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Reserve Text from Omar Sougou, Writing Across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta. New York: Rodopi, 2002 Chapter 4: Towards
Consciousness IT IS FREQUENTLY NOTED THAT EARLY FEMINISM (late 1960s to early 1970s) was conspicuously uninterested in motherhood. In the years since then, motherhood as an institution has become a concern of feminist studies. Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution is a significant early feminist work on the subject, exploring it in its development through history and social formations. A number of later analyses of motherhood acknowledge their debt to this work. Rich distinguishes two meanings of motherhood. One is the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children. The other is the institution which aims at placing that potential and all women under male control:
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[92] Motherhood in African
literature by male writers is viewed with a certain reverence influenced
by their patriarchal bias. Poetry especially has been replete with the
portrayal of woman as mother and symbol. Among the writers otten cited
are Leopold Sedar Senghor, who assimilates Africa to woman and the mother
and conveys the idea of Africa needing to open herself to the fecund
values of the West. This view echoes the colonialist picture of Africa
as "essentially female (needing and desiring European masculinity-and
paternal governance), so Senghor and many other African writers see
Africa as female awaiting the African male to take his rightful place."2
David Diop uses the mother trope to condemn colonial violence. Camara
Laye, in his novel The African Child and in the poem prefacing that
novel, conveys the notion of the nurturing African woman. To write about
Africa as the mother, or to write the mother as a substitute for nurture
and security, is not the same as paying attention to women as mothers.
There, perhaps, lies the difference between texts authored by male writers
and those by female ones. The fiction of African women has given us
different images of women and mothers. In the work of Flora Nwapa, for
example, motherhood is synonymous with victimization of the childless
woman. Procreation defines femininity in the world of her heroines.
Nwapa's fiction is particularly relevant to Emecheta's, because of the
many affinities between the two writers' thematization of female experience.
Their works share a similar fictional location in Nigerian society:
Igbo culture. On the theoretical
level, African and black feminist literary scholars concern themselves
with motherhood. Carole Boyce Davies studies its status in the work
of Achebe, Emecheta, Nwapa and Nzekwu.3 Barbara Christian produces a
comparative African! Afro-American study of motherhood drawing on Emecheta'
s The Joys of Motherhood.4 Motherhood appears as continu --------------------- 2 Kathleen McLuskie
& Lyn Innes, "Women and African Literature," Wasafiri
8 (Spring 1988): 4. 4 Barbara Christian,
"An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys
of Motherhood and Alice Walker's Meridian," in Christian,
Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New
York: Pergamon. 1985): 00-00.## ity and survival
in these two essays. Both critics agree about the centrality of motherhood
in African and African-American lite. What Christian observes about
Alice Walker and Emecheta could apply to a good deal of other writing
about mothering in Africa:
Boyce Davies studies
motherhood by using male and female writers to contrast the perception
of motherhood in male writing (Ache be and Nzekwu) with motherhood as
seen from within in the work of female novelists (Emecheta and Nwapa).
Like Christian and Filomina Steady,S whom she cites, Boyce Davies endorses
the importance of motherhood and the centrality of childbearing. Yet,
even if she accepts Steady's idea that this "is probably the most
fundamental difference between the African woman and her Western counterpart
in the common struggle to end discrimination against women," she
rejects the view in African ideological formations that motherhood defines
womanhood (243). Davies's reading highlights the "idealization
of motherhood and the inability of male writers to present the details
of woman's experience," whereas the women writers present "the
great 'unwritten' stories of African literature" (254). Such untold
stories reveal that children are not the final and only happiness for
their mothers and that womanhood should not be predicated on mothering.
There are alternative routes to success and freedom. As Boyce Davies
points out, "African women have never been limited totally to childbearing
but have consistently attained excellence in other spheres. This is
why Nnu Ego's life is such a tragedy" (255). The Joys of Motherhood is a radical questioning of the myth of motherhood as it has crystallized in African societies and writing, radical enough to -----------------------------------
The Joys
of Motherhood focuses on maternal issues while embracing African
women's problems in general. The wording of the title does not reflect
the 'reality' in the story. It marks the irony the writer employs throughout
this work. The events and actions lay bare the dark side of motherhood,
and undermine the myth of maternity as a source of happiness. The fictional
instrument of Emecheta, Nnu Ego, has seldom known happiness in marriage
or motherhood apart from the satisfaction of being able to give birth
to children, male ones particularly. Nnu Ego's story echoes that of
Efuru, the eponymous heroine of Flora Nwapa's novel, from which the
title of Emecheta's book is borrowed.7 Emecheta uses Nnu
Ego's experience to reconstruct the issues of urbanization in colonial
Nigeria and its effect on women. Similarly, the involvement of Africans
in the Second World War is shown and condemned through a woman's perspective.
As in the earlier novels of Emecheta, the need is stressed for education
in order to fit into the new social structure. So is the contention
between traditional values and the new ones. All of these topics revolve
around a central argument, which is the questioning of the traditional
values attached to motherhood as an institution defined by patriarchy
and based on gender. By transplanting
a woman of twenty-five, Nnu Ego, from her traditional milieu to the
developing city of Lagos in 1936, The Joys of l\1otherhood lends --------------------- 6 Lloyd Brown,
Women Writers in Black Africa (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1981):
142, 182-83. 7 Flora Nwapa, Ejilru (London: Heinemann, 1966). See Marie A. Umeh, "The Joys of Motherhood: Myth or Reality'?" Colby Library Quarterly 18.1(1982): 39-40 another dimension to the clash of values at work in The Bride Price. The structure of the novel highlights the difference between the two worlds. The analepsis to the traditional and precolonial world after an introduction to 1940s Lagos points to the rift between the old and the new order and their world-views. The device similarly offers a glimpse at women's status in the precolonial formation and furnishes a background to Nnu Ego's experience of motherhood and to the critique of this institution in the narrative.
