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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Evolution or Transition involves change and passage from one stage to another and the

circumstances that enable the changes. The meaning of the term has varied based on the

contexts in which it has been used. Transitional definitions alter according to the

disciplinary focus but most agree that transition involves people’s response during a

passage or change. Transition occurs over a period of time and entails change and

adaptation in areas that might be developmental, personal, relational, situational, societal

or environmental.

Van, Loon and Kralik define transition as “a process of convoluted passage

during which people redefine their sense of self and re-develop self-agency in response to

disruptive life events” (2). It is any event or non-event that results in “changed

relationships, routines, assumptions and roles” (Feaney et al 4). Time is a vital element in

transition. In fact, according to Debbie Kralik, there is an “Initial phase, midcourse

experience and outcome” (2) of every transition. Transition is not just another word for

change, it is a connotation of the psychological processes involved in adapting to the

change event or disruption in any sphere of life. It is about change and the circumstances

that influence it. The way people respond to change over time is transition. People

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undergo it when they adapt to new situations or circumstances in order to incorporate the

changed event into their lives.

In the area of literature, especially the novel genre, societal situations have

constantly been a subject matter as novelists use their art to inform and educate. Helen

Chukwuma asserts that the novelist is a representative of the people at large and his or

her story is the story of the people, his/her work is much more than beautiful story telling

“He arouses in the reader a true sense of himself, evoking his past and linking it to the

present” (5). This view is shared also by Dan Izevbaye who believes that the novelist

recreates for us the problems and efforts of a people creating a viable culture in response

to the demands of their environment, and it gives us frequent insights into the effect on

men of the culture they have created” (17) This is to say that the opinion of the novelist

matters in societal transition and their works can be used as mirrors of society, especially

in an evolutionary process. This is also true of feminist novels as a voice of women

against the society’s attack on the rights of women.

Feminist novels are not just novels about women, they are novels written for the

well-being of women in particular contexts or cultures, to encourage the equality of men

and women or speak out against the various forms of injustice perpetrated on female

members of society. They are novels that support the feminist goals of defining,

establishing and defending equal political, economic and social rights for women. They

often identify women’s roles in contrast to men’s roles as unequal to that of men in

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status, privilege and power and the usually negative consequences to women and the

men, families, Communities and society.

This study attempts to incorporate the important concept of transition to the study

of feminist novels in Nigeria, to trace the tremendous journey they have undergone in

Nigeria’s transitional history over the past half century, since Flora Nwapa began writing

in 1966 as the first female writer of women-centered novels to the present day feminist

novels. To further understand the contribution of feminist writers in Nigeria and their

continuous journey, a thorough understanding of the feminist literary theory and

feminism in the African context is needed because understanding why feminist novels are

written in the first place is the first step towards understanding the ways in which the

novels have evolved over the generations.

Feminist literary theory is concerned with women’s authorship and the

representation of women’s condition within literature. In the field of literary criticism,

Elaine Showalter described the development of feminist theory as having three phases.

The first she calls “feminist critique” in which the feminist reader examines the ideology

behind the literary phenomena, the second, she calls “Gynocriticism” in which the

woman is the producer of textual meaning. She calls the last phase “gender theory” (3) in

which the ideological inscription and literary effects of the gender systems are explored.

In Africa, and of course, Nigeria, feminism as a movement is shaped by contexts

that are African in nature and takes the experiences of African women into consideration

because of its peculiarity. In other words, what a ‘white’ woman might view as an

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encroachment on her rights might be enjoyed by an African as a normal traditional

gender role of a man towards his woman in the African context. For a long time, African

women writers have been invisible from what is characterized today as African literature

hence the advent of the feminist novel. Before they gained a voice, the first battle of

African feminist writers was to fight for recognition before their works could have the

desired effect. There was a need to change the condition of women in the scheme of

things before picking up pens to write. This is so obvious because Nigeria’s history

captures the difficulties faced by women in that era.

Women’s silence in the colonial era, for example, is reflected in the lack of

female-authored novels written within that period whereas men like Amos Tutuola,

Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe were already making strong male statements in the

field of Nigerian literature. The more the Nigerian Society changed, the more the ways

that women were silenced and they began to seek relevance in literature. Each era had a

very different or similar battle to fight and employed the required tactics to tackle it. The

experiences of women were misrepresented at first, thereby necessitating the first burst of

Nigerian feminist novels. Pioneer Nigerian writers like Chinua Achebe and Elechi Amadi

portrayed their female characters as almost less than human. Achebe created Okonkwo’s

wives as foolish childish women who needed to be whipped and a daughter who was so

special that Okonkwo wished she could have been a male child. Amadi’s Ihuoma was no

fool but her character was the kind of woman whose love could only ruin a man.

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The status of women in Africa and in Nigeria has been discussed in a number of

ways to emphasize the discrimination and degradation that has taken place especially

within the novel. This status has seen significant changes over the past half-century. In

the socio-political and economic spheres, these changes have also been constant. The

Nigerian woman has gone beyond the time when her birth was “neither recorded nor

celebrated nor was she educated” (Emecheta 74) but “she still reels under the heavy yoke

of dictatorships like the kind that brutalize and impoverish the nation and its people”

(Orabueze 256). Even though the majority of the African women are still under the

burdens of religious and customary practices that are often very degrading, coupled with

illiteracy and domestic abuse, the few enlightened ones have tried to make a change. This

is where the feminist novelist comes in, to correct the false images of women that male

writers have created. These images were not created from the blues; the male writers

were influenced by the ways in which women were presented in the Nigerian society-an

issue that dates back to the pre-colonial era.

It has been argued that pre-colonial Nigeria had a gendered division of labour.

However, the nature and implication of such a division of labour is often misinterpreted

especially in the novels authored by men. While male dominance was built into the

social system of some Nigerian ethnic groups, women played a significant role in all

aspects of the lives of their community. For some scholars, this is due to the

complementarity of male and female role functions. Colonialism also contributed to the

diminution of women’s rights and image. Pittin and VerEecke argued that in Yola, in the

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Northern part of Nigeria for example, women were extensively involved in Agricultural

production before the Fulani Jihad of the 18th Century. Before they embraced some of

the restrictive customs imposed on them by Islam. Under colonial rule, women lost a

great deal of authority and the opportunity to participate in decision making due to their

exclusion from all levels of administration, they also lost maneuverability because the

male-dominated elements of society were stressed. These factors and more informed the

negative portrayal of women in Nigerian literature and created a need for feminist texts to

correct them. In feminist novels of the country, discrimination manifests itself in the

forms of gender, class and personal discrimination. In some perspectives, discrimination

is attributed to structural factors. Some scholars contend that the most important

structural sources of female subjugation are social formations such as the family, which

conditions its members to conform to socially accepted gender roles. Although the pre-

colonial division of labour in Nigeria was based on gendered distinctions, social

definitions of men’s and women’s work varied by society or community. These were

some of the factors that informed male authors’ portrayal of Nigerian women in their

novels and the reason for the rise of feminist novels in the country.

The very root of the Nigerian feminist novels is the commitment of the Nigerian

feminist writer to empower her fellow women. Their preoccupation is to deconstruct the

Nigerian women’s stereotyped images and fight against several forms of abuse and

oppression that Nigerian women suffered in the past and are still suffering from. The

first relevant aspect of the empowerment Nigerian feminist writers are committed to, is

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the demystification of certain male stereotypes of African women as goddess or supreme

mother, self-sacrificing and willingly and silently suffering. The feminist writers of the

earliest period did not even mind these stereotypes because they thought it put the women

on a high pedestal. Nwapa, for example, did not mind creating female characters who

were economically independent and neither did Emecheta. Their characters even took

care of men. Their portrayal of women drew attention to a recurring problem in the

evolution of female characters as being both victim and victimizer.

The first step the writers took was to construct an oppositional thought in order to

empower oppressed women. The women became larger than life and the man became

less of a man. This is why feminist novels of the post-colonial era have such thematic

preoccupations as motherhood and abandonment of social roles and somehow, the virility

of the Nigerian man was hurt in the process and the writers of the era that followed had

more work to do. Apart from the quest to correct the image of women in male-authored

novels, the earliest forms of feminist writings were geared towards telling women-

centered stories built around extraordinary women or even ordinary ones who were

elevated as a result of their womanhood. In fact, it was this reason that made Flora

Nwapa who never professed feminism begin writing about women. If all the novels

before hers which were authored by men had strong male characters, wasn’t it only

natural that the first woman to write a novel would write about women? She began from

the grassroots, the environment that most women of that era could associate with, and

situated her female characters in traditional environments where she celebrated their

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womanhood to spur them into action to seek liberation from any form of oppression. Her

first two novels, the eponymous Efuru (1966) and Idu (1970) had lead female characters

who were uneducated, (as most women of that time were) village women who were yet

distinguished in their societies. Both Efuru and Idu were village women rising above the

shackles of tradition in a patriarchal society and making admirable lives for themselves.

In 1960s Nigeria only few women had the opportunity of being educated like their male

counterparts. Emecheta’s radical stance in this era runs through the best of her works-

from Slave Girl to Joys of motherhood even though women in the first generation to

which she belongs were not so exposed. For her, the struggles of the woman are not only

against sexism and patriarchal society structures but also against racism, neo-colonialism,

cultural imperialism, religious fundamentalism and corrupt government systems. In

Emecheta’s era, women were moving on with their lives without the men who draw them

backwards. They make good lives for themselves and their children, radically rising

above societal stereotypes and throwing caution to the wind. Emecheta was interested in

criticizing individual traditional and modern conventions (like polygamy) that

discriminate against women. Her era gives way to the second generation where the

novelists present alternatives that would improve the situation of women, holding true

that improvement within given structures is possible. Men are criticized as individuals

but they can change. Thus a happy ending is made possible for both male and female

characters. This is evident in Ifeoma Okoye’s Behind the Clouds and Zaynab Alkali’s

The Virtuous Woman and The Stillborn (1984 and 1987 respectively).

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The transition to modern Nigerian feminist novels can be traced to the availability

of education and Western influence on women’s lives and actions thereby resulting in

what Susan Arndt calls “Transformative texts” (85) which offer a fundamental critique of

patriarchy. Men’s behavior is presented more sharply and as being typical for them as a

group. Women’s complicity in the reproduction of gender discrimination is also

thematized. The radicality of the actions of the women is often extreme even though the

writers make it appear as though they had no choice in the matter. An example of this is

Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) where Kambili’s mother was left with no

other alternative but to poison her husband Eugene for being abusive to her and the

children. In Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will come, the same defiance is also evident.

As Nigerian women matured academically and socially, it reflected in the feminist

novels produced in the Country. More subtle ways of dealing with subjugation began to

manifest especially in the modern novels. The heroines are educated and relevant in

society and have more opportunities than their counterparts in bygone eras; like the new

Nigerian woman herself, the woman in the novel can grow to become anything they want

and their men are no longer portrayed as never-do-wells, lazy and against their women’s

dreams and aspirations, instead more sophisticated forms of abuse have surfaced and

silence and other psychological wars now rage in the home front.

A new face is being given to Nigerian feminist novels. The changes that have

occurred have been relevant to each generation. Cultural and political transitions in the

country have also been put into consideration in the novels. Like fashion, it is changing to

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accommodate the development and advancement in all spheres of life. There is no telling

what direction feminist novels will take in the coming years, but against the above

background there is the need to investigate the evolving trends and concerns of Nigerian

feminist novels, to survey the historical developments and advancements that necessitate

them and how such changes can enlighten women and men in Nigeria’s transitional

society, from the era of women’s stories to radicality in the face of oppression and

transformative approaches to issues that women face in the third generation feminist

novels.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The study intends to investigate the different ways in which Nigerian feminist novels

have evolved through the decades, highlighting and analyzing the distinguishing features

of each generation or period. The novels are analyzed in relation to feminist discourse

and the changing phases of women’s situation in Nigerian society.

Very importantly, the study is to examine if the evolutionary trends in Nigerian

feminist novels really show that the situation of women is improving through the decades

for the better and the effects of such changes on Nigerian literature.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The purpose or goals of this research are as follows:

To find out the manner in which Nigerian feminist novels have evolved and ascertain the

extent to which the transition has occurred and gained insight into the Salient issues

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facing women in Society and weigh the solutions offered in the novels and gauge their

effectiveness or lack of it.

The study inquires into the evolutionary trends and how they have contributed to the

development of Nigerian feminist novels, to trace the changes that have occurred and find

out the significant areas of these changes.

It also ascertains the degree to which feminist novelists of different generations under

study have portrayed the problems of women, to check the ways that they can be

attributed to what is obtainable in society in real life.

The study investigates into the degree in which evolution of thematic developments and

characterization in Nigerian feminist novels are significant in society.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

It is of utmost importance to trace the history and evolution of Nigerian feminist novels

because of the way that transition draws attention to change and what necessitates it and

how it is implemented, because in doing so, we are not only drawn to understand the

challenges of women in different eras in history, we see the different measures taken to

weather the storms, the effect of these measures, and how well it captures the experiences

of women in Nigerian society at the particular time in history.

