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Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests
for Women's Experience in Women's
Studies
Donna Haraway
These course syllabi in front of me are an exhibit indicating that Teresa's and my
talks grow out of a particular material practice--teaching in women's studies
classrooms in definite places and times. We found ourselves, two differently
situated Euro-American feminists, responsible to teach theory and methods, both
core courses in a women's studies major at a particular political moment, in
which the intersections of feminist theory and anti-colonial discourse, or the
critique of colonial discourse, have fundamentally restructured for us
individually and for our communities the meanings of what could count as
"women's experience." This is a potent and highly problematic construction that
is important for many contending agendas. What may count as "women's
experience" has shifted fundamentally in the discursive practices of feminism in
recent years. Showing how teaching arrangements are themselves theoretical
practice, we wish to come to terms with these issues in our pedagogical
approaches for beginning students. Women's studies pedagogy is a theoretical
practice through which "women's experience" is constructed and mobilized as an
object of knowledge and action.
When Teresa and I met to coordinate our talks, we discovered we shared some
principles with considerable passion. Fundamentally, they reduced to the serious
joke that, especially for the complex category and even more complex people
called "women," A and not-A are likely simultaneously true. This correct
exaggeration insists that even the simplest matters in feminist analysis require
contradictory moments and a wariness of their resolution, dialectically or
otherwise. "Situated knowledges" is a shorthand term for the same insistence.
Situated knowledges build in accountability. Being situated in that ungraspable
middle space, as Trinh Minh-ha suggested earlier today, characterizes actors
whose worlds might be described by branching bushes like the map or bush of
consciousness I have drawn on the board [see figure 1]. Situated knowledges are
particularly powerful tools to produce maps of consciousness for people who
have been inscribed within the marked categories of race and sex that have been
so exuberantly produced in the histories of masculinist and colonialist
dominations. Situated knowledges are always marked knowledges; they are
remarkings, reorientings, of the great maps that globalized the heterogeneous
body of the world in the history of masculinist capitalism and colonialism.
The "bush of women's consciousness" or the "bush of women's experience" is a
simple diagrammatic model for indicating how feminist theory and the critical
study of colonial discourse intersect with each other in terms of two crucial
binary pairs, i.e., local/global and personal/political. While the
tones of personal/political sound most strongly in feminist discourse, and
local/global in the critical theory of colonial discourse, both binaries are tools
essential to the construction of each. I have put the pair "local/global" at the top.
To begin, drawing from a particular descriptive practice (which can never simply
be innocently available; descriptions are produced), place an account of
"women's experience" or "women's consciousness" at the top. The simple
"dichotomizing machine" immediately bifurcates the experience into two aspects,
"local/global" or "personal/political." Wherever one begins, each term in turn
bifurcates: the "local" into "personal/political." Similarly, continuing indefinitely,
every instance of the analytical pair "personal/political" splits on each side into
"local/global."
This little analytical engine works almost like the dichotomous systems of
European Renaissance rhetoricians, such as Peter Ramus, to persuade, teach, and
taxonomize simultaneously by means of an analytical technology that is visibly
making its objects simultaneously with bisecting them. Referring to the European
Renaissance should also alert us to the particular Western history of binary
analysis in general and of the particular pairs adopted here in particular. Other
binary pairs that might well appear in my bush are "liberatory/oppositional" or
resistance/revolution," pairs deeply embedded in particular Western histories and
carrying the kinds of dangers Aihwa Ong warned us about in her paper. Noting
this tradition does not invalidate its use; it locates its use and insists on its
partiality and accountability. The difference is important. The bush plainly does
not guarantee unmediated access to the unfixable referent of "women's
experience," but the bush does guarantee an open, branching discourse with a
high likelihood of reflexivity about its own interpretive and productive
technology. Its very arbitrariness and its inescapable encrustings within the
traditions of Western rhetoric and semantics are virtues in feminist projects that
simultaneously construct the potent object, "women's experience," and insist on
the webs of accountability and politics inherent in the specific form this artifact
takes on.
