalent representation of her protagonist's subjectivity.
While Nwapa's primary object of implied critique is masculinist nationalism, her novel also indirectly implicates Eurocentric feminism. At the moment of Efuru's publication, Europe and the United States were witnessing the birth of the second wave of European feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, originally published in 1949, appeared in English translation in 1952, and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963. That Efuru's life appears to have no contact with Europe, certainly none with European-style feminism, means that the narrative's prototype of female power is Igbo—a notable statement in the face of a post-Second World War feminism which implied that the global liberation of women would begin in the West. Indeed, as the example of the Woman's War of 1929 suggests, Igbo culture contains sanctioned opportunities for women's gendered social expression, opportunities which permitted critiques of male power. Understanding this obviates locating Europe “as the primary referent in theory and praxis,” to use Chandra Mohanty's phrase (1991b, 52), and it illustrates a recent historical example of just the localized feminist modes of analysis Mohanty advocates.
Nwapa's novel operates in a feminine register depicting a world of domestic activity where dialogue is privileged over action and where, in the words of Carole Boyce Davies, “men are shown to be intruders” (1986, 249). Cooking, fashion, proverbs, rumors, child-rearing, and marketing stratagems, the defining discourses of rural Igbo femininity, occupy narrative center stage. Elleke Boehmer celebrates Nwapa's expression of “a self-generating orality” and declares that this author uses “choric language” to enable and empower, to evoke “the vocality of women's everyday experience” (1991, 12, 16). Masculine tales of adventure and male social space itself are relegated to the peripheries of the novel. Men are portrayed as desirable and occasionally admirable but are often seen as completely incomprehensible, as in the examples of the three unreliable husbands, Adizua, Adizua's father, and Gilbert.
A folktale Efuru tells some of the village children on a moonlit night serves as a metaphor for the larger novel's investment in a women's community—and reveals that community's anger toward men. The tale's only male character is the villain. The (unnamed) protagonist is “so beautiful that she was tired of being beautiful”; Nkwo, the protagonist's youngest sister, is also very beautiful and “the kindest of them all” (Nwapa 1966, 106). When the protagonist is pursued for marriage by a maggot-eating blue spirit so strong that her mother cannot protect her, she turns for help to her sisters, whose names correspond to the names for the days of the Igbo week. Eke, Afo, and Orie refuse her request for help, but Nkwo takes in both her sister and her sister's new husband, helping the girl negotiate around a dinner of maggots. At night the two sisters trick the sleeping spirit, run out of the house, and burn it down with the spirit inside. At the tale's end, Efuru tells Gilbert (and the readers) that women spend Nkwo day buying and selling then collecting their debts (116).
Efuru recounts the tale directly before her upcoming marriage to her second husband and soon after she formally leaves the house of the first. Positioned liminally, the tale foreshadows the end of her marriage to Gilbert. It claims unambiguously that women's relationships with each other are the most secure and that, like the days set aside for them, these relationships are imbricated in an economy of exchange, particularly in the trading of commodities. It is in trade (and thus through relations with each other) as much as in marriage and childbirth that women obtain power in Igbo society.
While Efuru's outer frame of narration offers a more subdued challenge to the institution of marriage, it nevertheless substantiates the embedded tale's claims about gender solidarity through its presentation of the friendship of Efuru and Ajanupu, and it binds the feminine exchange of gossip and advice with the (equally feminine) exchange of goods and money. Ajanupu, a character who frequently advises Efuru on domestic matters, early on in the novel offers to collect some of Efuru's debts, since the younger woman is not as practiced at this art. Ajanupu is intransigent with Efuru's debtor however, and, upon her return home, finds on her doorstep one of her own debtors, who, rather fittingly, is equally intransigent with her. This episode illustrates the novel's circulation of the overlapping discourses of domestic economy (and power) and market economy (and power).