Transition or evolution is progressive and over the past fifty years it has been a

driving force in Nigerian feminist novels. This study is significant as it will help to point

out the areas in which impact has been made in the novels and evaluate the various

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changes as well as inquire into the way forward as it keeps evolving to accommodate the

developments in culture, politics, religion and gender roles.

This study will contribute to learning by employing transition which is a fairly

new horizon in the field of literature to capture the effects of change in feminist novels in

Nigeria in order to prove that the issues raised by the writers of each era in the novels

could be seen in their society and so, transition is also a way of following the important

historical events that have given rise to the experiences of women in Nigerian society

even as it keeps evolving. The study will show that the more society evolves, the more

the ways in which women are subjugated or emancipated also evolve. The study will

also serve as a reflection of society.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Transition as a theory has a long history in disciplines such as psychology, anthropology

and education. In psychology it is employed to explore the psychological character of an

individual as s/he navigates through different stages in life, from infancy through

adulthood. In the field of Anthropology, it appears in the 1960 work of Van Genep and

was further developed by Turner in 1969, highlighting the way that “rites of passage”

through the stages of human life are marked by Socio-cultural rituals. Rites of passage

occur where there is a “transition in cultural expectations, social roles and developmental

or situational changes to being in the world” (Schlossberg and Anderson 347). In the field

of Education, it has been used to study the various changes that occur as children

progress from one level of education to another and to trace child development. Also, in

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the field of medicine, transition theory has been employed to understand how people cope

with life-changing illnesses.

As a body of knowledge, transition theory is premised on the notion that the

individual, like society, is in a constant state of transition. It holds that transition is an

inevitable experience and is characteristic at every stage of human life. To this end, an

understanding of this experience is important to the individual and society in order to

cope with transition and in order to live healthy and well-ordered lives. As a method of

analysis, transition theory is based on what Goodman, Schlossberg and Anderson called

the ‘Four S’ (4S’s) – self, situation, support and strategies. The self defines the key

character or identity and how this character processes growth; situation refers to the

environment where the self manifest and explains what happened or occurred and or did

not happen or occur; support explains who, what and or event available within the

environment to help the self through the situation and; strategies refers to the how and

what was done by the self in response to the situation given the available support.

Transition theory as an analytical tool simply examines how an individual or subject-

matter goes through life changing processes.

In the context of this study, transition is employed to explore the growth and

evolution of feminist novels through three generations collectively, and selected novels in

these generations individually. Collectively, transition is used to examine the themes and

peculiar circumstances under which each generation of feminist novels emerge, interact,

transform and pave way for the succeeding generation. Individually, it is evoked to

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explore the essential character of the heroine, the environment or situation within which

she had to find or actualize herself, as well as the support and strategies available to the

heroine in each novel as she evolves from childhood through maturity. Furthermore,

transition theory furnishes this study with the necessary tools to examine how these

characters interact with the environment or situation through series of events, experiences

and role changes; garner support through acquaintances and mentorship; and how these

trends explain the current state of feminist novels in Nigeria. Transition theory is thus

employed to explain the changing phases of feminist novels in Nigeria since

Independence to date.

SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS

The thesis studies the periods of change in the development of Nigerian feminist novels

based on history. It concentrates on the various changes that have occurred in the novels.

It follows the generational trends in the feminist novels over different periods of the

country’s equally transitional history. Since the novel is a reflection of society, the study

bases the evolution in Nigerian feminist novels on cultural and socio-political factors. It

also investigates the constant changes in thematic preoccupation, viewpoints and

characterization and the effect of such milestones on the feminist novel. Generational

changes in subject matter and style would also be explored and the factors that are

recurring in each era would be analyzed as well as the evolution of gender roles.

Three generations of feminist novelists will be studied within a historical period

from 1966 to the present. For the first generation, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Buchi

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Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood and other novels by the authors will be analyzed while

Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman and The Stillborn as well as Ifeoma Okoye’s

Behind the Clouds and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s The Last of the Strong of The Strong

Ones will represent the second generation. Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come,

Unoma Azuah’s Sky High Flames and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

will be analysed for the third generation.

The study would not delve into any other areas in which Nigerian feminist novels

have evolved. Tracing evolution historically is already all-encompassing and time-

consuming.

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CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED SCHOLARSHIP

Transition is defined as “any event or non-event that results in changed relationships,

routines, assumptions and roles” (Feaney, Evans and Dibrito, 4). They noted that

perception plays a vital role in transition as an event or non-event and the experiences of

a person or group meets the definition of a transition only if it is importantly defined by

the individual experiencing it. According to Goodman, Schlossberg and Anderson, “a

transition is any event that results in changed relationships” (Goodman, Schlossberg and

Anderson, 4). They explained that to understand the meaning that a transition has for a

particular person or situation requires considering the type, context and impact of the

transition. Schlossberg’s theory describes three different types of transitions- anticipated,

unanticipated and non-events. Anticipated transitions happen expectedly while

unanticipated ones are the types that were expected but they didn’t occur. Transition may

provide opportunities for growth or decline.

Van, Loon and Kralik opine that an essential element in transition is time, so,

longitudinal studies are required to explore “the initial phase, midcourse experience and

outcome of the transition experience” (2). They define transition as “a process of

convoluted passage during which people redefined their sense of self and redevelop self -

agenda in response to disruptive life events.

In Nigerian feminist novels, transition captures the process of change in portrayal

of female characters and the roles assigned to them in literature, and how those roles can

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be related to women outside literature. According to Afaf Ibrahim Meleis and Sandra

Rogers, ‘women are at the center of all life transitions, whether the transitions are within

the feminist, such as maturation or because of national modernization ….” (199)

According to Florence Orabueze, Nigerian feminist writers began writing in order

to correct the negative image of the woman portrayed in male-authored novels:

In the protest writings of African female writers like Flora

Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali and others, they

created female characters who have major roles and their

social and economic independence from their male

counterparts are unquestionable. ( 3)

Orabueze believes that transition in Nigerian feminist novels has a link to Flora Nwapa’s

creation of female characters to counter the negative ones created by pioneer novelists.

These unfortunate female characters like Ihuoma (in Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine) and

Jagua (in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana) bore the brunt of negativity but Nwapa’s

recreation of female characters in the novels was a giant leap for a woman of her

generation.

Emilia Oko asserts that this giant leap came to “redeem the uneven balance of

male writers’ characterization of women as adjunct, not selves” (72). Oko also opines

that as far as transition in Nigerian feminist novels is concerned, Flora Nwapa is a

forerunner to a generation of African women writers even though she never considered

herself as feminist.

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In agreement, Marie Umeh, who is Nwapa’s biographer takes a look at her 1995

interview with Flora Nwapa who says: “When I write about women in Nigeria,I try to

paint a positive picture about women because there are many women who are very

positive in their thinking, who are very very independent and who are very very

industrious”.

Imo Eshiet describes Nwapa’s milestone with the example of her novel, Efuru

where he points out that “the dominance and proliferation of the female character is

unmistakable” (24-25). In the same way, Jonas Akung noted in the area of thematic

development that:

The Nigerian feminist novels have moved from the themes of

women in village or traditional settings with docile female

characters who only look up to men as their benefactor to

novels that have vibrant and assertive female characters. The

new feminist novels explore new dimensions that would help

the woman’s career activism and participation. The women

are no longer the occupiers of the solitary spaces in the

kitchen; they are now at the forefront, leading other women to

achieve their goals. (3)

Akung is of the opinion that the feminist novel is changing in every way especially in the

areas of theme and characterization. Whereas at a point the women whose preoccupation

was producing children, the characters have evolved into vibrant well-educated and

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outspoken women whose dreams go far beyond the traditional housewife’s existence.

These women are now in positions of authority and economic independence from men.

Ayo Kehinde and Joy Mbipong agree to this change and explains that it is as a

result of globalization: because “the African writer and his craft predictably continue to

rise to the challenge of remaining committed to his community in the face of diverse

socio-political instabilities and the contending trend of modernization” (4). They also

assert that the writer not only probes but also responds to the yearning of their

environment. They believe that this is evolutionary.

In corroborating the stance of Jonas Akung, Sule Egya states that: “Over the

years, Nigerian feminist discourse seems to have shifted its focus from the plight of the

servile house wife or the peasant woman to the engagements, whether restricted or not, of

the professional woman in her urban society. He further opines that the Nigerian feminist

novelist, especially in the twenty first century has mainly concerned herself with a

woman’s negotiated space and how she utilizes it to not only privilege and advance the

condition of the woman but also to fully participate in society. He demonstrates this by

drawing attention to the novels of Zaynab Alkali and Adimora-Ezeigbo and asserting

that, “the new professional woman of the Nigerian feminist novel, such as Alkali’s Seytu

in the The Descendants (2005) and Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Nenne in Children of the Eagle

(2002) use their very professional achievements to pursue nationalist, not just womanist

objectives” (1). This shift in paradigm has been the preoccupation of many critics and

writers.

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Philip Emeagwali sums up the feminist literary historical evolution in Nigeria as

follows: “Flora Nwapa was joined by Buchi Emecheta and Adaora Ulasi in mid 1970s

and in the 1980s by Ifeoma Okoye and Zaynab Alkali”. (1) He notes that the contribution

of the various feminist writers have brought Nigerian feminist novels to the limelight and

effected societal change especially with regards to the Nigerian woman’s general

wellbeing.

Grace Okereke’s view is that the feminist novels show the Nigerian woman as she

“rises above her past, achieving independence and fulfilment outside marriage” (45) she

further states that in Destination Biafra:

Emecheta carves out a new role for women in the destiny and

survival of a nation. By creating a self-assertive, politically-

informed heroine like Debbie Ogedengbe, Emecheta has

successfully taken women from the periphery and made her

an agent of history (49).

“Bottom power, sexual bargaining, prostitution, all are women’s instruments towards

economic independence and selfhood” (14). This is Katherine Frank’s observation on the

emerging female characters like Emecheta’s Debbie who she calls “the most compelling

example we have of the new ...woman…she embodies a liberating ideal of potentiality of

a rich creative and fulfilling future ...And it is an autonomous future to embrace, a future

without men” (149) Her stand is that evolution is clear in the characters and their journey

from mediocrity to selfhood. Mineke Schipper supports this view as she sees a shift in

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the situation of women who were once within the confines of tradition which she

compares to that of the colonizer and the colonized. She compares the past image of the

woman as that of colonial annexation, “deprived of her voice and like those colonized she

is called unreasonable and emotional, thus representing everything that rational men are

not or do not want to be. Her situation and that of the colonized people are linked in joint

martyrdoms.” (165)

Schipper believes that as the Nigerian society became free from colonial rule, so did the

woman as she changes in the novels from servitude to authority and self-actualization.

Another area of importance of transition in Nigerian feminist novels is religion. In this

regard, Zaynab Alkali is an important figure, “in all her works, she offers a rare insight

into the life of Muslim women in northern Nigeria” (Pushpa and Jagne 42-43). Her

message is a culmination of another transition stage where education plays a vital role in

the liberation of women within literature. She points to the role of education. Her

character Li in The Stillborn (1984) attains boldness and economic independence because

of education. Onwudinjo and Dick opine that Li’s choices “contrast with those of her

Sisters who accept the downtrodden status of women in a Muslim society as normal” (3)

Alkali’s portrayal of an Islamic background is typical of those expressed in

Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter. This Senegalese novel which Abiola Irele described as

“the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction”(14), is the

depiction of sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the grief over the death

of her husband with his younger, second wife.

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Ba’s Ramatoulaye represents the majority of Muslim women of Alkali’s era. She,

(in the letter to her friend, Assatou), admits her weakness: “Yes, I was well aware of

where the solution lay, the right solution…And, to my family’s surprise, unanimously

disapproved of by my children…. I chose to remain.” (45)

To Vicky Sylvester- Malemodile and Nonyelum Chibuzo Mba, Nigerian feminist

novels have undergone transition from the Colonial era to a new freedom. They are of

the opinion that, ‘for male writers of the colonial era women’s productivity ends in child-

bearing…silence is a virtue because she needs no voice to bear children or perform

domestic work. Ezeigbo revised this in The last of the strong ones where the women are

not decorative accessories…because their roles and interests were vital issues of concern

to their communities” (7). They point out that Ezeigbo’s female characters are not

miserable victims but survivors. “Their identities are continually modified as they relate

to their respective husbands as wives and mothers or when they gain freedom from their

respective marriages” (8).

Willem Jacobus Smit establishes that original and existing developments have

been taking place in Nigerian literature According to him, this new “body of writing,

collectively called the third generation has lately received international acclaim. In this

emergent literature, the negotiation of a new, contemporary identity has become a central

focus…” (6)

In a bid to “Trace the new directions that fictional accounts of women’s identities

are taking in Nigeria” (2), Jane Bryce suggests that the forms of feminine identity evident

in earlier women’s writing, constrained by Nationalist priorities that privileged

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masculinity have given way to a challenging re-configuration of national realities in

which the feminine is “neither mythologized or marginalized” (3). For her, Nigerian

feminist novels have evolved from noiselessness to maturity; growth becomes a driving

motif as is the journey from naiveté to assertiveness. This journey articulates the identity

of the new Nigerian woman. Bryce observes that unlike what was obtainable in the past,

the female heroines are now the narrators of their own story, following the recent style of

Nigerian feminist novels which focuses on growth and development of a character from

adolescence to maturity, pointing out the significant events that shape the individual’s

experience.

