Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo Literature MADHU KRISHNAN
University of Nottingham, UK
[email protected]
ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which literary representations of the sacred feminine have shifted and evolved in anglophone Nigerian-Igbo literature. Beginning with an examination of the precolonial tradition of Mami Wata, or mother water, goddess worship among Igbo communities, this article traces the ways in which colonial imposition both fossilized previously exible standards of gendered discourse and promoted largely Judeo-Christia Judeo-Chr istian n norms for gendered behavior as part of a total politica political, l, economic, and social process of domination, which resulted in an effacement of the sacred feminine femi nine from literary representation. This effacement, effacement, however howe ver,, has been redressed in recent years through a shift in i n engagement engagement that has allowed the anglophone Nigerian-Igbo writer to return to the feminine as a means of voicing an alternative tradition, tradition, turning tur ning away from the colonialist problematic of earlier works. This evolution in discursive representations of gender gender and femininity femin inity is i s explored through readings of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , Nwapa’ Nwapa’ss Efuru , Emecheta’s Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood , and Abani’s GraceLand GraceLand..
T
his essay takes for its starting point a passing reference in Chris Abani’s 2004 novel GraceLand GraceLand.. In a passage buried midway through the narrative, Abani’s protagonist, Elvis, sees the remnants of a faded mural on the side of a public lavatory: On one wall of the toilet, toilet , the landlord, in i n an attempt to clean things t hings up years ago, had painted a mural. Faded now from years of grime and heat, the river scene, with a mermaid holding a baby in one hand and a staff of power in the other and a python draped around her neck, was still d iscernible. A crown hovered
2
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
however, was scratched out. He wondered who had done that, and how they could have endured the stench long enough to do it. (79)
Seemingly incongruous to its positioning among the fecal waste of an overused toilet in Maroko, one of Lagos’s largest and most notorious slums, the faded mural that catches Elvis’s eye becomes a gure apart. For Elvis, unversed in the Igbo tradition he lost with his mother’s death and his removal from his ancestral home in rural Igboland, the mural is unreadable; yet, for those literate in Igbo cosmology, its identity is clear. She is Idemili, goddess of the rivers and creator of the world, one of a pantheon of sea and river goddesses called Mami Wata, a general name used for the hybridized river and sea goddesses popularized across Africa and t he African diaspora in the nineteenth century. Following from this occluded glance, this essay considers Mami Wata, represented by Idemili, amongst others, as an alternative paradigm for discourses of gender in the Nigerian novel. As above, she remains hidden, barely discernible. Still, I argue, the use of the water goddess as a discursive positioning of gender marks a reclamation and re-constitution of precolonial social discourse, standing in sharp contrast to the colonially inected Judeo-Christian gender dichotomies presented in rst- and second-generation Nigerian literatures. This reconstitution of the discourse of gender, I suggest, is emblematic of a shift in address from a literature that seeks recognition from an imperialist West at the expense of a cultural attening, to one that strives towards emergent collectivities that exceed the Manichean divisions of colonialism. The occluded feminine, as such, shifts in its valuations, moving from a literature that seeks a direct engagement, or lack thereof, with the discourse of the divine feminine to one in which it is submerged, becoming an alternative discourse that escapes the connes of Manichean confrontation. Simultaneously, as seen in a reading of Abani’s GraceLand , this new presentation of discursive modes that defy Western conventionalities necessitates a criticism sensitive to voices beyond the center-periphery binary championed in the era of postcoloniality.
1. IDEMILI, MAMI WATA AND THE DIVINE FEMININE Mami Wata, gured as a siren-like gure throughout West Africa and the diaspora in the Americas, is imbued with ambivalence. Assimilated in various guises in the diverse localities in which she is seen, Mami Wata is contradictory, both known as a nineteenth-century invention and signifying, within the Igbo context of the Nigerian writers considered in this paper, a pantheon of water goddesses, long pre-dating colonial intervention as a name given to outsiders, known in Igbo as Nne Mmiri. While the Mami Wata legend bears considerable variance across its manifestations, marking the slippery discourses of postcolonial social identity constructions, in the Nigerian context she has been described as “more than of a divinity. She also embodies and manifests important aspects of womanhood in pre-colonial Igbo culture and society” (Jell-Bahlsen, “Concept of Mammywater” 30), representing both the femme fatale, instrumentalizing masculine discourses
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
3
feminine sacred and the existence of what she terms matrifocality persisted across the African continent, meaning that even the most virulently patriarchal structure was “not monolithically masculine, that is, consisting solely of male symbols and masculine principles and values” (Re-inventing 36). Barred from property ownership and with political rights largely subordinated to those of men, women nonetheless, through their control of the subsistence economy, trade, and the domestic sphere, wielded considerable power (Amadiume, Male Daughters 27; Uchendu 23), placing woman in the precarious position of both internal to and excluded from the sociality. Indeed, it was women who, in 1929, were able to bring about the dissolution of the colonial warrant chief system through their large-scale non-cooperation in what is now called the Women’s War (Mba 68–97), and women, through the purchase of wives and title-taking, could attain a limited range of leadership roles in their communities as male daughters or female husbands, even heading their own clans (see Amadiume, Male Daughters; Ogunyemi 32), despite claims to the