It is only at the novel's end, however, that the power of a feminine community is made manifest—and then only in response to masculine perfidy. Efuru's unknown illness is rumored to be the result of her adultery, although no sexual partner is ever named. Gilbert believes the rumors, and Ajanupu vigorously comes to Efuru's defense, questioning his judgment, education, and even his family history for believing such a scandalous thing of his wife. Angered, he slaps her so hard that she falls down. Her response evokes the traditional power of Igbo women: “She got up quickly for she was a strong woman, got hold of a mortar pestle and broke it on Gilbert's head. Blood filled Gilbert's eyes” (Nwapa 1966, 217). The pestle, an important domestic tool, is also the instrument brandished by angry Igbo women when they “sit on” a man. In its position at the end of the novel's penultimate chapter, this incident underscores Efuru's move toward a women's community, which culminates in the eventual worship of Uhamiri.
Only with a great deal of ambivalence can the novel bring itself to represent an economically and socially powerful woman who is desirable to men, at the same time as it represents many of those men as lacking. Precisely because Efuru has no strong female-authored precursors (as Efuru, the character, herself had no strong female role models while growing up), Nwapa can only inscribe such a strong woman if she inscribes her tragically—and the logic of the text, which strongly validates femininity, appears to lead Efuru to the quintessential marker of femininity, (biological) motherhood. Unlike Achebe's Okonkwo, whose “tragic flaw” was psychological, Efuru's “tragic flaw”—her barrenness— is utterly biological. Given the flexible construction of sex and gender in Igbo societies, this gender mark is ironic indeed.
Nwapa's (feminist) critique is launched not upon the institution of motherhood as much as upon that of marriage (or of heterosexual relations in general); more accurately, it confronts all obstacles to female strength and self-sufficiency. What is most incomprehensible within the narrative is why Efuru's two ex-husbands should spurn such an extraordinary, desirable, and accommodating woman. This unanswered/unanswerable psychological question about marital relations gets displaced onto the biological problematic of childlessness. In fact, marriage as such is a narrative casualty, while child rearing is not. Not only do Efuru's two marriages end in failure, but so does that of her first husband Adizua's parents; in fact, few successful marriages are visible. Neither marital relations nor the presence of husbands keeps Ajanupu or other significant female characters from their trading, socializing, or child rearing. The novel's doubts about male-female relations are displaced onto their fundamental biological consequence, that of reproduction—with the result, ironically, that biology appears to determine destiny for the first Nigerian woman's novel. Because the text cannot bring itself to reject the normative discourse of marriage, it posits failed or absent versions of the married couple and endows its protagonist with the “tragic flaw” of barrenness, which removes her from marital circulation. Yet the novel also challenges marriage as women's only avenue to power by staging a confrontation between married life and participation in an independent female community (represented here by the different women of the village and culminating in Uhamiri worship), and it couples Efuru's failing within marriage (her infertility) with her exercise of another traditional, female-gendered virtue, that of making money.
Although Efuru moves toward a celebration of the protagonist's independence, economic success, and goodness, the novel displays a constant undercurrent of doubt, ending on a note of profound ambivalence about the ability of any woman without children to be completely happy. In the Bakhtinian sense, Efuru's dialogism comprises the competing discourses of economic independence and maternal satisfaction, the latter of which, I have argued, is a result of displaced concern regarding male-female marital relations. Repeatedly, the text offers advice on what a woman should do in order to conceive, on how she should conduct herself during pregnancy, childbirth, and the upbringing of the child. In fact, Oladele Taiwo calls the narrative, “almost a manual of mothercare” (1984, 54).15But motherhood is the one condition that the otherwise perfect Efuru cannot satisfy.
The ambivalence over motherhood resonates most audibly in the novel's closing lines, which have been read by several critics (e.g., Condé 1972; Brown 1981; Holloway 1992) as key to an understanding of the text. Although Uhamiri appears to have everything she needs, the narrative suggests that motherhood is necessary to completely fulfill her—and, by extension, her disciple Efuru:
Efuru slept soundly that night. She dreamt of the woman of the lake [Uhamiri], her beauty, her long hair and her riches. She had lived for ages at the bottom of the lake. She was as old as the lake itself. She was happy, she was wealthy. She was beautiful. She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never experienced the joy of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her?