Tanure Ojaide is of the same opinion as he writes that “the individual’s will or

self-assertion can break the jinx of….Inaction and low self-esteem” (63).

On the other hand, Elleke Boehmer believes that the feminist novels of Nigeria have

changed to the point where the plight of the women is now the same with that of the

nation itself. For her, the new female characters,

By articulating their own struggles for selfhood… They not

only address their traditional muteness and/or marginality in

the national script….They also rewrites their role in it. By

rewriting themselves, they rework by virtue of who they are,

the confining structures of the national family to encompass

alternative gender identities (108).

Historically, the feminist novel has been portrayed as a representative of the

people, a true reflection of society through the different periods in the lives of Nigerian

24

women. In Helen Chukwuma’s view, the feminist novelists do more than tell stories

“their craft also arouses in the reader a true sense of himself, evoking their past and

linking it to the present” (5)

An onlinnigeria.com article looks at transition in Nigerian feminist novels from

Flora Nwapa, who is referred to as the doyen of feminist novelists, sometimes described

as a female Achebe because her novels dwell in the village ethos, the only difference

being that her novels portray strong women who are at the centre of events instead of

being peripheral and invisible. According to the article, the feminist writers have rejected

the stereotyped image of women in male-authored fiction and constructed an alternative

image of womanhood in which women are in charge of their own affairs and in which

motherhood is not all that a woman is created for or lives for. “Thus, in the novels of

Nwapa, while motherhood is important, the point is consistently made that a childless

woman can still live a fulfilled life and contribute meaningfully to the upliftment of her

society in whatever capacity or role she finds herself” (1).

Nwapa paves the way for Buchi Emecheta, who is described as the most prolific

of the Nigerian women novelists. Her works are seen to be where, “The Nigerian woman

is presented generally as an oppressed person who needs to cast off the male yoke and

assert her humanity and independence” (par.2) Emecheta is said to generally appear more

radical and more alienated than Nwapa and has pursued issues like sexual politics,

corruption and motherhood. From Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali’s works are evaluated. “It

has been said that by merely writing at all, she has exploded the myth of the voiceless,

faceless northern Muslim woman. Alkali is concerned, in these novels with the place of

25

the woman in a Moslem society, with the value of education as a support and sustenance

when a woman’s life appears to be falling apart in a severely male-dominated society and

therefore, with the need for women in their culture to recreate themselves” (par.3).

Alkali is also said to enlighten women not to be hide, bound by obsolete customs and

sanctions. There is also a query in her work about what constitutes virtuous living and

her answer seems to be that it is not conventional, cloistered virtue or a life that succumbs

to paternalistic male-domination, but a new vision of equality of opportunities as between

the male and female. In tracing transition in Nigerian feminist novels by authors, the

next writer in the spotlight is Adaora Ulasi who is called “a writer with a difference”

(par.4) because of her detective novels which are observed to be less committed to the

feminist cause. Her characters are bold and do not follow the rules. They speak and act

without being bound by conventional customs and even language. The article puts

forward the argument that transition is as a result of the specific feminist writer and their

personal message in reaction to the women’s situation at the time of their writing, instead

of the situation themselves.

Maledimole and Mba assert that the early writers of Nigerian feminist novels were

preoccupied with the themes of self-actualization, early marriage, political leadership,

etc. but “the growing trend gives rise to new discoveries and new modes of tracking

gender problems”(3). They view Nigerian feminist novels as having got to the point of:

Clear deviation…from traditionalism to modernism… within

the last two decades each of these trends has changed with

traditionalism shifting towards modernism and modernism

26

becoming fundamentalism while fundamentalism faces

imminent transition. (3).

Maledimole and Mba also posit that “there is early transition in Nigerian literature.

Gender consideration that is devoid in early Nigerian literature as turned to be dominant

in it”. (116). They believe that societal advancement and modernity pose deconstructive

modes as societal developmental measures for eradicating sex differentiation and

incorporating gender. The negation of gender disparity advances into successful

engagements thus ignoring the patriarchal abuse of the female writers with stereotype

characters, female writers with feminist views, and male writers that are typically

feminist. Thus, gender, a socio-cultural variable has been and is still undergoing changes

for better advancement of Nigerian literature.

In the view of Teresa Derrickson, Nigerian feminist novels have evolved as a

result of the transition from colonial to post-colonial eras. She gave an example with

Buchi Emecheta’s 1979 novel, The Joys of Motherhood.

Emecheta’s attempt to expose the gender politics operating

within… The joys of Motherhood… a work of socio historical

import, a novel that fills noticeable gaps in the historical

record of African women’s experiences. Nevertheless, … As

S. Jay Kleinberg discusses in his introduction to Retrieving

women’s History, the effort to rectify women’s erasure in

history entails not only an analysis of their work and their role

in the family, but also an analysis of “both formal and

27

informal political movements and ….their impact upon

women and the ways in which they shape male-female

interactions and men’s and women’s roles in society (3).

Derickson states that Kleinberg’s call for an analysis of the way in which women’s

experiences are impacted by local politics encourages us to raise an important question of

how colonialism impinged on women’s rights and how their plight changed as a result of

the transition from colonial to post-colonial rule. She quotes Rolf Rolbery as saying that

“the hardships endured by the women of Emecheta’s novel do not emanate from an

oppressive cultural practice regarding women’s roles in Nigerian villages, but from a

historical moment of political and economic transition” (5). She further suggests that The

Joys of Motherhood is proof that the transition period of Colonialism to post colonialism

was particularly disadvantageous for Nigerian women. As the plight of the heroine

reveals, Colonialism was a costly reality for those who were forced to walk a fine line

between what was demanded of them by their village communities and that which was

demanded of them by the rules of a European Political regime. “Nigeria’s transition from

a tribal culture and tribal moral value system to a western capitalist system with all its

benefits and pitfalls has occurred at the expense of women…” (5) In other words, “while

African men were allowed to enter the formal economy of colonial Nigeria by acquiring

jobs that paid standard wages, women were forcibly kept outside of the wage market

dominated by men in this Nigeria of the 1930s and 1940s” ( Katrak 17)

Kehinde and Mbipong echoed once again the issue of transition from

traditionalism to Westernization and how the female characters in the feminist novels are

28

affected by it. In Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will come, they observe that Enitan and

other female characters in the novel, portray the twenty-first century Nigerian woman

caught in the “restrictive and contradictory demands of traditional mores and norms

introduced by Westernization” (5). They point out that due to Westernization and the

experience that comes with it, conforming to traditionalism and the roles these would

have the woman play becomes problematic, resulting in chaos and conflict which were

absent in the traditional societies.

This is in line with the observation that fiction, especially African women’s

writing, explores the dynamics of power in African societies and the resulting tension and

conflict which ensue from such complexities and it is based on this that Kehinde and

Mbipong believe that Atta’s novel seems to question the transition from traditional norms

of nationhood to the individualistic, capitalist orientation which attend this.

Since, in the words of Paul Beckett and Crawford Young, Nigeria has chosen to

remain in “permanent transition” (4), one can contend that every sphere of life, especially

literature and more importantly, feminist novels have been in transition too to keep up

with the evolutionary trend in the Country. In line with this, Uzochi Nwagbara opines

that Nigerian feminist novels capture the evolution of the position of women in the affairs

of the nation. He quotes the contention put forward by Kunle Ajayi; that, “since

independence, Nigerian women have been denied opportunities of assuming political

leadership at all levels of governance in the nation’s federal set-up” (3). As a result of the

marginalization against women, Nwagbara asserts that feminist writing is informed by

the need to “break the patriarchal mould which contrives discriminatory political roles to

29

Nigerian women by assigning negative stereotypes to them by men in order to hijack the

public sphere” (3). He further notes that Nigerian feminist writers therefore see art as a

role-reversing narrative essentially contrived to deflect stereotypes, misrepresentation and

skewed knowledge about a woman’s true worth. He views the significance of early

feminist writers in Nigeria as a “Canonical revolution to transcend the tradition that

shores up the rhetoric of female oppression and inhumanity” (3). Nwagbara believes that

the effort of the early feminist writers like Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta in telling

stories replete with evidences of the subjugation of women and their maltreatment paved

way for other works from male authors who had once been responsible for the negative

and weak image of the Nigerian woman, to emerge. His example of such work is Chinua

Achebe’s Anthills of the Savanah in which he points out that “the diachronic

transformation of Achebe’s women, from victims of society regulated by patriarchal

norms and values to independent, political conscious and self-assertive women-as we see

in Beatrice, instantiates Achebe’s political and literary commitment…” (5) He goes

further to assert that as far as gender is concerned, Achebe’s use of Beatrice and her role

in the novel to “ingratiate himself with leftist feminists is quite transparent” (5). Achebe’s

paradigmatic shift is a huge transitory move for the Nigerian feminist novel genre.

One other perspective from which evolution in Nigerian feminist novels have

been observed is that of incorporating the changes in nation-hood, feminist writers

creating characters and situations that embrace the new directions that the country is

taking politically, economically and in the area of gender equality. As Jane Bryce puts it,

Nigerian feminist novels are tracing “the new fictional accounts that women’s identities

30

are taking in Nigeria” (2). She contends that the forms of feminist identity evident in

earlier women’s writing, constrained by nationalist priorities that privileged masculinity

has given way to a challenging reconfiguration of national realities in which the feminine

is neither essentialized or mythologized.

Florence Orabueze agrees with this shift even though she is of the opinion that

transition is an on-going process “Evidently, after four decades of feminist writings, the

Nigerian woman has made a giant stride in her socio-political and economic standing in

her society. She has gone beyond the time when her birth was neither recorded nor

celebrated nor was she educated” (256). She asserts that the plight of the women in the

feminist novels and their development in different areas can be likened to that of the

Nigerian women. To her, “the new millennium literary artists like Chimamanda Adichie

and Sefi Atta keep advocating for new rights for the Nigerian woman because she is still

under the obnoxious native laws and customs that are “flagrantly used to violate her

rights” (257).

Historically, the feminist novelist has been portrayed as a representative of the

people, a true reflection of society’s treatment of women as they capture the various

periods of women’s existence and patriarchal struggles. Helen Chukwuma states that

feminist novelists “do more than tell stories, their craft is to arouse in the reader a true

sense of himself, evoking their past and linking it to the present” (5).

Henry Onyema in authorme.com sums up transition in Nigerian feminist novels in

the following terms: “Our female writers have come of age rather awesomely… They

have blossomed into sturdy oaks. The pioneer rules of Nwapa, Emecheta and Alkali…

31

these pioneers cooked the rock and their literature are the soup… Adichie, Atta, etc,

navigating the minefields….within our patriarchal culture...” (par.3).

All that has been written on the ways that Nigerian feminist novels have evolved

are mainly on specific areas of change. Apart from Mary Lewu’s historical survey which

covered only the period from 1960 to 1985, to my knowledge, a thorough historical

survey of Nigerian feminist novels from the first generation to present has not been

undertaken. From the reviewed body of work however, it is evident that the

preoccupation of this study to trace the evolution of Nigerian feminist novels would be

instrumental in throwing more light on the changing phases of women’s situation in

society.

32

CHAPTER THREE

THEMATIC DEVELOPMENTS

It has been pointed out that Nigerian Feminist novelists started writing in the first place

as a response to the uneven portrayal by women in male-authored novels. In the early

works of Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi as well as other pioneer novelists, the

socio-cultural positions of women were those of weak, servile and voiceless beings

whose only hope for existence was marriage and child-bearing. There was no reference

to the matrineal nature of pre-colonial Igbo society or the famed exploits of women like

Amina of Zaria or Moremi of Ife who took on great feats in time when even men were

weak against the situations on ground. Male-authored novels paid more attention to the

male figures as all-knowing and legendary while portraying women as second fiddle or

ignoring their roles entirely. Themes of these novels revolved around post-colonial or

colonial male figures with larger-than-life personalities like Achebe’s Okonkwo who

chose to die instead of seeing his beloved land overridden by “effeminate” men. This

was a man whose love and admiration for his daughter Ezinma made him wish that she’d

been born a male child to succeed him.

African feminists believe that it was in response to these and other

misrepresentations of women’s lives that Flora Nwapa began to write novels about

women, to present them as also being “Social actors who contribute to the welfare of

their community” (N’Guessan 2). Her women-centered stories capture the socio-cultural

issues affecting women in her era and these issues form the pervading themes in not only

33

her works but also the works of other feminist writers after her. With the use of moving

themes and the creation of unforgettable characters, the feminist novelists have given an

insight into the pervading issues in the different generations they represent. Florence

Orabueze, on the trends and themes of Nigerian feminist novels, noted that, “throughout

the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, whenever women pick up their pens to write, there are

themes that run through their works”.(139). The themes have evolved over the decades to

give a glimpse of the socio-cultural challenges inherent in the eras in which the novels

are written. Some of these themes are motherhood, polygamy, abandonment, economic

emancipation, marriage and divorce, etc.