Nnu Ego is constructed as the reincarnation of a murdered slave woman buried, in accordance with custom, alongside her father's senior wife.8 The ritual murder of the slave woman in this part of the novel, in which the narrative voice celebrates African tradition, produces a sharp contrast with the positive picture that underlies this leap back in the past{The grandeur and dignity of precolonial Ibuza, in which women are supposed to enjoy status and power, is questioned by the narrative voice itself in the description of a murderous act that points to the connivance of class and gender..) The women's revulsion contrasts with male callousness, and their attitude suggests a similarity in status to the slave women. Even in the traditional ideological formation, women are the Other, regardless of their class. The reader is told: -------------------------------------
Ona is depicted
as a woman dedicated to asserting herself according to her own principles;
she is strong and arrogant enough to match the boisterous and witty
Agbadi. ana embodies the high value placed on womanhood and freedom,
which is expressed in this plea to Agabadi for Nnu Ego: A synoptic view of the ideal woman in the traditional community is given in Agbadi's tribute to Agunwa. "Your mother," he tells her sons, "is a good woman. So unobtrusive, so quiet. I don't know who else will help me keep an eye on those young wives of mine, and see to the smooth running of my household" (22). This testimony highlights the contrast between Agunwa and ana, and stresses gender ideology. In this light, if ana's refusal to marry Agbadi stems from a desire to attain self-fulfilment, then it is predetermined by male prospects. "She had been dedicated to the gods to produce children in [her father's] name, not that of any husband" (17-18). Obi Umunna's purpose was not to shape in her a personality which would challenge social ----------------------------------- norms but to attain
his own ends. He meant her to perpetuate his name, which would not be
possible if a bride price were paid, because all her children would
belong to her husband and bear his name. ana's freedom is eventually
limited on account of her divided loyalty; she is torn between two men,
her father and her lover, Agbadi, to whom she offers this deal as a
solution to her dilemma: The creation of
ana is perhaps a manner of asserting that traditional society did not
nurture subservient women only, but she demonstrates both an independent
spirit and a sense of loyalty to the males in her life -attitudes consonant
with phallocentric normative values. This tension is carried over to
Nnu Ego. Kathleen McLuskie
and Lyn Innes, as feminist readers, consider that the distribution of
emotional focus is undermined by the fact that the precolonial world
is one of male power in which Ona is "objectified in the language
of male fantasy," as manifested in the description of ana. They
consider this descriptive language to be associated with male fantasy
and the colonial fantasy of Conrad's MarIow viewing Kurtz's mistress
as splendidly barbaric, seductive and threatening; and posit that it
dislocates, for the feminist reader, "the possibility that ana
could be seen as an emblem of precolonial female power." McLuskie and Innes
read the narrative procedure of movement from wartime Lagos to Ibuza,
especially to the romantic world of ana and Agbadi, as a simple model
of social change which is frequently subverted by the language and tone
of the novel and the relationship it establishes with its readers. This
overturning of relationship, I would argue in agreement, introduces
a double-edged contrast which echoes a double-voiced narrative, and
resides "in the contrast between heroic pre-colonial days of tribal
dignity and power with the squalor and humiliation of a colonial city." Where also were
women writers to find their voices and audience in the dialectic between
form and counterform, language and counter-language already established
by such major writers as Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi? In such a dialectic,
the adoptation of the Western romantic genre might prove to be a step
forward rather than a step back, or alternatively, the female writer
might disrupt the dialogue of two. between Western and Atrican male
traditions, by creating a multiplicity of voices. (6) The Joys
of Motherhood employs a multiplicity of voices in various ways,
and this creates the complexity to which many critics have vaguely referred.
11 The novel offers
multiple perceptions, contradictions and paradoxes in the depiction
of ana by presenting her as a subject as strong as steel, but still
commodified and willing to be placed under her father and Agbadi, between
whom she moves, and depicting her in a language that insinuates the
pervasive hold of patriarchal ideology. The mother Nnu Ego is a medium through which ideas of motherhood are interrogated. Both of the categories set up by Adrienne Rich are apparent in the representation of motherhood through her. She dramatizes "the potential relationship of any woman between her powers of reproduction and to children." The novel undermines the institutionalization of this potential to ensure male control ------------------------- 10 Showalter, "Feminist
Criticism in the Wilderness," 263. over women. Unfairness
to women because of the value placed on fertility is shown in the callous
treatment Nnu Ego receives from her first husband. The following remark
put in his mouth asserts the centrality of children in a libidinal male
economy, as well as the reproductive and productive role that detennine
women's value in the traditional ideological formation:
This is a fictive
representation of what Lauretta Ngcobo holds as being the basis of marriage
among Africans, which implies "the transfer of a woman's fertility
to the husband's family group" as a means of lineage continuity.
Thus, the dowry (bride price, or lobola) is paid in exchange for sexual
rights, essentially as a warranty of social control on the children
borne by the woman in marriage.12 In the fictional treatment of motherhood by Flora Nwapa, what Efuru's neighbours say about her applies to Nnu Ego in the eyes of her people. Efuru is assimilated to a man for failing to bear child. Popular belief holds it that "two men do not live together," and the narrator adds, "to them Efuru was a man since she could not reproduce." Nwapa's characters repeatedly mention the usefulness of children, and one of them abstracts the notion here:
------------------------ 12 Lauretta Ngcobo,
"African Motherhood. Myth and Reality," in Criticism and
Ideology, ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute
of African Studies, 1988): 141. 13 Efuru, 23. The name is double-edged.
It can be a signifier for chattelism; the name is then assimilated to
the prospective bride price; just as it can be decoded as an expression
of love, had not Nnu Ego's actual bride price been equated with twenty
bags of cowries. Emecheta seems to be playing deliberately on both senses. Correlatively,
Afam Ebeogu's essay on Igbo names in literature includes a critique
of Emecheta' s "attempt to choose a name that culturally derogates
and delimits the humanity of the heroine so that [she] can base a protest
on that fact" which results in an unwitting misinterpretation of
the onomastic conventions ofIgbo culture. 14 This remark is based on
the names of Aku-nna and Ojebeta, but it is extensible to Nnu Ego's.
This device is a meaningful constituent of the protest which Emecheta
channels in her novels. The refusal to allow these names to mean what
they are traditionally designed to denote is part of a female writer's
resistance. It consists in subverting traditional discourse and the
patriarchal ideology that is Emecheta's target. This deliberate tampering
with names is central to her strategy of contestation. Nnu Ego is defined
in terms of The Bride Price paid on her, and the capacity
to mother children. She lives in a society which claims to value "motherhood,"
but what actually matters is male children. The Joys of Motherhood
emphasizes this point in its interrogation of this institution, which
goes along with a denunciation of the commodification of female subjects.
The text reiterates the allegory of women's slavery in Agbadi' s reimbursement
of The Bride Price to secure Nnu Ego's freedom from her
first husband. The treatment of
the character's second marriage that leads her to Lagos in the second
half of the 1930s prolongs the image of the utter dependence of women
on male power. Gender relationships in the new urban environment are
described as resembling those in force in the rural world, although
they seem to be worsened by the different economic and social realities.
