Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature: Looking Inward

INTERTEXTUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE

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INTERTEXTUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE Looking Inward

ODE OGEDE

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ogede, Ode. Intertextuality in contemporary African literature : looking inward / Ode Ogede. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-6446-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-6448-8 (ebook) 1. African literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Intertextuality. I. Title. PL8010.O328 2011 809.896—dc22 2011018756

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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This book is affectionately dedicated to the memory of my brother Goddy (1958–2009).

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xvii

1

When an Elephant Rustles the Bush . . .

2

Is a Picture Still Worth a Thousand Words? From Documentary to Investigative Realism: Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and Flora Nwapa’s One Is Enough

15

Lampoon, or the Power of Savage Satire, and the Visual Object of Distaste: Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

69

3

4 5

1

On the Politics of Love: Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Bessie Head’s Maru

123

Masking the Infrastuctural Frame: Christopher Okigbo and His Acolytes—Labyrinths’ Aural and Thematic Echoes in Okinba Launko’s Minted Coins and Chimalum Nwankwo’s The Heart in the Womb

145

Conclusion

Coming Out of Shadow: Eye on the Tradition, Looking for Consequence

201

Bibliography

213

Index

221

About the Author

229

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PREFACE

T

he subject of this book is the persistent and widespread role of local literary precedent in the development of African writing. This study’s working hypothesis is that an elucidation of the enlivening sense of their antecedents that can be found in many works by African authors is sure to spark interest in and garner appreciation for Africa’s creative writing considered as a whole. All texts have forebears, but it is especially enlightening to be told that some African writers read other African writers because the fact that they have often found a strong impetus to work through their own ideas with each other is seldom recognized. Notwithstanding the preponderance of the evidence about the considerable cultural circulation among them, while some critics continue to express lingering doubts on the subject of intra-African author dialogues, others conveniently ignore it: both parties perpetuate the tacit assumption that African authors only engage with the Western canon.1 Delineating unexplored connections in the work of the dialogic imagination in Africa provides a deeper insight into African authorship, for, when the abundant but elusive methods entangled in their compositional acts are carefully and coherently explicated we gain clarity on the terms and tactics through which African writers interrogate and revise one another’s works and begin to experience the full range and quality of creative inventiveness in Africa. Placing a special emphasis on this hidden dynamic—on how African writers alter one another’s styles while drawing from older texts to fashion new ones—this study therefore concerns itself with the complex aesthetic strategems adopted in the theft of creative thunder: the play of tropes, images, subject matter, narrative ruses, and performative conventions that are for the most part intrinsic aspects of fresh composition, the substance rather than the accident of artistic construction.

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Among the most prominent characteristic features of African literature, largely un-remarked until now, is how the writers negotiate strategies for authorship by looking to African texts before creating their own works. Again and again, African authors demonstrate that the discursive relationships among them are so strategic something startling and strikingly new takes place when they re-read or re-interpret one another—or, sometimes, even reappraise their own previous works. Through a reciprocal motivation, African writers open creative doors for one another; and the calculated moves they make which so greatly enrich individual texts emerging from the continent ought to receive more extended notice. But, all too often, in their eagerness to urge the relationship of African writers to Western primogenitors, critics have discussed African literature with little attention to this important dimension of it. African writers do not merely square up to each other and jealously engage in contests for supremacy. The impacts they have exerted on one another continent-wide cut across the lines of region, ethnicity, or country; therefore criticism needs to reckon with the way in which African writers look up to one another beyond local/ethnic/national filiations, for, working in a field that is both distinctive and interactive, they have greater imaginative engagement with each other than has previously been acknowledged. The recurrent neglect of the subject of the company African writers keep magnifies the silence about this topic, over which not many have paused. But, rather than maintaining their distance from one another—as is commonly thought—many African writers actually embrace. The pacts which these writers keep with each other are so substantive that critics need to review their negligence toward the aesthetic embeddings that exist in the works.2 One must come to terms with the fact that a great many works by African writers share mutually influenced forms, ideas, shapes, and sounds. The common habit of writers to fashion their works in one another’s image—consciously or unconsciously—is a constant in African literature, and it is a practice that says something about the esteem in which the authors hold each other. Focusing more on the cooperative endeavors among African authors than on their competition, and studying the textual reverberations, the imperfectly concealed or openly admitted ways they have shown awareness of and appropriation and re-writing of each other’s works, should teach us a lot about the character and quality as well as the function and psychology of composition—the sparks utilized by writers to ignite each other’s inventive tempers. Contemporary African authors make common cause despite the radical novelty of experimentation that each one of them puts on display; even