I suggest that this simple little diagram-machine is a beginning geometry for
sketching some of the multiple ways that anti-colonial and feminist discourses
speak to each other and require each other for their own analytical progress. One
can work one's way through the analytical/descriptive bush, making decisions to
exclude certain regions of the map, for example, by concentrating only on the
global dimension of a political aspect of a particular local experience. But the rest
of the bush is implicitly present, providing a resonant echo chamber for any
particular tracing through the bush of "women's experience." What should be
plain from this way of analyzing is that what counts as "experience" is never
prior to the particular social occasions, the discourses, and other practices
through which experience becomes articulated in itself and articulable
with other accounts, enabling the construction of an account of collective
experience, a potent and often mystified operation. "Women's experience"
does not pre-exist as a kind of prior resource, ready simply to be appropriated
into one or another description. What may count as "women's experience" is
structured within multiple and often inharmonious agendas. "Experience," like
"consciousness," is an intentional construction, an artifact of the first importance.
Experience may also be re-constructed, re-membered, re-articulated. One
powerful means to do so is the reading and re-reading of fiction in such a way as
to create the effect of having access to another's life and consciousness, whether
that other is an individual or a collective person with the lifetime called history.
These readings exist in a field of resonating readings, in which each version adds
tones and shapes to the others, in both cacophonous and consonant waves.
Claims about "women's experience" are particularly liable to derive from and
contribute to what Wendy Rose, in her poem about appropriations of Native
American experience, aptly called "the tourism of the soul." Women's studies
must negotiate the very fine line between appropriation of another's (never
innocent) experience and the delicate construction of the just-barely-possible
connections that might actually make a difference in local and global histories.
Feminist discourse and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very subtle and
delicate effort to build connections and affinities, and not to produce one's own
and another's experience as a resource for another closed narrative. These are
difficult issues, and "we" fail frequently. It is easy to find feminist and
anti-colonial discourses reproducing others and selves as resources for closed
narratives, not knowing how to build affinities, knowing instead how to build
oppositions. But "our" writing is also full of hope that we will learn how to
structure affinities.
The construction of "women's experience" through the reading of fiction in
women's studies classrooms and women's studies publishing is the practice I wish
to examine in this talk. My focus will be on particularly non-innocent objects at
this moment in "our" history in Santa Cruz and in the world: "African" women's
fiction; contending readings of this fiction; and the field of constructions of
women's consciousness/experience in the "African diaspora" as an allegorical
figure for many political constituencies, local and global. The novels I will attend
to were written in English; the genre, the language, and modes of circulation all
mark histories full of colonial and post-colonial contradiction and struggle. The
contradictions and the struggles are all the sharper for women's writing
and reading of these potent fictions. As Lata Mani has made clear from her study
of 18th-century colonial discourse on suttee in India, constructions of women's
experience can be fundamental to the invention of "tradition," "culture," and
"religion." On this terrain, taxation or labor migration policies or family law can
be legitimated or resisted. Women's "self-constructions" of experience, history,
and consciousness will be no less the ground of material practice--including "our"
own. (Watch how "experience," "history," and "consciousness" are all especially
complex European-derived terms with particular resonances in many U.S.
cultures, including white ethnophilosophies important in academic and activist
contexts.)
Reading fiction has had a potent place in women's studies practice. Fiction may be
appropriated in many ways. What will count as fiction is itself a contentious
matter, resolved partly by market considerations, linguistic and semiotic
practices, writing technologies, and circuits of readers. It is possible to
foreground or to obscure the publishing practices that make some fiction
particularly visible or particularly unavailable in women's studies markets. The
material object, the book itself, may be made to seem invisible and transparent or
to provide a physical clue to circulations of meanings and power. These points
have been made forcefully in Katie King's reading of the "genre" of
biomythography in Audre Lorde's Zami. Readings may function as
technologies for constructing what may count as women's experience and for
mapping connections and separations among women and the social movements
which they build and in which they participate in local/global worlds. Fiction may
be mobilized to provide identifications as well as oppositions, divergences, and
convergences in maps of consciousness. The fictions published by and about
"women of color" occupy a particularly potent node in women's studies practice
at the present historical moment in many locations. Appropriations through
particular reading practices of these fictions are far from innocent, no matter the
locations in the intersecting fields of race, class, and gender of any reader.