Motherhood is seen in similar terms and the heroine's own definition
of herself is predicated on this. Already disappointed
with her new husband's personal qualities and the nature of his employment,
Nnu Ego is comforted by pregnancy; but her baby son dies. Then the narrative
conjures up the mythic chi in Nnu Ego's visions, identified by the dibia
as the slaughtered slave woman. The chi "would not give her a child
because she had been dedicated to a river goddess before ------------------------------------- 14 Afam Ebeogu, "Names and Naming in Fiction: Igbo Proper Names in Nigerian Literature of English Expression." Literarv Half-Yearlv 272 (19RIi): R7 Agbadi took her
away in slavery" (31). The slave woman is thus synonymous with
Nemesis; and Agbadi propitiates her with sacrifices and vows to stop
dealing in slaves (35). On the other hand,
the dreams present the slave woman as paradigmatic of a rhetoric of
protest. The chi is construed as coming from a people whose women are
said to be very strong. Her obstinate silence implies an act of retributive
justice on behalf of slaves such as those in The Slave Girl and
The Bride Price, and of women in actual or symbolic slavery.
Emecheta gives the slave-woman trope a twofold significance. First,
according to the Igbo traditional world-view, she is reincarnated in
Nnu Ego. Secondly, as a chi she is represented as standing between Nnu
Ego and the object of her desire: mothering. The chi tantalizes Nnu
Ego with babies she does not allow her to have. Through the chi, a subversive
rhetoric is deployed against the traditional view of motherhood that
expresses the anger suppressed by Nnu Ego. The chi conveys in other
words the anger of a feminist writer against patriarchal definitions
of womanhood as motherhood. The text offers
two contrasting views of motherhood. One is that which comes from Nnu
Ego's dream of the plump baby and the chi's laughter "Yes, take
the dirty, chubby babies. You can have as many of those as you want"
(77). The other is her dream about a successful "man-child' who
would "live near his parents and look after them" (78-79).
These conflicting visions prefigure the ambivalent discourse on motherhood
conducted in the narrative. Through Nnu Ego's "masochistic-feminine
willingness to sacrifice," the procedure undermines the mothering
function presented in the novel; the type that Nancy Chodorow accounts
for when she writes:
The cultural construct of maternity as a guarantee of security and a safeguard of parents in their old age is questioned in Lagos society. Nnu Ego's hopes for a blissful future seem justified only along the lines of traditional thinking. ----------------------------------- 15 Quoted by Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Gamer, Claire Kahane & Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca NY & London: Cornell UP, 1985): 354. |
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[102] The chapter-title
"The Canonised Mother" ironically suggests that she can expect
a reward for her strenuous efforts to raise and provide her (male) children
with education, the modern asset for success in life. The chapter substantiates
the bitter understatement in its title and in the novel as a whole.
The protagonist's consolation has been no more than that of being a
mother. Her children -the male ones especially -for whom she has sacrificed
everything shirk their duty when they are in a position to fulfil her
dreams, leaving her to die alone. The novel problematizes
the traditional expectations attached to motherhood and attacks gender
discrImination through the manner in which Nnu Ego, before dying, reviews
her experience as a mother and concludes that she has been the victim
of both her husband and her children, the males in her life. She resembles
both her mother and the female heroes of Emecheta' s earlier novels.
Nnu Ego's children were the bonds which tethered her to her husband
and to an unhappy life in Lagos, in the remote prospect of relief when
they grow up:
The changing values are thematized by way of her male children, whose views are opposed to those of their parents. Here resides the demythologization of The Joys of Motherhood. The heroine's male children are swept into the momentum of the new relations of production, and privilege their selfinterest. They are the fictional illustrations of a new type of relationship between parents and children, and are used to question the traditional view of parenthood. Oshia is represented as insensitive to the tradition of duty to parents and of collective responsibility in which Nnu Ego and Nnaife were born and bred. The conflict is dramatized in the responses of each parent. Nnaife demands that Oshia take on his family responsibilities, while Nnu Ego bears with Oshia in silent disappointment. The narrator's mediation of Nnu Ego's thoughts challenges commonly held views on motherhood and the received ideas of children as investment for the future:
I would argue that the novel lends itself to a more informed reading when considered as double-voiced discourse, where voices collude and collide, and where the heroine's perspective is mediated in tight propinquity to the militant voice of the narrator. Such a rhetoric replicates the ambivalence about motherhood within African heroines, in the same way as it does the search on the part of their creators to reconcile the struggle against sexist ideology with the national one. Furthermore, closer attention to the text reveals that the objectification ofNnu Ego diminishes as the narrative unfolds. She is gradu ------------------------
A slippage from
the first-person singular to the first-person plural occurs in the two
final sentences, indicating a moment when two voices seem to converge.
On closer scrutiny the pronoun "we" may signal the narrator's
voice merging with Nnu Ego's, both sounding like the mouthpieces of
their oppressed sisters. Elsewhere in this
novel, the narrator identifies with the heroine in a similar way, but
with a distinctly autonomous voice. She starts Chapter Ten by saying:
"Humans, being what we are, tend to forget the most unsavoury experiences
of life." Similarly, the narrator overtly assimilates herself to
the Nigerian people by using the syntactic marker "us" while
explaining the concern of the passers-by for Nnu Ego's life. The comment
runs as follows:
Emecheta's use
of a voice that identifies with Nigeria earns her the acknowledgement
of homecoming from the Nigerian critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, who
writes: "by using the pronoun 'us' for the first time with herself
included, she finally accepts her sense of belonging with Africa instead
of emphasizing her spirit of dissociation."17 These syntactic
markers clearly identify the voice of a narrator implicated in the matter.
Discussing Emecheta as a storyteller, Cynthia Ward argues in favour
of "the possibilities for a variety of competing self:'identities
[that] are reified into woman, African, mother, author",18 but
I would suggest that these categories of subjectivity can be collapsed
into two main voices: that of the African and that of the woman. Of
these voices, the woman's seems to be predominant in the narrative,
as in the section based in Lagos. I have already noted various changes
of perspectives reflected in the language employed and partaking of
different traditions of writing, as in the precolonial section of the
narrative. In this episode, just as in the Lagos one, the narrative
voice assumes an African woman's perspective: both nostalgic for tradition
in some way and critical of its other sides. At one point, the narrator
contrasts urban experience with traditional life, and observes about
Nnaife and Nnu Ego:
Nnu Ego is shown
as unable to construct a language to articulate her experience, and
is killed at the moment in which she begins to understand the nature
of her double oppression. Susan Rubin Suleiman's summary of Kristeva's
argument on women and culture bears on Nnu Ego's position here:
Both Nwapa's and
Emecheta's novels conduct a critique of the patriarchal definition of
womanhood and motherhood by using the language of the ideological formation.