contrary (Mba 27). Igbo culture has certainly never been codied into a standard form, and throughout its various communities women’s roles differed considerably, leading to a cultural context in which, as Amadiume explains, traditional descriptors with their static notions of matriarchy and patriarchy have overlooked the more complex social positioning of women ( Male Daughters 189). Even in those societies that followed largely patriarchal systems of descent and property ownership, “relationships traced matrilineally were ritualized and symbolized in cult objects in most Igbo societies” (Amadiume, Male Daughters 177), indicating the centrality of the feminine through the discourses of the maternal gure. As Nkiri Iwechia Nzegwu reminds us, however, even these descriptors of the consanguineal structure of precolonial Igbo society are not without their own difculties, mired, as they are, in conjugal discourses privileging the manwife nuclear dyad (60), which occlude the complex and seemingly contradictory circulation of gendered identity in precolonial Igbo communities. Perhaps most strikingly, women’s roles presented a duality structured around fertility and women’s simultaneous existence as daughters and wives. Daughters, as part of their patrilineal community, were valued for their eventual worth in marriage through the bestowal of their bride price and for their centrality as members of the umuada , or association of daughters of the clan responsible for jurisdiction in the domestic sphere and social policing. Wives, though gured as external to their marital community, gained access to the discourses of fertility, enacting their inuence through this position, their entry into the rites of sexuality (Amadiume, Male Daughters 73–74), and their position within the wives’ association (Nzegwu 39). More so than anything else, it was through her children that a woman might gain inuence within her marital community (Jell-Bahlsen, “Con cept of Mammywater” 32, 36; Bastian 129). Within the context of Nigerian literature, the ability of female characters to give birth is seen as emblematic of womanhood, where sterility and lack of children become a marker of subhumanization, a trend characterized in writing from Chinua Achebe’s foundational works to the writing of Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa and also evident in the primacy of the
4
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
Despite the focus on maternity for African women (see Ogunyemi), biological sterility was itself not without contradictory readings. Women beyond child bearing years, for instance, functioned outside of societal control, fully enmeshed within their matriarchal function through the absence of sexuality in their social roles and the reverence inspired by their age (Uchendu 24), and indeed it was older women who most vigorously defended their positions even upon colonial imposition (Amadiume, Re-inventing 150). Women, perhaps most importantly, could become mothers through the taking of wives and custodial arrangements, separating the discourse of maternity from that of fertility (Nzegwu 175; Nwando Achebe 121). This maternal ideology within Igbo society was underscored by the worship of a range of water goddesses, Idemili amongst them. Manifesting as an enchantingly beautiful mermaid protected by her totem, the python, Idemili was believed by certain Igbo communities, particularly around the market town of Onitsha, to be the mother of creation to whom offerings must be made to promote prosperity and health. Idemili, as Mami Wata, is a gure both “admired and feared,” “demanding and awesome” (Jell-Bahlsen, “Concept of Mammywater” 33). Seen as a celestially beautiful woman, she is a temptress, leading men astray and stealing their wealth and luck through her manipulation of sexuality; yet, as the goddess, she is a protector, bestowing health and fertility upon those who worship at her alter. As the mother of creation, Idemil i and her worship point to a deeply embedded sacrilization of the feminine within Igbo culture and tradition, “represent[ing] a universal theme of the supreme ‘mother water’ goddess” (JellBahlsen, “Mami Wata” 30); at the same time, and as Amadiume explains, Idemili herself was an ambiguous gure, both all-powerful and yet somehow margin alized by the mythic creation of her husband to whom she must answer ( Male Daughters 109) and, in her contemporary imaginings, her need for male followers. As this discussion implies, within the Igbo cultural context the water goddess has long stood as totemic of the ideal feminine in all her ambivalence, marking one way in which the ideals of femininity stand as representative of cultural histories. With the imposition of colonial rule, however, the exibility of women’s roles in Igbo society was replaced with the strictures of Victorian gender ideology, an imposition that, as Chris Abani has noted, is today largely forgotten in discussions around women’s positioning (Aycock, “Interview” 6). Amadiume writes that “the new Western concepts introduced through colonial conquest carried strong sex and class inequalities supported by rigid gender ideology and constructions; a woman was always female regardless of her social achievements or status” ( Male Daughters 119). Institutions such as female husbands and title-taking among women were barred as practices and the worship of the water goddess discouraged, while women found their traditional position within the subsistence economy replaced by the imposition of a cash-based colonial system of trade (Amadiume, Male Daughters 141). Due in part to the lack of women’s organizations among European women and the binary-defying, seemingly incomprehensible exibility of gendered systems within Igbo sociality, Igbo women, as in other African societies, were discouraged from participation in their traditional roles within the commu-
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
5