(Nwapa 1966, 221)
Though published only thirteen years after Nwapa's novel, The Joys of Motherhood (1979) emerges into an already existing women's literary community and does not exhibit the same hesitancy or ambivalence as its forebear.16 While acknowledging her debt to Efuru through the similarity of the protagonist's stories, Emecheta revises and extends that novel and launches a biting critique of both indigenous patriarchy and colonialism. Henry Louis Gates (1984) might say that the later writer was engaged in an act of signifyin(g), of renaming and revisioning the earlier text, for it is from the paragraph above that Emecheta derives her title. Of greater importance is The Joys of Motherhood's recognition of its precursor's ambivalence about the childless woman's possibilities for happiness. The later narrative revises its forebear by giving its protagonist, Nnu Ego, Efuru's primary unfulfilled wish—many times over, to the point of misery. By arranging the phenomenon of Nnu Ego's “barrenness/fecundity” to coincide with her change of husbands, Emecheta interrogates Efuru's “tragic flaw” by shifting responsibility for conception onto the man. This textual move is especially noteworthy in African literature, where the theme of motherhood is extremely important, and infertility routinely assumed to be the “fault” of the woman. Moreover, by the very act of writing this novel, Emecheta draws attention to the irony of Efuru, named after its “barren” protagonist, as the “mother” text of (Anglophone) African women's literature.17 In so doing, she deftly appropriates the(male) domain of the production of texts by conflating it with the (female) production of children—and comments on the exclusion/absence of women from the tradition of African letters. She also rescues Nwapa from domestic oblivion and reintroduces her as a political actor.
The protagonists of Efuru and The Joys of Motherhood have generally similar personal and family histories. Both Efuru and Nnu Ego come from Igbo villages. Both are very attractive women, the cosseted only daughters of their fathers. The fathers, Nwashike Ogene and Nwokocha Agbadi respectively, are wealthy warrior-athletes, important men who are highly respected in the community. Each daughter is also her father's favorite, in part because she is the only child of his favorite woman. The determining narrative similarity appears to be that the mothers of both protagonists are dead at the time the narratives open, leaving their daughters with no strong female models on which to pattern their search for independence. Indeed, both daughters are particularly attached to their fathers. Perhaps because they are brought up by conservative fathers, Efuru and Nnu Ego begin as somewhat docile young women. They are invested in attaining the respect that deferral to authority offers.18 Perhaps because of their privileged backgrounds, neither is particularly rebellious. Both marry twice; in each case, the husband terminates the first marriage. And for at least a short time, both women are stigmatized by an inability to bear children. Lastly, both are skilled market women who achieve (some measure of) economic independence through successful trading.
Emecheta's depiction of a female character who shares so much of Efuru's background must inevitably call attention to the difference between the two. Through the character of Nnu Ego, Emecheta interrogates Nwapa's idealistic portrayal of female struggle, and of Efuru as the perfect (Igbo) woman. Rachel Blau Du Plessis suggests that celebrating a female character because she is exceptional only reinforces the norm of prescribed behavior for other women, setting “in motion not only conventional notions of womanhood but also conventional romantic notions of the genius, the person apart, who, because unique and gifted, could be released from social ties and expectations” (1985, 84–85). Apparently adhering to this logic, Emecheta questions the case of Efuru's success by presenting a much less exceptional female character. In contrast to the noble, talented, and indomitable Efuru, who overcomes her problems and eventually determines her own destiny, Nnu Ego is substantially weaker, more petty in her dealings with others. Also in contrast to Efuru, Nnu Ego leaves the village (and any protection it might offer) for Lagos. It is there that she experiences the brunt of indigenous patriarchy and the brutal effects of poverty under imperialism. Ultimately, she dies an ignoble death, alone.
