Writing The Motherland From The Diaspora

Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009)
Copyright 2008 All rights reserved ISSN: 1887-3456.
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REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES TUDES AFROEUROPENNES
WRITING THE MOTHERLAND FROM THE DIASPORA: ENGAGING AFRICA IN SELECTED PROSE TEXTS OF DAMBUDZO MARECHERA AND BUCHI EMECHETA
Ayo Kehinde, Ph.D University of Ibadan, Nigeria
1. Introduction
Africa has been variously read by both Africans at home and those in the Diaspora, all too often as a continent wallowing in neocolonial decadence; hence the popular tag Afropessimism. Actually, African literature, in general, and the novel, in particular, has always been a site for the contest of text and context. It is always handcuffed to history, unlike many other regional novels which have become insular and autolectic. This observation has influenced the assertion of Aijaz Ahmad (1992) that each third-world literature is a socially symbolic act, a national allegory. Over the past two decades or so, African literature in Europe has made a strong impact on world literatures and cultures. The myriad of Prizes that have been won by the African writers in Europe and the growing interest in the reception of their works demonstrate the validity of this claim. Diasporic African fictions (most especially the Europe-based ones) have taken three principal directions in recent times. One, there is the influence of the visionary style and picaresque narrative of Latin American magical realists. Such works now take African fiction into the once uncharted territory. The second variety of African fictions in exile comprises those that are preoccupied with social and political themes of a kind well established in African writings. The third category of African fictions in the Diaspora initiates a new wave of critical thinking; the writers in this camp view their works as an unproblematic
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synthesis of the Western and the African modes of fiction writing. This blend of autochthonous and imported cultures allows the writers to patronize many of the conventions of -isms postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and feminism. It also lures the writers to write in a highly complex style that looks both outward to the rest of the world and inward. The threshold of Diaspora is revealed as a zone of trepidation, whereby the subject (the writer) faces two places at the same time (Arjun Appadurai, 2001). On the one hand is the memory of home, and on the other, the agonies of desolation. He thus experiences a form of hyphenated or dual identity. The African writers of fiction in the Diaspora bring the horrors of their motherland to the fore in their literary explorations. In order to address the decadence of the neocolonial Africa and to reconstruct its painful realities, writing becomes an elemental tool for survival for most of the African writers in Europe. By choosing a permanent home in exile, they occupy an unstable and complicated position toward Africa, the memory of which, although inextricably linked to the postcolonial disillusionment, remains a presence in their lives, shaping their outlook and surfacing always in their works. Hence, Africa becomes, like Salman Rushdies India, a symbol of some sense of loss, relentlessly driving various African writers living abroad to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt (Rushdie, 1991:10). However, the decision to leave Africa, emanating mostly from a choice to relinquish physically the ordeals of struggling through the excruciating pains of neocolonial misrule, lends these writers the geographical and temporal distance necessary for an adequate assessment of personal and communal implications of the neocolonial decadence. Africa, and specifically the neocolonial betrayal of the emancipatory promises of independence, becomes a recurring theme directly or indirectly dominating the works of these writers who have been driven into exile by agonies of postcolonial disillusionment. One other preliminary remark which should be made about the current trend of African fictions in exile is that there is just a little element of emotional sense of homecoming in them. This is informed by the impetus that drove some of the writers into exile. It is saying the obvious that Africans are leaving their motherland, on daily basis, in great number. This phenomenon has led to the creation of a variety of new African diasporic communities,
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different from the traditional conceptions of the African diaspora. The motivation for their leaving ranges from voluntary migration to forced displacement. Actually, why some African writers have been propelled to go into exile cannot be divorced from the general sociopolitical climate of their individual nations; that is, their individual nations idiosyncratic troubles and the shared experiences of the nations in general. Many African writers have been forced into exile by need; others motivated by ambition, yet some others were driven away by persecution. One major side effect of this depressing scenario is the painful departure of both renowned as well as the little-known African writers from their primary source their continent. They flee their home countries in search of greater educational opportunities, better economic conditions, political freedom and other opportunities. The African fiction writers in Europe are considered in this paper as belonging to the emerging New African Diasporas. Isidore Okpewho (2002) describes this relatively fresh development as the New African Diasporas distinguishable from the traditional Diasporas, who were dispersed from their homeland by a traumatic, even catastrophic use of coercion or violence. To a great extent, there exist some divergences and convergences in the features and experiences of traditional African Diasporas and the new African Diasporas. The circumstances under which the New African Diasporas set sail from their homelands and their general sense of belonging, especially since they still have social and cultural roots back in their original homelands (Okpewho, et al, 2001) distinguish them from the proto-African Diasporas who are mostly either excluded from full integration into the dominant host society or do not intentionally wish to be integrated because the cost in terms of dignity and identity may be too high. In this paper, the (re)presentation of the image of Africa and Africans in one variety of many African diasporic writings is examined. In the main, the focus of the discourse is on fictions on Africa, which take place in Europe and centre on African identities and neocolonial decadence. The central thesis of the paper is that exile, as figured in the selected novels, does not portray a typical retreat from reality. The abandonment of the homeland is not a way to escape the boarders of a suffocating milieu, a continent being ravaged by a bewildering amalgam of problems and social ills poverty, wars, diseases, misgovernance, corruption,