of power in the public spheres during the post-independence period” (Amadiume, Male Daughters 140), resulting in a system in which women were comparatively delegitimized as social actors and marginalized both politically and economically (Amadiume, Goddess 22). The position of women within Igbo society thus shifted with colonial rule, taking on the qualities of deference in national affairs a nd subordination to the more immediate discourses of nationalism and independence, removing the discourse of the divine femi nine from public life. Of course, the gure of woman and the discourses of the feminine have long had complicating interactions with the discourses of postcoloniality, which are not unique to the Igbo context. Indeed, throughout Africa, because of the demands of liberation and nationalist movements, women’s interests on the continent have been historically neglected in favor of the allegedly more pressing need for racial liberation from the former colonizing powers, following a trend seen nearly uniformly across the postcolonial world. In a broader context, the role of women in Africa, in the words of one critic, “has often been dened by men rather than by women” (Ukadike 127). Through the effective splitting of gender from the wider eld of social relations, the notions of independence, resistance, and gendered equality became discrete and alienating concepts. As numerous theorists have written, under colonialism Africa, along with other colonial holdings in Asia and the Caribbean, was seen in feminine terms. As part of the process of turning the colonies into the Other of Europe, the colonial Other had to be seen as essentially weak, irrational, and feminine to the strong masculine rationality of the metropolitan power. Florence Stratton, for example, has written that colonial writers used “their feminization of Africa and Africans [to contribute] to the justication of the colonial presence in Africa” (Gender 37), while Fanon has characterized the black man, under white domination, as having lost his mascul inity (see Black Skin, White Masks). Geraldine Moane has further expressed the ways in which “a common pattern of regarding the colonized country and the colonized people as ‘feminine’ occurs. Discourses of femininity involving weakness and emotionality were invoked to reinforce the inferiority of the colonized country and people” (33). As these comments suggest, colonialism led to a social perspective in which the feminine was demonized and the masculine valorized, leading to the suppression of discourses touched by femininity on the public stage. Operating in collusion with colonialism, male judicial authority strove to efface the feminine from public participation, heightening the impact of cultural imposition (Nzegwu 2–3). Nationalist movements thus sought to re-masculinize their global image, reorienting themselves as equally strong along with Europe through what Nandy has termed “hypermasculization” (7–11). As part of both of these movements, the mother Africa trope was recongured as one that “operates against the inter ests of women, excluding them, implicitly if not explicitly, from authorship and citizenship” through a construction of woman as both emblem of the nation and keeper of its cultural purity (Stratton, Gender 40; Moane 50). This has occurred via what Florence Stratton has termed the discourses of the “pot of culture” and the “sweep of history” (“Periodic” 112), which she resolves as the tendency for writers
6
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
central to the preservation of the state and relegated to the margins of the body politic” (Sharpley-Whiting 58). In other terms, the feminine has been described by one critic as nding itself positioned by nationalism in the guise of “Woman as victim and goddess simultaneously” as this nationalism seeks to ideologically compensate for its inability “to produce its own history in response to its inner sense of identity . . .” (Radhakrishnan 85). Even as it addresses itself to an ingroup of national subjects as “authentic heritage,” the language of an anticolonial nationalism that must also seek its legitimacy as modernizing nds its modern articulation hostage to exogenous Western discursive norms. The problem, then, is a discursive pressure put on anticolonial nationalism—a pressure to which it succumbs whether it produces Woman as victim or goddess—to reproduce as rational and national the colonially imposed “modern” binary structurations in which gender is normalized. In a schizophrenic response to the colonial condition—to be “authentic” and “modern” simultaneously—nationalist discourse and practice ends up denying and effacing the heterogeneous nature of multiply articulated subject positionings. In literature, this schizophrenia is manifested in the impulse to represent the heterogeneity of Igbo culture, one which, before colonial imposition, certainly could not be seen as unied in any real sense (Harneit-Sievers 16), and the impulse to write back to the effacing structures of colonial imposition that place the traditional under erasure. This, in turn, has led to a conundrum for the Nigerian writer engaging with the discourses of gender, seen primarily through the critical confusion that readings of gender in Nigerian literature have produced and the evolution of the feminine and its traces within the body of that literature.
2. ACHEBE AND FIRST-GENERATION REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER The ambivalence brought up by the conuence of the ambiguous and doubly articulated role of the feminine, colonial imposition and the assertion, in Africa, of a right to an equal humanity might be best exemplied in the treatment of and reaction to the feminine in Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart. Certainly, much has been written about this foundational novel of African literature, and much of this established criticism deals, at least to some extent, with Achebe’s treatment of women in his representation of traditional Igbo society. As a novel of such standing and one that has inspired such a vast body of critical response, to discuss Achebe’s novel is neither an easy task nor one to be taken lightly. Regardless of the difculty inherent in approaching a novel so widely canonized, its treatment of the sacred feminine is crucial to a broader understanding of the ambivalences of gendered discourses for two reasons. First, as the father of African literature, Achebe, along with his novels, has been taken as the purveyor of Igbo cultural norms, a situation in which his texts, despite their status as works of ction, have gained sociological and anthropological currency (Nnaemeka 140). This fact, along with the foundational status of Achebe’s work, is itself directly responsible
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
7