Readings must be engaged and produced; they do not flow naturally from the
text. The most "straight-forward" readings of any text are also situated arguments
about fields of meanings and fields of power. Any reading is also a guide to
possible maps of consciousness, coalition, and action. Perhaps these points are
especially true when fiction appears to offer the problematic truths of personal
autobiography, collective history, and/or cautionary allegory. These are the
textual effects that invite identification, comparison, and moral discourse--all
inescapable and problematic dimensions of women's studies discourse. Contesting
critically for readings is a fundamental women's studies practice that
simultaneously insists on the constructed quality of politics and meanings and
holds the readers responsible for their constructions as ways of making and
unmaking the potent and polysemous category, "women." In this category
feminist, colonizing, anti-colonial, and womanist discourses converge and diverge
powerfully. Partially allied and partially contending, differently situated women's
readings of the fiction published by a "Third World woman of color" foreground
the issues I am trying to sketch. The readers themselves are tied and separated by
multiple histories and locations, including race, sexuality, nationality, access to
reading publics, and access to the fictions themselves. How are these readings
maps of possible modes of affinity and difference on the post-colonial terrain of
women's liberatory discourses? How do the figures of the unity of women in the
African diaspora enter into nationalist, feminist, womanist, postmodernist, black,
multi-cultural, white, First World, Third World, and other political locations?
So risking falling into the "tourism of the soul" that Wendy Rose warned against,
I will outline three different readings of a popular author, most of whose readers
probably have no interest in women's studies, but whose fiction appears in
women's studies courses and is also an object of contention in womanist/feminist
literary criticism and politics. Before engaging these three readings, consider a
short discursive construction of the text of the author's life, a text which will
become part of my stakes in reading her fiction. The author is Buchi Emecheta,
born in Nigeria in 1944 of Ibuza background. Emecheta married in 1962 and
went to London with her husband, who had a student fellowship. In England, the
couple had five children in difficult circumstances, and the marriage ended
painfully. Emecheta found herself a single mother in London, Black, immigrant,
on welfare, in public housing, and going to school for a degree in library science.
Emecheta also became a writer. I argue that her becoming a writer was
constituted from those webs of "experience" implicit in the biographical text in
the last paragraph. She was a mother, an immigrant, an African, an Ibo, an
activist, a writer. She published a series of novels that are simultaneously
pedagogical, popular, autobiographical, historical, political, romantic--and
contentious.
Let us study the dust jackets and reference library texts on Emecheta's life a little
further. Besides learning about the library science degree, a job as a sociologist,
and her habit of rising to write in the early hours of the day, we learn that she
has written eight novels, including The Joys of Motherhood (1979),
available in the prestigious African Writers Series, whose founding editor was
Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart and other internationally
renowned fiction. In the U.K., Emecheta's work is published by Alan and Unwin
and by Allison and Busby, and in the U.S. by Braziller. Until recently, it was
easier to purchase Emecheta's fiction in England or the U.S. than in Nigeria. Her
work has begun to be published simultaneously in Africa and the West, and it is
part of debates among African anglophone readers. The Joys of Motherhood,
set roughly in the 1920s and 1930s in Nigeria, treated the conflicts and
multi-layered contradictions in the life of a young married woman who is unable
to conceive a child. The woman subsequently conceived all too many children,
but only after she lost access to her own trading networks and so lost her own
income. The mother moved from village to city; and her children emigrated to
Canada, the United States, and Australia. Although she had many sons, she died
childless in an extraordinarily painful story of the confrontation of urban and
village realities for women in early 20th-century Nigeria.
But as for Achebe, for Emecheta also there is no moment of innocence in
Africa's history before the fall into the conflict between "tradition" and
"modernity." Much of Emecheta's fiction is set in Ibuza early in the 20th century,
where the great patterns of cultural syncretism in Africa are the matrix of the
characters' lives. In The Bride Price (1976) and The Slave Girl
(1977), Emecheta explored fundamental issues around marriage, control of
one's life from different women's points of view, and the contradictory positions,
especially for her Ibuza women characters, in every location on the African
cultural map, whether marked foreign or indigenous. Life in Europe is no less
the locus of struggle for Emecheta's characters. Second Class Citizen
(1974) explored the breakup of the protagonist's marriage in London. In
the Ditch (1972, 1979) followed the main character as a single mother into
residence in British public housing and her solidarity with white and colored,
working-class, British women's and feminist organizations challenging the terms
of the welfare state. The Double Yoke (1982) returned to Nigeria in the
late 20th century to take up again Emecheta's interrogation of the terms of
women's struggles in the local and global webs of the African diaspora, viewed
from a fictional reconstruction of the paths of travel from and to a minority
region in Nigeria.