They appropriate elements of the belief systems (goddesses; chi) as
vectors for their contestation, and point to alternative paths for women
to take. In her construction ofNnu Ego, Emecheta pursues the slave parable that is palimpsestic in the narrative. The chi seems to retaliate against a system that robs women first of their identity and then of their freedom. The spirit of the departed Nnu Ego also upholds the protest her chi has sustained thus far through her, and prolongs the narrative of dissent in her silence before the prayers of women appealing to her for fertility. Nnu Ego's denial is a signi ----------------------- 19 Suleiman. "Writing and Motherhood." 367-68. Gilbert and Gubar
link the explosive violence of'" the soul's moments of escape'"
that women writers continually imagine tor themselves to the mad double
projected into their works:
Thus, using doubles may be a subterranean way of mediating protest, anger, an ideological wish or perspective. The unconventional double, whether mad or criminal, functions as eccentric or marginal with respect to the symbolic order. In Emecheta's text, even though it is Nnu Ego the "angelic woman" who becomes mad, Adaku compares with the madwoman in Gilbert and Gubar's theory. Their formulation is appropriate to the manner in which Adaku turns into the "monstrous" or "criminal" woman in the eyes of tradition. She functions in the text as an echo of that other smothered voice which does not sound loudly in Nnu Ego. The Adaku trope
has, then, the value of a sub-text that participates in the double-voiced
discourse. Through Adaku, the narrative voice communicates what it does
not via Nnu Ego. Adaku becomes the vector of that other tone of voice
which distances itself radically from the patriarchal ethos. The doubling
turns into an expression of double-voicedness, providing an outlet for
the submerged story of self-definition, and questions the voice of authority.
As Foucault says:
-------------------------------- 23 Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. ed. Rohert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1981): 62-64. The discourse that
is mediated through Adaku can be assimilated to the manifestation of
the object of the female subject's desire and her struggle to seize
the power that discourse is. The textual treatment
of Adaku and Mama Abby partakes of the strategy of a discourse that
attacks the male-dominated structure of traditional society and the
encompassing colonial formation. That both strong independent figures
are, as it were, backgrounded in the sub-textual layer of the narrative
makes them understated presences. But this effect can foreground them
for a feminist reading: one that seeks to unearth the silences buried
in the text. Adaku functions
as a catalyst for Nnu Ego's reactions and a mirror in which the heroine
can see her own image (her Other). Nnu Ego's most significant introspective
moments occur in relation to Adaku. Furthermore, the fact that Adaku
joins Nnaife as his second wife stresses the effects of polygamy on
women who are subjected to it. The heroine's reaction
to the coming of Adaku as her husband's second wife lays bare the pain
a woman may have to endure in such a situation. The handling of Nnu
Ego's internal reaction to the odds confronting her, which surfaces
now and again, seems so plausible to Lauretta Ngcobo that she commends
the author for allowing the heroine to release "the full expression
of jealousy":
Tradition recommends that women fetch a second or more wives for their husbands, and Nnu Ego's status as a senior wife requires composure and forbearance from her; but the "green-eyed monster" is at work inside her mind:
------------------------- Adaku appears in
this instance as a mirror for Nnu Ego, as the desired Other, that which
she is not. Beyond jealousy loom anger and the consciousness of her
deprivation, impairing her fulfilment and tightening her bond to Nnaife. The contrast between
the two women is highlighted in the role each of them plays out, their
different attitudes replicating the two poles of the dis course that
The Joys of Motherhood constructs. This seems to reflect the
ambivalence the African heroine is subjected to with regard to motherhood,
selfhood and culture. Where Adaku spurns the conformism that is instrumental
to Nnu Ego's subjection, the latter is constricted by motherhood. Within
the house, Adaku challenges their husband, demanding an increase in
their housekeeping money and control over Nnaife's drinking sprees,
but Nnu Ego relents, hampering the bid to discipline him. The polarity between
Nnu Ego and Adaku is effected in the manner in which each of them comes
to terms with Nnaife's absence. It allows Adaku's independence to bloom.
She achieves comfortable financial autonomy, and starts a process of
self-definition, whereas Nnu Ego remains attached to nurturing her children
by petty trading, and panders to Ibuza value systems. It is significant
that Nnu Ego loses her business advantage as a result of summons from
her dying father. As she returns to the rural world, Adaku gains access
to the new market economy. Her small trade steadily thrives, giving
her a higher status than that of Nnu Ego, whom the narrative confines
in a nursing role. The text introduces a reversal of roles which Nnu
Ego cannot accept; she resolves to engage in the strenuous sale of firewood
to maintain her children. The sight of Adaku and others prospering in their trade causes Nnu Ego's pent up jealousy and self-introspection to explode. She is shown violating custom by refusing entry to her co-wife's visitor because of the glamour surrounding the latter. This incident is doubly significant. It re-enacts the specular effect Adaku has on Nnu Ego, just as it constitutes a dramatic treatment of the oppositional values represented by each character, thus enhancing the doubling. As it appears in the repercussions of this incident, namely in the judgement given by the male acquaintances to whom Adaku has referred the matter, tradition sides with Nnu Ego, the angelic figure and mother of sons, whereas Adaku is dismissed as a deficient woman. Male dominance and the value conferred on mothering male children as legitimation of a woman's status is disparaged by the narrator, who reports: "instead of laying the whole blame on Nnu Ego they made Adaku feel that since she had no son for the family she had
no right to complain about her senior's conduct" (166). The speech
of traditional patriarchy put in the mouth of one of the arbiters in
his impeachment of Adaku derides its own ideology:
The consequence
of this man's attitude is as important as the exposition of the ideology
conveyed by his speech. It causes Adaku's rebellion against the oppressive
customs, which resembles an enactment ofNnu Ego's own revolt. "My
chi be damned!," she replies to Nnu Ego, "I am going to be
a prostitute. Damn my chi I don't care for the life he or she gave me.
I'm leaving here tomorrow with my girls. I am not going to Ibuza"
(168). She walks out of the house, leaving behind a perplexed Nnu Ego,
who is described, by a markedly gendered narrative voice, as a mother
of three sons who "was supposed to be happy in her poverty, in
her nail-biting agony, in her churning stomach, in her rags, in her
cramped room" (167). The parting moment is a highly suggestive
and bitterly ironic picture of motherhood:
Adaku is shown
as a dignified woman with the will to alter the order of things in a
gendered world. She uses her wealth to enrol her daughters in a good
school so that they can "take their own chances in this world"
(169). Here we see the implementation ofNnu Ego's angry realization
("Who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters?")
noted earlier; an opportunity which Nnu Ego denied her own daughters
for the benefit of their brothers. The manner in which Adaku is constructed can be regarded as feminist in terms of an "images of women" analysis. The desire for a literature that offers role models for women was expressed by some early American feminists, and a text that placed Adaku at the centre, rather than Nnu Ego, would Adaku is one of
those rare rural illiterate female characters who rises out of her social
condition and realizes herself in such a potent way. Of course, her
living in the city has been a determinant in her change, but we are
told that she has always been a purposeful person. Moreover, Adaku,
unlike Mariama Ba's educated feminist and middle-class protagonists
in Une si longue lettre, started from scratch.26 Her challenging
of the status quo endorses the notion that women in her circumstances
can wake into consciousness and shrug off the yoke. She and Mama Abby
are the alternatives to the type of motherhood represented in Nnu Ego's
development. Through Mama Abby, the text states the importance of being
literate, and also that motherhood can be lived differently: a son can
take care of his mother. Adaku's experience suggests that a woman can
conquer individual freedom by shaking off the shackles Nnu Ego has never
been able to rid herself of until she dies her lonely death. Adaku's liberatory
move enhances the sub-text of resistance inscribed in The Joys of
Motherhood as Nnu Ego's double, through whom "the perceived
self-division of the female writer is reflected in the self-division
of the heroines and the language of female-authored texts.',27 In creating
Adaku, Emecheta seems to be compensating for the failure of the central
character to realize her aspiration to selfl1ood in spite of her growth.