alternately as a classic misogynist who demonstrated a type of “hyper-masculinization” (Whittaker and Msiska 11; Jeyifo 183; Arndt 190), or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, as particularly sensitive to and aware of women’s role in Igbo society and the danger implicit to forgetting them (Edame Egar 69; Ogunyemi 18). These seemingly contradictory positions may be made comprehensible through a closer examination both of the workings of the feminine in Achebe’s novel and in its reception across literary criticism. As alluded to above, Things Fall Apart is frequently taken at face value as an accurate and authentic representation of Igbo society, evidenced in views that the work is intended “to ll gaps in historical reconstruction” (Ogede ix) and demon strates the validity of precolonial Igbo cultural codications (Okechukwu 13). As such, the portrayal of women in Achebe’s novel is seen as a sign of the barbarism and patriarchal cruelty of Igbo civilizations. Certainly, witnessing Okonkwo’s blatant disregard for the laws of Ani, the earth goddess, along with his violence against his wives and children and continual denigration of the feminine as diametrically opposed to strong, masculine virtue, it is easy to see where critics nd in the novel a picture of a misogynist society in which women function as scarcely more than slaves, marginalized and subjugated. Under this line of reasoning, even the priestess Chielo, voice to the Oracle of the Hills, is regarded as an example of the despotic and cruel character of women in a society that offers them no regard, and the existence of a priest, rather than priestess, for central deity Ani is viewed as another subjugation of feminine power to male authority (Cobham 176; Okpewho 26). Yet, what these commentaries seem to neglect is the equally central role of the maternal feminine within the Umoaa of Things Fall Apart. It is to his motherland that Okonkwo must return, banished from the patrilineage for his accidental murder of the son of Ezeudu. Indeed, precolonial Igbo society, while largely patrilocal and patrilineal in its formation, held a special place for children of a matrilineage, called nwanwa , who, while members of their fatherland, or umunna , retained special rights and responsibilities towards their motherland. Interestingly, however, Achebe’s novelization of Okonkwo’s return to the nwanwa neglects to include their ceremonial aspects, which, quite saliently, included a requirement that male nwanwa seeking refuge in his motherland take on feminine responsibilities, including cooking on feast days (Jell-Bahlsen, Water Goddess 147). Along with the function of the motherland as that where Okonkwo is able to reconstitute his lost riches as his place of refuge, the notion of the divine female becomes crucial to Achebe’s narrative at its climax. Immediately preceding the confrontation with the missionaries and district commissioners in which, indeed, everything for Okonkwo would fall apart, is the killing, by fanatical Christian Enoch, of the python, totem of Idemili and her rst child. It is particularly important here to note that Idemili, in contrast to Ani, represents the dynamic and malleable aspects of Igbo cosmology through the life-giving and life-taking capabilities of the sacred feminine. Ani, the goddess foregrounded throughout Things Fall Apart , is instead associated with the static and, ironically, the masculine through her implication
8
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
“were more interested in the Earth than in water they could not control” (JellBahlsen, Water Goddess 345). Still, by guring the crucial moment of irreparable violation of the community as a crime against Idemili, the secret and sacred tongue of the maternal divine reasserts itself in the novel. In precolonial Igbo tradition, the notion of an entirely masculinized or entirely feminized society stands as alien. Instead, as Sabine Jell-Bahlsen repeatedly demonstrates, the male and female were gured as halves of a whole, operating to temper and balance the other as interdependent discourses (Nzegwu 15). Indeed, within political organization in precolonial Igbo societies, the masculine okonko depicted by Achebe was tempered by the society of ekwe, or titled women who, along with the powerful women’s council, undertook responsibility for a range of domestic affairs and personal grievances. Yet, in Things Fall Apart , the umuada is noticeably absent, as are the society of wives, titled women, and any interaction between co-wives. Despite these omissions and inaccuracies, it would be unfair to view Achebe as historically ignorant or a misogynist seeking to efface the traces of feminine power within his society. Instead, following the thoughtful analysis of Rhonda Cobham, I would suggest that the transgression of the sacred maternal and the effacement of the divine discourse of the feminine in Things Fall Apart is a direct result of Achebe’s mode of address and intended audience. It is by now well known that Achebe’s early writing was inspired by his devastating encounter with the colonialist works of Conrad and Cary (Whittaker and Msiska 16–20; Ogede 115), and Things Fall Apart has frequently been read as an African reassertion of identity and humanity in the face of denigrating portrayals of the socalled Dark Continent. As such, Achebe’s intended audience, in this work, stands largely as the colonialists who have dismissed Africa and Africans wholesale. To reach this audience, then, two narrative effects come to the fore. As Cobham notes, critically, Achebe chooses representations of Igbo society that are most easily digested by a Western audience and its preference for systems dened in binaries. Compounding this effect, Achebe, like his fellows in the nationalist era, subsumes the question of gendered oppression such that women “recede into the ground which enables the fgure of Okonkwo and his father and son to achieve their representation prominence” (Jeyifo 183) through a category error in which women must become subordinated to the seemingly separate and more-pressing concerns of nationalism. This, in turn, leads to erroneous categorizations of that society as rigid or misogynist (Simola 148), putting the feminine under erasure in a manner analogous to Mami Wata’s own appropriation and dissemination by the discourses of postcoloniality. Yet, as outlined above, the effaced feminine remains in traces, seen most strongly through Idemili and her ultimate driving of the narrative’s nal trajectory through what has been called the “studied ontological balance between male and female principles” underlying the novel (Okpewho 26).
3. WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FEMINIST DOUBLE BIND The problem of address and its implication in the representation and reception
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
9
a similar conundrum when addressing the divine feminine. This becomes visible particularly in these writers’ works as well as the often contradictory critical responses both women, as writers, evoke. In the works of Flora Nwapa, for example, Idemili, called by one of her many alternate, locality-specic names, Ogbuide, proves central to her characters’ trajectories. At the same time, Nwapa’s representation of the water goddess and her cult remains highly selective, serving more as a deconstruction that favors certain aspects of the divine mother than a faithful representation of her status in traditional Igbo society. In Efuru , a narrative in which the eponymous heroine remains tied to movements dened by men (Nnaemeka 144), for instance, the water goddess is depicted as a relatively obscure force, despite the fact that, as Jell-Bahlsen demonstrates, her worship was “the major reference point” for communities under her inuence. Indeed, Nwapa’s novel works through a series of manipulations of traditional water goddess worship, including the depiction of her cult as entirely female, forcibly celibate and barren, suppressing the feminine in order to create a narrative that directly writes back to older portrayals of women in Nigerian literature. As is now well known, Flora Nwapa’s career as a writer began in response to her male peers of the rst generation of Nigerian literature where, like her fellow women writers, Nwapa “showed close afnities with [her] male counterparts” (Nnaemeka 140), and her initial foray into writing was both supported and legitimized by Achebe’s approval (Umeh 7). As such, despite claims that women’s writing was intended “to reclaim the tradition of female history and stories” (Jeyifo 190) and “intended primarily for women who mostly bear burdens” (Ogunyemi 4), Nwapa’s work may be read as a response to the masculinized discourses of her peers whose erasure of the feminine, in the name of nationalism, she sought to redress through a partial representation of tradition in which the feminine would be erased of its contradictions, instead celebrated as equally worthy of individuation and progression as the male. At the same time, this erasure and reconguration of the feminine has led to a critical practice that, unable to make coherent its conicting discourses and modes of address, seems incapable of coming to terms with Nwapa’s work, alternatively condemning and celebrating her (see Chineze Chukukere 118–20). With Nwapa, then, the water goddess is instrumentalized as a signier of independence separate from male inuence through this redeployment that nonetheless confounds her originary primacy in Igbo cultural tradition. While Nwapa is undoubtedly the mother of Nigerian literature, secondgeneration writer Buchi Emecheta remains the best-known Nigerian woman writer and, indeed, among the best-known African writers of either gender. Like Nwapa, from whom she took a great deal of inspiration, Emecheta presents a confounded view of the divine maternal, most strikingly in her fth novel, criti cally deemed “a culminating achievement in the literary career of Buchi Emecheta” (Chineze Chukukere 185), The Joys of Motherhood. The novel explicitly grapples with the degradation of the Nigerian woman through the dual forces of patriarchal oppression and colonial imposition in what has been seen as a Manichean system of subjugation (Jita Allan 104) seemingly conating two distinct discourses,
10
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
inviting sympathy for its heroine from Western feminist readers (Fishburn 106; Allen 104–16; Chineze Chukukere 165). At the same time, however, historical inaccuracies have been noted (Cobham 176; Arndt 286), most strikingly through Nnu Ego’s failure, in a narrative set as contemporary with the Women’s War of 1929 , to engage with the traditional forms of female agency and solidarity available to her (Nnaemeka 150; Arndt 286; Ezeigbo 17). Following this line of argumentation, then, Nnu Ego’s predicament could be seen equally as caused by her own denial of her dual role as wife to Nnaife, but daughter to Agbadi, instead attening herself into a single-dimensioned and essentialized notion of femininity where colonialism has thoroughly effaced any positives from tradition (Stratton, “Grave” 152; Arndt 358–59). While traces of the divine feminine and feminine agency remain, notably through Ona and Azuka’s abilities to leverage their roles as male daughter and center of subsistence economy, respectively, as well as the importance of Nnu Ego’s chi , or destiny-bestowing personal deity, a riverine follower of the water goddess, The Joys of Motherhood , like Achebe’s novel before it, betrays a confusion in its form of address, leading to the erasure of the divine feminine. Like Achebe, Emecheta, too, seems to be writing to a split audience, both Western, through her engagement of forms of femininity recognizable to and sympathetic for a EuroAmerican feminist audience, and male, through her sense of writing back to the gure of woman as represented in male-authored Nigerian texts. As such, the text falls prey to “the temptation to limit the roles it ascribes to women in traditional society to those ‘invented’ by Achebe” (Cobham 178). At the same time, again, as with Achebe, Mami Wata again proves her uidity through the traces she leaves on the text. Despite this, however, the trope of the water goddess and precolonial feminine agency has been largely neglected in critical readings of the text, which instead respond to the foregrounded voice of the novel that encourages an erasure under the imposition of colonial rule and its attendant discourses.
4. GRACELAND AND A RETURN TO THE VERNACULAR All three authors, Achebe, Nwapa and Emecheta, demonstrate that, through their reconstitution of address, the powerful discourse of the feminine available in traditional Igbo society and represented by Idemili is instead forced under erasure, replaced with an incomplete notion of the feminine that takes its inspiration from colonialist binary norms of gendered relations. By speaking to their oppressors, rather than to tradition, all three novelists create narratives that present essentialized pictures of the feminine, despite the lasting traces of Idemili remnant in all three texts. On the surface, GraceLand too appears to fall prey to the masculin ized ambiguities surrounding feminine discourses in Nigerian literature, seemingly subordinating its female characters to the ultimate narrative trajectory of its male protagonist, while engaging in a dichotomizing view of femininity that transforms women into mere signiers of sexuality. Yet, GraceLand presents an alternative method of feminine depiction to the cases I have traced above, more clearly resist-
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
11