In a course called Methodological Issues in the Study of Women in 1987, the
students read politically-engaged essays by two literary theorists who placed
Emecheta in their paradigms of women's fiction and women's unity in the
African diaspora. One was by Barbara Christian, a professor of Afro-American
Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and the other was by
Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, a professor teaching Afro-American and African
literature in the English Department at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. With
women from Ibadan and Ife, Ogunyemi participates in a group developing
women's studies in Nigeria. (Tola Olu Pearce, personal communication). She has
written extensively on Emecheta's fiction elsewhere; but in the text we read in
class, it was Ogunyemi's relative marginalization of Emecheta that organized our
reading of her essay in its particular publishing context and in other political
aspects. Barbara Christian published Black Feminist Criticism (1985j in
the Athena series of Pergamon Press, a major feminist series in British and U.S.
women's studies publishing. The third reading was my own, developed from the
perspectives of a Euro-American women's studies teacher in a largely white state
university in the United States and delivered here in a conference co-constructing
the critical study of colonial discourse and feminist theory. I wanted my women's
studies undergraduate students to read, mis-read, re-read, and so reflect on the
field of possible readings of a particular complicated author, including the
discursive constructions of her life on the surfaces of the published novels
themselves. These readings were directed to fictions in which we all had
considerable stakes--the publishers', Emecheta's, Ogunyemi's, Christian's, mine,
each of the students'. I wanted us to watch how those stakes locate readers in a
map of feminist politics and women's self-consciously liberatory discourses,
including constructions, such as womanism, that place "feminism" under erasure
and propose a different normative geneology for women's liberation. The goal
was to make these critically reflexive readings open up the complexities of
location and affinities in partially-allied, partially-oppositional drawings of maps
of women's consciousness in the local/global, personal/political webs of situated
knowledges.
First, let us examine how Ogunyemi (1987) read--or declined to read--Emecheta
in an essay published for a largely non-African audience in Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, a major scholarly organ of feminist theory in
the U.S. Signs has one (out of 17) international correspondents from
Africa--Achola Pala of Kenya. Ogunyemi's essay was an argument to distance
herself from the label "feminist" and to associate herself with the marker
"womanist." She argued that she had independently developed that term and then
found Alice Walker's working of it. Ogunyemi produced an archaeology or
mapping of African and Afro-American anglophone women's literature since the
end of colonization, roughly from the 1960s. The map led to a place of political
hope, called womanism. Ogunyemi used the word to designate a woman
committed to the survival and the wholeness of the "entire people," men and
women, African and the people of its diaspora. She located her discourse on
Emecheta in the diaspora's joining of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, and
African anglophone literatures. Ogunyemi argued that a womanist represents a
particular moment of maturity that affirms the unity of the whole people through
a multi-layered exploration of the experiences of women as "mothers of the
people." The mother binding up the wounds of a scattered people was an
important image, potent for womanist movement away from both Black male
chauvinism and feminist negativism and iconoclasm. But Ogunyemi's principal
image was somewhat oblique to that of the mother; it was a married woman.
Ogunyemi read the fiction since the 1960s in order to construct the
relationships of women in the diaspora as "amicable co-wives with an invisible
husband." In her archaeology of anglophone African and African-American
literature that finds the traces of womanism in Black foremothers-as-writers,
Ogunyemi rejected Emecheta. Her fiction did not affirm marriage as the image of
full maturity that could represent the unity of Black people internationally. Quite
the opposite, Emecheta's explorations frequently involved an account of the
failure of marriage. Emecheta's fiction has a sharp edge on marriage throughout,
even where it is most affirmed, as in The Double Yoke. In addition,
Emecheta the social actor allied herself with Irish and British feminists and
developed an international discourse quite different from Ogunyemi's account of
womanism.
