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Reserve Text from Omar Sougou, Writing Across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta. New York: Rodopi, 2002
A Critical Enquiry THE NIGERIAN-BORN NOVELIST Buchi Emecheta, resident mainly in London, is a cross-cultural figure. She writes in the African tradition, drawing on African materials and experience. She has also been selected as one of the Best Young British Writers. Her fiction gives expression to the aspirations and problems of African and black women, and this makes it a valuable reference-point in the literature written by African women. Emecheta' s novels not only challenge the hegemony of male authors but also the representation of African women in literature. As a novelist writing about female experience and questioning societal assumptions and practices hostile to women, she has received significant critical attention, but the focus of the criticism is mostly geared to the critic's particular field of interest; it is usually based either on one or two novels or on a theme. |
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The present study
offers a comprehensive enquiry into Emecheta's fiction, and aims to
bring to light the significance of her work and show the development
of the writer through it. The guiding principle of this research rests
on a conviction that her fiction deserves a fuller treatment which can
be achieved by an approach based on a variety of readings chiefly informed
by the feminist and postcolonial theories and strategies. The rationale adopted
is founded on a study of ten novels:
In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class
Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl
(1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Destination Biafra
(1982), Naira Power (1982), Double Yoke (1982), The
Rape of Shavi (1983), and Gwendolen (1989). Emecheta's literary
production is larger than this, but in a study of this kind one has
to be selective. The criterion for selection rests on my desire to offer
various perspectives on Emecheta's works. Thus, while aware of the arbitrariness
of any selective process, I have endeavoured in my choice This investigation
is set against the broad basis of literature and society in Africa,
in the context of both the writing of established male novelists and
of women writers. Emecheta' s rhetoric is not restricted to feminist
protest; her texts question metropolitan assumptions with regard to
African culture, even though at moments there was a propensity to give
it the cold shoulder it in her early fiction. This generates tensions
perceptible in her creative work. Those moments that correspond to the
most intensive adoption of the centre's values by arrivants from the
periphery, or the former Empire, lead to a sense of disillusionment.
And this produces in Emecheta's narratives a reaction to the hegemonic
status of the old metropole. The work of African
writers generally, and including Emecheta, fits into the pattern of
social activity and commodity production. As Engels observed, art may
be "the most highly 'mediated' of social products in its relation
to the economic base, but in another sense it is also part of that economic
base-- one kind of economic practice, one type of commodity production,
among many."l Then literature can be regarded ''as text, but we
may also see it as a social activity, a form of social and economic
production which exists alongside, and interrelates with, other such
forms."2 Canonized texts within this domain, such as those of Achebe
and Ngugi, are means of circulating the creative product for personally
economic and otherwise utilitarian ends. Such texts are based on social
concerns, whatever the ideological vantage point of their producers. Emecheta's fiction
has won recognition in the field of African literature after withstanding
aggressive forays and in-fighting from its fringes. Even though a novel
like The Joys of Motherhood made its way successfully within
the 'canonical' domain of African writing and was published in Heinemann's
African Writers Series, Emecheta's other novels have mainly appeared
under the imprint of smaller publishers such as Allison & Busby
with its socialist commitment and George Braziller with its solidarity
for more marginalized yet aesthetically first-class talents, occasionally
with Collins/ Fontana (with a selective African list dating back to
the 1960s), occasionally with Macmillan, 1 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976): 60. 2 Eagleton.
Marxism and Literary Criticism. 60 or under her own
imprint, Ogwugwu Afar.3 A prolific writer, Emecheta has produced a wide
range of fiction which fits typology into categories as various as the
'belles-lettres' tradition and 'popular' and children's literature.
A study of her fiction thus requires a selective approach based on the
identification of the audience to which a particular genre is addressed
and on determining the correlation between the voices and the language
in which the fiction is mediated. General elements
of approach As attractive,
and liberating for the text, as this notion might seem, it somewhat
thwarts a certain view of the author and the text, and their relationship
to the reader and the social formation commonly held by critics of African
literature. For historical reasons, this literature has been mostly
re- ----------------------------- 3 Emecheta's last
two novels, Kehinde and The New Tribe, were published
by Heinemann in 1994 and 2000 respectively, in the African Writers Series;
this series also advertises new editions of In The Ditch, Second-Class
Citizen, Destination Biafra, Head Above Water, and
Gwendolen. 4 Of Grammatology, tr. & intro. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976): lxxvi-lxxv.