THE THEME OF MOTHERHOOD

In Efuru, Flora Nwapa presents the issues facing women in post-colonial Nigeria, one of

which is motherhood. Just a few years after Efuru’s first marriage, motherhood becomes

a soaring issue in the novel and becomes Efuru’s major problem. While she and Adizua

were still happy in the first year of marriage, gossip spreads about her barenness from

that early stage.

Seeing them together is not the important thing’ another said.

The important thing is that nothing has happened since the

happy marriage. Marriage must be fruitful. Of what use is it

if it is not fruitful? Of what use is it if your husband licks

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your body, worships you and buys everything in the market

for you are not productive? (137).

According to Mary Mears, “Obligatory motherhood is the downfall for Efuru

based on cultural concepts. Her traditional community expects and demands that she

become a mother” (81). Approximately two years after her marriage to Adizua, she is

concerned about her state; she says to herself, ‘I am still young, surely God cannot deny

me the joy of motherhood’” (24). Even though Efuru has ignored courtship and marital

traditions in marrying Adizua, she is so concerned with obeying cultural traditions about

motherhood. Her mother in-law privately wishes that Efuru would have a child or her son

would marry a second wife to give children to the family and remove the social stigma of

childlessness. After Efuru tries many times to conceive a child, she seeks traditional

avenues to help the situation. Efuru and her father visit a dibia who tells them that Efuru

will have few children and they must come back to see him for further instructions, which

includes making sacrifices to the ancestors on Afo day, buying certain items at the

market, then placing them in a calabash basket, and allowing the basket to float away.

After obeying the instructions, she and Adizua have a baby girl. Efuru has her baby in a

quiet and unobtrusive manner while her husband is sleeping in the house. He awakens

afterwards when he hears a baby crying and joyfully speaks to the baby, “‘Welcome my

daughter; your name is Ogonim” (32). As tradition demands, Adizua and Efuru visit the

dibia to show their gratitude with gifts; however, in the course of his divination, he sees

something that bothers him, but unfortunately, the dibia dies before their second visit. “A

connection is implied between the Dibia’s earlier comment about Efuru’s having few

35

babies, the opened kola nuts, and the couple’s future; and subsequent events confirm the

connection” (Mears 81). Although Ogonim acts like any normal child for two years,

playing with her nurse maid, Ogea, and other children, Efuru’s marriage begins to

deteriorate. For six months, Adizua does not sleep with her and he begins disappearing

for days at a time. Ogonim suddenly develops a fever, starts having convulsions, and

eventually dies. The family makes preparations for her burial, but Adizua fails to attend

his daughter’s funeral. “To Efuru, the death of her daughter is a sure indicator that her

marriage to Adizua is over; there is no bond between them”. (Mears 82)

After a few years in her father’s house she marries Gilbert Enebiri. Similarly, the

concept of motherhood becomes a major concern in her second marriage. Again, after

two years of marriage, Efuru is not pregnant. The voice of tradition starts to speak once

again especially as the couple seems happy “‘we are not going to eat happy marriage;

Marriage must be fruitful’” (137). In fact, after the first one year, Omirimma advices

Enebiri’s mother, “it’s a year since your son married; one year is enough for any woman

who would have a baby to begin making one. Find out quickly if she is barren and start

to look for a black goat because at night a black goat will be difficult to find” (39)

In fact, these words indicate that some women believe women have only one function or

purpose in life and that is to be mothers. This supports what Davies in Ngambika calls

“obligatory motherhood” (9) expected of women in Nwapa’s generation.

In the end, Enebiri leaves her as a result of her inability to attain the status of

motherhood and Efuru turns to the goddess of the lake, Uhamiri about whom she dreams

as an “elegant woman, very beautiful, combing her long black hair with a golden comb”

36

(183). Efuru’s independence becomes desirable and blessed as she becomes a mother in

her community. Still, the pain and sorrow she went through for being childless, the ill-

treatment of her two husbands and their consequent abandonment is a pointer to the

importance of motherhood in the society where Efuru found herself. This is evident in

the tone of the novel’s closing line “Efuru did not experience the joy of motherhood.”

The publication of Nwapa’s Efuru has been described as a watershed moment for African

women writers. Her works offer realistic pictures of gender issues in a patriarchal society

and showcase strong female characters who sail against the tides.

Born in 1931 in Oguta, Florence Nwazuruahu Nkiru Nwapa obtained a Bachelor

of Arts degree from The University College, Ibadan in 1957 and a Diploma in Education

from The University of Edinburgh in the following year. Upon her return to Nigeria, she

joined the Ministry of Education in Calabar as an Education Officer until 1959 when she

accepted a teaching position at Queen’s School in Enugu where she taught English and

Geography between 1969 and 1971. Her career as a writer began with the publication of

Efuru in 1966 and Idu in 1971. She had so many works to her credit including children’s

books and poems. On her deathbed in 1993 at the age of 62, she held on tenaciously to

her unpublished plays, Sycophants. Although Nwapa never considered herself a feminist,

many of her works address the question of tradition and transition of women. She

weaves together traditional Igbo myths and contemporary dilenmas to create complex

characters struggling for independence in their societies. She showcases women

succeeding comfortably without any form of obstruction outside the traditionally

accepted roles of mother and wife, while also reaffirming Igbo Culture.

37

“The mystical influence of the “beautiful blue Ugwuta lake” which the community

depended upon for food, transportation, and for life sustenance was decisive in Nwapa’s

mythopoeia when she began to create her women centered fiction.” (Maalpotra 1). Her

mythic imagination derives its force from the spiritual being that controls this body of

water – Uhamiri (also called Woman of the Lake), the powerful female deity worshipped

by Ugwuta people. Uhamiri is the central and controlling image and represents the

feminine principle in Efuru and Idu. In the war novel, Never Again (1975), the Woman of

the Lake becomes the influential, powerful figure and deity to which the people run to for

refuge.

In a 1995 interview with Marie Umeh Nwapa described her writing as follows: “I

have been writing for nearly thirty years. My interest has been on both the rural and

urban woman in her quest for survival in a fast-changing world dominated by men” (np).

Buchi Emecheta’s in The Joys of Motherhood, set in a period of Nigeria’s

economic and political transition, features Nnu Ego, the daughter of a wealthy Ibuza

Chief and his mistress Ona. Nnu Ego enjoys her parents’ love and attention until her

mother dies in second childbirth. She becomes her father’s consolation, the apple of his

eyes. Her father raises her lonely as he promised her mother before her death and when

she comes of age, he sends her to Lagos to become the wife of Nnaife, Laundryman of a

white man.

In Colonial Lagos, Nnu Ego battles with accepting the new culture without

abandoning her native one. Her Igbo background is one where marriage and motherhood

are the greatest achievements of women. Unlike Nwapa’s Efuru, having children is not

38

difficult for Nnu Ego, but from a feminist perspective Nnuego is a repressed woman

living according to the dictates of her patriarchal society much to her detriment. She has

child after child for Nnaife and even in their poverty he goes out to marry a second wife

to share in the family’s meager resources. Nnu Ego’s obsession with motherhood is

ironically portrayed by Emecheta as she makes her character an embodiment of illusions

of grandeur as a result of childbirth. She assumes that having children would guarantee

her a good retirement that her sons would come to live with her and care for her as she

ages. “Nnu Ego realized that part of the pride of motherhood was to look a little

unfashionable and be able to drawl with joy, “I can’t afford another outfit because I’m

nursing him, so you see, I can’t go anywhere to sell anything” One usually received the

answer, never mind, he will grow soon and clothe you and farm for you so that your old

age will be sweet” (Emecheta 80).

However, her eldest son travels to America for his education, marries a white

woman and forgets his mother. Her younger son follows in the footsteps of the older one,

so even though Nnu Ego is considered a success in her village, she dies alone on a lonely

foot path, an old almost demented woman bent with her many disappointments and failed

expectations of motherhood. Her elder son returns to Nigeria and pays for a big funeral

in order to prove his love for his dead mother. Emecheta’s tragic heroine becomes a

sacrificial lamb on the altar of motherhood in the author’s exploration of the theme as one

of epic proportions in that era of womanhood in Nigeria.

Buchi Emecheta’s contribution to feminist novels in the first generation in Nigeria

is great Even though Flora Nwapa first began to write women-centered stories with

39

themes commenting on women’s lives in Nigerian society, it was Emecheta who first

took a radical stance by creating characters like Debbie Ogedengbe in her Destination

Biafra and Adah in Second Class Citizen who clearly not only challenged societal norms

but made absolute breaks and took on roles that society would have normally reserved for

men.

Orphaned at a young age, Emecheta who was born in Lagos in 1944 spent her

early childhood getting educated at a missionary school. At the age of sixteen in 1960,

she married Sylvester Onwordi and moved to London with him. Their marriage which

ended after six years is the crux of her semi-autobiographical novel, The Second Class

Citizen.

In Behind the Clouds Ifeoma Okoye depicts the theme of motherhood or

childlessness in the family of Dozie and Ije Apia who have been married for a few years

without a child. All their wealth and love for each other is seen as nothing unless they are

able to have children. Ije’s mother-in-law invites them to the village to discuss their

childlessness, after which Ije’s predicament is worsened by the woman’s subsequent visit

to encourage her son to take a second wife. The strain left on the marriage by

childlessness drives Dozie into another woman’s arms which results in the other woman’s

intrusion into the Apia home with a pregnancy she claims is Dozie’s. In the novel, Okoye

portrays the fact that childlessness in the family is viewed by society as the woman’s

fault even in the second generation where more and more women had access to education

and the working woman living in the urban society is portrayed. Dozie does not know

that he was the reason for their childlessness. Even Ije’s gynecologist, Dr. Mellie never

40

for once suspected that it might be Dozie’s fault, and Ije follows that line of reasoning

and begins to seek solutions for her “problem”. In this process she realizes what great

price women were prepared to pay to have children, in a society that encourages men to

take second wives if their wives were unable to have children. Ije’s friend Beatrice,

desperate for childbirth, goes the extra mile of sleeping with the fake prophet Apostle

Joseph to have a child. She confides in Ije, “I’ll confide in you, for two reasons. You’re

so good that I’m sure you would keep my secret and moreover if I confide in you, the

guilt will be lifted off my chest and I’ll feel better. This boy is Apostle Joseph’s” (61).

Even though Ije is desperate to have a child, she does not resort to sleeping with

another man. Okoye shows how the desperation of the childless woman is exploited in

Apostle Joseph’s words to convince Ije to sleep with him before her friend’s confession

to her. His words, no matter how evil should have made Ije demand that her husband get

tested, however. He said that,

Some men for some reason are unable to father children.

Wise women who are married to such men tactfully find other

men to give them what they so much desire. This is not

adultery in the eyes of God. Think about this, Mrs. Appiah, I

have gladly done if for some women, I can do it for you,

too… (55).

In Behind The clouds, the theme of childlessness and motherhood is presented in a unique

manner. Like her predecessors, Nwapa and Emecheta, Okoye sheds light on society’s

definition of womanhood only in terms of motherhood, and how the man is often

41

exempted when solutions to the problem of childlessness are being sought. In the end, Ije

leaves her matrimonial home for the pregnant intruder but in the heat of an argument

between Dozie and Virginia after Ije’s departure, it is revealed that Dozie is not the father

of the child in Virginia’s womb as she blurts out “I had better tell you the truth now.

The baby is not yours. I chose you as the father because you are the richest of the

lot….And because you wanted a child so badly”. (111).

It was the trend for a long time for Nigerian feminist novels to dwell on the

motherhood issues, so much so, that Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie noted that the themes of

motherhood and childlessness were “Over flogged” (20). However the truth remains that

the novels follow the pressing socio-cultural issues facing women in Nigerian society. In

Nigerian society, a woman’s identity was closely related to her ability to produce

children. This ideology of motherhood is so widely spread that the natural process of

child-bearing takes on a cultural dimension. Childlessness was synonymous with social

rejection. This is the reason for the prominent portrayal of this socio-cultural issue as a

theme in the early feminist novels of Nigeria and why it continues to be a motif in

Nigerian feminist novels. However, in the second generation to which Okoye belongs,

the woman like Ije can decide to leave and work hard on their own as opposed to the

steadfast endurance seen in women of the preceding era.

Another theme that unfolds is economic emancipation. First generation novelists

encouraged trading and other forms of industry if a woman is to be economically

emancipated but in the second and third generations, education is the way forward.

42

THE THEME OF ECONOMIC EMANCIPATION

Most feminist writings in Africa seem to be in agreement that a woman’s saving grace if

she is to escape being defined only by labels of wife and mother is economic

emancipation. Helen Chukwuma states that “women’s dependence on men, husbands and

paramours alike is economic” (13) most of these women sufferers have neither education

nor viable means of livelihood. Charles Nnolim corroborated this by suggesting that

“women’s saving grace, their last redoubt, lies in being economically independent” (7).

In Nwapa’s Efuru, this freedom and emancipation is demonstrated in Efuru’s

industry; her trade gives her economic stability and she survives comfortably when her

husband abandons her. In her “Poetics of Economic Independence for female

Empowerment: An interview with Flora Nwapa” Marie Umeh cites Nwapa in her own

words:

Nwapa…. I feel that every woman married or single must have economic

independence. If you look at One is Enough, I quote a Hausa proverb which says, A

woman who holds her husband as her father dies an orphan.

