"Half and Half Children": third-generation women writers and the new Nigerian novel.(Critical essay)

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-08

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ABSTRACT

The paper looks at seven novels by women published since 2000, and asks in what ways they reconfigure realism and the social text of the recent Nigerian past. Their authors are engaged in a lively dialogue with their literary precursors, male and female, using their interpretation of the past. Though realism is their preferred mode, it is a realism that bears the trace of pre-existing non-realist modes of expression and belief. By reclaiming the traditionally negative icon of the abiku child, they effect a retrieval of the feminine repressed, casting the feminine double as shadow or negative to the paradigmatic male protagonist of Nigerian fiction and reinserting it into the postcolonial national narrative. Like one of the protagonists, these novels ask the urgent question: "What was the country I loved? The country I would fight for? Should it have borders?"

In this article, I consider the novels by mostly young women with at least one Nigerian parent, whether domiciled in Nigeria or elsewhere, which have been published since the year 2000: House of Symbols (2001) by Akachi Ezeigbo; Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Everything Good Will Come (2005) by Sefi Atta; Sky-High Flames (2005) by Unoma Azuah; The Icarus Girl (2005) by Helen Oyeyemi; and 26a (2006) by Diana Evans. By placing them in the context of Nigerian women's writing as it has emerged since Independence, and by reference to earlier writers (from the 1960s to 1990s), I trace the new directions that fictional accounts of women's identities are taking in Nigeria. I suggest that the forms of feminine identity evident in earlier women's writing, constrained by nationalist priorities that privileged masculinity, have given way to a challenging reconfiguration of national realities in which the feminine is neither essentialized and mythologized nor marginalized, but unapologetically central to the realist representation of a recognizable social world. This constitutes a shifting of the ground of identity-construction in Nigerian fiction away from the fully-constituted masculine self, to a notion of selfhood as split or multiple. The use of twins as a narrative device has emerged in these writers as a means of exploring the repressed feminine in relation to a socially conditioned version of femininity, inflected by issues of exile, hybridity and metissage. These developments lead us to ask where their works are taking the Nigerian novel, how they are changing or reformulating it and to what end. What do these largely realist fictions bring to its form, and to what extent are they in dialogue with earlier, male- and female-authored fictions?

In the 1980s, as a PhD student at the University of Ife, the response I commonly encountered when I said my research topic was Nigerian women's writing was, "I didn't know there was any." For male academics at that time, since the fathering of Anglophone Nigerian literature by Tutuola, Achebe, J. P.Clark, Okigbo, Soyinka et al., it had been masculine by origin and by definition. With one or two outstanding exceptions, female academics, though they recognized the presence of Flora Nwapa, Mabel Segun, and Adaora Lily Ulasi among the first generation, sought to legitimize their own presence in the academy by studying canonical writers. Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie and Chikwenye Ogunyemi were honorable exceptions, whose work is cited today whenever African women's writing or African feminism are under discussion. My own work here is inevitably in dialogue with theirs, along with feminist commentators like the philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu and the social scientist Oyeronke Oyewumi. Since the 1980s, African women's writing has achieved a level of visibility where it is no longer possible to ignore it or pretend it does not exist, as testified by the increase in critical attention. (1) Understanding the difference in the environment in which "third-generation" writers are finding their voice from that of first and second generation women writers, is crucial to understanding how these late-comers are rewriting the script of national identity-construction.

I have written elsewhere about the relationship of the post-Independence generation of Nigerian writers to the process of constructing a Nigerian postcolonial national identity, and in particular, "Soyinka's project of self-creation as autonomous agent of his own destiny, metonymic of nation-formation, (a)s an informing principle of African autobiography" (see Bryce). I concluded that analysis with the words: "For an alternative vision, and other 'possible types of relation' in the narrative of nationhood, we have to look to the new generation of women writing in Nigeria, to feminist critics, commentators and historians" (Bryce 17) Perhaps, indeed, we should begin with the caveat issued by Ogundipe-Leslie in the introduction to her collection of polemical essays: "[T]here is no such thing as 'the African woman.' She cannot be essentialised in that way; rather she has to be considered, analysed and studied in the complexity of her existential reality ..." (9). Although made more than a decade ago, this call to the interrogation of seemingly "natural" categories all too often still goes unheeded in critical work on African women's writing. Underlying Ogundipe-Leslie's emphasis on the necessity of uncovering the "real" is a political critique of the primacy of Western academic theory and the consequent marginalization of African commentators; this critique is central to Oyewumi's project in African Women and Feminism (2003), where she has assembled a series of contestations of prevailing feminist paradigms, and in her earlier book, The Invention of Women (1997), a sustained attempt at deconstruction of "the imposition of Western gender categories on (Yoruba) discourse" (ix). As the title indicates, we have moved here from empiricism to discourse--the idea, formulated by V. Y. Mudimbe, of Africa as invention, a contested space onto which have been projected a multiplicity of meanings, underpinned by the imperatives of colonialism, race, diaspora, and, in the case of Ogundipe-Leslie, Oyewumi, et al., feminism.