This secondary character partakes of the representation of what may
be called the dual sub jectivity of the contemporary African fictional
heroine. In juxtaposing these two figures, Emecheta constructs a double-voiced
discourse through which she outlines the predicament of the new African
woman in whom feminist consciousness needs to go hand-in-hand with awareness
of and commitment ------------------------------- 25 See, for example,
Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan
Koppelman Comillon (Bowling Green Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press,
1972). 26 Mariama Ba,
Une si longue lettre (Dakar: Les nouvelles editions a!ricaines,
1980). 27 Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993): 85.
~ The type of mother
represented by Nnu Ego finds it difficult to gain access to the symbolic
order of language, culture, of the law --which, in The Joys of Motherhood,
are represented by the traditional culture and the colonial formation.
The treatment of colonialism is an important aspect of the text, its
effects on women as mothers being dramatized in the experiences of the
main character and her husband. This goes along with a clear stance
against colonialism. The Meers and the other whites for whom Nnaife works function as archetypal colonialists. The relationships of the Meers to their servants are the metonymic representation of those between colonizers and colonized, To preserve his job, Nnaife must conform to his employers' religious principles, and must conceal Nnu Ego's desperately wanted pregnancy, since they have not yet been married in church (50). Conscription of unprepared colonial subjects to fight in an alien war is condemned in women's voices, as is done by Adaku, the second wife, when Naife is abducted by the press gang: "The British own us, just like God does, and just like God they are free to take any of us when they wish" (148). To this the narrator adds that in those days Nigerians had no voice; "No paper would report what had taken place; even if it were reported, how many of those affected could not read, and how many could afford to buy a newspaper?" -------------------------------
This criticism,
which echoes that of the patriarchal assumptions regulating gender relationship
in the nascent modern society of Nigeria, is effected more strongly
through Adaku, Nnaife's second wife, whose experience of motherhood
seems to be (in Suleiman's words again) "a privileged means of
entry into the order of language and culture." She is portrayed
as a dissident figure who has grasped the essence of the new order and
has, unlike Nnu Ego, succeeded in wresting her autonomy from the patriarchy.
The African female subject has to struggle against the patriarchal culture's
constricted social formations and their hegemonic economic power. This
is clear from most of Emecheta's writing; and the thematic drift of
her later novels inscribes this Destination
Biafra [115] Destination
Biafra constitutes another stage in Emecheta' s writing -here, a
woman is at the centre of political events. The author creates Debbie
Ogedemgbe in order to mediate the role and problems of women in a modem
society at war. As a protagonist who has been conditioned both by modernity
and by exposure to tertiary education, Debbie is aware of the ideals
of women's liberation, and Emecheta refers to her as her "dream
woman" in her introduction to Head Above Water. Yet it is also
of considerable import that the novel is concerned with political developments
in the post-independence Nigeria in which Debbie evolves. This novel,
whose subject Emecheta defines as a masculine one, is thus a fictional
treatment of recent history: the Nigerian Civil War or the Biafra war,
which took place between 27 May 1967 and 15 January 1970. It imaginatively
re-creates the history of the early years of Nigeria's independence.
The political and military characters are all versions of people recognizable
in Nigeria's political history. Such "world historical individuals"
in Nigerian political annals appear under the names of Chief Odumosu
and Chief Durosaro, supporters of Momoh, and as Dr Ozimba and Dr Eze,
who rallied to Abosi, the future leader of Nigeria, in Biatra.29 Their
anonymity stops at the pseudonyms they are given in the novel. Most
of the events are genuine as well. The Nigerian Civil
War has produced a growing literary corpus. Nigerian writers of different
generations have produced fictional versions of that traumatic national
experience -among the older generation are Achebe, Amadi, Ekwensi and
Soyinka, while Emecheta and Festus Iyayi can be named as representative
of the younger writers. Just as the literary production is sizeable,
so is the handling diverse. It ranges from Elechi Amadi's account in
Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary (1973) to the allegorical treatment
found in Kole Omotoso' s The Combat (1972). All of the works generated
or Flora Nwapa's short novel Never Again recounts the fall of Owerri, a sanctuary of Biafran forces.30 This chronicle of the last days of the Biafran ------------------------ 30 Flora Nwapa.
Never Again (Enugu: Nwamife. 1979) The female viewpoint
on the war is conveyed in Nwapa's novella by a first-person narrator,
Kate, whereas the adventures of Emecheta's heroine, the female officer
Debbie Ogedemgbe, are recounted by a third-person narrator. These different
narrative strategies are illustrative of the nature of each writer's
experience of the war. Nwapa' s is first-hand, while Emecheta bases
her fiction on research and informants. The Civil War may even have
deterred Emecheta from returning to Nigeria!! She was nonetheless concerned
about the events occurring there, and her novel is testimony to this
fact. The narratorial difference accords with a remark Chidi Amuta makes
in his study of the literature of the Nigerian Civil War, in which he
identifies a "marked difference between the works of these writers
who experienced the war from inside Biafra and those of writers who
were outside." Amuta finds in the works of the former (Ike, Munonye,
Achebe et al.) "a certain directness and prosaic immediacy,"
whereas "those of the other writers like Soyinka and Clark tend
to be more distant and appeal mainly at the level of ideals.,,32 Destination Biafra would appear to locate itself in this latter framework, being basically informed by ideals. The novel attempts a fictional reconstruction of the transition from colonialism to international sovereignty and engages in a critique of home and foreign policy in Nigeria. "The Biafran war," Emecheta says in her note to the reader, is "the main background and I have peopled the foreground with figures and ideas drawn from history, experience and imagination." Where Amuta observes: "Because of his [her] proximity with the history of the war, the Nigerian writer on the war is faced --------------------- 31 Tunde Obadina,
"A Worshipper from Afar: An Interview with a Nigerian Novelist,
Buchi Emecheta, Living in Britain," Punch (Nigeria; 17 March
1979). 32 "Literature of the Civil War," in Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Guardian Books Nigeria. 1988). vol I: 91
Looking at the
critical reception of Destination Biafra, it appears that it
has been considered as lacking in some areas such as character delineation
and the fusion of the personal with the historical. Dieter Riemenschneider
observes that Emecheta, concerned with the fundamental question of what
freedom really meant for Nigeria and her citizens, extends the meaning
of the term beyond its political aspect and reclaims its human dimension
as the freedom of African women and men in general. "However,"
writes Riemenschneider, "Destination Biafra does not quite
convince us the way A Wreath I would argue that
the novel moves between the categories of the personal and the political.