Umeh…….My interpretation is that a woman should be economically

independent. One should at least not rely on inheritance or men for survival?

Nwapa……..Exactly.

Feminist novelists of the first generation, in a bid to grant freedom and economic

emancipation to women took it a bit too far until male characters began to suffer. Citing

Nwapa as an example, Charles Nnolim observes that:

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No woman in Nwapa’s novel is a parasite that depends on

men for sustenance. If anything, in Idu it is the man who

borrows money constantly from the wife, who when the wife

deserts him hanged himself from the thatched roof of his hut.

(196).

The novels portray female characters that are economically free. The woman that

emerges in place of the servile housewife of male-authored novels is different,

emancipated. “She challenges accepted ideals of marriage and maternity, she chooses to

work for a living…” (Stephens 184).

Economic emancipation is a predominant theme in the second generation works of

Zaynab Alkali who was the first female novelist to emerge from northern Nigeria.

Alkali received a degree from Bayero University in 1973. Her first novel, The

Stillborn was published in 1984 and explores the theme of education as a means to

achieving economic emancipation. Her female character, Li is raised by an overbearing

father in a traditional patriarchal society where abuse is the order of the day. The thirteen

year old who has completed her elementary education and has dreams of acquiring

further education with her friend Faku sees education as the key to her freedom from the

shackles of poverty and abuse. Li’s dreams with Faku are stifled in marriage but unlike

Faku, Li’s unsuccessful marriage serve as a launching pad to reach her dreams. She

eventually achieves her dreams of becoming a teacher and this gives her confidence.

Alkali’s exploration of the theme of economic emancipation is seen also in The Virtuous

Woman where she uses the journey motif through which the woman from ignorance to

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experience and selfhood. The relationship between Nana Ai, Laila, Li and Faku shows

the role of friendship in attaining one’s dreams, especially that of education. “The

journey motif is central to both The Stillbborn and The Virtuous Woman” (Njoku 178).

Alkali’s characters often pass through a pain process and then emerge with a strong sense

of self and determination to actualize their dreams. Education brings with it

emancipation. Tradition and culture play vital roles in shaping the destinies of her

heroines and education is the point of empowerment and emancipation. Alkali presents

Li’s independence of thought which she came to possess as a result of education in

contrast to the dictates of her male-dominated society. Her choices contrast with those of

her other sisters who accept subjugation on the grounds of tradition and religion. Li’s

education puts her in a position of authority. Her transition is marked by Awa’s

statement, “The mourners are outside and waiting for you. You are the man of the house

now” (101)

In Unoma Azuah’s Sky High Flames, we see her character Ofunne stuck in a bad

marriage with a philandering husband who has given her syphilis. She starts a fish selling

business to attain economic independence and in the end when she has a stillbirth as a

result of complications from the infection, she leaves him and returns to her hometown to

present herself to the river goddess Onishe for cleansing. She implores the goddess. “I sat

in front of the shrine and cried. I begged whatever powers that be to cure me of the illness

Oko gave me to let me complete my education and become a teacher” (161) she rises up

against her parents who sell her off at first to Oko at her fourth year in secondary school.

She understands that economic empowerment is her ticket to escaping the travails of

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being a female member of a poor family and she believes that education will offer her

that. She tells her mother, “…You and father have had a good part of my life, whatever is

left now is mine” (163) Emecheta’s Nnu Ego in Joys of Motherhood as well as Adah in

Second class citizen engage in trade and jobs to sustain their children. Ifeoma Okoye’s

character, Ije, fishes out her certificate, gets a job and an apartment of her own, leaving

Dozie and Virginia in the house, in order to regain her peace of mind. Even though she

had been a house wife all the while, she had a means of livelihood once the marriage

turned sour. Attah’s Enitan has her job and does not bother about Franco’s wealth, her

friend Sheri is a business woman who would not want to be controlled by Brigadier

Hassan’s wealth.

It would seem from all the examples that feminist writers of every generation are

in agreement in their deep commitment to portraying economic independence as a sure

way of escaping the perils women face in society.

THE THEME OF MARRIAGE, POLYGAMY AND DIVORCE

Nigerian feminist novelists of every generation are often preoccupied with the issue of

matrimony and how it affects the woman in the particular society they portray. How the

marriages are contracted or how they end if they do is a pointer to the values and cultural

practices which the writers through their characters choose to uphold or debunk. Nwapa’s

Efuru opens with the protagonist, Efuru, choosing her own husband and marrying without

permission from her father and without the obligatory brideprice. This act is a serious

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disregard for traditional values. A traditional marriage involves the community, with the

families’ meeting and discussing terms for the marriage and a dowry paid to the bride’s

family. Shortly after their meeting at a village festival and a brief courtship, Efuru insists

that Adizua marries her or she will drown herself. She decides that they are “going to

proclaim themselves married” (7) when Adizua raises the issue of his inability to pay the

brideprice because he can’t afford it yet. On her insistence however, he says to Efuru,

“‘you will come to me on Nkwo day. Every place will be quiet that being market day.

Take a few clothes with you and come to me. We shall talk about the dowry after’”(7).

Efuru moves into the home Adizua shares with his mother; and when the mother-in-law

returns from the market and learns about the situation, she says, “‘You are welcome my

daughter. But your father, what will you say to him?’” to which Efuru responds, “‘Leave

that to me, I shall settle it myself’” (8). So even though Adizua’s mother is happy that her

son has married the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the village, at the same

time, she fears Efuru’s father’s reaction as a result of her son’s blatant disobedience of

the traditions regarding marriage.

Although Nwapa presents a character who is assertive enough to take laws into her

hands to marry who she wants, she also reveals the fact that such actions are unusual for a

woman of Efuru’s time. Marriages in that period were often contracted by parents on

behalf of their daughters who usually have very little say in the matter. The importance

of proper marriage in that era is shown when a year later, Efuru and her husband still

fulfill the tradition by paying the bride price and Efuru allows her husband’s family to go

to her father’s house to commence marriage talks. It is only after Nwashike Ogene gives

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his blessings to the marriage that, Efuru and Adizua go home and “for the first time since

that fateful Nkwo day the two felt really married” (24).

Adizua does not communicate with Efuru and resorts to secrecy when he leaves home to

see another woman even though Nwapa creates an environment and culture where

polygamy was acceptable. His actions are infrequent at first when he misses meals,

comes home, bathes, and leaves, only to return home at midnight and refuse to eat his

dinner. Eventually, he stays away from home for days at a time until he stops coming

home at all. Efuru’s mother-in-law encourages her to be patient and give Adizua time to

mature. She says, “‘Have patience, my daughter. . . . Everything will be all right. Don’t

mind my son. It is only youth that is worrying him and nothing else. He will soon realize

what a fool he has been, and will come crawling to you. . . Men are always like that’”

(51). At one point Adizua tells Efuru that he is going to Ndoni to buy groundnuts, but

Efuru senses that he is going to another woman and begins questioning herself. “‘There

is a woman behind this indifference. A woman whose personality is greater than mine. . .

I must face facts. . . . Perhaps she is very beautiful and has long hair like mine . . . . Is she

as stately as I am’” (54). Even though she wants Adizua back she wonders, “‘How long

will this last? How long will I continue to tolerate him? There is a limit to human

endurance. I am a human being. I am not a piece of wood. . . . I don’t object to his

marrying a second wife, but I do object to being relegated to the background’” (53 )

From Efuru’s words we realize that her problem is not with polygamy itself but

with the fact that as the first wife she is not consulted first. She would have stayed in

Adizua’s house if not that her daughter, Ogonim, dies and Adizua does not come home to

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the funeral. Messages are sent to Adizua in Ndoni, but he never responds. After waiting

the set number of days based on custom, Ajanupu and others perform the rites for the

funeral to please the ancestors. Now Efuru is childless and to her, it is proof that her place

in the compound is shaky. She blames her dead child: “‘Ogonim has killed me. My only

child has killed me. Why should I live? . . . Oh my chi, why have you dealt with me in

this way?’” (73).

When Efuru’s marriage ends, she leaves Adizua’s home and returns to her father’s

compound and it is from there that she marries Gilbert. Efuru’s second marriage poses

problems similar to those of her first marriage. Again, she has married a man who gives

the impression that he is not a polygamist. However, Gilbert eventually marries three

wives and has children by the second and third wives as well as by another woman. But

earlier when Efuru first mentions finding a second wife for Gilbert because she has not

become pregnant, he appears not interested. Instead, Gilbert disobeys tradition by no

tasking Efuru about having children by another woman. The marriage also ends in

divorce even though the second time all the cultural marriage rites are performed.

In Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, it is the fathers who choose husbands for

their daughters. Agbadi chooses Amatokwu for Nnu Ego and when the marriage fails, he

chooses Nnaife. The marriage is by proxy: Nnu Ego had never seen the man, but a good

daughter would not reject the man chosen by her father. Like a good daughter, Nnu Ego

agrees to domesticity and wifehood to please her father, living with a man she despises.

When Nnaife tries to exercise the same right over Kehinde, he tells her: “You don’t have

to like your husband … you don’t even have to know him in advance you just marry him.

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You are lucky you know what job he is in. Things have changed before; you might not

have known him at all” (204).

Emecheta attacks polygamy as a cultural practice. Agbadi, NnuEgo’s father is

presented as being insensitive to the plight of his wives, who had anxiously tended to him

in his illness. Immediately he shows a sign of recovery, it is to his mistress Ona that he

goes. His neglect leads to the death of his first wife, Agunwa. NnuEgo’s first husband,

Amataokwu is even more cruel; When he discovers Nnu Ego’s barrenness, he tells her

brutally to make way for a new wife in a demeaning manner. When the new wife gives

birth to a son, be prefers her to Nnu Ego and futher degrades her for being barren and

literally stops being her husband. Her second husband Nnaife inherits his brother’s

widow and brings her to share the one room accommodation where he is with his already

overflowing polygamous household. Even though the younger wife Adaku leaves in

anger, NnuEgo stays put because everyone told her to savour every moment of her

‘exalted’ position of senior wife.

In the second generation, there is a recurring trend of marriage and the existing

struggles that ensue in the women seeking to break away and unlike what is obtainable in

the first generation, issues like polygamy were treated as acceptable cultural practice as

long as the woman is consulted but in the second generation it becomes the reason for the

dissolution of marriage. In Ifeoma Okoye’s Behind The Clouds, Ije, despite her supposed

barrenness chooses to move out of her matrimonial home for the pregnant intruder,

Virginia who appears at the Appiah’s doorstep claiming to be pregnant for Dozie. Ije’s

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action is not only because of Virginia’s overbearing presence in her home or the

pregnancy but it is more importantly because of her husband’s betrayal and infidelity.

In Zaynab Alkali’s The Stillborn, Habu’s dalliance with the southern woman he

met in the city is the reason Li decides to walk away from him because they had both

grown up together with dreams- Li, Awa, Fiama and Habu, as a result of the influence

of western education perceive marriage from the westernized perspective of a happy

union between one man and one woman; where both work for the success of the

matrimonial home and live happily ever after in love as encapsulated in Li’s thoughts:

“She was going to be a successful Grade I teacher and Habu a

famous medical doctor like the white men in the village

mission hospital. The image of a big European house full of

houseboys and maids rose before her. Li smiled to herself.

The bushy stream, the thorny hillside and the dusty market

would soon be forgotten in the past. (Alkali 55)

This picture is shattered first when Habu goes to the city to work and she remains

in the village and then when after being abandoned in the village for four years she

finally decides to go after her husband but she meets a totally different Habu:

“She bent her head and hot tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘Where is my man?

‘She wailed, silently, ‘That boyish man with an incredible smile and a mischievous

twinkle in the eye? Where is that proud, self-confident, half-naked lover that defied

the laughter of the villagers and walked the length and breadth of the village just to

see me?” (70)

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Li’s attempt to console herself is to remove the blame on her unfaithful man and

heap it on the city. She believes that Habu Adams is a victim of city life which

“…destroys dreams” (94) and a more experienced “woman from the south” (91) who

takes advantage of his ignorance on his arrival in the city. “They worked in the same

office. It was when Habu was new in the city and was a bit awkward, but she showed him

round, cooked for him and was generally helpful. The friendship went too far and she

found herself with child…” (91).

In the end, like Ije in Behind The Clouds who returns to her repentant husband

after the departure of the intruder, Virginia, Li decides to return to her husband. she

rationalizes that “this is a game of life and we are all struggling to survive” (93).

And on the issue of Habu’s condition of lameness after his accident, she postulates:

“We are all lame, daughter-of-my-mother. But this is not time to crawl. It is time

to learn to walk again.” (105). Her decision to return is in line with the womanist ideals

of the second generation novels.