Emecheta also responds to Nwapa's more subtle treatment of the effects of imperialism on the Igbo people by representing two less idealized feminine figures in The Joys of Motherhood: first Ona, a woman of the precolonial period, and then her colonial daughter, Nnu Ego. The historical specificity of the later text indicates that Efuru's contemporary is not Nnu Ego but her mother, Ona. Emecheta thus comments both chronologically and tropologically on her predecessor's protagonist, for while the events of Efuru's life parallel those of Nnu Ego's, it is with Ona that Efuru shares a certain precolonial, culturally sanctioned independence in village life.19The Joys of Motherhood affirms Efuru's claim that precolonial Igbo women enjoyed more freedom than did their colonized descendants. Of the difference between the two generations, the later narrator says: “To regard a woman who is quiet and timid as desirable was something that came after his [Ona's lover Agbadi's] time, with Christianity and other changes” (Emecheta 1979, 10). However, acknowledging that Igbo women enjoyed far less freedom under colonialism, does not blind Emecheta to their subjection under indigenous patriarchy. Ona's struggles with her lover, Agbadi, occasionally result in her public humiliation. Moreover, being a “male daughter” accords her status and permits her to contribute sons to her father's diminishing line but prevents her from marrying.
Reading The Joys of Motherhood from the perspective of Efuru offers a different vantage point on the effects of European imperialism than does reading the text solely on its own terms. Though the later narrative vividly depicts the misery of colonialism, it represents it as an act perpetrated on Africans, declining to comment on African complicity with or resistance to the phenomenon. And while The Joys of Motherhood does not depict the precolonial period as paradisiacal, it barely examines colonial relations of power within the Igbo village hierarchy. Efuru, by contrast, offers a perceptive, albeit narratively marginal, account of the events that preceded colonialism and aided in its acceleration; in so doing, it manages a subtle critique of the protagonist's family history. Efuru's family is secure in the village hierarchy, as it has historically had both stature and wealth: “her family was not among the newly rich, the wealth had been in it for years” (Nwapa 1966, 19). Toward the end, however, the novel undermines that stature by revealing at her father's death the manner in which he obtained his riches:
It was the death of a great man. No poor man could afford to fire seven rounds of a cannon in a day. …
The cannons were owned by very distinguished families who themselves took part actively in slave dealing. … Now the shooting of the cannon did not only announce the death of a great man, but also announced that the great man's ancestors had dealings with the white men, who dealt in slaves.
(200–201)
Not only is Efuru's family prestige put into question, but the novel suggests that the construction of Igbo history—indeed of Igbo patriarchy—is determined by the interests of hegemony. Because of both Nwashike Ogene's stature and the chronological remove of their ancestors' histories, Nwosu and the fishermen do not connect the death of this great man with the cannon that celebrates his greatness. His role in the slave trade will probably slip through the cracks of historical discourse; only his wealth and stature will be remembered. Thus Efuru rejects the nostalgic approach to Ogwuta's past, pointing instead to traces of colonial violence evident in the structures of the current hierarchy. In the more active narrative style of Things Fall Apart, imperialism signifies a sudden cultural collision. Nwapa, by contrast, intimates the gradual ways in which European violence permeated and transformed Igbo culture. In dialogue with this male predecessor, then, Efuru illustrates the complicity of some Africans with the European colonialist enterprise, the commodification of Africans that developed from the slave trade, and the resulting colonial conquest of the continent.
Though the precolonial period is not idealized, Efuru is idealistic in its representation of a supportive women's community. Buchi Emecheta interrogates that idealism by representing both the great desire for—and continual frustration of—such a community. She also engages Nwapa's idyllic depiction of rural Igbo life by conjoining it to a depiction of urban life as it develops under the conditions of colonialism. For Nnu Ego, the lack of a female community partly results from the absence of other, older women. The cross-generational protection from male power that Ajanupu, Efuru's mother-in-law's sister, offers Nwapa's heroine is rewritten as the unsuccessful attempt of Nnu Ego's mother, Ona, to secure a greater degree of freedom for Nnu Ego than she herself had enjoyed. On her deathbed Ona asks Agbadi “to allow [their daughter] to have a life of her own, a husband if she wants one” (Emecheta 1979, 28). Agbadi agrees but soon begins arranging one marriage after another for their pliant daughter. Later on Nnu Ego moves to Lagos; there her friendship with Cordelia is cut short when the latter's husband finds work far away. Since Cordelia had helped Nnu Ego survive the loss of her first baby and had explained gender and racial power relations in Lagos, the loss of this friendship is especially painful. Nnu Ego's friendship with the Yoruba woman Iyawo, who saves Nnu Ego and her son from starvation, is always tenuous because of the economic inequality of their situations.