Debbie is created as a vehicle for an ideal rooted in women's capacities
and rights and in the displacement of patriarchal bias. She seems in
some ways to embody the slogan "the personal is the political."
The relationship of the personal to the political is variously conceived;
some feminists wish to emphasize the personal -women's experience as
women over the social.
However, there seems to be a consensus that women's subjectivity is predetermined by the social system, and that all domains of life are political, all political issues personal. Some feminists think that "the personal is not poli- -------------------------- 34 "The Biatra
War in Nigerian Literature." Journal of Commonwealth Literature
18.1 35 Catherine A.
MacKinnon, "Feminism. Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda tical enough,"
stressing the importance of sociohistorical determinants and the significance
of the oppression of larger groups in terms of class, race and ethnicity.36
Destination Biafra attempts to merge the personal in the political
through the heroine's experience in the troubled atmosphere of early
Nigerian Ben Okri perceives the first part of the book as smacking of newspaper reports, with excessively long stretches of dialogue. He would rather see
The creation of
Debbie as a fictional character also suffers from stiffness and lack
of depth. She is drawn rather artificially, and appears as a character
whose contours are not wholly in line with the role and ideas represented
by her. There is a mismatch between what she is meant to embody and
the function the narrative voice bestows on her. The book's strength
is what Okri rightly sees as its attempt "to weave together many
important themes into one single novel, an attempt which shows a vision
which is altogether missing in much of Nigerian fiction that has emerged
on the subject ofwar.,,37
----------------------------------- 37 Ben Okri, "Women
in a Male War," West Africa 3371 (15 March 1982): 727-29. 38 Katherine Frank,
"Women Without Men: The Feminist Novel in Africa," Women
in
Leaving aside the
critic's fitting Debbie into the grid ofexclusivism central to her essay
(a topic to be discussed in later chapters of this book), it follows
from the foregoing that the novel does not open itself readily to evaluative
criticism that privileges the aesthetic. Any approach that neglects
the ideological function of the novel falls short of appreciating its
significance. Destination Biafi'a is important socially and historically,
and effective in terms of its agit-prop function. ~ As a fictionalized
version of recent historical events, of course, Destination Biafra
has some of the trappings of the historical novel, as theorized by Georg
Lukacs, who, Linda Hutcheon writes,
The first part of the novel seems to generalize and concentrate; it initiates the constitution of a fictional heroine who is a synthesis of the general and the particular. Debbie is represented as a quite particular subject whose construction runs counter to the type common in the discursive formation in which she is placed. She resembles the protagonists of historiographic metafiction, "the ex-centrics, marginalized peripheral figures of fictional history," to use Hutcheon's term (114). Debbie might appear 'ex-centric' to the reader, as she -------------------- The novel's structure
suggests the binary division between history and fiction, which is erased
by the imagined story of Debbie's involvement, in the same way as the
narrative attempts to undo what Cixous calls "hierarchized oppositions"
by virtue of the role it assigns to Debbie.40 The first part, ending
with the dates 28 May and 30 May 1967, is emphatically history-based;
while the second, though relying mostly on actual events, is more fiction-oriented,
and focuses on Debbie. She bridges the two worlds, fusing the two spheres.
With her entry on the scene, "the binary opposition between fiction
and fact is no longer relevant: in any differential system, it is the
assertion of the space between the entities that matters."41 Emecheta uses Debbie
to offset the social construction of gender. This amounts to stating
that if women at this point in history were debarred from national affairs
by masculine hegemony and their experience of the war glossed over,
their narrative can still be imagined and inscribed in the "space
between the entities." Such entities may also be read within the
novel as the First Republic of Nigeria and the State of Biafra; just
as they can be imagined as dichotomized male/female, gendered subjectivities.
In Emecheta' s shaping of her, Debbie, as a marker of liberal energies
and aspirations, de constructs phallocentrism:
What Emecheta does in Destination Biafra is part of a sustained programme in her fiction to challenge patriarchal assumptions, this time employing a heroine equipped with a modern education. The novel offers a view from within, looking at the plight of the voiceless victims of the Civil War who --------------------------- 41 Paul de Man, quoted by Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 42 Helene Cixous. "The laugh of the Medusa." in New French Feminisms.
Greed permeates
the novel. It motivates all the parties involved in the power-play and
struggle of interests over the nascent nation. Alan Grey, the British
military counsellor, a representative of imperialist ideology, is there
to further the colonial mission of the British Governor. All his actions
are shown as being motivated by a will to safeguard his country's interests
in independent Nigeria and maintain it as a game preserve, out of the
reach of other international rivals. This design is re-enacted in the
way Alan plays on the sensitivities of the elite with whom he deals. Alan embodies the duplicity of colonialism in its new guise. He pursues his government's interests according to the policy stated at the beginning of the novel in a scene set in the then Governor's residence. Alan butters up to Saka Momoh, of whom Emecheta is very critical. The figure of Alan serves also to debunk the other hegemonic international powers like the "Chinese and Russians' friends' hovering about" and out of whose clutches he wishes to keep Momoh. Similarly, Alan functions as a tool to expose those "friends" whom the Biafran leader Abosi has collected in France, Ireland and Eastern Europe, "who would jump on the bandwagon of drilling oil from the East" (I. 1.4-15).Emecheta extends her exposition of imperialism to culture, and has Grey travel to the Mid-West Region to collect traditional artistic works of worship ----------------------- The country's political
leaders are shown to be no better than Grey. They appear to be mindful
of their own interests, to the detriment of the Nigerian people. This
type is portrayed in Samuel Ogedemgbe, the heroine's father and one
of that breed of African politicians designated to replace colonial
rulers in the newly independent countries. The corrupt Chief Ogedemgbe
wallows in his wealth, and uses his political position to run a fraudulent
and prosperous business in connivance with foreign capital. The other
tribal and political figures are not spared Emecheta's criticism, either.