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nepotism, ethnic rivalries and unemployment. Actually, one common motif found in African fictions in Europe is the idea of memory; there is a renewed interest in a broad variety of socio-cultural discourses. Another theoretical underpinning of this paper is that fiction is a veritable weapon for the formulation of cultural, political and social identities. African fictions of exile (in Europe) are held in this paper to have the capacity to capture an image of Africa beyond cultural-nationalist stereotypes. They provide an alternative vision of the Negritudinal sentimental temper whereby Africa is construed as a beautiful mother; what we have in most of the fictions of Africans in Europe is a counter-discourse to the hitherto popular sentimental portrait of Africa. The pervading images that populate the works include disillusionment, planlessness, misgovernance, heartlessness, tension, inequalities, and injustice; in fact, all forms of dissonance and pain are elaborated in most of the works of African writers in Europe. Their works constitute a virtuoso performance of double consciousness, more directly influenced by Paul Gilroys articulation of the dilemma of striving to be both Europeans and black than by the regionally specific context of W.E.B. Duboiss theory about the internal/external hybridity experienced by African Americans in the United States. The African writers in Europe react constantly to their condition of displacement and loss in their works; they are always trying to negotiate the gulf separating the homeland from an exile location. African fictions in Europe provide a quintessential paradigm of articulating the transformation of exile and migration (Wumi Raji, 2003). The same blood flowing in the veins of African people at home also flows in those of their counterparts staying in Europe. Although the African writers of fiction in Europe have crossed boarders, their texts are still expressions of the cultural, social, political, artistic, economic and religious experiences of the globally dispersed populations of African ancestors. In line with Stuart Hall (1997) and Niyi Osundare (2002), the African diaspora is hereby approached as a geographic, transnational, cultural and ideological space. The African writers of fiction in Europe have always taken a leap forward in the meshing of socio-political concerns with their works. This brings to mind Adebayo Williams view that: The crisis of governance and democratization in Africa has left a profound mark on its literatureAfrican writers have played a crucial role in the political evolution of the continent,
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particularly in influencing the turbulent trajectory of the post-colonial state in Africa (1996:349). Really, African writers in Europe, despite their physical separation from their fatherland, still attach great importance to Africa, a continent which deserves to be better understood and appreciated. It is a fact that, sometimes, our national discourse as reflected in the domestic media is often overheated, frequently sensational and occasionally overly passionate. In the process, interested outsiders and discerning nationals are at a loss as to the credibility and real direction of an African Renaissance. Therefore, African fiction writers in Europe use their works as their contributions to an increased understanding of Africa. Their specific mission is to capture the spirit of the continent, to reposition the continent in the minds of Africans and the rest of the world. As a generation of African writers, they have discovered their mission and fulfilled it. The African fiction writers in Europe considered in this paper are the Nigerian-born Briton, Buchi Emecheta, and Dambudzo Marechera, the late radical Zimbabwean writer who lived in London. Through an analysis of these writers fictional works, the paper considers how Africa has been constructed in and by the works of fiction, that is, how Africa has been used as a topos, a theme, a trope, how in short, it has been metaphorized. The selected works reveal that in most African nations, self-determination seems elusive, primarily because of social, political, economic and educational degeneration under successive military and civilian regimes and administrations respectively. One excruciating pain of African neocolonial decadence which is a motif in the fictions of Africans in Europe is that, as a heritage in leadership, the continent has, as a bequest, men and women with no vision of a better Africa, but an unwavering mission to enrich themselves in the midst of their look-alike loafers as well as grinding poverty, not only of materials but also of technological prowess. And, with hindsight, it is obvious that the problems associated with self-determination will take a miracle for some of the nations to get back on the right but ingenuous track of meaningful development, a track they veered away from since the early 1960s. Another unfortunate revelation of the trouble with Africa isolated in the selected fictional works is that, certainly, the task of self-awareness and the unique empowerment of the individual as well as the advancement of the continent are not going to be lived up to by
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our present crops of bad managers, as opposed to genuine leaders that we lack in the present dispensation. These African writers in Europe enjoy the advantages of a foreign land, where there is freedom to write and time as well as space for this aspect of selfrealization and personal development. Not to commit the heinous fallacy of
overgeneralization, this claim applies only to those who can surmount the daily problems of existence itself. In fact, not all African writers in the Diaspora succeed, but despite all odds, one or two do triumph in their adoptive countries. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, aptly captures the benefit of being an African writer in exile, most especially during the agonizing period of military rule in some African countries. Playing on the term brain drain, Soyinka comments: Lucky drainees! The brains of their stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures (1990:112). Therefore, physical distance from home with its attendant experiences of sorrow, victimization, bitterness, loneliness, dejection, depression and nostalgia (Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003) may be a painful and very agonizing experience. However, staying at home, inundated with socio-political and economic problems, may not be a better and safer alternative. A living exile is far luckier than a dead stay-athome. Those African writers in exile have always proved wrong the hypothesis that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity. Nurudin Farah, a Somalian writer, who has been in exile since the 1970s, also concurs with the opinion of Soyinka on the luck of the African writers in exile. He believes that he could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a prisoner. In his words, distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing (quoted from Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003:2). To a great extent, African writers do more to reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars (Patric Chabal, 1992:8). The African writers in exile prefer peace and their own peace of mind to any piece of land. However, Edward Said (1991) asserts that the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. The African fiction writers in Europe, in order to reconstitute this loss referred to by Said and Rushdie, strive in their works to reconstruct and deconstruct the African neocolonial betrayal by turning their scrutinizing gaze upon it.