may reasonably be viewed as a work where “conformity to gender roles weaves throughout the novel as a force destructive to both men and women, denying women access to full personhood and robbing men of the ability to express tenderness and love for each other” (Aycock, “Becoming” 13), read closely, and with an attention to the seemingly silenced voices running t hroughout, the text reveals itself as a trickster, to use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s term (4–5), transforming the feminine into a secret tongue that permeates the work as a whole, buttressing its development and ultimately driving its outcome. Like the water goddess who, “controlling entry and exit into and from this world” (Jell-Bahlsen, “Concept of Mammywater” 31), impels the trajectories of earthly life, the h idden feminine in GraceLand impels its narrative trajectory, and, similarly like the water goddess, “elusive and slippery as the liquid element itself” (Jell-Bahlsen, “Concept of Mammywater” 32), throughout GraceLand , woman appears not as a singular gure but in many guises ranging from the hypersexualization of Elvis’s cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing to the maternal gures of Oye, his grandmother, and Beatrice, his mother, representing in narrative a dually written ambivalence towards woman taken from this tradition. Women appear as both the maternal producer of life and the sexualized female, but this very duality is continually transgressed through contrapuntal acts of resistance. Seemingly effaced, the feminine instead functions in the guise of masquerade, turning the text in on itself and mocking its limits as a return to a vernacular tradition that puts the feminine at the fore, lifting it from its historical effacement. The importance of the feminine occurs in three motifs that both drive and motivate Abani’s text, demonstrating the ways in which, as an alternative code that dees assimilation into the dominant code of the novel, the water-goddess trope may provide an alternative reading of gender. In GraceLand , this is maintained through Elvis’s fascination with drag play and makeup, the gure of his mother’s journal and his memories of his mother and grandmother, Oye, who, as Novak has point out, represent the alternative tradition of women’s histories in the text (47). These histories serve as the governing logic of the text that dees easy uncoding and therefore resists the closure and appropriation seen in the critical assimilation of Achebe’s and Emecheta’s works above. Early in the pages of GraceLand , the narrative describes Elvis, alone in his room, as he puts on his mask of makeup, recounting his meticulous process of applying foundation, mascara and lipstick as part of his costume as an Elvis Presley impersonator (Abani 77–78). Elvis’s transformation, through a play of drag, into Elvis Presley, a white man who, himself, enacted a feminized drag performance of black culture, has been critically described as his attempt to inhabit an alternative personality, his means of escaping the stiing connes of tradition and his search for a more uid working of gender and race through his assimilation within the symbol of white America (Adéèkó; Dunton; Dawson). Yet, it soon becomes clear, the trappings of femininity and whiteness represent not so much a desire for an alternate identity as a desire for an idealized “authentic” identity rooted in the foreclosed past which haunts Elvis. Drag and play in makeup transform from acts of racialized and gendered transgression into acts of recuperation, attempts
12
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
Beatrice laughed and set the plastic disk on the record player. The needle scratched the edge a few times as though undecided, then launched into the throaty call of Elvis Presley. Beatrice grabbed Elvis and began to dance with him. Her illness made her movements slow, although it wasn’t hard to see they were once uid and smooth. (42)
The narrative makes it apparent that Elvis Presley and the whiteness that represents him function as metonyms for Elvis’s childhood under his mother’s protective gaze, linking his play to a striving towards the effaced feminine. It is she who introduces Elvis to this music, the joy of dancing and indeed who bequeaths him his namesake. As a child unable to understand the cancer that is killi ng her, Elvis thus constructs a conception of self that encloses himself, his mother, and Elvis Presley in a homogeneous relationship of holistic identication, turning the American star into a signier of Beatrice and all her loss represents in Elvis’s young life. For Elvis, the progression from his mother’s laughter to the scratching of the needle to the “throaty call” of Elvis Presley operate together as the totality within which he identies his idealized youth. At this young age, then, Elvis is interpellated into a social stratum in which the inclusion he seeks is associated with the feminine sphere of his mother’s presence, linking the past to the present and complicating the discursive circulation of gender and race in his drag play. Later in his narrative, Elvis expressly ruminates on his desire for comfort through the mask of the feminine, watching his aunt put on makeup: “He was amazed not just at how much makeup made her aware of herself, but by how much he wanted to wear t hat mask. [. . .] He envied her ability to prepare a face for the world. To change it any time she liked. Be different people just by a gentle hint of shadow here, a dash of color there” (Abani 173). For Elvis, the trappings of femininity become the signiers of a holistic communal inclusion where, under the literal mask of makeup, he may return to the unity of self that he only experienced when with his mother. This link is further developed as dancing and make-up, in the wake of his mother’s death, become for Elvis the metonymic method through which to surpass his grief; as an attainable pursuit, drag and performance replace the unattainable goal of being reunited with the mother who he admits to forgetting (Abani 104). This search is echoed in Elvis’s obsession with his mother’s journal, described in the narrative as a talisman of sorts, part of his daily attire as that which he keeps close in an effort to make sense both of his own existence and of his mother’s life. Beatrice’s journal serves as a site of mystication for Elvis. As the sole inheritance he holds from his deceased mother, the book and its incomprehensible collection of recipes never used and herbal cures taken from his grandmother stands as the opaque code which Elvis seeks to understand in order to nd meaning in her life and, by extension, his own. Novak writes that “the journal offers a record of the past very different from that which focuses on the large-scale events of public life”, serving, within the narrative, as a signier of “the traumatic loss of women’s traditional culture in Nigeria and of the way in which that story remains isolated from the narrative of neocolonial trauma that is Elvis’s story” (47), tacitly positioning the book along with the other suppressed
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
13