Nor are the group of Sandhurst-trained officers who plot the coup that
ends the fragile Nigerian First Republic, with dire consequences for
the precarious ethnopolitical stability of the country. The officers' plan to cleanse Nigeria by way of a gory takeover is treated in the text in a dubious way. The narrative voice reports their action with mixed feelings. Their anticolonial position is mediated through Abosi, the future leader of Biafra, and seems to be endorsed by the narrator. He defines their purpose to rescue the whole of Nigeria in these words:
The novel prefigures
this period of Nigerian history early in the narrative by means of metaphoric
language grounded in the female field of reference matrimony, gestation,
and birth. These images are all connected with the destiny of Nigeria,
in the same way as rape and Debbie are assimilated to Nigeria later
in the text. Thus Abosi's and Juliana's wedding party, which is interrupted
by news of serious political unrest in the western part of the country,
becomes symbolic of the hindering of federal state unity. The narra The stillbirth
of the state of Biafra is similarly prefigured by the miscarriage that
Juliana is enduring at the moment when Abosi promises to break away
if the Aburi talks fail (98). Emecheta extends the figure of childbirth
and growth related to Biafra into the ephemeral life of baby Biatra,
a child born during the war (212). Parturition serves
to effect a further trope by which the criticism of Saka Momoh, the
head of the Federal government, is compounded. His wife, Elizabeth,
gives birth to "a deformed piece of humanity" (203). The narrator
points to this birth as if to identify Momoh' s actions in Biafra as
monstrous. This event significantly coincides "with the day he
was to be honoured as General of the Nigerian Army." The substance
of the metaphor is heralded as soon as Elizabeth starts into labour:
The use of reproductive
imagery reinforces the parallel between Nigeria's plight and Elizabeth's
labour pains. It equally intensifies the criticism of the ruling elite,
which uses the country's oil for their own ends, and attacks the actions
of the federal leadership in Biafra. The narrator indicts Momoh and
all that he represents for their selfishness and lack of consideration
for the people. Dr Ozimba, described as suspicious of over-educated women, will not heed his wife's opinion about the fallacious information which Radio Biafra broadcasts to raise people's spirits, and admonishes her to silence:
The territorial division of power along gender lines appears clearly in the treatment of Abosi, whose sexist prejudice is shown in the way he dismisses Debbie's mission with this patronizing remark: "What could you have done, just you, little you?" (239). Through Abosi, the text disparages the phallocentric discourse denying women agency and a voice. Later, in a telephone communication,
Abosi reminds her "that she was a woman and that a good woman should
do what she was told and not ask too many questions" (244). Salihu Lawal, by
means of whom the novel ridicules a type of officer, rounds off the
disparaging picture of the artisans of the war. This criticism culminates
in the scene in which Colonel Lawal, who is in charge of "Operation
Mosquito," aimed at stamping out Biafran resistance, is shown raping
Debbie to impress on her that she is "nothing but a woman, an ordinary
woman" (175). Rape, recurrent in the novel, is part of the untold
or suppressed stories of the war that the novel exposes. Women, girls
and nuns are sexually assaulted and killed. The rape of Debbie is important,
since, towards the close of the story, it serves to define her attitude
towards Alan in her relation with him. In the manner in which Alan recoils
once he learns that she has been raped by ordinary soldiers, just as
Lawal did when he heard the same thing. Debbie discovers his pretence
and chides him for it:
Most significant
in the novel is the manner in which Debbie is represented. Emecheta
makes of her the first female officer in the Nigerian army along with
her friend Barbara Teteku or Babs. As already indicated, Emecheta writes
in her introduction to Head Above Water that Debbie is her dream woman
and Destination Biafra is based on ideas and ideals. But Emecheta's
image of her ideal woman would be incomplete if it were uniquely restricted
to Debbie and not attentive to Babs. By means of Babs's presence though
transient --the novel to some extent implements the doubling device
that was seen earlier in the Nnu Ego-Adaku pairing. Debbie and Barbara
are complementary representation of the new African woman in Emecheta's
vision. They are university graduates, and are determined to assert
their freedom as women and play an active part in national affairs. Debbie's political
consciousness is not made sharp enough for her to grasp fully the issues
at stake at the dawn of the secession of Biafra. It is Babs who analyzes
the implications perceptively:
[126] would simply be
statistics, war casualties. But tor the soldier-politicians, the traders
in arms, who only think of their personal gain, it would be the chance
of a litetime. And the politicians who started it all can pay their
\yay to Europe or America and wait until it has all blown over. (109) Barbara's voice
also re-states the point about male stupidity expressed earlier through
Elina. This statement underlies the whole narrative, and is perhaps
the most powerful instance of rejection of the war by women, who are
shown as more perceptive than men but are sequestered by historical
and social determinants. The judgement passed on secession is placed
strategically in the mouth of a neutral entity, Barbara. Like Debbie,
she is created as someone who identifies with neither side in the war. Debbie is represented
as honest, romantic and idealistic; and so dedicated to justice that
she can accept the murder of her father without resentment. There is
a gap between the ideas put in her mind and the attitudes she adopts. She suspects the
designs of Grey and other foreign powers, whom she lmows from the very
start will come back and befriend the winner once the Civil War ends
(92), but remains irresolute. Again it is Babs who goads her:
Debbie is portrayed
as a muddled-up character, not clear about the extent of her commitment.