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The question remains: how do Marechera and Emecheta engage the dilemma of their individual motherland? The discussion that follows attempts an exploration of this question. In the main, this paper confirms the veracity of the basic hypothesis of this discourse that, although a marked divide separates African writers who remain in Africa at this period of neocolonial disillusionment from those who have opted to escape the daily traumas by becoming expatriates, emigrants, refugees and exiles, they still dwell on the same issue: the critique of neocolonial rulers who have made the emancipatory promises of independence impossible (Carol Fadda-Conrey, 2003). Their themes are bound by a single entity Africa in the throes of neocolonial decadence. I shall link the fictions of Africans in Europe to the social conditions that inspire them, that is, their continual (and ardent) emphasis on the motherland.
2. Dambudzo Marechera: Venom on Postcolonial Decadence
We cannot gainsay the fact that a peoples literature evolves out of their individual and communal experiences. This is, perhaps, why literature from Southern Africa is essentially a literature of commitment. Marecheras novels, for instance, are replete with violent scenes, which signify the socio-political outlooks of his homeland. A study of his art, therefore, may tend to be defective if an attempt is not made to locate his major thematic preoccupations within the totality of the history of his society. Charles Dambudzo Marechera, a quintessential subversive writer, was born in Vengere Township, Fusape, in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) on June 4, 1952. He died in Harare on August 18, 1987. He grew up amid racial discrimination, poverty and violence. He lived a life of protest he was expelled from Mission school (for challenging the colonialist teaching), from the University of Rhodesia (for protesting racial discrimination), from Oxford (for allegedly attempting to burn down part of the school), and he had a solo protest march against the government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia and had to flee the nation. During his lifetime, he used his creative enterprise and vigour to imaginatively chronicle the state of affairs in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), especially the war situation. Thus, his works foreground a background of discontent and disillusionment with the past, present and
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predictably the future situations in his continent. Mbulelo Mzamane (1983:203) comments on the art of Marechera thus: A new generation of writer among whom the most celebrated is probably Dambudzo Marechera, author of the prize-winning The House of Hunger and Black Sunlight is less preoccupied with early historical theme. They are more concerned with the contemporary state of affairs, namely the recent war situation in Zimbabwe. Marechera also had his own personal crisis that influenced what he wrote. For instance, at the time of writing The House of Hunger, he was in a crisis having just been expelled from the University of Oxford. He therefore became a homeless wanderer (Flora Veit-Wild, 1992:176). His feeling of total loss and utter despair greatly informed the bitter venom which he poured on African neocolonial leaders through his works of art. The title story of the collection (House of Hunger) captures Marecheras brutalized childhood and youth in colonial Rhodesia. He vividly depicts the township squalor of growing up in a settler-exploited Rhodesia. In fact, House of Hunger relies heavily on a carnivalesque the world is upside down approach and scatological imagery which foregrounds the woes of an underdeveloped country. The following scene is an apt illustration of this claim:
Theres hungry people out there. Theres homeless people out there. Theres many going about in the rags of their birthday suits. And theyre all mad. Theys all got designs Theres clouds of flies everywhere you go. Theres armies of worms glittering in our history. And theres squadrons of mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future (59-60).
The significance of Marecheras contribution to the fictional discourse of the issues of war and corruption in African continent is that he carved out a niche for himself through a special treatment of such seemingly obsolete theme. What is foregrounded in Marecheras fiction, what stands out in sharp relief against the determinate temporal-spatial setting, are the existential realities of birth and death, pleasure and pain, power and victimization that is, the realities of human experience. These problems are treated in a generalized, abstracted manner, as constant, trans-historical and ubiquitous continuities in human existence.