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a casual reading of their works reveals the thematic and stylistic lines that join them.3 They read one another’s works and take possession of each other’s materials, often breaking through barriers of ethnic chauvinism. Such interchange is integral to African writing and is a worthy object of investigation. Looking Inward explores for the first time in depth this intergenerational continuity, which hitherto has tended to be absent from the critical canon, and examines the overt and covert affinities—the intertextual reverberations—that pervade African writing, with the aim of leading readers to a coherent understanding of the practice of African literary relations. Texts of contemporary African literature bear elaborate, if largely not that obvious, trace of the robust creative dialogue that is continually taking place among the authors. Irrespective of each writer’s frenzied quest to forge a distinctive style from his or her compeers; regardless of the determined search each author makes to escape the conventional code, to create a distinctive category that does not as yet exist; their work forms part of an extended conversation—a continent-wide give and take. In that give and take, each writer must, to adapt Abiola Irele’s prescient expression, aspire to “the appeal of novelty of language in addition to that of theme” by clearing a space in which he or she is distinguished from other writers through the construction and the making of innovations.4 In a context assailed by a profusion of rapidly produced texts, no author wants to be lost in a crowded overgrowth of tradition, and so the practice of authors looking anxiously and endlessly in every direction to claim some place as theirs is a norm rather than the exception. Yet, as undoubtedly irresistible as the appeal of novelty is, what writers across the whole continent of Africa are up to in terms of the adaptation, reinterpretation, and redeployment of enduring texts is nothing short of spectacular. This is the crux of the paradox of African writing: developing writers envision having to elbow aside their predecessors or compeers as the best possibility for them to clear imaginative spaces for themselves, but they all have to draw creative inspiration by standing on the shoulders of those larger than themselves. It is not a situation all the writers are necessarily aware of or willing to publicly admit; but they are caught up in a flow of art in which past and present, old and young, blend—sometimes seamlessly, and sometimes quite awkwardly. To come to terms with the totality of the matter of consanguinity, of the interconnectedness of the writers, is to take a quantum leap forward in the understanding of the singular entity called African literature. Influence is a layered and complex subject, and what calls attention to the texts of contemporary African literature is that they subvert the familiar belief that impropriety is almost inevitably implicated in the economy of