In addition to criticizing Emecheta's discourse on and history in relation to
marriage, Ogunyemi highlighted Emecheta's exile status. Having lived abroad for
twenty years, Emecheta returned to Nigeria to teach in 1980-81 as a senior
research fellow at the University of Calabar. On this specific publishing occasion,
Ogunyemi problematized Emecheta's "authenticity" as a returned emigrant
writer. In Ogunyemi's archaeology of African anglophone literature, socialism,
feminism, and lesbianism all stood explicitly for an immature moment, perhaps
recuperable later, but for the moment not incorporable within the voices of the
"co-wives," who figured a normative kind of Black women's unity. Ogunyemi
proposed a logic of inclusion and exclusion in an emerging literary canon as part
of a politics about nationalism, gender, and internationalism, argued through the
central images of polygamous African marriage.
Barbara Christian had very different stakes in reading Emecheta. In Black
Feminist Criticism, Christian read The Joys of Motherhood (1979) in
close relation with Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), in order specifically
to reclaim a matrilineal tradition around the images of a particular feminism that
Christian's text foregrounds. Christian located this discourse on matrilineal
connection and mothering in these two important novels of the 1970s in order to
discuss the simultaneous exaltation and disruption/destruction of mothering for
Black women in African traditions, in Afro-American slavery, and in
post-slavery and post-civil rights movement contexts in the U.S. She uncovered
the contradictions and complexities of mothering, reflecting on the many ways in
which it is both enjoyed, celebrated, enforced, and turned into a double bind for
women in all of those historical locations. So while Christian sounded a faint note
of a lost utopian moment of mothering before the "invaders" came, the invaders
were not only the white slave traders. Rather the invaders seemed to be co-eval
with mothering; the world is always already fallen apart.
But the mother was no more Christian's fundamental image for the unity of
women in the African diaspora through time and space than it was for Ogunyemi.
Christian read Meridian and The Joys of Motherhood in delicate
echo with each other in order to foreground a particular kind of feminism that
also carried with it an agenda of affirming lesbianism within Black feminism and
within the model of the inheritance from Africa of the tie between mother and
daughter, caring for each other in the impossible conditions of a world that
constantly disrupts the caring. Barbara Christian was committed to forbidding the
marginalization of lesbianism in feminist discourse by women of color, and she
subtly enlisted Emecheta as one of her texts, for precisely the same reasons that
Ogunyemi excluded Emecheta from her geneology of womanism in the African
diaspora. But like Ogunyemi, Christian proposed a narrative of maturation in the
history of the writing of her literary foremothers. The trajectory of maturation
for each theorist provided a specific model of the growth of selfhood and
community for the women of the diaspora. Ogunyemi schematized the history of
West African women writers' consciousness since national independence
movements in terms of an initial "flirtation" with feminism and socialism,
culminating in a mature womanism organized around the trope of the community
of women as mothers, healers, and writers centered in the image of "co-wives
with an absent husband." That last image could not avoid being a stark reminder
of the labor migration realities for many rural women in colonial and
post-colonial Africa, even as it invoked the positive self-sufficiency of married
women, in contrast to the Western figure of the (hetero)sexualized bourgeois
couple with its dependent and isolated wife and her consequent negative
"feminist" politics of protest.
Christian schematized the history of Afro-American women writers'
consciousness in terms of a chronology with suggestive similarities and
differences from Ogunyemi's. Before about 1950, American Black women wrote
for audiences that largely excluded themselves. Christian characterized the fiction
as other-directed, rather than inward searching, in response to the dominating
white society's racist definitions of Black women. Zora Neale Hurston was the
exception to the pattern. Christian traced the process of initial self-definition in
the 1950s and the emergence of attention to the ordinary dark-skinned Black
women. Roughly, the 1960s was a decade of finding unity in shared Blackness,
the 70s a period of exposure of sexism in the Black community, and the 80s a
time of emergence of a diverse culture of Black women engaged in finding
selfhood and forming connections among women that promised to transcend race
and class in a worldwide community patterned on the ties of mother and
daughter. In the 1980s, the terrain for the growing understanding of the
personhood of Black women, figured in the fictions of the diaspora, was
worldwide.