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Therefore, with particular reference to The House of Hunger and Black Sunlight, Marechera exhibits a passionate concern for human issues which underline the various betrayals of trust, love, duty and conscience and the inhuman treatment that is often the lot of the many underprivileged members of the society. He is primarily concerned with man as a victim of history within the framework of the socio-political structures that oppresses him. A blurb writer in The House of Hunger captures the preponderance of social realities in Marecheras fiction thus: I dont know another book about Africa that deals with the whole situation at such a level, except perhaps Lessing or Head. Actually, The House of Hunger captures, as much as possible, the typical African life, so that the various problems facing the entire Africans, in particular, and the black race, in general, are made known, even to the ignorant ones, for them to see the need for a better tomorrow. The peculiar tone of the work may be traced to a certain traumatic influence of his social background. His life and literary vocation manifest in the context of neocolonial decadence. This is in support of the assertion of Mark Afadama (1988) that Marecheras imagination, the depth and variety of which are well externalized through his works, bespeaks a conditioning by experiences acquired in the contemporary South Africa (27). The artistic expressions of Marechera are pivoted on two basic concerns: first, on a commitment to exploring intensely and ultimately the wellsprings of our (African) modern experience in all its range and complexity (Abiola Irele, 1981:9); and second, on a quest for and an accentuation of intrinsic value -properties of literary art. Although Marechera was in Oxford when he wrote his works, he still dwelt perceptively on the trouble in his motherland. The House of Hunger, for instance, deals with social issues in Africa, such as oppression, alienation, power lust, its source, social marginalization and betrayal of trust. All these issues are effectively blended into the story of an individual consciousness developing in a society, which, in its turn, is battling against many odds. The anonymous protagonist of the story grows through experience, which can be rightly described as a rite of passage. By so doing, Marechera creates an intense degree of alienation so severe that the protagonist occasionally suffers mental disturbances which often develop to full-scale mental derangement. The traumas of the protagonists personal domestic history
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juxtapose with his experiences of the dehumanizing agonies of Zimbabwe (nay Africa) to make him a neurotic person. Marecheras nihilism about the conditions of his society, in particular, and Africa, in general, is not significantly different from those of other African writers who are at drastic odds with their individual societies. However, his brand of pessimism differs significantly, even more shattering than what the avowed pessimists like Armah or Ouologuem can achieve. Narration in The House of Hunger hinges on the intermittent retrospection of a psychotic mind. Familiar events, places and persons are recalled and commented upon in an irregular manner. Marechera, in his search for thematic preoccupations, has often turned his attention to the subject of oppression in postcolonial Africa, so obvious, so crippling, and so dehumanizing. The House of Hunger is, above all, a text that deals with the effects of great events of the external world on individual people. The issues portrayed take place in the context of war and racism in Zimbabwe, but Marachera focuses the readers attention not on the events as abstractions, but on their effects on the individual soul and the individual mind, and on person-to-person relationship. The treatment of sex in the text is an aspect which provides clues to understanding the nature of life and interpersonal relationship. Its value is more than literary; it also performs artistic, political and social function. Sex is employed in the story to signify a sort of assertiveness that can be perceived as a form of defensive mechanism against lifes total meaninglessness and brutality. In the text, Marechera presents the protagonist in a number of sexual escapades, ranging from his family, to his dormitory, to the streets and to the bush. Sex, thus, becomes a metaphor of the socio-political realities of the novelists homeland, which was inundated with wars and many other violent actions at that time. It is also revealed that, apart from being a victim of racial machinations, woman in African also comes under the burden of sexism. Actually, Marechera, in the story, dwells on gender-violence unleashed as a signifier of neocolonized dichotomy of another generation. The story opens with a young revolutionary, Peter, whose young woman, Immaculate, sweet and childish and big with his sperm, is flogged night and day until she is reduced to a red
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stain (2). The brutality inflicted on Immaculate is sexually motivated; she, however, dreams of a better future because she is pregnant. Again, the relationship between her and Peter signifies the problem of betrayal of trust which is a pervading social phenomenon in neocolonial Africa. The story signifies that, in the dichotomy between the colonized man and woman, the colonized man becomes the coloniser in a very specific sense. Therefore, the budding colonizer (the colonized male) exclusively in his role as oppressor of the colonized female has vested interest in continued exploitation of the doubly (sexual political) colonized woman. Black Sunlight is an expansion of the socio-political problems of Africa already initiated in The House of Hunger, offering a macroscopic portrait of the black race from a perspective of the Zimbabwean experience. Using the trope of photography, a press photographer is depicted roving across the span of a society that is in disorder, giving hasty glimpses of the chaos. The text is couched in a fragmentary manner, showing that the society he depicts is in an era of turbulence, anarchy and disorder. In this work, Marechera gives a vivid view of the new strains and tensions plaguing the African society. In fact, Black sunlight chronicles the daily experiences in Zimbabwe, in particular, and the entire black world, in general - the story of the black race under the siege of socio-political intrigues and multiple forms of institutionalized violence. In the text, Marechera is disillusioned with the past, present, and deductively, the future of African continent. The problem of sexism recurs in Black Sunlight. The issue of sociopolitical betrayal of women by their men, thus, becomes a motif in Marecheras fiction. The experience of colonialism lingers on in the society through the binary dichotomy between men and women in the neocolonial period. For instance, Susan draws a similarity between her father and the protagonist, Christian, when he tells her to shut up after making love to her. To Susan, this form of verbal male violence is indicative of her fathers irritation at his own ignorance. Here, two generations of men have betrayed Susan in curiously similar ways. Susan recognizes the violence inherent in her chosen task as similar, if not identical, to the destruction that societies impose on the people they claim to serve.