But let us not over-state the case: between empiricism and discourse it is not an either/or, but more of a continuum. The "real" returns as the repressed of mainstream discourse, as a primary tool of contestation and reformulation. Among the contributors to African Women and Feminism, Nkiru Nzegwu locates her wide-ranging argument firmly in concrete, lived experience. Her interrogation of discursive categories is embodied through the use of proverbs and aphorisms; she and Abena Busia are both concerned with the politics of enunciation, and both their pieces were written for an audience. In the same volume, Chikwenye Ogunyemi speak to the question of how to find an appropriate discourse for the articulation of difficult or negative ideas, a theme anticipated by her survey of firstand second-generation Nigerian women's writing, Africa Wo/man Palava (1996). Such testimonies not only insist on but exemplify alternative methodologies and epistemological paradigms in relation to African gender categories and discursive formulations. How we might relate these to the discussion of third-generation Nigerian women's writing is part of the problematic of this paper--one I do not claim to have fully resolved.

The last statement is intended not only to cover my back, but to make visible a very real tension in the work of African feminist criticism--between "existential reality" and discursive construction, between materialist and idealist, or, to put it simply, between the "real" and the ideal. We are required perpetually to balance between overtheorizing of African realities, thereby effacing lived experiences and objectifying the very subjects whose agency we claim to promote; and undertheorizing in such a way as not to question received notions of "Africanness," not to acknowledge that all identities are historically constituted and subject to change. A potent strategy in the attempt to speak of specific realities within a theoretical frame has been the incorporation of vernacular paradigms, as we have already noted in Oyewumi, as when she challenges the feminist truism of a global "sisterhood" as being predicated on the western nuclear family, and proposes instead that, for Africans, "the most profound sisterly relations are to be found in co-mothering [...] not reducible to biological motherhood" (African Women 13). Other examples are Henry Louis Gates's use of "signifying" in the The Signifying Monkey and Soyinka's deployment of Ogunnian principles in Myth, Literature and the African World. In African Wo/man Palava, Ogunyemi has attempted a similar maneuver in her recourse to Igbo history, situating the book as "part of the fallout from the explosive 1929 Igbo Ogu Umunwanyi, usually translated as the 'Women's War,' " but which she prefers to translate as "women's struggle, or rather, in the contemporary discursive space, the ongoing African wo/man palava" (Palava 11). What this means for her argument overall is that she attempts to place it within a vernacular--Igbo/Yoruba--conceptual frame, from which she draws metaphors to demonstrate the specificity of Nigerian women's writing. But it is precisely here, in, for example, her exploration of multiple feminine mythological figures and aspects of indigenous cosmologies--chi and ori--as tropes for women's power, that the tension between "real" and "ideal" comes into play. On the one hand, the vernacular concepts she offers illuminate the writing, positing new ways of reading women's texts and lives. On the other, they indiscriminately recuperate all indigenous cultural tropes and historical figures in such a way as to romanticize and mythologize them. This undifferentiated approach to culture, whereby biological femaleness becomes the undisputed touchstone of all feminine endeavor, is problematic at best: it contradicts, for example, Oyewumi's theoretical divergence from Western paradigms based on the assertion that gender differentiation does not in fact exist in most African languages and is therefore a Western imposition. Moreover, though they may seem to agree on the question of motherhood as a more appropriate trope than sisterhood, Oyewumi's claim that this is "not reducible to biological motherhood" (African Women 13), appears to be contradicted by Ogunyemi's...

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