I will conclude by suggesting a third non-innocent reading of Emecheta's fiction--
my own, as a Euro-American, middle class, university-based feminist, who
produced this reading as part of a pedagogical practice in U.S. women's studies in
the 1980s, in a class in which white students greatly outnumbered students of
color and women greatly outnumbered men. Enmeshed in the debates about
postmodernism, the multiplicity of women's self-crafted and imposed social
subjectivities, and questions about the possibility of feminist politics in late 20th
century global/local worlds, my own stakes were in the potent ambiguities of
Emecheta's fiction and the fictions of her life. My reading valorized her
heterogeneous status as exile, Nigerian, Ibo Irish-British feminist, Black woman,
writer canonized in the African Writers Series, popular writer published in cheap
paperback books and children's literature, librarian, welfare mother, single
woman, reinventor of African tradition, deconstructor of African tradition,
member of the Advisory Council to the British Home Secretary on race and
equality, subject of contention among committed multi-racial womanist/feminist
theorists, and international figure. As for Ogunyemi and Christian, there was a
utopian moment nestled in my reading, one that hoped for a space for political
accountability and for cherishing ambiguities, multiplicities, and affinities without
freezing identities. These risk being the pleasures of the eternal tourist of
experience in devastated postmodern terrains. But I wanted to stay with affinities
that refused to resolve into identities or searches for a true self. My reading
naturalized precisely the moments of ambiguity, the exile status and the dilemma
of a "been-to" for whom the time of origins and returns is inaccessible.
Contradiction held in tension with the crafting of accountability was my image of
the hoped for unity of women across the holocaust of imperialism, racism, and
masculinist supremacy. This was a feminist image that figured not mothers and
daughters, co-wives, sisters, or lesbian lovers, but adopted families and imperfect
intentional communities, based not so much on "choice" as on hope and memory
of the always already fallen apart structure of the world. I valued the
post-holocaust "families" in the fiction of Octavia Butler as tropes to guide "us"
through the ravages of gender, class, imperialism, racism, and nuclear
exterminist global culture.
My reading of Emecheta drew from The Double Yoke, in which the
incoherent demands on and possibilities for women in the collision of "tradition"
and "modernity" are interrogated. At the same time, what counts as "traditional"
or "modern" emerges as highly problematic. The fictions important to the
intersection of postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonial local/global webs
begin with the book as a material object and the biographical fragments inscribed
on it that construct the author's life for international anglophone audiences. In the
prose of the dust jacket, the author metamorphosed from the earlier book jackets'
accounts of the woman with five children, on welfare and simultaneously going to
school, who rose at 4:00 a.m. in order to write her first six novels, into a senior
research fellow at Nigeria's University of Calabar and a member of the Arts
Council of Great Britain. There are many Emechetas on the different dust
jackets, but all of these texts insist on joining the images of a mother, writer, and
*migr* Nigerian in London.
A short synopsis must serve to highlight the multiply criss-crossing worlds of
ethnicity, region, gender, religion, "tradition" and "modernity," social class, and
professional status in which Emecheta's characters reinvent their senses of self
and their commitments and connections to each other. In The Double Yoke,
a "been-to," Miss Bulewao taught creative writing to a group of mainly
young men at the University of Calabar. Framed by Miss Bulewao's assignment
to the students and her response to the moral dilemmas posed in one man's story,
the core of the novel was the essay submitted by Ete Kamba, who had fallen in
love with a young woman Nko, who lived a mile from his village. Nko, a young
Efik woman, came from a different ethnic group from Ete Kamba, an Ikikio.
Hoping to marry, both were at the university on scholarship and both had
complicated obligations to parents as well as ambitions of their own. But gender
made their situations far from symmetrical. Emecheta sketched the University of
Calabar as a microcosm of the contending forces within post-independence
Nigeria, including the New Christian Movement, Islamic identities, demands of
ethnic groups, economic constraints from both family and national locations in
the global economy, contradictions between village and university, and
controversy over "foreign" ideologies such as feminism.