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In Black Sunlight, the views of women, exemplified by Susan, are not as trivial as the political perception of Immaculate in The House of Hunger. Therefore, gender dissonance in Black Sunlight is more eloquent and complex than the dream-versus-social-reality dialectic we encounter in The House of Hunger. In Marecheras fiction, sexism and capitalism are portrayed as patriarchal concepts which can be dismantled only by women who are as brave as Susan. This corroborates the opinion of Helene Cixous that women must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes (1994:256). With courage, Susan is able to wreck sexual and rhetorical partitions in order to give birth to a new history. Also, in the novel, Marechera enunciates some instances of mans inhumanity to man among the peoples of Africa. He catalogues the sufferings of the downtrodden masses in the hands of their leaders. The image of the African masses depicted in the text is that of people being exploited, brutally murdered extra-judicially, hanged or detained. The masses of the society depicted in the text wallow in poverty, starvation, unemployment and socio-political alienation. The following scene in the text captures these gory experiences of the masses in Africa: The chief, as black as human beginnings, pondered. What new madness had struck this messenger? White men indeed! The chief removed his fit from my head (1). The above signifies the fate of the black masses in the hands of their neocolonial leaders. This suggests that the burden of the average African man is a double yoke. He was oppressed by the white colonialists and now by his own brothers and sisters. The chief in the above quoted scene is so brutal that his throne is lavishly decorated with human skulls and he wore nothing but a necklace made of human finger bones (p6). These are apparently the skulls and finger bones of his victims. Where, then, is the hope of African masses? The above highlighted episode suggests that despite his physical absence from his motherland, Marechera still contributes to the debate on the quest for a viable political leadership in Africa through his works. A careful reading of his texts reveals that leadership should be a selfless service devoid of all traces of corruption and brutality. The question to which Marechera seeks an answer in Black Sunlight is this: Who can provide this true leadership? Is it the traditional rulers (like the tyrant chief in the text!), the politicians or the
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military? Marechera implicitly proclaims that the traditional rulers cannot be the desired saviours because of their brutality and vainglory. He also despises military dictatorship for being too assuming and over-zealous. Thus, Marecheras search for political leadership in Africa is abortive:
Was there a difference between the chief on his skull-carpentered throne and the General who even now had grappled all power to himself in our twentieth-century image? (13)
The foregoing historicist reading of Marecheras fiction has revealed that his stories grew directly out of his socio-political awareness of neocolonialism; even though he was in exile, he succeeded admirably in bridging the gap between the functional use of literature and the ability to stir humanity as a whole. His fiction produces a feeling of hollowness. He does not comment directly on reality; he permits reality to comment on itself. What he has offered in his prose texts is a unique form of realism; his works are solipsistic, post-realist texts (Neil Kortenaar, 1997:25). Here lies the hallmark of his fiction. 3. Buchi Emecheta: Reversing the Image of the African Woman
Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta was born on July 21, 1944, in Yaba, near Lagos, Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudike and Alice Okwuekwu Emecheta. At a tender age, she was orphaned, and she spent her early-childhood years being educated at a missionary school. In 1960, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was eleven. After their marriage, Sylvester and Buchi moved to London. The marriage which was blessed with five children was an unhappy, oft-violent one, and it hit the rock in 1966. She was conferred with the prestigious Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emechetas fictional cosmos is on the sexual exploitation of African women and the monster, the witch, the mad-woman stereotypes that emerge when an African woman tries to resist patriarchy. In her texts, she engages the trouble with her motherland, including child
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slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom. Her thematic leaning towards a redefinition of African womanhood is purposeful. This is informed by her personal agonizing experiences of male victimization and the single-mindedness with which she has successfully countered such hostilities. However, one notices an apparent ambivalent strain evident in her brand of feminism, especially in her non-autobiographical novels. This is as a result of her exposure to two cultures African and European. Lloyd Brown (1981) comments on the status of Buchi Emecheta as an African woman writer. Says he:
Of all women writers in contemporary African literature, Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria has been the most sustained and vigorous voice of direct, feminist protest. Only Bessie Head of South Africa compares with Emecheta in a certain intensity and directness when describing sexual inequality and female dependency. In Emecheta, we detect an increasing emphasis of the womans sense of self (34).
