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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
While Azuah's novel Sky-High Flames (2005) is firmly grounded in the Igbo sociological context, comprising ancestor worship, the cult of a female goddess, polygamy, and the levirate, the novel taps into the practice of female husbandry documented by cultural anthropologists (e.g, Sylvia Leith-Ross and Ifi Amadiume, whose theories I reassess), previous West African literary attempts at representing lesbian seduction, as well relational nexuses within the boarding school system. Nigerian feminisms, I argue, need to make room for the material factors of "doing lesbian." While pointing to this debut novel's reluctance to allow same-sex desire to develop, I also comment on womanly relationality, such as Azuah's displaced (auto)biographical vestment in her aunt's story, as well as on moments of intimacy between women, which augur the new Nigerian novel's capacity to comment on the economy of pleasures and on the way of constituting oneself as the moral subject of one's sexual conduct.
It is my contention here that Unoma Azuah's fiction was not created out of a vacuum but taps, possibly unwittingly, into the Igbo ancestral matriarchal past, the practice of female husbandry documented by cultural anthropologists (both British and Nigerian), previous West African literary attempts at representing lesbian seduction, (1) as well as her own and her relatives' participation in gender bending.
What we know about gender subversion among Igbo women (in Eastern Nigeria) has been mediated via cultural anthropology. The earliest study is without a doubt the British anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross's African Women, a Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939). With reference to reincarnation in Eziama (between Owerri and Aba), (2) Leith-Ross had observed that "a woman might be reincarnated as a man, but not vice versa" (101). Ifi Amadiume in her Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987), especially in relation to Nnobi, in Idemili Government Area southeast of Onitsha, took Leith-Ross to task, calling her book "racist" (13). Amadiume recognizes that Leith-Ross "was familiar with Igbo women s feminism and ambition for power," yet she adds: "That the women [Leith-Ross] studied did not wish to become men, but males, was beyond Leith-Ross's imagination" (15). To be fair, it was not beyond Leith-Ross's imagination but that of her Nnaeto female informant who had deemed it "'very foolish for a man to wish to become a woman" and the women present said frankly that "they would like to become men." But, Leith-Ross continues, "I could not get them to explain themselves fully. This is to be regretted as I had occasionally caught glimpses of some peculiar conception of sex or of a thread of bi-sexuality running through everything ... or of a lack of differentiation between the sexes--or of an acceptance of the possibility of the transposition of sex--which it could have been interesting to study" (101). Notwithstanding Amadiume's biased reading and partial quoting of Leith-Ross's text, it remains that her work on Igbo "female husbands" helped popularize the phrase when, to readers steeped in British literature, the phrase--"female husband"--may have conjured up Henry Fielding's 1746 pot-boiling pamphlet of that name about a "lesbian en travesti," based on a real-life cross-dresser who was tried for vagrancy after she (under a male name) married a woman, who was not too long in discovering the subterfuge.
Female husbands in the Igbo context, then and now, are generally widows without a male offspring, who take on "wives" to produce heirs for their husbands' lineages. The "wives" then take in male lovers, have children who are in turn handed over to the "female husbands." Families whose lineages are in danger of dying out due to lack of male heirs encourage their eldest daughter to stay home as the "son" of the family, take in lovers and bear children, hopefully sons to perpetuate the family name.
Amadiume, who, incidentally, features among the writers whom Azuah admires most, as she reported in an interview with Nnorom Azuonye, contends that daughters could indeed become sons and consequently male, after the nhanye practice of ritualistically transforming a daughter into a son or "male daughter." Also, women could become husbands and consequently males in relation to their wives in a woman-to-woman marriage. However, as Amadiume's own book subtitle, Gender and Sex in an African Society, acknowledges, the distinction between biological sex and its social construction, gender, is a relatively recent theoretical concept that Leith-Ross could not have used in its contemporary sense, all the more so since Leith-Ross used "man" (nwoke) and "woman" (nwaanyi) to refer to "male" (oke) and "female" (anyi). In all fairness, Leith-Ross, who is conversant with, Fulani grammar, if not Igbo, and has even written a book on that subject, cannot be faulted for not making this distinction, all the more so since recent Igbo dictionaries do not recognize either the contraction of nwa-oke (male child) into nwoke (man) nor that of of nwa-anyi (female child) into mwanyi (woman), nor even the suffix -anyi, which Amadiume also uses (89). (3) Leith-Ross's study thus remains the earliest instance of the awareness of female Igbo gender bending before its conceptualization. And, as Joseph M. Carrier and Stephen O. Murray (254), following Denise O'Brien (109), remind us, woman-woman marriage has been documented in more than thirty African populations, including the Nandi, Kikuyu, and Luo of Kenya, and the Venda in South Africa. Amadiume's study thus joins a brace of anthropological works on female husbands, going as far back as the early 1950s with Evans-Pritchard's seminal study of the Nuer practice. (4)
Amadiume's most original contribution lies more in her argument that the flexibility of Igbo gender construction is inscribed in the Igbo grammatical construction of gender, which, because of the neuter particle in subject or object pronouns, cancels the very idea of gender distinction between males and females. She concludes that "[t]here is, therefore, no language or mental adjustment or confusion in references to a woman performing a typical male role" (17). Since the third-person singular pronoun, O, stands for both male and female unlike he and she and the third-person singular of the possessive pronoun, ya, stands for both his and hers, Amadiume's thesis is that "the Igbo non-distinctive subject pronoun allows a more flexible semantic system, in which it is possible for men and women to share attributes" (89). Although seductive, such an argument makes one wonder if the inherent flexibility of semantics can be stretched to accommodate a society that had thirteen genders. "Oh yes, one says, masculine, feminine and neuter," Margaret Mead ventriloquized in Male and Female (1949), "and what in the world are the other ten?" (12). Taking her cue from R. N. Henderson s The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture, Amadiume concludes that the Igbo word for wife, onye be, is a genderless expression meaning "a person who belongs to the home of the master of the home" (90) and that the "master," or di-bi-uno (i.e., one in a master relationship to a household, which Amadiume misspells di-bu-no), can be a woman. The practice still exists in different Igbo communities in contemporary times but the question that anthropologist Regenia Smith Oboler asked in 1980--"Is the Female Husband a Man?"--is still very much in the open, suspended ... queer.
What is cruelly missing, however, from Amadiume's account of female husbands among the Nnobi is the sexual dimension of such formations,...
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