Gender, narrative space, and modern Hausa literature.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University Press

This essay seeks to demonstrate the interplay between gender and (oral and written) narrative spaces, and the relationship between those spaces and the shifting roles of men and women in the production of literatures in Hausa culture. The term Hausa is used to refer broadly to a putatively multi-ethnic and predominantly Muslim community of speakers of Hausa as a native language. Over the centuries the neighboring peoples from various ethnic backgrounds (e.g., some Fulani, Kanuri, and Nupe) have adopted Hausa identity simply by virtue of linguistic assimilation. The discussion here will be placed in historical space--from the indigenous oral heritage, through the Islamic and Jihadist phase, to the more modern period of the Western impact. This historical course reveals how a conjuncture of different kinds of forces has impacted differently on men and women as producers of verbal arts (literature). These gender-based divergences, however, have not obliterated the fact of their interdependency. At the same time, to the extent that the gender factor is related, to some degree or other, to the dichotomy between orality and literacy, it has naturally featured in the discourse on tradition and modernity. And it is to this interplay between tradition and modernity, on the one hand, and orality and literacy, on the other, that we must first turn.

The view adopted here is that tradition and modernity are coexisting modes/ways of (re)inventing and (re)interpreting culture within a given space. As such they must not be dichotomized as referential corollaries to precolonial and postcolonial, respectively. In this regard, I am embracing Kwame Gyekye's argument:

The concept of modernity may give the impression that modernity represents a break with tradition and is thus irreconcilable with it; such an impression would clearly be false. For one thing, every society in the modern world has many traditional elements inherited and accepted from previous, that is "premodern", generations; for another, if in modern times we can talk sensibly about "our tradition of so-and-so", then traditions are not irreconcilable with modernity. Thus, the modernity of tradition would be an intelligible concept, just as the tradition of modernity--in as much as that modern culture itself has become a tradition. (271)

The situation on the ground, then, is one in which orality--a legacy of tradition--and writing--a legacy of the "modern" in many parts of Africa--are co-existing traditions. Furthermore, as much as written literature has drawn from the heritage of orality, the oral itself is dynamic and continues to reinvent and inscribe itself into the space (s) of the modern. The oral heritage, for example, was appropriated, reshaped, and used effectively as part of the anti-apartheid literature of combat in South Africa. Gcina Mhlope, for example, had the following to say about his adoption of story-telling from the oral heritage:

When I decided to concentrate more on storytelling full time, I found that I could draw many different kinds of people who would not necessarily come if they thought I was telling strictly political stories. All these people came and enjoyed the stories of long ago and found their own meanings. Many told me how surprised they were at seeing the South Africa of the day in the stories. They also saw very vividly the similarities in character of some of the people around them. (112)

This is an artistic legacy that Mhlope attributes directly to the influence and inspiration of his own grandmother:

I was born in [...] Hammarsdaleon the East Coast of South. I was brought up by my paternal grandmother and she was a great storyteller--her expressive face, her eyes, her voice, even the way she used her hands--these images are still very vivid in my mind. She deserves the praise for creating the storyteller I am today. (109)

Within the world of the Hausa, furthermore, the continuum between tradition and modernity is further complicated by the quadruplet, rather than dual, arena of literary articulation. In addition to the multifarious oral spaces, there are the century old domains of Arabic and Ajami writing--an adaptation of the Arabic script for writing in indigenous languages--as well as the more recent literature in the Roman script. Because of the difference in their origins, these four legacies--the indigenous (essentially oral), the Islamic (Arabic legacy), the Afro-Islamic (in Ajami), and the Western (the Latin impact)--reflect more than a modal division: they also entail a diversity of styles, themes, and orientations that interact in proactive and reactive manner in a way that constantly reshapes each one and all of them.

For decades, however, the modal bias toward writing that came, first with Islamic literacy, and later and more forcefully with European colonialism, led to the "invisibility" of the oral. It is only in relatively recent times that scholars of non-Western cultures in general and of Africanist orientation in particular began to challenge the assumed "ahistoricity" of predominantly so-called "oral" societies, opening the doors for serious scholarship into an understanding of world cultures that operate predominantly through orality. As a result, in the past decades we have witnessed a proliferation of an impressive body of research that provides new insights into the study of folklore and oral literatures from multiple perspectives (Finnegan, Scheub, Johnson, Julien, and Okpewho).

Within this wider expanse of the oral heritage, my focus here is confined to Hausa oral literature and more narrowly to its imaginative genre popularly known as hira. Skinner suggests that hira refers to the broader category of imaginative prose narratives that itself can be subcategorized into labarai, tarihi, and tatsuniya. Labarai are narratives about past or current events that have some factual bearings, whereas tarihi are epic narratives about historical heroes. On the other hand, tatsuniya are fantasy tales of ogres, animals, and spirits. He further informs us that the term hira covers any act of recreation where the narrator and his/her audience can be identified as playing different and yet complementary roles in the actualisation of a traditional oral text (Skinner 1-6). The different relations between the narrator and the audience, in other words, is crucial in determining the type of the story to be told.

While many studies of Hausa oral literature constitute an important contribution to the structural understanding of the Hausa traditional oral narratives they fall short of addressing the source (the authorship) of the oral texts themselves. Social rules governing story-telling in Hausa tradition are, in fact, determined by the type of the story to be told which often correlates with the gender and the age of the storyteller and his/her audience. Within this cultural configuration, labari and tarihi are male-crafted and narrated stories, whereas tatsuniyoyi (plural of tatsuniya) are traditionally the heritage of women, especially of the grandmother.

In Hausa tradition, the oldest woman of the household or neighborhood--the grandmother--is the "master" storyteller. Her advanced age is a symbol of a deep experiential understanding of life as its unfolds in its many facets across time and she is culturally regarded as an important source of knowledge production, preservation, and transmission.

This matriarch becomes the mediator/transmitter of knowledge and information across generations. Her audience cuts across gender, until the adolescent age at which the socialization of a female child into her future role as a woman becomes the task of her mother and that of the male child is the responsibility of the father. She uses her skills of storytelling to artistically convey information to younger generations about the culture and worldview, norms and values, morals...

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