Since the suppression of women is a global phenomenon, the African woman is also on the march towards liberation in the literary sphere. Emecheta appears to be a frontline feminist, dissipating the message of emancipation of the African womanhood. In most of her prose texts, we have a depiction of the oppression of Igbo women in connection with the claim that colonialism, classism and sexism are intertwined in the African womens experience of oppression. Writing from outside her native culture offers Emecheta a conducive atmosphere to dwell on the problem of cultural, economic and gender oppression that African women are subjected to. Actually, she denounces the negative aspects of her traditional culture rather than celebrating its positives. She, therefore, exposes the harmfulness of patriarchy in her communities. Emechetas first two novels, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen are feminist works in the tradition of Edna OBrien and Kate Millet. In addition, her domicile in England has contributed immensely to her feminist growth. The liberal English setting obliges her to exercise certain rights. For instance, she was able to obtain a divorce and gain custody of her children. The African society is predominantly patriarchal and would have greatly inhibited
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such actions by a woman. Her field of study, Sociology, further exposes her to the sufferings of womanhood in various cultures. This heightens her concern for this disadvantaged subgroup and awakens her urges for politics of the female plight. Therefore, a combination of factors her diasporic identity, her personal victimization by the patriarchy and her exposure to the works of other feminists- sharpen her consciousness. Commenting on her consistent narration of the woes in her motherland, Emecheta says:
Some people have said that a talk which I gave at the Africa Centre a few weeks ago is unpatriotic, but I, as a writer cannot afford to tell my people what they want to hear. If I start doing that I would be betraying my conscience, my profession and my country (1981:2582).
Emecheta does not stop at cataloguing male hostilities; she goes on to fight them. In reading her novels, one is aware that she is furthering the female cause. Her brand of sexual politics is not mediocre; she extends it to the emancipation of the males. Emecheta derives the title of her second novel, Second Class Citizen, from Simone de Beauvoirs phrase. The African society is depicted as a patriarchal world where man is the reference point; he defines woman in relationship to himself. The female has no autonomy outside the male who may be her father, husband or brother. In a traditional patriarchal society like Nigeria, this concept strongly persists. This idea is articulated in Emechetas The Slave Girl. Hear her:
A girl needed men to guide her: her father, or any man who could represent a father to her, or when she grew up a husband. So, was not her brother the rightful person to decide the fate of little Ojebeta? (30).
Consequently, the African women are portrayed as finding themselves perpetually trapped in this eternal triangle of the patriarchy. They are just what the apparatus decree. Exposing further the status of the girl-child in Africa, Emecheta, in The Slave Girl, states through, the narrator, that a boy is like four girls put together (p.68). She further muses on the inessentiality of the female when she observes unenthusiastically, Titi is only a girl (71). The phobia for male children is further heightened in the reaction of Adahs parents at her
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birth. In fact, she was born when everyone in the family expected a male child; her arrival was such a disappointment that her birth was not recorded. These instances serve to highlight the disregard which plagues the female from infancy to adulthood in a patriarchal society like Africa. The Slave Girl is, thus, a critique of the way women are caught in a double bind between what tradition expects of them and the experiences of the colonial social context. In this novel, Emecheta attempts to conscientize African women and make Africans redress their contributions to the subjugation of African women (Sarah Anyang Agbor, 2008). The fact that the patriarchy regards the female as an object of amusement further reinforces his conception of her as a piece of property. A man purchases a woman in marriage as he would any item, such as a piece of furniture, an animal or a slave. Marriage is usually profit motivated. When Francis, in Second Class Citizen, feels threatened over Adahs pay packet, his father reassuringly reprimands him by observing that he should count himself lucky for possessing such a wife. The word possessing is significant in the context because what one normally possesses is a piece of property. In fact, one thing that binds Francis to Adah is her money. Adah is the breadwinner and, to this effect, indispensable, since Francis has an aversion to work. In marriage, the woman takes care of the home and bears children, tasks erroneously supposed to be fulfilling. Therefore, bearing children is highly valued. Childlessness in African society results to the type of mental agony and shame NnuEgo, in The Joys of Motherhood, is subjected to. This novel attempts a denunciation of womens entrapment between the expectations of the Igbo traditions and those of modernity. It is with ignominy that NnuEgo relinquishes her position as the head wife. It is ironic that a father is usually a very active participant in the drama that enacts the sale and subjugation of a daughter. The actual marriage negotiation of NnuEgo and Amatokwo is solely conducted by the males of the family. It is also significant that it is Ojebetas brother, Okolie in The Slave Girl, who sells her into slavery to Ma Palagada. Had Ojebetas father, Okwuekwu Oda, been alive, she still would have been given away in marriage. Either way, they are both versions of slavery because they impede economic independence and self-expression.