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debt; to understand African writers’ accomplishments one must explore all manner of variations—including what the writers take from one another and what they add to the subject. It is readily apparent that any effort to come to grips with the various manifestations of debt in contemporary African literature must involve an elaboration of the neglected indigenous sources of inspiration and the striking structural and modal similarities that subtend them. The diversity in practices of negotiation of influence in contemporary African literature affords a wealth of persuasive evidence for the contention that derivativeness and inventiveness are far from being mutually exclusive. In many texts, there is evidence indicating indebtedness but without any wholesale transfers of one author’s works by another. Most of the texts show ample possibilities that remodeled works can come without involving one writer’s works being blatantly lifted by another despite the comparisons invited by their striking near identical signature themes or styles. To level allegations of plagiarism, outright theft, or literary rape in such a context is to cry wolf. Even in the active culture of free-wheeling scavenging in which many authors find themselves, and where the allure of borrowing not only is extensive but borderless, responsible borrowing can be a realistic expectation. The literatures of Africa, in which influence traverses all known demarcation zones and shows up in almost every form of covert conversation, offer confirmation of the legitimate liberties that must be permitted. The arbitrary frontiers created by colonization might have been intended to isolate the African peoples. But barriers have been violated with ease by African authors. The grammar of relationships in exhibit in works by authors such as the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Christopher Okigbo, Chimalum Nwankwo, Flora Nwapa, and Okinba Launko; the Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah and the South African Bessie Head—to name only a few of the outstanding writers—clearly shows that imagination defies all limits, be they barriers of ethnicity, gender, religion, politics, or nationality. Cross-fertilization of ideas has flourished in Africa without restriction. Between and among both the older and the younger generations of African authors, among English-speaking, Portuguese-, French-, Igbo-, Yoruba-, Akan-speaking Africans and others, the delights of borrowing and carrying are on ample display. Their work transcends the conventional typologies devised by the critics who pigeonhole African writers along geographical, generational, linguistic/political, and ethnic lines.5 Indeed; careful explication of the formal properties of works of these exploratory writers reveals that the early conclusions about the sharp divisions that presumably

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exist among them are misguided. African writers have commonly shared stylistic strategies. This is true of all genres; accounts of these forms should tell us a lot about what does and does not work and about the patterns of variation that exist within apparently repetitive structures and modes in the literatures of Africa. The literary world is a closely intertwined family which is remarkable for the intensity of its romance with formal patterns. Pilfering is so much taken for granted it seems an entertaining sleight of hand. Individual artists don’t offer many clues about how they pull off their creative stunts, so there is plenty of room for critique. This book makes the case that African writers do actively engage in creative dialogue, deliberately commenting on and revising each other’s themes and techniques. Arguing that an aesthetic of African literature which is not alert to this dialogue that gives African writing its energy is inadequate to formulate a poetics for the continent and to offer new models of interpretation that are not so exclusively tied up with Western assumptions, it suggests poetics is to be understood as the aggregate aesthetic principles that define African writing, those core literary features binding or separating African writers. African authors have taken the freedom to engage with each other’s works stylistically as well as thematically, the broad argument goes, and so criticism needs to stress even further the convergences of aesthetics and ideology in their writing. The liquidity of creative assets—allusion, intertextual echo, mimesis, mixture of media, replicating, syncretism or remixing, recycling, and parody as constitutive elements in the making of a literary form—makes it abundantly clear why viewing the influence of earlier works as necessarily a ground for the denial of claims to originality, for instance, distorts understanding of the mechanics of composition and does not allow one properly to perceive the forces at play in the compositional act of many African works. It is inevitable that almost everyone who has put pen to paper has drawn from at least one of these techniques; to labor to disconnect oneself from all of one’s predecessors is to be grossly evasive if not downright dishonest. Examining the epistemological debates and paradoxes surrounding the concept of literary affiliations, chapter 1 demonstrates that creative inventiveness, transformatory agency, new liberties, assimilation, along with resistance to old forms and a reworking of other cultural dichotomies (marriage and divorce, familiarization and de-familiarization, attraction and pulling away, following and breaking with tradition) are the key components of the processes of the critical vocabulary of exchange involved in