strands of “neocolonial trauma” and “the traumatic loss of women’s traditional culture” are not able to remain discrete; instead, through Elvis’s dual implication in both, where the lost feminine is what both drives and confounds him, they become intertwined aspects of a story told in multiple voices and contradictory codes. Expanding from these comments, the journal may be seen in a broader light as exhibiting not just the suppressed world of the traditional feminine, but an entire foreclosed past towards which Elvis strives, indicative of the precolonial tradition as a whole. The suppressed voice of the feminine and the tradition it expresses reassert themselves through their very resistance to an easy decoding, becoming the wedge that prevents an easy narrative closure; instead, the effaced feminine forces the narrative upon itself, as it seeks to decode that which is decodable and speak in tongues not its own, as Elvis himself soon discovers (Abani 46). Finding that the book fails to connect him with his mother’s spirit, Elvis, by the narrative’s end, can admit that he never learned anything at all from the journal, musing that “[i]t had never revealed his mother to him. Never helped him understand her, or his life, or why anything had happened the way it had. What was the point? Nothing is ever resolved, he thought. It just changes” (Abani 320). The journal’s open-ended signiers remain beyond him, their rhetorical play exceeding his comprehension, foreclosed in the same ambivalent space as his own existence in a fragmented Nigerian society. Rather than serving as the silenced feminine narrative described by Novak, then, the journal in its silence embodies the trickster; the signication of Beatrice’s journal shifts, this time becoming a type of narrative mockery that refuses entry and comprehension, instead forcing an acknowledgement of its irreducible difference on a liminal cultural boundary and the continual frustration of any attempts to view the text as a passive repository of meanings swallowed by a dominant masculinity. The characters of Beatrice and Oye, Elvis’s beloved grandmother, materialize what Abani hints in his narrative when Elvis catches an askew glimpse of a mural of Idemili through their maternal power as matrons. Novak has argued that the feminine voice is cast aside in GraceLand , citing both Beatrice’s and Oye’s deaths as evidence (47), echoing Abani’s own comments that “[w]omen are the terrain over which masculinity is charted” (Aycock, “Interview” 9); yet both Beatrice and Oye remain imbued in the narrative through the lasting inuence of the maternal gure on Elvis and its implication with his striving towards selfhood. Through the very primacy of Oye and Beatrice in Elvis’s self-construction and the potency of their quasi-magical protection over him, the lost discourse of the feminine nds its reassertion in the narrative as an alternative code that eludes domination and appropriation within the text. The gure of woman, represented by the mother gure, remains within the text, as its driving force, yet out of its reach and trans gressing its limits. It should be noted that it is precisely this alternative discourse of matriarchy that prompts Elvis’s ultimate trajectory in the novel, motivating his movements and remaining with him, through his mother’s possessions, even at his nal moment of ight. The gure of woman is thus less suppressed within the narrative than spoken in terms outside of its dominant idiom; while it appears
14
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
It is of course possible to see in GraceLand a female gure that is entirely dif ferent through the portrayal of sexualized violence and the seeming expendability of sexualized female characters, most directly through Elvis’s relationships with his cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing. These women have been described as the collateral damage necessary for Elvis’s narrative progress; yet, at the same time, they function in a manner akin to the maternal gure, destabilizing the narra tive’s codes and ultimately motivating Elvis’s own journey. Throughout GraceLand , indeed, Elvis’s memories of Efua are nearly equal to those of his mother, and it is through these ashes that Elvis nally comes to acknowledge the very constructed quality of the impossible past which impels him. Recalling his witness to Efua’s rape by her own father, the man who would later rape him, becomes, for Elvi s, the impetus to break with the truncated signiers of authenticity and essentialized identities. Echoing this formative experience, Elvis’s inability to stop his fellow caretaker, Okon’s, extortion of sex from Blessing returns Elvis to the feelings of impotence and shame that his inability to act have evidenced throughout his life. Like Efua, whose plaintive gaze at Elvis during her rape marks the lack at the core of his being, Blessing looks towards Elvis conveys “shame” and “pity,” complicating a simplistic reading of this scene as one that capitulates back to the traditional use of sex work as a means for advancement in Nigerian literature. Through her sense of pity, Blessing somehow objecties Elvis, returning him to the liminal through his inability to adapt to the rigid standards of his society. Certainly, it would not be without reason to interpret these women’s sexual exploitation and the violence against them as an objectication of women at the service of Elvis’s growing being-in-the-world. Simultaneously, however, it is precisely these memories and incidents that move Elvis throughout the narrative and destabilize his static notions of self, community, and memory, suggesting that, running in parallel to the violation of the fertile woman is an altered and truncated agency that effects its boundaries on Elvis. It is this partially written agency that enforces the fragmentation that drives him on his quest for a self-in-community and leading to his ultimate ight to America. Elvis’s knowledge of what these young women know and have seen highlights the lack of totalizing identications from this foreclosed space of femininity, an impotence that haunts Elvis to his nal ight to America and exposes the very constructedness of memory, community and self. This unresolved feminine disallows a tidy ending to Elvis’s story; instead, his, too, is a story to be displaced, unnished and unheard in its totality.
5. CONCLUSIONS The gure of woman and the discourse of femininity, as traced throughout this essay, demonstrate that, speaking in a code inassimilable to dominant, Manichean currents, the feminine confounds an easy or direct reading of any of these authors’ work. Tradition, displaced and re-congured through its interaction with the competing discourses of colonial imposition, masculinity, and nationalism, is instead transgured, shifted, and continually (re)appropriated. At the same time,
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
15
Abani’s novel demonstrates the fecundity of an unashamed return to the vernacular and a re-presentation of tradition that exceeds the strictures of postcoloniality. Mami Wata has been described as a site of instability, inhabiting a space both prior to the colonial encounter, as a repository of cultural signiers, and one inextricably altered by the imposition of outside forces (Gore and Nevadomsky 62). Rife with irreducible differences that were nonetheless partially effaced by transcultural circulation and external appropriations, the water goddess thus serves as an allegory for the shifts in representation in the Nigerian novel, as writers move from seeking to legitimize their cultural identications to an outside audience historically dismissive, to a sense of reclamation of tradition that strives, instead, towards emergent and heterogeneous collectivities that surpass the binaries of male/female, Africa/Europe, and colonizer/colonized, representing both the multiply articulated and often conictual discourses of the feminine and the space of liminality in which novel identications are enacted. Missy L. Bastian has written that in the 1980s, the tradition of Mami Wata and the water goddesses became particular prevalent among the Igbo-speaking populations of southern Nigeria: In the grip of powerful feelings of alterity and t hinking that their lives are out of control, Igbo-speaking people turn to the foundations of their social experience to socialize and connect with these others. Kinship is familiar as both a comfort and a discomfort—and, as such, offers a discursive space where ambiguous relations can be played out and made gures for creative play. Perhaps what can help draw together such disparate worlds as those of spirit and humanity can help explain and knit up, for the Igbo, some of their fractured experience(s) of modernity as well. (131)