It is through the figure of Adaku, Nnu Ego's co-wife in Lagos, that The Joys of Motherhood explores most thoroughly the possibility of a neocolonial urban Igbo women's community; and it is also through her that the text illustrates such a community's failure. The tension between the co-wives is due partly to their competition for limited resources in the urban colonial context. The cramped single room in which the Owulum family lives in poverty contrasts with the clearly delineated women's living space that is part of the rural life described in Efuru, and with the greater control that Efuru's rural women claim over their economic resources and sexual activity.20 Through its depiction of the failed cooking strike mounted by the co-wives, The Joys of Motherhood challenges the patience with which Efuru waits for her husbands to behave responsibly. In an attempt to force Nnaife to give over all of his money to his hungry family instead of spending much of it on alcohol, Adaku instigates a cooking strike and convinces Nnu Ego to join her.21 Within a village economy, men would have no recourse other than to capitulate or do their own cooking. In the city, however, Nnaife's male coworkers share their lunches with him. The women's strike is soon abandoned.
The quiet acceptance and waiting characteristic of Efuru are proven ineffective in the new urban context, and The Joys of Motherhood suggests that in new contexts different modes of women's resistance have to be adopted. Adaku's departure from the Owulum family and her brief period of prostitution may be read as just such a strategy of resistance. By becoming a prostitute, Adaku is able to accumulate enough capital to begin a more prosperous cloth-vending business and move out of the room, leaving little doubt that she is happier in her new living arrangement. Moreover, her new economic security represents a significant measure of success in the context of the Igbo valorization of women as good traders, and it contrasts sharply with Nnu Ego's continued poverty. Through Adaku, The Joys of Motherhood responds to and subverts the authority of Jagua, the “naughty” Igbo prostitute of Ekwensi's earlier novel. Through his titillating representation of Jagua as a violator of traditional taboos, Ekwensi upholds the patriarchal discourse his character is supposed to subvert. Emecheta's text, by contrast, does not linger over the details of Adaku's prostitution. It depicts only her decision to engage in the practice and the subsequent horror of the Ibuza community in Lagos.22 By emptying prostitution of glamour, and by foregrounding it as a variant of commodity exchange, the feminist narrative thus refigures the topos of the prostitute. Most important, unlike Jagua (or Efuru or Nnu Ego), Adaku is not interested in (re)marriage, choosing to live outside the boundaries of patriarchal protection: “‘I want to be a dignified single woman. I shall work to educate my daughters, though I shall not do so without male companionship.’ She laughed again.‘They do have their uses’” (Emecheta 1979, 170–71).
The Joys of Motherhood interrogates Efuru's easy success and her adherence to one version of indigenous tradition by separating passive acceptance of tradition from the active pursuit of power and locating them in rival characters. The former is represented by Nnu Ego (who bears the children Efuru desires), the latter by Adaku (who controls her destiny and matches Efuru's economic independence and her status as a successful trader). This strategy permits Emecheta to privilege the latter over the former, thus valorizing Efuru's independence without undercutting her success, as does Efuru's creator, Nwapa. In this light, the final passages of The Joys of Motherhood constitute a response to the infamous last paragraph of Efuru. If one of the most important moments of ideological negotiation in any work resides in the choice of a resolution, then Nwapa's resolution of her novel deserves special consideration. The ambivalence characteristic of the later part of Efuru becomes so acute, and the discourse of motherhood so elevated by the time one reads the concluding paragraph that the success of the divinity Uhamiri, and by extension that of Efuru, is subverted. In response, Emecheta blatantly criticizes her precursor's privileging of motherhood through her last lines. The poignant depiction of Nnu Ego's death represents the final undermining of Efuru's maternal discourse. Devastated by her sons' silence, Nnu Ego begins wandering about Ibuza:
After such wandering on one night, Nnu Ego lay down by the roadside, thinking that she had arrived home. She died quietly there, with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never made many friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother. …
Stories afterwards, however, said that Nnu Ego was a wicked woman even in death because, however many people appealed to her to make women fertile, she never did. …
Nnu Ego had it all, yet still did not answer prayers for children.