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African text making—the primary means through which the transactional practice known as literary debt is negotiated. Part of chapter 1’s concern is thus to contextualize the intertextual business in African literature in terms of its own history and objectives. The hostile gesture excluding Africa from the domain of the literary marketplace, where literary forms are traded, is a hallmark of traditional European criticism. Such trading of forms is an essential component of recent African literature—whether or not African authors themselves have always been aware of it. The received wisdoms, considerable ignorance, and the prejudices which over the years have clouded the issue of relations among African authors are not going to be overturned overnight; bringing about a paradigm shift in how Africa is perceived is a task that will eventually be well worth the effort. To read African literature with this new paradigm requires not only an open mind but proper instruction, as well as recognition that, assuredly, not all borrowing is creative, for littering the literary terrains of cultures worldwide are the corpses of bad imitators, and current Africa is no exception.6 There are also plenty of African works that are being brought into successful conversations, however; responding to these texts with the appropriate attentive ear, generosity of heart and sharp eye for detail will maximize one’s chance of being able to treat the delicate contours of the politics of debt management with a savvy and intuitive grasp of the understated connections that ring from them. Chapter 2 considers the specific character of the hints taken from pioneer Igbo male author Cyprian Ekwensi’s seminal documentary novel Jagua Nana by his fellow-Igbo first female novelist Flora Nwapa in her absolutely witty fiction of maturation, One is Enough, which I read as a stimulating variation of the precursor text that nicely combines in-depth psychological exploration and sociological analysis. Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana perpetuates stereotypes about the inevitability of women’s vulnerability to patriarchal control, while Nwapa’s transformation One is Enough shows how Nigerian women can use their sexual agency to gain freedom from male dominance. It is further argued that Nwapa appropriates not only Ekwensi’s themes but also his narrative techniques and carries them to new levels of sophistication and psychological depth. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the uses to which Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah and his South African counterpart Bessie Head have respectively put the work of Africa’s best-known novelist, Chinua Achebe. As real as the links with La Guma’s A Walk in the Night are, while it cannot be said with any certainty that Armah could not have written his politically vilified but critically acclaimed novelistic debut The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born if Achebe had not published his novel of post-independence disillusion-

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ment A Man of the People, Armah’s text has even more in common with Achebe’s. It is clear that Bessie Head’s theme owes much to Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, but her novel interrogates rather than affirms the ideology of male dominance valorized by her precursor. Bessie Head sees revolutionary ideas as the key to inventing a new myth of relationship and power, setting her work apart from Achebe’s. Whereas, for both Achebe and Head, to see is to believe—that is to say, the visual is the most significant element of narrative emphasis hence both writers mine the worlds around their characters with a keen sense of visual verisimilitude—there is, however, in Head’s text a delicate sense of optimism and clamor for feminine freedom absent from Achebe’s, even if both treat gender as always potentially relevant. Chapter 5 discloses how the haunting power of Christopher Okigbo’s work is purloined and recreated by two contemporary Nigerian poets, Okinba Launko and Chimalum Nwankwo, demonstrating why Okigbo’s collage techniques are revived; his verse lines echoed; the plot lines of his epic quest refurbished; and the redeployments of symbolism, of recurrent tropes and icons, imagery, verse structure, vocabulary, as well as of character traits first popularized by his poetry, all serve a new agenda: new political purposes, new class interests, and different artistic aspirations. The study concludes by urging critics to be cautious in their handling of the subject of piracy or dialogue in African literature; they must set aside entrenched opinions about Africa and its peoples so that a genuine and accurate understanding can emerge.

NOTES 1. The issues of the peculiar features of their national/ethnic/regional literatures which African writers’ works individually embody and reflect also certainly deserve fuller exploration elsewhere. Nor are readers of African literature adequately informed about the ethnic bases of African texts. For instance, about p’Bitek’s Acholi influences; Awoonor’s Ewe roots; the Gikuyu derivation of Ngugi’s works; and the Igbo and Yoruba components of Achebe’s and Soyinka’s works, respectively, so little is known. The narrow picture available so far is of course owing to the diligent efforts of scholars such as George Heron (The Poetry of Okot p’Bitek, London: Heinemann, 1976); Gerald Moore (Twelve African Writers, London: Hutchinson, 1980); Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981); Carol Sicherman (Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel, a Source Book in Kenyan Literature and Resistance, London: Hans Zell, 1989); Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and Eldred Jones, ed., Orature in African Literature Today: ALT 18 (London: James Currey, 1992).

