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