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In addition, the female is assessed by either whose daughter or whose wife she is but never by who she is. Married or single, a woman remains under patriarchal dominance. The case of Ona in The Joys of Motherhood offers an apt illustration of the selfish paternal love some women are subjected to in traditional African societies. Her father sees her as a means through which his desired ends can be achieved. Invariably, marriage is depicted as an extension of female enslavement. Adah, Emechetas persona in Second-Class Citizen, experiences slavery in marriage in its crudest form. To Francis, her husband, Adah is like a yoke-fellow whose labour was crucial if he were to prosper (14). At this juncture, it is worth reiterating that Emecheta is a feminist writer as evinced in her autobiographical novels, In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen set in London. In dealing with the preliterate African characters that are not extensions of herself, characters considered from a historical perspective and placed in a rural context, Emechetas feminism becomes ambivalent as in The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood. However, in Double Yoke, she creates a literate female who successfully counters patriarchal victimization in the more modern and liberal atmosphere, thus reaffirming her feminist ideology with which she started. Willful and persistent Emecheta counters male subjugation and achieves selfhood. In her reaffirmation of feminism in Double Yoke, Emecheta creates a new African woman, that is, an emancipated female. Through the metamorphosis of the heroine, Nko, the double standard morality pervading the African society is exposed. The female questing for independence is a victim of the duplicity of life. The myth of the acada (bookish) woman, as well as the sexual victimization that some females encounter is also explored in the text. In addition, Emecheta advocates that the liberated woman grows simultaneously with the modern African man. One of Emechetas most recent texts, Kehinde, also dwells on the modes of patriarchal suppression of the female in African society. It also thematizes the issues of community, kinship, sisterhood, multiculturalism and shifting identities as they affect Nigerians both at home in the Diaspora. The male characters are portrayed in negative images. This is with a view to asserting the novelists own selfhood and extorting other educated Nigerian women to join the campaign for the liberation of African womanhood. In fact, in the text, Emecheta
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dwells on the predicament of African woman in the postcolonial period. Her redefinition of African womanhood in the text is both positive and radical. This is an appropriate ideological posture that aims to rock the patriarchal foundation on which the stereotypic female portrait is set. The text dwells on the ideological conflict between couples. The husband (Albert), an idealist, is ready to return home on the prompting of his sisters, but the wife (Kehinde), the eponymous heroine of the text, is more pragmatic and realistic. She does not feel comfortable in her home country after a long absence: she found herself once more relegated to the margin (Kehinde, 97). She, therefore, prefers to stay behind at her home, in exile, which she finds more comfortable and convenient than her original home, Nigeria. Emecheta has lived in Britain for more than four decades. Thus, her perception is inevitably shaped by her hybrid consciousness which is a feature of post-colonial writing (M.E.M Kolawole, 1998). What Emecheta embarks upon in Kehinde, in a conservative patriarchy as Africans, is a bold and remarkable quest. Adjustment will certainly occur in the consciousness of the male who eventually will have to accept the new African woman. Thus, in Kehinde, Nigeria is depicted as a nation where dreams and hopes are shattered. The protagonist, Kehinde, dreamt of visiting a nation (Nigeria) which would not relegate her to the margins. However, her hope dream is not fulfilled as she is given only a secondary position in relation to her husband. Kehinde feels isolated and ridiculed during her stay at her fathers household. Consequently, when she gets back to London, she does not miss Nigeria. London is, therefore, her home. It is a place where Kehindes creator (Emecheta) is able to have an outright rebellion against the traditional and patriarchal values in her motherland. Ana Arce (2000) comments critically on the possible link between Kehinde and Emecheta, with a view to arguing that in Kehinde, Emechetas narrates herself: Kehindes feelings could be a reflection of Emechetas ambivalence towards Nigerian and English or Western societies. She takes what she thinks is the best for her from both worlds and stays in the transition area. In this way, her identity is always open and surprising to those who expect coherence from her (82).