It is of little surprise, then, that in GraceLand , a novel set during this very time of tumultuous change and following the tortured transition of its protagonist from an idealistic child to a disillusioned adolescent, the hidden discourse of the water goddess should prove so crucial to the narrative’s underpinnings in a way that the circumstances of colonial imposition and cultural imperialism disallowed earlier works. While functioning within the landscape of Nigerian literature and its historical lineage as a body of work, the water goddess is re-appropriated as a means of insisting on the heterogeneity and dynamism of precolonial traditions that, though irrevocably altered by the passage of time and the imposition of colonial cultural context, remains retrievable and itself fertile. The feminine emerges out from erasure as a tongue spoken in a distinct code uncontainable within the dominant discourse of the Nigerian novel, and instead reclaims its centrality as a marker of the ambivalence which marks the postcolonial Nigerian condition, and, through this re-emergence, the tradition within Nigerian literature itself reasserts itself as a discourse both irreducible to and liberated from outside imposition. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and Universitas
16
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
WORKS CITED Abani, Chris. GraceLand. New York: Picador, 2004. Print. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print. Achebe, Nwando. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland 1900 –1960. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005. Print. Adéèkó, Adélékè. “Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination.” Global South 2.2 (2008): 10–30. Print. Allen, Tuzyline Jita. Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995. Print. Amadiume, I. Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: Af rican Women, Culture, Power and Democracy. London: Zed, 2000. Print. . Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. London: Zed, 1997. Print. . Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed, 1987. Print. Arndt, Susan. African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality . Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1998. Print. Aycock, Amanda. “Becoming Black and Elvis: Transnational and Performative Identity in the Novels of Chris Abani.” Safundi 10.1 (2009): 11–25. Print. . “An Interview with Chris Abani.” Safundi 10.1 (2009): 1–10. Print. Bastian, Misty L. “Married in the Water Spirit Kin and Other Afictions of Modernity in Southeastern Nigeria.” Journal of Religion in Africa 27.2 (1997): 116–34. Print. Chineze Chukukere, Gloria. Gender Voices and Choices: Redefning Women in Contempo rary African Fiction. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1995. Print. Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. London: Routledge, 1999. 34–56. Print. Chukwuma, Helen. “Positivism and the Female Crisis: The Novels of Buchi Emecheta.” Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective. Ed. Henrietta C. Otokunefor and Obiageli C. Nwodo. Lagos: Malthouse, 1989. 2–18. Print. Cobham, Rhonda. “Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart.” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook , Ed. Isidore Okpewho. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 165–80. Print. Dawson, Ashley. “Surplus City: Structural Adjustment, Self-Fashioning, and Urban Insurrection in Chris Abani’s Graceland.” Interventions 11.1 (2009): 16–34. Print. Dunton, Chris. “Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words.” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (2008): 68–78. Print. Edame Egar, Emmanuel. The Rhetorical Implications of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Lanham: UP of America, 2000. Print. Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. London: Heinemann, 1979. Print. Ezeigbo, Theodora Akachi. “Tradition and the African Female Writer: The Example of Buchi Emecheta.” Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Ed. Marie Umeh. Trenton: Africa World P, 1996. 5–25. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2008. Print.
MADHU KRISHNAN
�
17
Gore, Charles, and Joseph Nevadomsky. “Practice and Agency in Mammy Wata Worship in Southern Nigeria.” African Arts 30.2 (1997): 60–69. Print. Harneit-Sievers, Axel. Construction of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2006. Print. Jell-Bahlsen, Sabine. “The Concept of Mammywater in Flora Nwapa’s Novels.” Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995): 30–41. Print. , The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake. Trenton: Africa World P, 2008. Print. Jeyifo, Biodun. “Okonkwo and his Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse.” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. Ed. Isidore Okpewho. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 181–200. Print. Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1990–1965). Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1982. Print. Moane, Geraldine. Gender and Colonialism. Basingstoke: MacMillan. 1999. Print. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism . New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983. Print. Nnaemeka, Obioma. “From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re)Inscription of Womanhood.” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (1994): 137–57. Print. Novak, Amy. “Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel 40.1/2 (2008): 31–51. Print. Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966. Print. Nzegwu, Nkiri Iwechia. Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philoso phy of Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006. Print. Ogede, Ode. Achebe and the Politics of Representation . Trenton: Africa World P, 2001. Print. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. Africa Wo/man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996. Print. Okechukwu, Chinwe Christiana. Achebe the Orator: The Part of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe’s Novels. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. Print. Okpewho, Isidore. “Introduction.” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. Ed. Isidore Okpewho. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 3–53. Print. Radhakrishnan, R. “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity.” Nationalisms and Sexualities. Ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Routledge, 1992. 77–95. Print. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1998. Print. Simola, Raisa. World Views in Chinua Achebe’s Works. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995. Print. Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. . “‘Periodic Embodiments’: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing.” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990): 111–26. Print. . “The Shallow Grave: Archetypes of Female Experience in African Fiction.” Research in African Literature 19.2 (1988): 143–69. Print.
18
�
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES � VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1
Ukadike, N. Frank. “Reclaimi ng Images of Women in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora.” Redirecting the Gaze. Ed. Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 127–48. Print. Umeh, Marie. “Introduction: Historicizing Flora Nwapa.” Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Marie Umeh. Trenton: Africa World P, 1998. 1–24. Print. Whittaker, David, and Mpalive-Hangson Msiska. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
�
�
�
�
�
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