If one were to entertain monolithic expectations about a character,
then one would have to say that she does not live up to the burden her
creator places on her shoulders. Her gradual ideological awareness will
appear once she is considered as a subject in process, whose subjectivity
develops as the narrative unfolds. At at one stage, for examp !.e ,
she understands Alan's divide-and-rule tactics and confronts him about
the game he is playing, and about the part he played at Aburi and in
changing Momoh's mind; but, emotionally overcome, she succumbs to his
sly suggestions. At the end of their talk Debbie's enlightenment does
not go beyond saying, "I'm not doubting you as a person ...but
it's just the attitude of your government and what you stand for. I
can't just reconcile the two" (115). Debbie's articulation of her subjectivity is located mainly in her journey to the East, especially when the narrative shows her among the women and
-------------------- 44 Plora Nwapa. One is Enough (Enugu: Tana Press. 1981): 49-50
This is shown in various ways through minor incidents like trying to tie a child on her back, the difficulty of which causes a sense of inadequacy that is made worse by the women's gibes. "What kind of African woman was she, indeed? ," she chides herself (191). The narrative situation here points up her feeling of 'otherness,' something already impressed on her by the reactions of males she has met, from condescension to rape. The way in which the narrator registers the loneliness Debbie feels and the gap her status creates between her and her companions makes evident both her' otherness' and social separateness, even among the women:
This event narrativizes
the relations between educated African women and the larger number of
ordinary working women. In Debbie's awareness of and consequent sloughing
off of her snug past --shoes decorated with real gold and the fine 'been-to'
accent which filled her parents with pride (44) --there appears what,
in revolutionary writing, has been termed intellectual suicide. The
horrors of war and the social determination of values are shown from
her perspective as she walks with the women and children, witnesses
murders and childbirth in the bush, and watches children starving to
death and women burying the dead. The chapter called "Women's War," a title found again in The Rape of Shavi, enhances the narrative of women by highlighting their solidarity and strength, which stimulate Debbie's growing self-awareness. It is the women's resources, discipline and commitment to each other's plight that are insisted on most, along with the idea that men are dispensable. Their determination embodied by Uzoma and again expressed in the five hundred women who have organized in an autonomous militia to defend themselves from the soldiers of both sides -heartens Debbie and steels her. All of this she records in her notes for the manuscript of the "entire story of the women's experience of the war" which she will call "Destination Biafra" (223, 246). Thus it is well into the book that we find the story, in the manner of a meta-narrative, suggesting its own creation as being Debbie's own constructed narrative, which is presented
as a forbidden discourse to be concealed and codified, as she does in
her manuscript, which must be hidden away in order to survive. Debbie's youth
and ambition, the rape she undergoes, her will to survive and to work
for unity: these are all components of a frequent trope tor Atrica in
male literature. But Emecheta reworks it to grant her heroine a degree
of agency that prevents her representation from resembling an all-suffering
mother Africa or Nigeria, though this is the way in which she has mostly
been shown to the world. Debbie's love relationship with Alan Grey is
a transparent metaphor for British-Nigerian relations. Grey exploits
Debbie in many ways, just as colonial and neocolonial territories and
subjects were and are used. As much is implied in the scene where he
entrusts her with the mission to persuade the Biafran leader to surrender:
As has been seen,
throughout the story males have seen in Debbie an instrument of use
in their contest. Immediately after the first coup, Abosi saw in her
resolve to enlist in the army an opportunity to secure arms from Britain,
thanks to her connection with the white officers in the Nigerian army,
Alan Grey especially. Unlike Emecheta's heroines in the African trilogy, who fail to provide upbeat images at the close -where they are either killed, as Aku-nna and Nnu Ego are, or shown enslaved, as Ojebeta is -Debbie is represented at the end of the novel in a changed light, perhaps because of her education. She finally realizes that Abosi and his like are still colonized and need to undergo decolonizing when she fails to blow up the South African plane evacuating Abosi. And Grey's double-dealing likewise dawns on her in the rather selfcongratulatory speech that Emecheta puts in her mouth here:
The figurative treatment of Debbie as a character by means of whose relationship with Alan the Britain-Nigeria connection is enacted replicates the slavery parable that Emecheta constructs in the trilogy, particularly in The Slave Girl. One recalls the narrator's parting words, which assimilate Ojebeta's predicament to the slavery in which Britain was implicated. In Destination Biafra the reader is shown Nigeria just "changing masters," to use Emecheta's phrase, in the same way as Ojebeta was. The national elite who took charge of the country on its "sham independence" reveal themselves as self-seekers (117). The war enterprise finally proves to have been engineered by ambitious politicians, generals and top businessmen.
The same idea is
found in a more recent novel among the body of literature that the Civil
War continues to generate: Festus Iyayi's Heroes. In this book, the
reader, in the manner of the main character, Osime Iyere, gradually
realizes the extent to which the working people on both warring sides
are manipulated and drawn into a war which they fight for indolent warlords
(greedy and corrupt senior officers), politicians, traditional rulers,
and other profiteers such as contractors. The novel encapsulates this
in two memorable statements that broaden the perspective supplied by
Destination Biafra, The first of these is made by a colleague
of the character Osime early in the novel, on the basis of a remark
made by the head of state:
The second capital observation comes from a sergeant at the war-front who is bitterly conscious of the position of the non-commissioned officers and the rank and file who do the fighting, suffer, and die unacknowledged on the -------------------------- [131] The real heroes,
tor Emecheta, are those soldiers and civilians who mostly belong to
the broad masses that are ground down by the war machine. Both Emecheta and
Iyayi condemn the motives behind the war, each in the light of their
social vision. Emecheta's novel ends with Debbie on the brink of a new
but rather belated understanding of the situation, resolved now to resist
and aspire to equality with Grey and what he represents. Iyayi's Osime,
by contrast, saw the light early enough to know that the issue was to
resolve the crisis by creating a "third force" which, in the
language of Heroes, would be the grass that is trampled by two battling
elephants -the workers, peasants, and people like Sergeants Audu and
Kesh Kesh and their men, who are in fact the salt of the earth. Such, Osime claims,
was the belief of Colonel Victor Banjo, and a fellowjournalist adds
accusingly: "He was sold out. He was betrayed" (170), In The
Man Died, Wole Soyinka provides an echo of the ideas for which Banjo
and others paid with their lives,46 Soyinka believes that "there
existed then, and exists even now in spite of its reverses a truly national,
moral and revolu Looking at these
views in connection with Destination Biafra and contrasting Heroes,
it appears that Emecheta's novel, although admirable in some respects,
is lacking in any deep political and ideological insight. This is manifest
in Debbie's blind acceptance of the missions assigned to her and in
her belated awakening. Her short-sightedness seems to be a projection
of the writer's own ideological ambivalence, which is indicative of
the tensions involved in handling the personal and the political. In
Heroes, Osime, like Debbie, starts with confused loyalties and learns
in the course of the fray, The reader follows his growth in his constant
soul-searching and his quest for a lasting solution grounded on clear-sighted
conviction, Debbie, by contrast, remains a victim of higher circles
of power until the promising close. ---------------------------------- 46 Wole Soyinka.
The Man Died (London: Rcx Collings. 1972): 174 A similar faith
might be seen to have informed Debbie, but on the plane of gender. One
might assume that her construction as a character linking the Eastern
and the Federal side could be assimilated to another imaginative expression
of the Third Force stemming from both sides, in order, as Osime thinks
in Heroes, to challenge the murder, rape, pillage and cruelty that went
with the war, so that they are not carried over into peacetime. "A
movement which will write the history of this war and give each man
and woman his or her proper due" (247). As already seen, Debbie
herself has been taking notes to write a similar history entirely from
a woman's perspective. Finally, Destination
Biafra embodies Emecheta's political ideas on the national question.
Debbie sets out with feminist ideas and a vision of life that has been
questioned by the realities she encounters on her journey through the
Mid-Western Region. And even though the reader is not given much opportunity
to absorb the full import of her ideals, glimpses of these can be detected
at work in her at definite moments. From such insights derives the notion
that the educated and professional African woman needs to add to feminist
consciousness an awareness of the particular situation in which her
Africanness, with all that this implies politically and culturally,
places her. This is the important issue which this book raises, and
which I shall now subject to detailed scrutiny in the light of Emecheta's
subsequent literary creations and other writings. |
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