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The foregoing exploration of Emechetas narration of her motherland from the Diaspora has revealed that she privileges stories of a world (unmistakably Nigeria) where women face the problems of poverty and oppression. She also articulates protests against the overwhelming power of tradition in African societies. Actually, Emecheta offers a biting critique of Igbo cultural traditions that oppress, marginalize and contrive to enslave women. She is, therefore, at the forefront of defending the rights of African women. Carole Boyce Davies (1981:9), Emechetas fiction examines African societies for institutions which are of value to women and reject[ing] those that work to their detriment. Akachi Ezeigbo (1996) also corroborates Daviess evaluation of the utilitarian value of Emechetas fiction. To Ezeigbo, Emechetas fiction exposes the injustices lined up against women so that society could be restructured in a more equitable manner. For instance, Aku-nna, the protagonist of The Bride Price, rebels against the oppressive tradition of her society by choosing her own husband regardless of societal rules. Her effrontery to choose Chike Ofulue, an Osu or slave descendant , an outcast from the society, is Emechetas way of exposing on the social foibles of her motherland.
4. Conclusion
The foregoing discussion has revealed that the prevailing point of view in the fictions of Africans in Europe is critical and rather pessimistic, but surely not negative. The future fills the continent with foreboding and apprehension, but it hopes to arrive. One easily notices the familiar distaste of the writers for the gleam, delusion and unfulfilled expectations of the present social period in postcolonial Africa. In fact, the texts examined in this paper, like many other fictions of the African Diaspora, cast a critical and sardonic look over the social physiology of the continent. Whatever the influences of the writers may be, they are sensitive and exciting artists who are not dancing to receive gifts, but feel they are fulfilling a social function. It is our contention in this paper that Marechera and Emechetas prose texts do lead to precisely such a powerful, profound and evocative (re)assessment of the individual authors motherland. They transmit a vivid picture of the socio-historical realities of their enabling
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milieus and offer an insight into various aspects of the realities. Ayo Kehinde (2008) makes a similar observation about African fiction: in the various periods of African literature, sociohistorical and political realities are foregrounded in literary texts through the employment of certain images and metaphors (35). Despite the disparity in individual experiences, what remains unchanged is the agonizing historical cum political epoch of Africa itself and its inscription in the mental register of a continent. The narratives of Africans in Europe, although distinctively different from one another in that they convey different personal experiences of the same neocolonial disillusionment, are still joined by the need to express such memories and expose the misdeeds of the African neocolonial rulers to the world. Therefore, African fiction writers in Europe are truly translating reality into language, and they are meticulously interrogating the conditions of human existence and (un)recorded history of African neocolonies. Their artistic mission is to present an image of Africa that is ruined by the rancour of decadence.
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Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in Identity and Difference, Ed. Kathryn Woodward. London: SAGE, 1997, 51-58. Irele, Abiola. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann, 1981. Kehinde, Ayo. An Aesthetics of Unmitigated Realism: The Image of Africa in Meja Mwangis Going Down River Road. The Atlantic Literary Review. Vol 9, No 2, 2008: 33-55. Kolawole, M.E.M. Reversing Gender Myths and Images in Buchi Emechetas Novels. Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa A Socio-Cultural Approach, Ed. M.E.M.Kolawole, Lagos: Arrabon Academic Publishers, (1998): 159-176. Kortenaar, Neil. Doubles and Others in Two Zimbabwean Novelists, in Contemporary African Fiction, Ed. Derek Wright, Bayreuth: Bayreuth University Press, 1997: 19-41. Marechera, Dambudzo. The House of Hunger: Short Stories. London: Heinemann, 1978. ---. Black Sunlight. London: Heinemann, 1980. Mzamane, Mbulelo. New Writings from Zimbabwe: Dambudzo Marecheras The House of Hunger. African Literature Today 13.London: Heinemann (1983): 201-225. Okpewho, Isidore. Introduction. In The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali A. Mazrui. Indiana: Indiana University, 2001, x-xxviii. Olaniyan, Tejumola. African Writers, Exile, and the Politics of a Global Diaspora. West Africa Review. Vol.4, 1, 2003. Osundare, Niyi. Thread in the Loom. Essays on African Literature and Culture. Trenton, NJ: African WorldPress, 2002. Raji, Wumi. A Half-Way House: Identity and Memory in African Fictions of Exile. An Unpublished Paper Presented at the International Symposium organized by CODESRIA at University of Ghana, Legon, September 17 to 19, 2003. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991.London: Granta, (1991): 9-21. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile. Reflections on Exile and OtherEssays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (2000): 173-186.Soyinka, Wole. Twice Bitten: The Fate of Africas Culture Producers. PMLA. 105.1 (Jan, 1990): 110-120.
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Veit-Wild, Flora. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Works. London: Hans Zell, 1992. Williams, Adebayo. Literature in the Time of Tyranny: African Writers and the Crisis of Governance, Third World Quarterly, 1996, Vol. 20, 349-362.

Writing The Motherland From The Diaspora

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Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009)

Copyright 2008 All rights reserved ISSN: 1887-3456.

Ayo Kehinde, Ph.D University of Ibadan, Nigeria

2. Dambudzo Marechera: Venom on Postcolonial Decadence

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