As the world celebrated the International Women’s Day, Art & Ideas looks at the prominent women who have contributed to the changing perception of women in literature and have set the path for women writers coming after them.
This week, the world is celebrating the International Women’s Day, to look at the contribution women have been making and could make to the development of the world.
It is a fitting time to look at the contribution of women to Nigerian literature.
Literature has been a potent force in the portrayal of peoples and ideas. The female demography has always fascinated writers over centuries for very different reasons and their portrayal in literature has been a subject of great debate. Who will forget in a hurry characters like Anna Karenina in Toltsoy’s classic or Madam Bovary in Flaubert’s masterpiece or even Hester Pryne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and even to a less extent Lolita in Nabakov’s masterpiece.
In Nigerian literature, finding its feet after the colonial disruption of the oral story telling traditions, women too, like their male counterparts, had to struggle to find their place in literature. And if the early portrayal of women was not considered positive, or were deemed passive, especially considering the powerful domineering roles women have played in pre-colonial African societies, either as the powerful queen mothers of the Kanem Borno empire, or the fearless Dahomey worriors or even the legendary conqueror queen, Amina, among others.
The portrayal, as a writer and academic Razinat Mohammed noted in her essay, Female Representation in Nigerian Literature;
“The society had no time to waste with the womenfolk whose significant contributions to communal matters centered around singing and dancing during ceremonies. The women did not fit much into the heroic cadre of the society at that time and, therefore, were not subject of literary imagination or creativity. Indeed, in such a society, being a woman was like being sentenced to a life of insignificance and subsidiary existence. Perhaps, it is for this reason that Okonkwo’s mother hardly exists while his father, Unoka, an efulefu or worthless man who has never cleared even a footpath of his own, receives a mention even if it was a juxtaposition to his son.”
She argues that this portrayal is tied to the patriarchal nature of traditional society. These portrayals were common place and only started to take on different perspectives when women started telling their own stories in their own voices.
“In the novels of Flora Nwapa, Nigeria’s first published female novelist, and the plays of Zulu Sofola, we see women as backbones of families by actively engaging in commerce and agriculture. More often than not, women are the stabilizing force in men’s life, a fact that only began to rear up its head when women began to tell their own stories,” Dr. Mohammed wrote.
The birth of the feminine pen warriors
A lot has been said of the pioneer generation of modern Nigerian writers. The dominance of the likes of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Amos Totuola, Cyprian Ekwensi and others likes was reflective of the realities of life in the time. Male dominated women were relegated to the background.
When female writers began to stir, their male counterparts had attained international repute. With the emergence of Achebe as an internationally acclaimed writer in the late 1950s and colonisation folding up across the continent, the time was right for a female voice to challenge the single story of the continent.
Flora Nwapa
Up steps the pioneer woman Flora Nwapa (1931-1993). In 1961 she became the first African woman to be published in English language and to an international audience with her book Efuru, bursting open the gate for women writers to come through.
Her titular character Efuru, and Idu in her subsequent novel, were strong female characters who took life by the horns, presenting women as enduring figures in the face of adversity and resourceful in lean days.
Something can be said about the portrayal of Efuru the character. She is a strong beautiful woman who elopes with a poor farmer she met and fell in love with. He turns out to be a useless man and abandons her and her child in favour of another woman. The challenges Nwapa throws at her character and the failure of her first and second marriages to men who felt intimidated by her strength was typical of the fate of women who choose to show strength. Efuru had to struggle with issues of absconding husbands, childlessness and the societal expectations of women in society.
What Nwapa succeeded in doing in her novel was to put words to the travails of women, to name them essentially and in essence capture the human condition or in this specific instance, the women condition.
Ironically, Nwapa never identified herself as a feminist but as a womanist. But whatever she called herself, her story and influence spread across generations, emboldening women writers to write about women issues.
Zulu Sofola
While Nwapa was blazing the trail as a novelist, and she would become a publisher later in her life, Zulu Sofola was undoubtedly the queen of Nigerian playwrights. The Delta-born Zulu was educated in the US, where she spent her adolescence and early adulthood.
Sofola returned to Nigeria in 1966 and became a lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan where she obtained her PhD. Later she would teach at the Unviersity of Ilorin.
What made Sofola stand out of course, apart from her dancing and acting skills, were her numerous plays, the most famous being The Wizard of the Law (1975) and Wedlock of the Gods (1972),The Deer Hunter and the Hunter’s Pearl was published in 1969.
Sofola published over a dozen plays before her death in 1995.Her plays explore historical tragedy and domestic comedy and incorporate elements of “magic, myth and ritual to examine conflicts between traditionalism and modernism in which male supremacy persists.”
Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017)
Perhaps non of the women on the list above has distinguished herself as an ardent feminist as Buchi Emeta has. She was not afraid to confront patriarch in her works having been subjected to its subjugation for most of her early life.
Being kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school pricked a nerve and being married to a man who famously destroyed her manuscript fuelled her creativity and her perspective on how women could use literature as a weapon. The Bride Price would have been her first novel, but her husband in a fit of rage had destroyed the text. It took her another five years to re-write it and it was finally published in 1976.
Her novels like Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979) all echo, in resonating tones. the issues of female subjugation and had at the heart of the stories, strong women who refused to roll over and die in the face of this challenges.
Her themes of female slavery, motherhood and female independence have gained currency worldwide and the fact that these issues were largely drawn from her personal experience, being married at 16 and finally divorced at 22. No surprise that only a few weeks ago, women and academics gathered in London, where Emecheta had lived most of her life to celebrate her life, one year after her death.
Zainab Alkali (b. 1950)
Zainab Alkali is considered the first female from northern Nigeria to be published in English when her gut-wrenching novel, The Stillborn was published in 1984.
She followed up on that with her 1987 sophomore, The Virtuous Woman, and Cobwebs & Other Stories (1997) among others.
Alkali was a teacher and then a lecturer, rising to be dean of Arts at Nassarawa State University. She is still writing and maintains her status as the matron of women writing.
What these women have in common in their numerous works is the representation of women as the spine of the family, not just silent shadows there for the dancing and singing at ceremonies. They capture the feelings and reactions of women to the circumstances forced upon them by their gender and laid the foundation for the advocacy of gender equity. These discussions would not have been possible today if these women had not written their experiences in poignant and effective ways that engendered sympathy and understanding.
History of Nigerian women and women in literature cannot be complete without a nod to these women, and others who have made sacrifices to capture and share with the world through literature what it means to be a woman.