All of these structured the consequences of the love between Ete Kamba and Nko.
The pair had intercourse one night outside the village, and afterwards he was
consumed with worry over whether Nko was or was not still a virgin since they
had intercourse with their clothes on and standing up. It was crucial to him that
she was still a virgin if he was to marry her. Nko refused to answer his obsessive
questions about her virginity. Instead of images of matrilineality linking mother
and daughter or of the community of women as co-wives as emblems of
collective unity, a deconstruction of "virginity" structures this novel's arguments
about origins, authenticity, and women's positions in constructing the potent unit
called "the people" in the heterogeneous worlds of post-independence Nigeria.
The young man went for advice to an elder of Nko's village, who was also a
faculty member and a leader of the American-inspired, revivalist, New Christian
Movement at the university. The professor, religious leader, and model family
man had been sexually harassing Nko, who was also his student; and following
Ete Kamba's visit, the older man forced her into a sexual relation in which she
became pregnant.
Nko told Ete Kamba that whether he called her "virgin," "prostitute," or "wife,"
those were all his names. She came to the university to get a degree by the fruits
of her own study. If she were forced to get her degree through negotiating the
tightening webs of sexualization drawn around her, she would still not flatten into
the blank sheet on which would be written the text of post-colonial "woman." She
would not allow the local/global and personal/political contradictions figured in
Ete Kamba's need for her to be an impossible symbol of non-contradiction and
purity to define who she--and they--may be. Perhaps Emecheta's fiction should be
read to argue that women like Nko struggle to prevent post-colonial discourse
being written by others on the terrain of their bodies, as so much of colonial
discourse was. Perhaps Emecheta is arguing that African women will no longer
be figures for any of the great images of Woman, whether voiced by the
colonizer or by the indigenous nationalist--virgin, whore, mother, sister, or
co-wife. Something else is happening for which names have hardly been uttered
in any region of the great anglophone diaspora. Perhaps part of this process will
mean that, locally and globally, women's part in the building of persons, families,
and communities cannot be fixed in any of the names of Woman and her
functions.
Ete Kamba related his dilemma and Nko's story in his assigned essay for Miss
Bulewao, who called him in to talk. In a wonderful depiction of a faculty-student
meeting where the personal, political and academic are profoundly intertwined,
Miss Bulewao advised Ete Kamba to marry the woman he loved. The young man
was absent when the papers were passed back; he had gone to join Nko, who had
returned to her village to bury her father. Their marriage was left open.
Ogunyemi's, Christian's, and my readings of Emecheta are all grounded in the
texts of the published fiction; and all are part of a contemporary struggle to
articulate sensitively specific and powerfully-collective women's liberatory
discourses. Inclusions and exclusions are not determined in advance by fixed
categories of race, gender, sexuality or nationality. "We" are accountable for the
inclusions and exclusions, identifications and separations, produced in the highly
political practices called reading fiction. To whom we are accountable is
part of what is produced in the readings themselves. All readings are also
mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined
readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the
world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending
practices and hopes. From our very specific, non-innocent positions in the
local/global and personal/political terrain of contemporary mappings of women's
consciousness, each of these readings is a pedagogic practice, working through
the naming of the power-charged differences, specificities, and amenities that
structure the potent, world-changing artifacts called "women's experience " In
difference is the irretrievable loss of the illusion of the one.
Works Cited
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Pergamon,
1985.
Emecheta, Buchi. In the Ditch. London: Allison & Busby, 1979.
_____. The Double Yoke.New York: Braziller, 1983.
_____. The Slave Girl. New York: Braziller, 1977.
_____. The Bride Price. New York: Braziller, 1976.
_____. Second Class Citizen. New York: Braziller, 1975.
_____. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: Braziller, 1979.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider.Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press,
1984.
_____. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: The
Crossing Press, 1982.
Ogunyemi, Chickwenye Okonjo. "The Shaping of a Self: A Study of Buchi
Emecheta's Novels," Komparatische Hefte.
_____. "The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English."
Signs, 11.1 (1985):63-80.
Taiwo, Oladele. Female Novelists of Modern Africa. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1984.
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