Furthermore, in
her essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,"
Spivak, reading Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys and Mary Shelley, chooses
strategically to take shelter in an essentialism which, she says, will
continue to honour the suspect binary opposition -book and author, individual
and history. Her reading aims "to incite a degree of rage against
the imperialist narrativization of history" by exposing the axiomatics
of imperialism. As we go through the readings of "Drapaudi"
and "Three Women's Texts," we realize that there is a need
to pin down the ideological contention which involves the text, the
author, the reader and the social formation of the time of production.6
Implicit in Spivak's strategy are the practice of symptomatic reading
as developed by Pierre Macherey and awareness of Louis Althusser's theory
of ideology, both of which add a materialist basis to poststructuralist
de constructive reading practices. They are necessary for revealing
the text's unconscious: ie more than that which it overtly says.7 Further, in her
study of African-American women, Elizabeth Fox Genovese makes a useful
point that would also apply to imaginative fiction. ------------------------
6 Critical Inquiry
12.1 (1985): 244. 7 Pierre Macherey,
A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge,
1978): ch. 15-16; Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State Apparatuses,"
in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 ). Mikhail Bakhtin's
theory ot'language is useful in revealing the potential of the text
as a signifying practice. Terry Eagleton sums up some of its elements:
The author organizes
the composition of work without "directly reflecting the represented
chronotopes" (254). Building on the idea that a variety of voices
controlled by the author operate in the novel, Bakhtin develops the
principle of dialogics or dialogism in the novel, thus granting a certain
polyphony to the fictional text. -------------------------------- 8 "To Write
My Self: The Autobiographies of Atro-American Women," in Feminist
Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington
& Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987): 161-62. 9 Literary Theory:
An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983): 117-18. 10 The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist,
tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: Texas UP, 1981): 254.
Further page references are in the main text. In prose writing,
the producer of a text does not "purge words of intentions and
tones that are alien to him" (298). Bakhtin posits that the writer
does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words.
One might, then, see words as ideological indicators that inform not
simply about the characters constructed through language, but about
the author as well:
In the novel, the
speaking person is an ideologue, his words ideologemes, and discourse
becomes, in Bakhtinian terms, the object of representation in the novel
as ideologemes, "and it is for the same reason that novels are
never in danger of becoming a mere aimless verbal play" (333).
The novel is thus a dialogized representation of an ideologically freighted
discourse, and a particular language in it "is always a way of
viewing the world, one that strives for a social significance"
(333). These elements
of approach to the novel expounded by Bakhtin are useful with regard
to Emecheta's work, especially Naira Power and Double Yoke. On the other hand,
as will be shown, Emecheta' s texts are decentred in relation to the
body of African writing, on account of their focus on gender. They are
different in theme, and the manner in which they are encoded challenges
patriarchal language and 'canonized' writing in Africa. The voice
The work of Emecheta,
like that of many writers in societies or groups confronting exploitation
and oppression, conveys some degree of programmatic intentionality,
whether reliable or not, because in such social formations art is not
uniquely for art's sake. Women's writings in other parts of the world
fall under the same paradigm; they are locked in a struggle with patriarchy,
and as a result deal with experience. Buchi Emecheta shows a well-developed
capacity to produce a competently structured narrative, and can be located
in the context of the practice of writing fiction which is at the same
time 'serious' and popular. Her work seems to participate in women writers'
"important influence in breaking down some of the restrictive boundaries
between high and popular culture, challenging some of the hierarchical
divisions within the league table of canonical literature."12 Some
of her works subscribe to conventional literature, while others, like
Double Yoke and the Macmillan Pacesetters publications A Kind
of Marriage and Naira Power, are of the popular fiction genre.