In the third generation novels however, marriage is first of all not projected as the

ultimate and so polygamy as well as other forms of marital oppression are strongly

objected to. In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, even though Kambili’s mother, Beatrice is

stuck in an abusive marriage in the beginning, she orchestrates events to eliminate

Eugene who is the source of her pain and that of her children. Kambili’s aunt Ifeoma

raises her children alone and in Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, Enitan abandons

Mark when he begins to misbehave. When Sheri complains of Hassan, she advises her to

“drop him… you don’t need him” (132). When Sheri thinks otherwise, Enitan insists:

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“you are young and this man is treating you like a house-girl” (138). Jonas Akung posits

that “Sheri’s suffering is blamed on polygamy.., and the istonia tenet which promotes it.

This istonia is the issue of male progeny which allows the man to value male children

more than the female ones. Entian’s mother Ariola suffers when she could not give birth

to a male child in order to fulfill the society’s idea of motherhood. When she could not,

her husband sneaks out to have a male child outside their marriage and Ariola is kept in

the dark for over 20 years. This shows how morally debased the men have become”

(119). As Enitan continues to learn and comes to terms with the star realities of the

woman’s problems, and the experiences in her home; the need to move out of this

patriarchal space becomes expedient.

In polygamy the women are turned into their very own enemies fighting to prove

who the better wife is. Enitan finds this abhorrent because to her, all that is part of the

past. The new woman’s reason for marriage is love and not to satisfy society’s dictates.

Both Enitan and Sheri revolt against the limited space of abuse and in Sheri’s case,

polygamy. When Hassan threatens Sheri she tells him: “Raise your hand to hit Sheri

Bakare, and your hand will never be the same again. Stupid man”(169). She even breaks

away the chains that his wealth put around her legs when she starts her business. She

recounts this to Enitan: “the man is jealous of me … with all he has. He wants me to have

nothing except what he gives me. He says he will take it all back. I said take it! All of it! I

did not come to this place naked” (170). In the end, Enitan narrates on a triumphant note

about Sheri and Hassan,

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“Sheri didn’t need any man. I was there when she walked out

on her lousy Brigadier…. I envied her freedom”(p.207). The

woman must be economically independent. When Sheri left

Hassan, she concentrated on her business, “within a year of

starting her business she was able to buy herself one of those

second hand cars … and after two years, she was able to rent

a place of her own” (207).

For Enitan, in the beginning her husband Niyi whom she marries as an escape

route from her father’s overbearing hold on her life, loved and protected her, even though

his male ego is very important to him .Once He pleads with Enitan “better watch what

you’re saying. Next thing they’ll be calling me woman wrapper. Woman wrapper was a

weak man, controlled by his woman” (182). The marriage fails because Enitan refuses to

play second fiddle. Her mother’s advice never left her “never make sacrifices for a man.

By the time you say ‘look what I’ve done for you’, it’s too late. They never remember”

(173). She refuses to be disrespected ad ignored even if her marriage looks perfect to

outsiders.

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CHAPTER FOUR

CHARACTERIZATION

Characters in Nigerian feminist novels have been changing in a lot of ways since

Nwapa’s Efuru. These shifts have occurred in different ways and male characters as well

as their female counterparts have evolved through the generations. The changes in

themes, style and characterization are evident in the novels because of the different

experiences of the writers and the fast-changing world of the Nigerian Society. For

instance, the marginalized role of the woman in early male-authored novels is widely

believed to be the reason why Nigerian feminist novels began to create larger-than-life

images of women at the expense of male characters, some of whom were portrayed as

cruel, lazy or unfocused beings. Female characters have come a long way. From the days

of their silence in early male-authored novels as mothers, wives or daughters exempted

from serious roles they have been cast in a new light.

Empowered by education and literary skills, the writers began to, as Rose Mezu

puts it, “dismantle the myth of female irrelevance by challenging such archetypal roles as

witches, faithless women, femmes fatales, viragoes and playthings of capricious

gods”(6).

FEMALE CHARACTERS

In the first generation, we see Nwapa’s characterization of Efuru as a strong assertive

woman who chooses her own husband and marries without his paying a dowry. She

decisively deals with conflicts, radically departing from the script of the traditional

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African woman "in the peripheral, tangential role of a passive victim of a masculine-

based cultural universe" (Mezu 27-28). Efuru is beautiful and industrious as well as well

respected despite her choice of ignoring tradition in marrying her first husband, Adizua

but her childlessness is like a plague; her strong desire for a child of her own especially

after the death of her only child Ogonim is like an unquenchable thirst that even the lake

goddess Uhamiri to whom she pledges allegiance after two failed marriages could not

quench. In Efuru, Nwapa paints the picture of a woman whose strength and will clashes

with that of fate and the dictates of her patriarchal society. For instance, it is not her

childlessness that causes Adizua to leave because he is not even around when Ogonim

dies and neither does the child’s death make him return.

In Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood her NnuEgo is the beautiful and spoilt

only daughter of Agbadi an Ibuza chief. From the time of her birth because her chi is her

father’s late wife’s vengeful slave girl who was buried with the woman, from the onset

we glean that she is to be an unlucky person. After her first marriage we realize that

NnuEgo’s greatest desire is to be a mother. When her first marriage ends as a result of her

childlessness, her father marries her off to Nnaife who lives in colonial Lagos. At last

NnuEgo’s chi grants her child after child but unlike her earlier dream her children are

unkempt and do not live up to her delusional expectations. She realizes rather too late

than many children were not a ticket to a happy life. Her husband marries other women

and adds other mouths to the already starving ones in the overcrowded one room house

Nnu Ego’s children absorb urban lifestyles and abandon their mother. Two of her

sons travel abroad and her daughter marries a Yoruba man in defiance of her parents’

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wishes. At the end she dies a lonely woman on a bush path at her hometown of Ibuza; a

lonely woman who has spent her life birthing and raising children and making sacrifices

for everyone else but herself. Her woes are concluded thus:

However, what actually broke her was, month after month,

expecting to hear from her son in America, and from Adim

too who later went to Canada, and failing to do so. It was

from rumours that she heard Oshia had married and that his

bride was a white woman. ... After such wandering on one

night, Nnu Ego lay down by the roadside, thinking that she

had arrived home. She died quietly there, with no child to

hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never

really made many friends, so busy had she been building up

her joys as a mother. (227)

She is deified in her village so that other women can go to her with prayers for

fertility. In NnuEgo, Emecheta embodies the pursuits of women of her era in marriage

and her end serves as a warning to women who toe the same path.

In the second generation, Alkali’s heroine, Li is presented as a woman in

transition. We meet her first as a young girl living in a village she impatiently endures.

Her love for education propels her alongside her two friends Faku and Hawa. Li is in

motion from the moment we see in her in the novel. She sets out to get educated, to

become a successful teacher and valiantly face the future. Ultimately, through a very

difficult road paved with challenges and discouragement, She gets to acquire more and

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more until in Alkali’s words “she wished there was something else to struggle for” (189)

when she decides to return to her repentant husband who has become lame in the city we

see the interdepence or complementarity strand of feminism typical of the second

generation. Theodora Akachi Ezeigbo explains this as:

Mutual interdependence of the sexes is a consistent theme in

the works of female oriented novelists in Africa. Woman

needs a man and a man needs a woman. Many recent

novelists are beginning to do this and at the same time

upholding the uncompromising viewpoint that women

maintain a reasonable measure of social and economic

independence. (148)

In the third generation feminist novels, the characters have evolved in many ways.

From the era of Efuru’s and Nnu Ego’s obsession with motherhood and their marital

woes, the assertive woman of the second generation comes along but she is not a woman

who can exist without men so Li is seen returning to care for a husband who betrayed her

after his accident and consequent loss of his legs and Ije in Behind The Clouds returns to

Dozie after the latter’s show of repentance and riddance of the intruder, Virginia.

However, the heroines of the third generation are slightly different in their reactions to

the same situations experienced by the preceding generations.

In Adimora-Ezeigbo’s The Last of the Strong Ones, “Ejimnaka was greatly

respected and admired. She was one of the watching eyes and listening ears of

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Umuga….Chieme was barren and got divorced but she was soon to realize her power of

oratory and poetry” (Maledimole and Mba 4).

In Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will come, Orabueze posits that “Atta’s women are

bold, courageous, assertive” (in Akung, 121). Enitan, the lead character who narrates the

story is a strong woman who rises up to deal with the stigma of being a woman. She

fights the male dominant culture in which she finds herself. Her education becomes a

tool for her struggle. After spending time in jail, it dawns on her the full magnitude of

female subjugation obtainable in Nigeria which her privileged life and time abroad had

shielded her from. In the end, when she finds out about her father’s illegitimate male

child, she understands the real situation of things when it comes to female children, and

realizes that the father she’d trusted her whole life was a liar. It affects her trust for other

men in her life and is part of the reason that she breaks tradition and leaves her husband

to lead a woman’s group involved in the release of political prisoners. Another shift

worthy of note in Atta’s work is the fact that the misfortunes of the women are not all

blamed on the men as was the style in the past. In recent times,

Women are both victim and victimizer conflicting as they do

to the headache of others. Sheri goes out with Ibrahim

knowing full well that he has family…Sonny’s mistress is

aware he is married yet she has four children for him. Peter

Makoro’s second wife knows he is married with children

(Orabueze in Akung, 121)

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Sisterhood and genuine friendship are in-built in the new female characters; they have

been allowed to grow in the novels-Atta’s Enitan changes from a simple, innocent and

ignorant girl to an adult with a voice, evolving from a psychological struggle” (Odife 38).

Atta’s and Adimora-Ezeigbo’s characters engage in professions and are strong focused

women who rise above subjugation in their respective rural and urban settings.

In Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus we see Kambili’s growth into an

assertive young woman. Unlike the other heroines, it is not an abusive marriage that she

must break away from but from the shackles of a religious maverick father who builds a

wall of stiff order and silence within which Kambili and her brother suffocate daily. Their

mother is not like the other women in the feminist novels; she is a woman with many

fears. Once, she tells her sister- in- law Ifeoma that she has nowhere to go with the

children. At first, her actions are repugnant especially as she suffers more abuse than the

children but in the end when she poisons Eugene as the only way to free her children and

herself, the realization of her strength dawns on everyone. Her son Jaja takes the fall for

the murder and is sent to prison. Mrs Eugene is the first example in Nigerian feminist

novel history of a woman who takes the route of destruction to escape her own woes.

This confirms the radical nature of third generation feminism.

Adichie and her contemporaries have continued to explore and propagate new

identities that guide Nigerian women in the process of becoming by recognizing the

struggles of the Nigerian woman over the past decades and strive to give her a voice and

allow her grow like Atta’s Enitan and Adichie’s Kambili.

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The character in the first generation demonstrates the hitherto subservience to

traditionalism and a struggle to tear down the veil for the emergence of new women; the

character in the second generation demonstrates significant progress by calling to

question family inhibitions and limitations on women by persuading her husband to

vindicate himself; and like Sheri’s overcoming her childlessness with total disregard of

societal imposed expectations of an ‘ideal’ woman, the third generation characters are not

bound by society’s guidebook. They do whatever is expedient to find their true selves and

are emancipated economically and educationally. What is important to note is, though

they all share in a common struggle for the emancipation of womanhood; they each deal

with it from different perspectives but simple progression.

MALE CHARACTERS

In studying the ways in which Nigerian feminist novels have evolved it is important to

study the major male characters as well. As has been ascertained, feminist novels came as

a response to the larger-than-life images of men created by pioneer male authors which

resulted in the whittling down of the female characters. In their response, feminist

novelists of the first generation were more preoccupied with carving out a niche for the

woman than in developing their male characters.

Shalini Nadaswaran, in her “Out of Silence: Igbo women writers and

Contemporary Nigeria” asserts that “The second way Nwapa breaks the myth of the

‘silent’ woman is in her representation of male characters, in particular undermining the

stereotype of Igbo male characters as strong male protectors. Male characters like Adizua

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and Eneberi in Efuru (1966) and Chris and Ernest in Women are Different (1986) are

presented as flawed men consumed with their own needs rather than accepting

responsibility for the women in their lives. They leave the female characters to fend for

themselves, breaking the myth that Igbo women are helpless and ‘silent’”(48). This, she

believes in turn renders them “feminized men” (Ogunyemi 148).

Nwapa’s Adizua is portrayed as being irresponsible just like his father before him.

This “waywardness…in his blood” (Nwapa 61) is indicative of the irresponsible nature of

the men and contrasts with the glowing image of the man in pioneer male-authored

novels where they are portrayed as perfect, superior and supreme. Adizua abandons Efuru

and their daughter after the latter marries him without a brideprice and even contributes

to the payment of the brideprice when he could afford it one year later. A real man is not

supposed to let a woman pay her own brideprice to be with him yet when he leaves, he

does not even return for his daughter, Ogonim’s funeral.