(224)
By highlighting Nnu Ego's abnegation of self in favor of children, The Joys of Motherhood responds to its precursor's last line, “Why then did the women worship her?” Emecheta thereby signals a return to the discourse of economic independence that the childless Uhamiri represents in Efuru.
A closer look reveals, however, that Emecheta is most invested in critiquing women who passively accept oppressive institutional structures under the guise of adherence to “tradition.” It is adherence to “tradition,” for example, that informs Efuru's self-doubt about marriage and motherhood. Moreover, The Joys of Motherhood argues that while it might have been possible to be compliant during precolonial (and even colonial) times, imperialism and neocolonialism demand a vigorous (and different) response. Though passive in reacting to her husbands' indifferent treatment of her, Efuru is protected by the larger women's community. In The Joys of Motherhood, the lack of such a community, the result of the ravages of colonialism, modernization, and the constant uprooting the two factors together engender, is named as a cause of Nnu Ego's suffering. And what might appear to be “modern” in Adaku, her entrepreneurial spirit, independence, and stamina, are in fact traits intimately associated with the audacious market women who rose up in the Women's War.
If Emecheta divides Efuru's discourse between Nnu Ego and Adaku, she also favors the latter character.23 By foregrounding the passivity and misery of Nnu Ego, the narrative suggests that Adaku's rebellion contributes to her greater happiness. Adaku's break with the conventions of Ibuza society also means her exclusion from it, however, and, ultimately, from the narrative itself. Although independent and well-to-do, she and her daughters nevertheless live apart from the community of Ibuza emigrants, which disapproves of her. Once she leaves the Owulum family, she virtually disappears from the narrative. The last times she reappears are special occasions for Nnu Ego's children, and on both occasions Adaku gives them expensive presents. Adaku's subsequent behavior suggests that had Nnu Ego been willing, a friendship free from the strain of close quarters and food shortages might have developed between the two women. Despite her curiosity about Adaku's new lifestyle, Nnu Ego is too proud and worried about her standing within the community to maintain a friendship with her former co-wife. As a result of the break, no news of Adaku's personal life or business dealings is offered. It is as if the text cannot contain so radical a choice as becoming a prostitute. Consigning such rebellious acts to the margins allows Emecheta to articulate their potential and also prevent them from dominating the rest of the narrative.
The topos of rebellion links Efuru and The Joys of Motherhood. Nwapa's creation of a heroine who is both an independent and an authentically Igbo feminist is an act of rebellion against an Igbo literary tradition dominated by male writers and female absences. Yet this assertive depiction of Efuru marginalizes the day-to-day struggles that such a character must confront. Moreover, Efuru's desire to be traditional (to uphold the institution of motherhood) threatens to subvert the text's manifest assertion of female independence. Thirteen years after the publication of Efuru, Emecheta interrogates Nwapa's elision of indigenous patriarchy and the colonial oppression of Igbo women, an oppression that her precursor's insistence on the valorization of tradition reinforces. Despite the critique of Efuru made by The Joys of Motherhood, the relation of the second text to the first does not entail a violent rewriting. Rather, it ultimately emphasizes the affinities that marginalized women writing in a shared tradition must acknowledge. In its rebellion against the “mother text,” The Joys of Motherhood inscribes the conservatism of its precursor into the text through Nnu Ego and escorts its rebelliousness out of it through Adaku. The silencing of Adaku's radicalism need not be equated with its failure, however. Instead that radicalism can be read as eluding textual compromise. The near silent presence of Adaku, like that of the historical phenomenon of the Women's War, resists narrative closure, and thereby marks a rebellious potential that has not yet run its course.
Although gender should constitute a primary category of analysis, it is (still) too often conceived of as a marginal and private discourse within African letters. Both African historiography and African literary history have pretended to be gender-neutral, when, in fact, their genealogies reveal an implicit ideology of gender. As a result, the “feminine” has been elided, and until now nationalism has lacked the means by which to integrate either the 1929 Women's War or the first Nigerian woman's novel into its narrative. The “real” Women's War, which serves as a historical link between Things Fall Apart on the one hand and Efuru and The Joys of Motherhood on the other, also serves as a reminder to the male-dominated nationalist tradition of the rebellious potential of the feminine. The Women's War erupts, challenging conventional, patriarchal, and top-down historiographies. Similarly, the notion that there is no African women's literary history is undermined by the ways in which (Igbo) African women novelists have self-consciously inscribed themselves and their predecessors into a literary history; for before there is an official women's literary history, there is often an intertextual one.