I shall study the genre as practised by Emecheta together with the question
of audience in Chapter 5. Emecheta' s discursive practice shows a liberal
appropriation both of fictional technique and language. Thus, when some
African writers debate on whether to write in English or in African
languages, she leans towards a version of appropriated English.13 All of Emecheta's
novels give expression to Fredric Jameson's idea of literature as being
informed by the political unconscious and as an activity which "must
be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of the community."14
Such a meditation on the destiny of the community preoccupies women
in Emecheta's narratives; hence a feminist reading is most appro- -------------------
12 Pam Moms, Literature
and Feminism: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993): 78. 13
See O. Sougou, "The Issue of Literature in African Languages: A
Survey," Universite, Recherche et Developpement (Universite
de Saint Louis) 1(1993): 63-78. 14 The Political Unconcious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1981): 70. [8] priate. In this
respect, my enquiry into her literary production endeavours to explore
the literary discourse on gender. In the process, I hope to show that
the duality or dyadic aspect of Emecheta' s literary production, apparent
in the contiguity of 'high' and popular literature, seems to be echoed
by a double consciousness within the texts. This duality is also resident
in the feminist consciousness that pervades her work, and which is in
dialogue with an African outlook. In the course of my investigation,
a double-voiced discourse emerges as an expression of this dual consciousness.
-------------- 15 Showalter, "Toward
a Feminist Poetics," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed.
Showalter, 162. 16 Annette Kolodny,
"Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory,
Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," Feminist
Studies 6.1 (Spring 1980): 1-25. This line of approach
has political and ideological limitations which Kolodny recognizes in
recalling Lillian Robinson's assault on the bourgeois bias, which she
calls the "myth of pluralism."17 But the pluralism of which
Robinson warns us is that which involves the rejection of ideological
commitment ''as too simple," on the grounds of pronounced aestheticism.
Feminist criticism, she states, "is a criticism with a cause, engaged
criticism. [...] It must be ideological and moral criticism; it must
be revolutionary."18 Radical textual criticism, Robinson says,
could study the way in which narrative devices relate to ideology. Subjecting
a text to radical criticism can also be a useful procedure that will
bring together the notion of characters as linguistic constructs and
the need for a type of literature that establishes a correlation between
the fictively constructed world of the text and the living actors' existence.
Robinson's propositions can be juxtaposed with those of Elaine Showalter. Gynocritics or
gynocriticism looks within; it is introspective, and concentrates on
the construction ofa female framework for the analysis of women's textual
production. It endeavours to generate new theoretical models based on
the study of female experience. Female culture is the focus of gynocritics,
which begins with the liberation of women from the linear absolutes
of male literary history, and wants an end to the attempts "to
fit women between the lines of male tradition" (131). Showalter's
proposed model finally assigns the feminist critic the task of finding
a new language, a new way of reading that ---------------------------- 17 Lillian S. Robinson,
"Dwelling in Deficiencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective,"
in Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose, ed.
Cheryl L. Brown & Karen Olson (Metuchen NJ & London: Scarecrow,
1978): 28-29. 18 Robinson, "Dwelling in Deficiencies,"20. 19 Showalter. "Toward a Feminist Poetics..' 128 Showalter pursues
her theory in another essay, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,"
which further documents the notions of female culture and women's experience,
the mainstay of a gynocentric criticism.20 The theory based on women's
culture is an eclectic model incorporating ideas about women's body,
language, and psyche but interpreting them in the social context in
which they occur. This context and cultural environment are significant
in the construction of the female psyche. Language and the determinants
of its use, the shaping of linguistic behaviour, are all influenced
by cultural ideals. The cultural theory Showalter evolves is not a wholesale
deletion of difference, but takes into account the important dissimilarities
among women. Thus class, race, nationality and history are literary
determinants that are just as significant as gender; but women's culture
remains a distinct entity: a collective experience which, for Showalter,
binds "women over time and space."
--------------------------------- 21 Donna Haraway,
Simians Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
However strong
the bonding and collectivist nature of women's culture, it is a culture,
in Gerda Lerner's analysis (on which Showalter draws for her theoretical
model), embedded in the general culture shared by men and women. For
Lerner, "women live a duality as members of the general culture
and as partakers of women's culture." However, they resist patriarchal
restraint or segregation into separateness by transforming it into complementarity
and redefining it.22 The theory developed
by the Oxford cultural anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener serves
Showalter to expand on the notion of women's culture. It identifies
two sets of members in society: the muted group constituted by women,
and the dominant group composed of men. The boundaries of the muted
group overlap those of the dominant but are not wholly contained by
it. Showalter finds in the Ardeners' method of enquiry "many connections
to and implications for current feminist literary theory, since the
concepts of perception, silence, and silencing are so central to discussion
of women's participation in literary culture."23 Interaction between
the muted and dominant groups is governed by power relationships. Both
groups generate beliefs and ideas, but the dominant group "controls
the forms or structures in which consciousness can be articuated.24 At the core of
the diagrammatic representation of the space each group inhabits lies
an area where the two circles intersect. This sphere of confluence engulfs
much of the muted circle, while the remainder of the muted constituency
falls outside the boundary of the dominant. The Ardeners call this realm
"the wild," which Showalter terms "the wild zone":
a possible location of women's culture. This "wild zone" is
spatially a place forbidden to men, corresponding to the zone in the
dominant circle that is closed to women. In terms of experience, the
"wild zone" denotes those aspects of female life different
from those of men, unknown and inaccessible to them. The "wild
zone" is to be thought of in terms of metaphysics, or consciousness.