Efuru’s second husband Gilbert Eneberi is equally weak; he lacks the courage to

tell Efuru that he has a son with another woman. He also avoids explaining his jail

sentencing to Efuru for fear that she would desert him. Out of weakness he leaves Efuru

to deal with the truth of his son and the death of her father on her own. “The

representation of weakness in the male characters not only contests the myth of Igbo male

strength, nor is it only to allow a depiction of the strength of the women. Nwapa reveals

that the men are as likely to benefit from the presence of strong, self-fulfilling and

independent women as the women themselves.”(Nadaswaran 49)

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In The Joys of Motherhood, Emecheta’s portrayal of NnuEgo’s first husband

Amatokwu as being unable to impregnate her is deep. He is a savage man, lacking any

true feelings. He beats NnuEgo mercilessly when she is discovered breastfeeding his

second wife’s child and when the marriage ends he returns her to Agbadi with the excuse

that he cannot continue to “waste” his precious seed on a barren woman. However, when

NnuEgo marries Nnaife, she bears him child after child until it becomes a burden to raise

her nine children. Nnaife on the other hand is also portrayed as an irresponsible man who

cannot cater for his large family. His children are unkept and unfed and left for NnuEgo

to raise alone while he still goes out to marry more wives and even inherit his dead

brother’s wives and bring them into an overcrowded one room house. When he loses his

job as a laundryman for the Meers, a colonial family, he tries his hands at other things

and subsequently joins the army and goes off to fight in Burma. On his return, as a result

of the attempted murder of his daughter Kehinde’s father in-law, he is sentenced to five

years in prison and thereafter released before the completion of his sentence. He returns

to Ibuza a wretched and broken man.

In Ifeoma Okoye’s Behind the Clouds the main male character is Ije’s husband

Dozie. He is the cause of their childlessness but he goes ahead to ‘impregnate’ another

woman. He is weak and does not stand up for his wife when Virginia appears with her

pregnancy to live with them nor does he go to beg her until Virginia’s confession and his

consequent test that reveals that a minor corrective surgery is required to enable him

impregnate a woman. Dozie is portrayed as a weakling tossed here and there by both his

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mother and the society at large. His love for Ije is enough for him but his life is heavily

influenced by his environment.

Third generation male characters are not pathetic despite their tendency to burden

the women. Unlike the male characters in the first and second generation they are not

never do wells who cannot cater for their families or stand up for themselves. In Atta’s

Everything Good will come for instance, we see that although her female characters are

strong and assertive women, their assertiveness is not to the detriment of the male

characters. Atta creates her characters without making caricature of their male

counterparts. Her female characters are strong women but that fact did not affect the

male characters as was the case in the works of some earlier feminist novels. Her novel’s

female characters are made to shine alongside very successful men. Enitan’s father is a

well respected lawyer, her first boyfriend Mike was an artist. The flaws of Atta’s male

characters do not lie in their inability to provide for their families like the never-do-well

male characters of Buchi Emecheta’s novels. Her characters are not stereotyped. “They

are neither caricatures nor dummies nor spineless men” (Orabueze 287).

Adichie’s men are also successful and respected men. Her major character in Purple

Hibiscus, Eugene is a business man and philanthropist who is given the title Omelora the

one who takes care of the community. He runs successful businesses and is respected in

religious and political circles despite his penchant for abusing his family based on his

religious fanaticism.

The changes that is evident in the male characterization of third generation

feminist novels is proof that modern feminist novelists are leaning on a more radical

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brand of feminism that does not seek to curry favour by validating the actions of women

as being the only alternative because the men are not strong or intelligent enough instead,

the women are portrayed as being on a journey of self-realization and growth.

REALISM AND COMING OF AGE IN MODERN FEMINIST NOVELS

In the words of Jane Bryce, “Recent novels by Nigerian women are predominantly

realist, demonstrating little of the iconoclastic tendency we see in francophone women’s

writing by authors such as Calixthe Beyala or Veronique Tadjo” (53) she also likened

them to the works of Ben Okri and posits that the works of Nigerian feminist novelists in

recent times is an embodiment of forty years of a failed democracy, military rule,

corruption, state violence and war on those who were wither children or unborn at the

time of the event which would form Nigeria’s postcolonial landscape.

Enitan, the lead character in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come says, “I was born in

the year of my country’s Independence and saw how it raged against itself” (330).

Kambili, in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is born a decade after independence

and Ofunne of Unoma Azuah’s Skyhigh Flames is a school girl and a young wife in the

pre-independence era. The novels are mostly historical in nature, recreating certain

moments in Nigeria’s political past. About Adichie, one book reviewer comments: “I

look in awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of

her country….” (Edmund White in Powell.com). But these novels are not history. They

are powerful and evocative in the fashion of all true realism; they are convincing and the

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characters are set against realist renderings of a particular time and place and their

coming of age is tracked. The coming-of-age story focuses on the psychological and

moral growth of a protagonist from youth to adulthood. Wikipedia explains that the

character’s change is “extremely important” in this narrative style. It posits that this style

of writing follows a sensitive young person in search of answers to life’s questions with

the expectation that these will result from gaining experience of the world and attaining

maturity. In the case of new Nigerian feminist novels, the journey is likened to that of a

woman from a state of voicelessness to the point where she finds her voice.

As the protagonist grows, they gain more insight into their true nature and begin to

understand the reality of the Nigerian socio-cultural atmosphere in which they have to

live and survive as women. Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, Unoma Azuah’s Sky

High Flames and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, among other third

generation feminist novels capture eloquently the coming-of-age phenomenon which is

the most recent trend in the history of Nigerian feminist novels.

Chikwenye Ogunyemi describes this style as being both beneficial to the

protagonist or heroine and the reader. She asserts that it educates while narrating the

story of another’s education. Interestingly therefore, both the heroine and the reader

benefit from this education” (15). Four distinct characteristics of this style is given by

Ogaga Okuyade. He suggests that first, there is a period of awakening, the point in which

the heroine understands that her station or condition in life is a limitation to her aim for a

better future and then begins to display discontent and resentment for her present

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environment and dreams of a time when she would transcend into a better place where

her humanity, social status and gender comes into question in her own mind. Secondly,

the woman attains self-awareness through coming in contact with other women who

show her the way to survival in a patriarchal society. The third stage is that the character

begins a journey of self-exploration of her femininity and begins a redefinition of her

identity as she gets to adulthood. Finally, at the point of maturity, she takes control of her

transition or journey of self-discovery.

This style is a far cry from the styles employed by feminist novelists of the

preceding generations where sometimes the characters are thrust into the middle of a

patriarchal society without any escape route. Adichie’s Purple Hisbicus, told through the

eyes of the young and naïve Kambili whose narration of the story captures the different

stages of her development. From her opening lines, one can easily tell a lot about her:

“Things started to fall apart at home when my brother Jaja did not go to communion and

papa flung his heavy missal across the room”. (1). The novel follows the physical and

psychological development of this character Kambili who alongside her brother embarks

on a journey of self-definition to break out of the joyless world created by her

fundamentalist father. Unlike Emecheta’s heroines and other heroines of the past,

Kambili is not up against a cruel husband or lover but against her own father “who builds

a world that lacks ventilation” (Okuyade, 146), this world threatens to suffocate her.

Kambili’s home is affluent yet she suffers from psychological emptiness, is

alienated socially from people around her. Her father Eugene is a religious

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fundamentalist whose unshakeable moral position founded on his fanatic allegiance to

Catholicism affects even his own father to whom his children are never to go because the

latter is described as a pagan because of his affiliation to the traditional African beliefs.

Eugene’s expectations of his family are unrealistic but he insists on his own way at every

point, so even though he works hard to ensure that they lack nothing, the people of his

house are gasping for air. Kambili says of their living arrangement: “Although our

spacious dining room gave way to an even wider living room, I felt suffocated” (7). She

elaborates on the physical and emotional alienation they suffer; “The compound walls,

topped by coiled electric wires, were so high I could not see the cars driving by on our

street. It was early raining season and the Frangipani trees planted next to the walls

already filled the year with the sickly-sweet scent of their flowers (9).

Silence in the home assumes a tangible personality and this affects Kambili’s

speech even in front of her classmates who label her a “backyard snob” (53) and as soon

as school closes for the day, she rushes off to her father’s waiting vehicle without time to

bond with her fellow students. This is further interpreted by her class mates as arrogance

but little did they know that the dictates of the timetable made for Kambili by her father

are etched in her heart. Both her home and school are prisons to which Kambili is

confined daily and any slip from schedule is mercilessly punished as was the case when

she takes the second position in her class. Rather than encourage her to put in more

effort, Eugene presents a mirror to her and asks “how many heads has Chinwe Jideze?”

(46) the girl who came first.

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The silence is personified in Kambili’s mother who would rather converse in spirit

with her children than open her mouth but when she does, she speaks in monosyllable.

Of this silence, Pauline Uwakwe observes that:

Silence comprises all imposed restrictions on women’s social

being, thinking and expression that are religiously or

culturally sanctioned. As a patriarchal weapon of control, it

is used by the dominant male structure on the subordinate or

mutual female structure. (75)

As a result of this and other pains Kambili is subjected to, her development is

unstable until Christmas when her feisty aunt visits with her children and becomes a

symbol of hope for Kambili. Although aunt Ifeoma is a devoted Catholic like Eugene,

she raises her own children to have a voice, to be viable players in the scheme of things

albeit without a father. Ifeoma’s children find Kambili and her brother abnormal because

of the silence in which they are engulfed and their reaction towards her is what leads to

her awakening and introduces her to the guidance and mentorship of another woman

other than her weak mother who’d been taking Eugene’s assault on her and her children

over the years without action. This mentorship is an important aspect of the coming-of-

age story. Aunt Ifeoma becomes Kambili’s major mentor while her daughter Amaka

completes the process by teaching Kambili how to be a ‘normal’ young girl. Both

women offer her an opportunity to view the world beyond the high prison walls of her

father’s compound.

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Kambili sees in Ifeoma, a self-reliant woman in a male-dominated society as she

plays the role of both mother and father effectively to her children. Through her

character, Kambili begins her initiation into womanhood. She learns how to be a woman

in Ifeoma’s house; she learns how to cook for the very first time. Ifeoma’s example is

powerful. She is a woman, well positioned in the male-dominated academic world yet

she is humble enough to listen to others and help out the best she could, and despite her

brother’s wealth and her own difficulties sometimes, she is self-sufficient and

independent and a good role model for her voiceless niece.

On discerning the caged lives that her brother’s family are living and observing

Kambili’s glacial expressions unlike her vibrant children, she suggests to her brother

Eugene that the children need a vacation to Nsukka, the University town where she

resides with her children. Eugene agrees reluctantly but makes a strict timetable for the

children to follow while they are away. Ifeoma takes Kambili under her wings and brings

back the girl’s voice. For Kambili, Nsukka stands as a symbol of freedom for it is in

Nsukka that she finds her voice and develops fully. Here, her heart opens up; she smiles,

laughs, talks and even sings. It is also in Nsukka that she meets father Amadi who,

unlike her father and her parish priest at home practices a brand of Catholicism that is

neither overbearing nor fanatical. He helps to draw her out from her shell and it was for

him that she beams her first smile, but in her naiveté as Okuyade.

She commits a cardinal sin through a Freudian slip. Midway

through her journey of apprenticeship she falls in love with

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the priest. At this point she does not know the implications of

this psychic emotional drive. Father Amadi is perhaps the

only man outside her family circle who has been so close to

her. As she matures physically and mentally, her emotion

builds up as well and reaches the climax with her sensational

pronouncement of her love for the priest. This invariably

becomes a vibrant statement of her first access to freedom of

speech. (154)

On her return to her father’s house after the trip to Nsukka Kambili and Jaja are

armed with seeds of purple hibiscus and the uncompleted painting of her grandfather

whom she had only begun to understand through Ifeoma’s help before his death. When

Eugene discovers the painting, he destroys it and Kambili, hurt and frustrated begins to

gather the pieces together in reverence for her dead grandfather and in defiance of her

father. In that defining moment, Eugene beats her into a state of unconsciousness but

Kambili had succeeded in making a statement; she breaks away by that singular action

and rebel for the first time in her life, against her father’s stifling autocratic rule. It is in

that moment that Eugene watches the great control which he has wielded over his

daughter fall off his hands, because silent or not, Kambili’s voice finally echoed in his

head in defiance.

Kambili comes of age and after Eugene’s death and her brother’s imprisonment

she becomes the head of the home. Her sense of self-worth is heightened after Nsukka

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and she help her mother through her newly acquired art of communication to overcome

her grief and guilt at Eugene’s death and her son’s incarceration. Her growth process is

complete and she is ready to fight for her family.

In Unoma Azuah’s Sky-High Flames, the attention is on Ofunne who is growing

up in a rural environment with the enormous responsibilities and expectations of being

the first daughter and eldest child in a rural community. She begins her story thus:

I was almost driven to hate my parents. My father never

approved of anything I did. He felt he know what was best for

me, and my mother picked on me like a bird with a sharp

beak. As the first daughter, I’ve always had to cater to

everyone’s needs by any minutes spent by myself was called

day-dreaming. (1)

She is raised to be a good woman to become a good wife to some man when the time

becomes right. This destiny chosen for her is guarded jealously by her parents hence the

strict domestic upbringing she receives. At an early age, she realizes her entrapment and

seeks for a way out; the way out came in form of education. She dreams of being “well-

educated with a high school certificate. I wanted to become a teacher and get married to

the man of my dream” (7), she insists. Her journey of self-discovery begins when she

succeeds in her entrance exam and leaves home to acquire education. It is in school that

her development begins. Sister Dolan, the head-teacher of her school becomes a symbol

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of inspiration to her like aunt Ifeoma to Kambili in Purple Hisbicus. She is a guardian

and mentor for Ofunne on her evolution from childhood to womanhood.