Notes
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JanMohamed outlines this model uncritically in his landmark book Manichean Aesthetics (1983) and in “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” (1985). Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), his first engagement with anti-racist politics, explicitly links gender to political power and implicitly objects to the demasculinization of black and brown men that underpins white male masculinity. Even Said, in Orientalism (1978), objects to being the bottom (i.e., disempowered and feminized) half of the binary.
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According to Isichei (1973) the 1929 uprising was not isolated; other documented women's rebellions took place in 1925 and in 1919. See Van Allen's two essays (1972, 1976) as well as the rather different interpretation of the Women's War given in Ifeka-Moller 1985. For British records of the events, see Leith-Ross (1939). And for a native feminist and more recent anticolonial reading of women's organizations and female access to power in Igbo societies, see Amadiume 1987.
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One reading here is Davies 1986, which suggests that there are traces of a larger feminine narrative in the Chielo-Ezinma story. I would add that the contradiction that this narrative line in Things Fall Apart engenders (e.g., by developing a female subjectivity that does not depend on the male) must be relegated to the margins of the text in order for the novel to produce the illusion of coherence. For other feminist readings, see Cobham (1991) and Jeyifo (1993).
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Okonkwo's third wife, Ojiugo, is named primarily so that a discrete identity may be attributed to the woman whom he beats during the sacred Week of Peace, thereby proving his violent masculinity. Okonkwo's second wife, Ekwefi, who leaves her first husband for him, has a distinct identity; she may be read as a cipher for a Western-style romance (Cobham 1991). And Okonkwo's favorite daughter, Ezinma, is so smart and spirited that he often wishes that she were a boy.
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Nwabara offers some details: “Dr C. K. Meek was temporarily transferred from the anthropological department in the northern provinces to help with the study. Margaret Green and Sylvia Leith-Ross were also members of the study group, while Ida Ward concentrated on the Ibo language. These studies were published as books. In addition administrative officers were busy gathering information about the people (known as intelligence reports) which, by the end of 1934, had amounted to about two hundred” (1978, 201).
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Achebe responds to Conrad in “An Image of Africa” and responds more directly to anthropological discourse in “Colonialist Criticism,” his essay on a scathing (and racist) critique of Things Fall Apart by a British woman; here, Achebe indicates that he is well aware of the conflation of colonial anthropology and state hegemony, observing that the critic's literary style “recalls so faithfully the sedate prose of the district-officer-government-anthropologist of sixty or seventy years ago” (1975, 5). C. L. Innes's book (1992) examines Achebe's oeuvre as a rejoinder to Cary.
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Having been taken to task for his gender politics in writing, Achebe has taken pains to depict women as active political agents and as protagonists in his most recent novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987), written after a gap of almost twenty years; this novel even includes references to the Women's War.
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Amadiume recounts the story as follows: “When news reached the women, they demonstrated their anger by bypassing the local court, controlled by equally fanatical Christians, and marching half-naked to the provincial headquarters, Onitsha, to besiege the resident's office. He pleaded for calm and patience and asked the women to go home, saying that he would look into the case. The women considered this a feeble response, so they returned to Nnobi, went straight to the man's house and razed it to the ground. This was the indigenous Igbo female custom of dealing with offending men. … Two weeks after the incident, the man is said to have died” (1987, 122).
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This statement is less true in 1996 than when the first version of this chapter was published (Andrade 1990). Since then, see the chapters on Nwapa in Wilentz 1992, Holloway 1992, and Stratton 1994. Nevertheless, in contrast to the attention given to the novelists Mariama Bâ, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, or Emecheta, Nwapa is usually addressed only in broad comparative studies of African women's literature.
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For critics see Ojo-Ade 1983 and Gordimer 1973; for defenders see Emenyonu 1970 and Taiwo 1984. Feminist readings include those by Davies 1986, Banyiwa-Horne 1986, Condé 1972, Brown 1981, and Nnaemeka 1989.