According to Showalter, it is a unique space proper to women, without -----------------------------------------------
Inscribed in Cixous'
text is the problematic of colonialism, imperialism and assumptions
about the 'Other.' The thematics of 'otherness' is highlighted in the
similarities drawn by Cixous. First, it touches on the grammar of domination,
which is at the centre of Showalter's theory on male/female worlds;
second, it transcends it to include the dialectic of imperialism in
historical and aesthetic terms. All colonized social formations suffered
from the colonial enterprise and still endure its subsequent phase -neocolonialism.
Female subjects labour under a double subjection or 'double colonization,'
as we shall see later. Cixous strives
to undo the logocentric ideology of patriarchy which conceives of the
male as active and the victor, of the female as passive and defeated
in the battlefield that is the couple. This stance is implemented in
her deconstructive critique of the binary scheme steeped in patriarchal
valuesystems, the ultimate logic of which wills the annihilation of
femininity by masculinity, the perennial victor. In "The Laugh
of the Medusa," Cixous urges women to venture into the Dark Continent,
because it is "neither dark nor inexplorable." The woman is
lured into accepting "Lack," or incompleteness, and into looking
up to man. Women are made to internalize the concepts of Freudian castration
and desire (death). Even Lacan preserved "man-with-rock" in
the sanctuary of phallus: he makes of the male the controlling figure
in the order of the Symbolic or mirror stage -the law of the father.29 In her attempt to shatter phallocentrism, Cixous sublimates woman and lays emphasis on her libido as producer "of far more radical effects of political and social change than some might think" (252). She subsequently defines woman with respect to history:
----------------------------------------- 29 In Marks & de Courtivon. New French Feminisms, 255. |
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[14]
In all of this,
one perceives a constant in Cixous' theory -the analogy of the dominated
world with the wilderness, a forbidden area, a locus of nullification,
erasure, the penetration of which entails challenging phallocentric
discourse. This discursive practice echoes postcolonial theory, which
has some connections with Cixous' thinking, and which I use in conjunction
with both Showalter's and Cixous' work.
[15]
According to Stephen Siemon and Helen Tiffin, postcolonial critical theory wants to keep in view
The concept of 'the postcolonial' refers to the formerly colonized Third and Fourth Worlds, which have gained relative independence from the empire though they are still dependent economically and culturally in some ways. Some critics want the term to refer also to white settler cultures.
----------------------------------- 31 See Salman Rushdie,
"The Empire Strikes Back with a Vengeance," The Times
(3 July 1982). 32 Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 1989). 33 Stephen SIemon
& Hclen Titfin. "Introduction." Kunapipi I 1.\
(19R9): xix. The landscape of
postcolonial literature thus bears the inscriptions of dominant Western
critical practice and its technologies of interpretation and conrol,
but "it is also infused with a pulsating, though often silenced
subterranean energy which speaks to the postcolonial reader of another
realm of semiotic 'meaning,' another ground of interpretative community"
(xxi). A bond emerges
between postcolonial and women's theories of culture. They both evince
a tension between domination and resistance, suppression and will to
affirmation, controlling power and energy to resist. 'Otherness' prevails
in both theories. Patriarchy and imperialism operate in a similar manner,
each on its own or in compound action. In the metropole, women are subject
to class, race and gender-based oppression or discrimination. Women
are under the sway of all of these as well as that of imperialism in
post colonial societies. The silencing and marginalization of the postcolonial
voice, the abrogation of the imperial centre's ideology within the text
and the appropriation or subversion of the centre's language -these
are central to postcolonial discursive practice and to women's writing.