However, with Ofunne’s mother’s ill-health, the girl is forced into early marriage

to Oko who takes her to Kaduna where her grapple with silence begins. She discovers

emptiness in a marriage where her husband is promiscuous and indecent. She takes

solace in the kitchen and her good cooking becomes one of her tools to use against her

philandering husband; when he is found wanting, she refuses to serve him food. The

kitchen becomes her space to attract Oko’s attention. It was also the kitchen that

Kambili’s mother utilizes to a dangerous end in Purple Hisbicus.

After her stillbirth delivery and being abandoned by her husband in his parents’

home, Ofunne’s development continues as she fights her mother-in-law to defend herself

from the woman’s lies against her. The peak of her development is evident in her loss of

faith in her Catholic God. She returns home and submits herself to Onishe, the water

goddess of her land because to her, the Christian God is a symbol of male domination-

when her parents forced her to marry Oko, it is not only because of their immediate need

for money but because of their belief that the Okolos are a good Catholic family. She

abandons her marriage and her faith-two symbols of her enslavement. First her parents

pull her out of school to marry Oko, and although he promises that she would continue

her education once they got to Kaduna, she doesn’t make it past the kitchen and her fish-

hawking space. In the end, she makes up her mind to find sister Dolan and begin again

but before the new beginning she goes to Onishe’s shrine and strips naked to gain

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strength from the deity to make a fresh start. Obi Nwakanma says of this journey thus:

“Unoma Azuah’s realist novel is a powerful statement about the right to return from

innocence to self-awareness, from vulnerability to a sense of feminine power, in the story

of Ofunne’s transition in Sky-high flames, from an expatriation in Kaduna in search of a

matrimonial idyll, to return to Asaba into the transcendence of matriarchal power” (12).

In the same journey of development, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come

follows the development of two girls, Enitan and Sheri through a period of twenty five

years from 1971 to 1995. Like in Purple Hibiscus where things fall apart on a particular

day, “on the third Sunday of September ….everything changed” (12) as a result of

Enitan’s and Sheri’s meeting as children. Soon afterwards, Sheri is raped in the park, a

pregnancy occurs and she self-aborts it thereby becoming infertile. Jane Bryce believes

that this infertility “equals to the childless woman in earlier women’s fiction…a tragic

loss recuperable only by the woman dedicating herself to a powerful goddess (Efuru), or

persuading her husband to have tests (Behind the clouds), here it is not only irrevocable

but incontrovertibly the fault of male perpetrators” (13).

In their journey as grown up women, Enitan struggles to find herself in a marriage

where silence is tangible and Sheri becomes the mistress of a powerful man, Ibrahim who

has no need for children. Both of them travel through a journey of awakening. First,

Enitan thinks on their plight as women and narrates:

I’d seen the metamorphosis of women, how age slowed their

walks, stilled their expression, softened their voices, distorted

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what came out of their mouths. They hid their discontent so

that other wouldn’t deprive them of it. By the time they came

to age, millions of personalities were channeled into about

three prototypes: strong and silent, chatterbox but cheerful,

weak and kind-hearted. All the rest were unknown as horrible

women. I wanted to tell everyone, I! Am! Not! Satisfied with

these options! (200)

The point of dissatisfaction with her present situation is the first step to Enitan’s

awakening. Born at independence, Enitan is only seven at the outbreak of the civil war

and subsequently, events in her life are always disrupted by one upheaval or another.

The story begins with her at eleven years of age. She is a naïve, ignorant and

inexperienced child who held hostage by her father and their gardener, Baba. Her mother

is described as being cold and distant and Enitan does not know yet that this silence is a

total subjugation that has become a part of the woman. Enitan narrates, “my mother

never had a conversation with me…The mere sound of her footsteps made me breathe

faster” (22)

In her journey to self discovery, as in most coming-of-age stories, Enitan like

Adichie’s Kambili and Azuah’s Ofunne lacks a strong female figure as a mother. Her

knowledge of sex education was shadowed from the onset because her mother tells her

that “sex is a filthy art…and I must wash myself afterward” (26). Her childish curiosity

and the equally childish manner in which things are explained to her, confirms the

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position of Onuka Ogu that: “Atta rather achieves success in her attempt by the validity

and grandeur of her narrative which traces the decisive moments of a young Nigerian

woman’s challenging life from infancy to adulthood” (114).

As the story continues, Enitan becomes increasingly aware of her individuality.

Meeting the girl next door, Sheri is another important aspect of her growth process. Like

Amaka in Purple Hibiscus, Sheri has had a different upbringing and becomes an agent of

change and influence in Enitan life. Their conversation on choosing career paths is

prophetic in its revelation of the girls’ future choices; Enitan’s father wants her to become

a lawyer like himself. Sheri chooses on her own to become an actress, Enitan in her

childish voice declares:

“I want to be something like…the president”

“Eh?” Women are not president”

“Why not?

“Men won’t stand for it. Who will cook for your husband?”

“He will cook for himself”

“What if he refuses?”

“I’ll drive him away”

“You can’t” she said

“Yes I can. Who wants to marry him anyway?”(33)

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Enitan’s meeting with Sheri changes her life in so many ways. Although Jonas

Akung believes that “Sheri dissuading Enitan from her dream of becoming the nation’s

president is an example of patriarchal brainwashing of the woman” (116), it is indeed,

Sheri who helps Enitan discover her voice, their meeting marks a transition to an entirely

new life. It is Sheri who answers Enitan’s questions about her sexuality and teaches her

worldly wisdom. This infuriates Enitan’s mother and she tries to put a stop to the

friendship between the girls but in typical bildungsroman fashion, It is her father who

comes to her aid by telling the mother “you’re her mother not her juror” (40) the same

way it is Eugene in Purple Hibiscus who releases Kambili to go with her aunt.

In school at the boarding house of Royal College, Enitan’s education continues as

well as her growth process. She learns about her country and its diverse cultural and

ethnic groups she realizes that, “Outside our school wall, oil leaked from the fields of the

Niger Delta into people’s Swiss bank accounts. There was bribery and corruption, but

none of it concerned me….” (50) It is also in the School that Enitan developed romantic

feelings for another student Daramola, and against the dictates of traditional gender roles,

she is the one who makes moves to have him until as Kehinde and Mbipom put it:

She is exposed to the reality of the multicultural nature of her

nation, the myths and culture practices that characterized

these different ethnic groups. It is during this period that

Emitan tries out her first relationship with the opposite sex.

She also learns of the brutality that could result from relating

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with the opposite sex when Sheri is raped and commits a

crude abortion to save her face. Forthrightly Atta’s heroine

not only recounts the experiences that plague her as a

growing woman in a tumultuous country but gets some

assurance that our world was uniformly terrible (70).

Enitan is disappointed and angry when she discovers his role in Sheri’s rape.

“Sheri was lying on the seat. Her knees were spread apart. The boy in the cap was

pinning her arms down. The portly boy was on top of her. His hands were camped over

her mouth. Daramola was leaning against the door.” (68). Sheri is raped as a victim of

oppression, to silence her and put her in her place. Enitan’s view of the world around her

continues to expand as she grows, she discovers her father’s hidden male child, and all

the other ways that women are exploited and subjugated. She lashes out at her father:

“Show me one case, just one, of a woman having two husbands, a fifty year old woman

marrying a twelve year old boy. We have female judges, and a woman can’t legally post

bail. If I were married, I would need my husband’s consent to get a new passport…”

(141).

When she gets married to Niyi, Enitan began to see things clearly and becomes

more revolutionary, thereby refusing to play second fiddle. She says: “...the expectation

of subordination bothered me most. How could I defer to a man whose naked buttocks

I’d seen? Touched? Obey him without choking on my humanity like fish bone down my

throat”? (184). She comes to the conclusion that men and women should be equal

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partners in a marriage and in society. She begins to educate women on how to assert

their human rights. She once tells Sheri about Niyi: “The man behaves as if I’m his

personal servant” (264) and Sheri replies, “show him sense jo” (265). In the end, both

Sheri and Enitan walk away from their situations; one from a husband who wants her to

be second fiddle and the other from an adulterous affair.

The stages of growth in the novel begin from 1971 where Enitan’s early life is

showcased, till 1975 where they are in school. The third part shows the different

relationships Enitan has with the opposite sex in 1985. The final part in 1995 shows an

assertive and well-developed heroine. Each of these phases attests to a particular phase

in the journey of Enitan to self-discovery. The different stages of growth help in shaping

the heroine and other female characters in the novel. Enitan changes from the naïve

adolescent girl who knew nothing about her identity to the voice of the voiceless who

helps others to grow. She becomes successful in her quest through association with other

women like her mother, Sheri, Grace Ameh and her mother in-law. She does not allow

her husband to limit her growth process. She eventually gives birth to a baby girl but at

last, walks out of every space that limits her vision and dreams. She walks out on the

overbearing influence of her husband and her father.

The coming of age style in these novels suggests that this trend is stamped in the

feminist literary scene of the 21st century in Nigeria. The novelists pursue the uniform

ideal of portraying the modern Nigerian woman through her stages of growth from

adolescence to adulthood, a period of voicelessness to that of assertion. The characters

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are bold and iconoclastic in their approach to emancipation and unlike what is seen in the

works of other preceding generations, there is no negotiation or the bid to tone down the

actions of the woman and the novelists themselves do not claim to be anything other than

feminists. The modern feminist novels are evolving as well and the destination it will

take in the future is still unknown.

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CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

This study set out to analyze the concept of transition as a theoretical framework to

capture the changes and evolutionary trends in the feminist novel genre in Nigeria. Some

scholars have explored the shift from oral literature to written literature and transition of

Onitsha market literature to film, but the crux of this study has been on historical survey

of the significant shifts that have occurred in Nigerian feminist novels from the early

writings about women by Flora Nwapa and the feminist works of Buchi Emecheta up till

the 21st century or third generation novels of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her

contemporaries.

Feminist novelists of different eras have been studied and areas of transition in

their works and respective generations have been observed as well as the pervading

themes of the eras in question and the similarities in their exploration. In the first

generation which began with Flora Nwapa’s milestone in 1966, for instance, it is clear

that the emergence of female-authored novels is a huge step in itself that sought to give a

place to women in the literary scheme of things even though the label feminist was not

taken on as it is today by the 21st century feminist novelists. Economic emancipation and

motherhood as well as marriage are identified as the major themes of the first generation

novelists because the writers believed that all of the problems of women would be solved

once they are able to stop depending entirely on men for survival. This is no surprise

since the early novels were set at a time when most people lived in the rural areas and

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women were given the opportunity to function to a large extent outside the home. It was

an era when women had to keep homes and have children in order to be accepted by

society and find reliance in their communities, hence the theme of marriage and

motherhood. Nwapa ‘shocked’ the world when she created characters who defy societal

norms about marriage and childbearing but who excel in business thereby gaining respect

in their communities. Her characters are rural women who do the unimaginable as far as

their generation is concerned and get away with it, but she also reveals their personal

struggles especially as regards marriage, childbirth and voluntary singlehood.

Buchi Emecheta and Zaynab Alkali whose works are influenced (as were works of

other African feminist writers), by Nwapa, also lend their writing skills to the issues

facing women in their era. Emecheta was preoccupied with the travails of womanhood,

especially in marriage and motherhood and the distaste of society at women who try to

rise above illiteracy and the shackles of abusive marriages. She was vocal and very

feminist in the solution she offered through her characters and any one of them who

failed to break off her yoke like Nnu Ego in The Joys of Motherhood pay a dear price for

it. Alkali on the other hand, from a northern and Islamic points of view, called for

complementarity- If a husband was repentant enough and a woman had acquired

education and economic freedom, she could choose to forgive and continue the marriage

on her own terms.

In the third generation, however, women began to fight male domination in

unimaginable ways. The new crop of feminist novels seems to be a study of transition all

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on their own. The characters pass through a journey from naiveté to full maturity. They

are bold and assertive and like the feminist novelists who create them, they are unafraid

and wear the label of feminist with pride. They rise above stigmatization and neglect;

they find their voices and raise them even against the government.

Nigerian feminist novels seem to follow the progress of the liberation process for

Nigerian women because the novels in every generation offer a glimpse to the issues

relative to the time in which they are produced. The third generation novels studied

reveal that much as the female voices are rising, different new forms of abuse are now

obtainable in the home front, in institutions and government and the more the women

triumph, the more mountains to be climbed.

Evolution is a continuous process and a new generation will still emerge after

now. With more women acquiring higher education, heading organizations and

businesses and being heard in different spheres of life, it is only natural to hope that in the

future, feminist novels in Nigeria would have lesser issues to tackle or new ones would

emerge. Whatever be the case, studying historically the changes in Nigerian feminist

novels gives us a clue as to the ways that women have risen above first, misrepresentation

in the novels written by male authors and secondly the issue of early marriage while their

male counterparts were acquiring education, it also makes it obvious that the society is

progressive and open to change and hopefully, the situation of women would continue

evolving until there would be no need for women to write or speak out against inequality.

83

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