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See Brown's introductory chapter to his classic text Women Writers in Black Africa (1981). Even Emmanuel Obiechina argues that “Jagua's personality shines through the vicissitudes and corruption of the city” (1975, 104).
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That Brown reads Jagua's “redemption” at the end of the narrative as corresponding to her pregnancy and new interest in “rural living” only supports my point here (1981, 7).
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In a comparative reading of Efuru and Jagua Nana, both of which address “the woman question,” Uzoma Esonwanne in a letter to me addresses the dilemma of the “united front” stance adopted by cultural nationalists. “The problem was: how to articulate the specificity of women's oppression at precisely the moment when the dominant ideology eschewed internal critique? Those of us who grew up in Nigeria in the late '60s and '70s remember so well how this problem was resolved: Ekwensi's Jagua was the literary symptom of a pervasive attempt by men to displace this problem from the realm of the political economy dominated by men to that of an abstracted sexual probity of women themselves. Read against Jagua, then, Efuru emerges as a far more serious, but ultimately unsatisfactory, attempt through literary art to resolve this contradiction in the ideology of nationalism.”
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The “Achebe school” comprises Igbo writers Nwapa, Nkem Nkwankwo, John Munyone, E. C. C. Uzodinma, and Clemen Agunwa, all influenced by Things Fall Apart. See Innes and Lindfors 1978, 5–6.
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Taiwo illustrates, citing from the novel: “For example, a pregnant woman should ‘not go out alone at night. If she must go out, then somebody must go with her and she must carry a small knife. When she is sitting down, nobody must cross her leg.’ … If at birth the child does not cry at once, you ‘took hold of its two legs, lifted it in the air and shook it until it cried.’ … The mother should put her legs together or else she will not be able to walk properly in the future. Breast-feeding should go on for a year or more” (1984, 54).
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In addition to Efuru, Nwapa had published Idu; Bessie Head had published all three of her novels; and Emecheta herself had already published The Slave Girl, which contains specific references to the Women's War. 1979 is also the year in which Mariama Bâ published Une si longue lettre, for which she would win the first Noma award.
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Florence Stratton (1994) correctly points out that Nwapa shares the honor of being the first black African woman novelist with Kenyan Grace Ogot; both published their first novels in 1966.
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Efuru does run away with first husband, Adiuza, without first obtaining approval or going through the formality of bride-price. However, she, her husband, and mother-in-law work hard to earn the necessary money, and her father, Nwashike Ogeue, immediately sanctions the marriage.
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While Efuru is not set in the precolonial period, it also refuses to date its narrative. What colonial presence it implies has not yet begun to wear at the fabric of Igbo social life.
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Amadiume relates how separate gender space in the village could encourage autonomy for women and hinder marital rape: “Sex was not forced upon a woman; she was constantly surrounded by children and other people. Men did not enter the women's quarters freely or casually. Avenues were open for ‘politicking.’ … Indigenous architecture and male/female polygyny made these choices possible” (1987, 114).
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Amadiume points out that according to tradition women could refuse to give their husbands food if they “did not contribute meat or yam for the meal” (1987, 114). Van Allen explains the manner in which cooking strikes were traditionally utilized by women: “all the women refused to cook for their husbands until the request was carried out. For this boycott to be effective, all women had to cooperate so that men could not go and eat with their brothers” (1972, 1970).
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So understated is the text's treatment of prostitution that some critics refuse to acknowledge it. Eustace Palmer (1983) denies that Adaku becomes a prostitute—without offering any textual evidence to the contrary. Palmer's attempt to read sympathetically feminist texts coupled with a certain morality make his approach similar to Emenyonu's.
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Since Adaku has two children, Emecheta's text clearly does not argue against motherhood as such, merely against adhering to a notion of it as essential no matter what the context.
My thanks to Uzoma Esonwanne, Nancy Glazener, Greg Diamond, and especially Deidre Lynch for their conversations and comments. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Research in African Literatures 20, no. 1 (1990): 91–110, and is reprinted here in altered form by permission of Indiana University Press.
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