It is by writing from and toward women and by seizing the right to speak
that
-------------------
Both discourses
seek to subvert, dismantle hegemony and recover a voice in the textual
realm, in the politics of culture and in the political economy of society;
this goes along with a radical questioning of dominant systems of language
and thought. The two intersecting theories posit societies in which
social and political hegemony are subverted in the same way as patriarchal
literary forms are. For the postcolonial text, the subversion may not
be a conscious aim of the author, but "may derive from the ideological
conflict taking place in the text" (176). Both approaches
are useful critical implements for the study of the fiction of Buchi
Emecheta. In their inclusion and absorption of other practices such
as deconstruction, elements of Marxist materialism, and psychoanalysis,
they offer a broad basis for investigation. The theoretical tenets compounded
by Ashcroft et al. call for a questioning of eurocentrism and its politics
of dominance with regard to literatures and cultures of the former empire.
Although burdened by broad eclecticism, this approach offers promising
prospects for the study of literature from the former colonial world,
by virtue of the critical sources on which it draws, among them theoreticians
both of feminism and of colonial alienation, domination, race and resistance
such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Babha, Abdul R. JanMohamed
and Edward Said. The literary frame of reference of the postcolonial
critical school similarly embraces the whole of the colonial world,
regardless of the colonial linguistic heritage. Thus, the literatures
of Quebec and Martinique can be accommodated along with those of Australia
and New Zealand. South Asian literature, African literature and the
literature of the black diaspora are equally located in the field of
postcolonial criticism. Postcolonialism as theorized by Ashcroft et al. clearly embraces too broad a spectrum, which in some ways makes it problematical. Arun Mukherjee voices reservations, also harboured by critics from the former colonial space, when she writes: "While [Ashcroft et al.] heroically stand up to the appropriations of postmodernists, they too homogenize and assimilate when they write about 'the post-colonialliterature,."35 I share Mukherjee's resentment at ----------------------------
------------------------------ 36 Carole Boyce
Davies, Black Women. Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject
(London: Routledge, 1994): 80-89. 37 Ama Ata Aidoo,
"That Capacious Topic. Gender Politics," in Critical Fictions.
The consider as allies,
and use in my enquiry, any critical theory (as surveyed above) that
resists or challenges hegemony and oppression. Many critics of
African literature have had to grapple with this dilemma. For example,
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Chechukwu Madubuike, called the Bolekaja
critics, have attempted to resolve it by combatting modernist tendencies
and eurocentric criticism and by promoting an African aesthetic from
an "Afrocentric liberationist perspective, and insisting on commitment
to the concerns of the community."38 Their theory nonetheless suffers
from its radical exclusionary and prescriptive assumptions, and from
its seemingly nativist outlook, which tends to turn a blind eye to the
dialectical relationship at work in literary and social discursive practices
in the contemporary world. They equally reduce attention to women writers
to a mere mention of Flora Nwapa, Efua Sutherland, and Ama Ata Aidoo,
one of whose poems is quoted. The critic Omolara L. Ogundipe is also
quoted, not on her position on gender issues but for her critique of
Charles Larson. Buchi Emecheta is ignored and perhaps implicitly ranked
among those African writers catering to alien interests and audience
(252). This notwithstanding, the Bolekaja critics' acknowledgement of
a synthetic literary production is worth noting, if only for their call
to African novelists guilty (from an afrocentric point of view) of wealcnesses
to train themselves in African orature "so that our narrative prose
literature can become a thorough synthesis in the service of African
liberation and autonomy." Another work that
is well worth referring to is Marxism and African Literature, whose
editor, Georg Gugelberger (also a contributor), takes issue with the
Bolekaja critics' lack of a class perspective and argues for an international
radical criticism that keeps pace with developments in Marxist
--------------------------------------------- 38 Toward the
Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and
Critics of African
literature generally agree with the view expressed by Kole Omotoso:
----------------------
Women writers are
involved in this process of themselves creating and recreating a history
within their communities. They address specific issues pertaining to
their own social situation, such as gender politics. In their writing,
woman as subject is a focal point, but it is dealt with in conjunction
with other problems of national interest. It is a truism that African
men and women alike are subjected to imperialism, but women are subjected
to male dominance on top of this. In this context, women's struggle
is to some extent related to matters of collective interest. In Ousmane
Sembene's L 'harmattan, Ngugi's Devil on the Cross and Matigari, Nuruddin
Farah's Sardines and Mongane Serote's To Every Birth its Blood, the
characters Tioumbe, Wariinga and Guthera, Medina, and the South African
women all contend chiefly with economic systems and political regimes
that affect both sexes. But in the narratives of these male writers
their gendered subjectivity seems subsumed in the process of national
liberation. The male writers represent women's emancipation as part
of the liberation process of the whole societywhich may be problematical
for some feminist critics. -------------------------------- 41 Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
Writers in Politics (London: Heinemann, 1981): 5-6.
------------------- prerogatives, and insists on a synchronic liberation process: the concomitance of national liberation with women's struggle for gender equality. Furthermore, Ogundipe cogently argues,
This sums up a
major trend in the women's movement in Africa, the Third World, and
the black diaspora. The specific circumstances in these areas tend to
place gender issues within the framework of national and cultural liberation.
But, as Ogundipe's rebuttal in these lines of her own poem shows, women
intend to define their own subjectivity:
In an introduction
to an anthology of black women writers in Britain, Lauretta Ngcobo examines
the position of the black female writer confronted with racism and sexism.
Ngcobo maintains that the sex war goes on among blacks quite apart from
the complicity of white society. Pointing to the leniency in black women's
criticism of their men owing to conscious selfcensorship deriving from
"a sharing of the pain of racism, which is ultimately the major
cause of domestic problems," she notes:
---------------------- 44 "Not Spinning
on the Axis of Maleness," 506. 45 Quoted in "Not Spinning on the Axis of Maleness," 506 with racism; yet
we are protective of them, not wanting them attacked by other women
(particularly white women) or even grouped with other men tor their
sexism. At the root of this ambivalence is the question of inequality
between races.46
Commitment to art
implies involvement in social concerns and their expression in works
of art. Being committed to their womanhood is a problematical matter
for female writers, as Ogundipe notes. In the feminist tradition, they
must destroy male stereotypes of women and challenge patriarchal ideology;
"nothing could be more feminist than the writings of these women
writers, in their concern for and deep understanding of the experience
and fates of women in society" (10-11). Yet they must be "concerned
with various social predicaments in their countries" and situate
"their awareness and solutions within the larger global context
of imperialism and neocolonialism" (13). Looking at the
critical theory of African literature, one finds a consensus around
the social dimension of literature, and a degree of syntheticism, whether
acknowledged or not. What is lacking is the gender variable, and this
is introduced by African and non-African feminist critics. Just as the
feminist scholar is the daughter of a male tradition and its components,
against which (to paraphrase Showalter) she pits a new awareness, so
are African women writers and critics. They are confronted with the
implications of their need to liberate themselves from societal strictures
and of societies grappling with imperialism. This leads to an ambivalent
position, underscored by critics like Petersen, Ngcobo and Ogundipe. --------------------------- 47 Women in
African Literature Today (African Literature Today 15; London:
James Currey, 1987): 10. Katherine Frank's
"Feminist Criticism and the African Novel" is also one of
the early useful studies of the feminist problematic in African literary
discourse, despite its generalization that feminism is a profoundly
individualistic philosophy and that the concept' African feminist' seems
a contradiction in terms.48 Feminism involves more than what Frank reductively
suggests. It places emphasis on women's bonding in most of its forms
and trends. Socialist and materialist brands of feminism integrate the
socialist dimension of class and collectivity. And' African feminist'
may not be a contradiction. African feminist ideology comes out of the
particular conditions of African women as a transformational current
of international feminism. It challenges patriarchal tradition, and
enhances the notion of the family. It seeks egalitarian partnership
between male and female; acknowledging the struggle against imperialism,
neocolonialism, racism and exploitation. On the other hand,
Frank's essay makes a useful review of Anglo-AmeriCaJ1 modes of feminist
scholarship in the 1970s. She maintains that several of them, "the
archetypal, historico/sociological, recovery and re-evaluative approaches,"
can be altered and enhanced to suit African fiction (44). Feminist criticism's
flexibility and variability, she argues, could be put to diverse uses
in African studies (47). Frank ignores black women's critical writing
in America, and "loses by not understanding the critical connection
between feminist criticism and African literature by not taking into
consideration how African-American feminists apply feminist theory to
black literature."49 Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi attempts an integrated
approach within this field. Working from Alice Walker's "womanism,"
she argues for an African and African-American women's literature informed
by a 'womanist' aesthetic. 50 Mineke Schipper
suggests an inclusive methodology requiring openminded criticism which
does not include or exclude texts according to the current value system
of the critic. Texts should be read within the context of -------------------------------- 48 Katherine Frank.
"Feminist Criticism and the African Novel," African Literature
Today 14 (1984): 34-48. 49 Carole Boyce
Davies, "Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary
Criticism," in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature,
ed. Boyce Davies & Anne Adam Graves (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press,
1986): 13. 50 "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary black Female Novel in English," ,Signs 2.1 (19R5): 63-80. their production,
especially when they are produced by authors from other cultures or
ideologies, or of the other sex.51 I consider the
theoretical position articulated by Carol Boyce Davies as according
with the view that informs my critical approach in this study. Boyce
Davies sees the African feminist theoretical framework as a "balancing
act" including the idea of a synthetic approach referred to earlier:
There is in this
discussion an awareness of the writer's position as a male, an outsider,
located beyond the "wild zone" of female experience. He is
almost like the postcolonialist critic needing the "cultural inwardness"
Mukherjee spoke about earlier. His insight will necessarily suffer from
not being able to see things from within; but he hopes that his work
will make a modest contribution to the effort of countering the politics
of silence around African women's literary work. Another intention behind
this work is to take part in a constructive dialogue between male and
female African writers and critics. As Florence Stratton says:
---------------------------------------------- 52 Carol Boyce
Davies, Ngambika, 12-13. 53 Contemporary
African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge,
1994): 11-12. Boyce Davies argues along the same lines: "African
men who challenge the traditional social and political dominance of
patriarchy and who support women's issues are obvious partners"
(Nt:ambika. \ 5) The strategy of
Emecheta' s literary discursive protest against the hemming-in of the
female by patriarchal tradition, the problematic of exile, and the social
vision imparted by the texts are examined in all the abovementioned
ten novels, which will be considered in sets of two. The growth in consciousness,
the revolt of the heroines, and the emergence of feminist ideals are
important aspects that will be attended to. The questions of feminism
and black/ African women will be discussed in both the fictional texts
and in Emecheta's other contributions, such as interviews and essays.
The views of other prominent African women writers and critics are also
considered. The literary expression of Emecheta's own evolution with
regard to feminism also comes under scrutiny. It may be useful to recall
that I seek to apply an eclectic system founded on 'close' and 'symptomatic'
reading, mainly informed by feminist and postcolonial criticism. In
my reading of Emecheta, I seek to apply the notion of difference beyond
the binary opposition of colonizer/colonized, and to look further than
the '" parody' of imperial textuality."54 In this introductory
chapter, I have attempted to explore some major critical theories in
order to support my argument for a literature as a socially significant
art and for a possible way to approach Emecheta's work in particular.
My enquiry has led to a synthetic critical perspective grounded on ----------------------------
theories of liberation,
in the expectation that these can offer a useful tool. I have also broached
the issue of a critical theory for African literature, but this issue,
though deserving of further serious exploration, lies beyond the scope
of my study, which is to offer a critical reading and understanding
of Emecheta's fiction. Chapter 2 is devoted to the study of Second-Class
Citizen and In the Ditch in relation to autobiography, self
definition, and displacement. The Bride Price and The Slave
Girl are examined in Chapter 3 within the context of colonialism,
with particular reference to women's subjectivity in a patriarchal society;
this chapter also addresses the question of audience and attitudes towards
traditional culture, and explores double-voiced discourse. With the
study of The Joys of Motherhood and Destination Biafra
in Chapter 4, the focus is on the interrogation of motherhood and women's
subjection and revolt against constrictive societal definitions in colonial
and post-independent Nigeria and their textual framing. In Chapter 5,
Naira Power and Double Yoke are discussed in terms of
popular fiction, not simply to indicate the breadth of Emecheta' s production
but to contribute to the exploration of popular literature as a valid
genre. Finally, in Chapter 6, I examine the extent to which Emecheta
is writing back in The Rape of Shavi and Gwendolen, focusing
on the problematic of home and homecoming, and on intertextuality. Gender
will be at the core of my reading of all these novels. It is hoped that,
by the close of this study, Emecheta' s development as an African and
feminist writer will have been demonstrated in all its range, quality
and relevance.
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