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2. Among the few critics who have tackled this subject with precision, wit, and grace, see Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Kenneth Harrow, “A Formal Approach to African Literature,” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990): 79–89; Peter Nazareth, “The Beautyful Ones Take a Walk in the Night,” in Toyin Falola and Barbara Harlow, eds, African Writers and their Readers: Essays in Honor of Bernth Lindfors Vol.II (Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2002), pp. 153–66; and Joseph McLaren, “Return and Reconciliation in Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last,” in E. Anthony Hurley, Renee Larrier, and Joseph McLaren, eds., Migrating Words and Worlds: PanAfricanism Updated (Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 1999), pp. 129–38. 3. The term “contemporary African literature” is employed in this study to mean what Abiola Irele calls it in his survey of the character of sub-Saharan African letters, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981): a literary expression that “presents itself both as a challenge to the pervasive spirit of imperialism of the West and as a mode of a creative process of self-differentiation”; a writing which rests “its enduring interest—in the way it throws a vivid light upon an area of human life and experience which, though circumscribed in its immediate reference, has nonetheless a fundamental correspondence to other areas, in other climes and other times.” Significant African writing, as Irele further notes, takes the African experience as it object of central interest; it is thus about events in the lives of Africans as they attempt collectively and individually to stake out a living in their increasingly disconnected world (2–3). 4. Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology 2nd edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 163. 5. See Charles Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). Charles Larson may have unwittingly created these schisms, laying the critical premises for those who place some African writers among the regional or tribal/ethnic group, while viewing the others under the rubric of the “universalists,” i.e., those Larson referred to as “the novelists of the future.” 6. In a pioneering essay, “Plagiarism and Authentic Creativity in West Africa” (Research in African Literatures 6.1 [1975]: 32–39), for example, Nigerian literary critic Donatus Ibe Nwoga, who was ahead of his time as a critic and died before his time, too, reviewed evidence of source and copy by setting them side by side, and, in that way, established a solid case for stolen work among such West African authors as Okigbo, Awoonor, Laye, and Ouologuem.

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ACK NOWLEDGMENTS

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his book has been several years in the making. Along the way many people facilitated my effort and I would like to thank everyone who pitched in. Foremost among these individuals is my wife, Shianyisimi, who provided the affectionate encouragement that I needed to meet a very high expectation. My thanks are due, as well, to Michael, Ochuole, and Ogede, our lovely children, for standing behind this work from start to finish. It seems particularly in keeping with the spirit of a work on genealogy to dedicate this book to the memory of my brother, Godwin Edugbeke Ogede; though he is no longer here with us on this plane of existence, his spirit is alive and well and continues to inspire me. Outside my immediate family, much assistance also came from many kind people—so many, in fact, that space can not permit me to mention each one of them by name here. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the singular help received from Priscilla Wald, who read an early draft when the project was still searching for direction, made sense of it, and provided useful feedback. I alone, however, am responsible for any imperfections that still remain.

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1 WHEN AN ELEPHANT RUSTLES THE BUSH . . .

I

nfluence is a widespread, well-documented, and widely acknowledged practice in the Western literary tradition. But there has been a flat denial that influence exists among African writers.1 The very fact that a controversy should arise at all as to whether the readership of African writing lies within Africa is odd since leaving a legacy of hope and inspiration is every writer’s dream, hence, along with fame and fortune, the perception that one’s work could ignite the creative spark for others both in one’s immediate surroundings and afar is what continues to provide writers worldwide the incentive to keep honoring their calling, and common sense ought to suggest that the situation of Africa cannot be any different.2 After all, as a familiar African proverb has it, “it takes a village to raise a child,” and another has it that “when an elephant rustles the bush, the effects are resoundingly felt in the neighborhood.” So, why has it become convenient to argue that dialogue of an indigenous nature, as a mode of creative interaction and invention, is absent in contemporary African literature? A part of the answer to this question is that influence is the last thing many African authors are eager to flag indiscriminately. This is one context that African writers’ experience is not entirely antithetical to the situation described for American literature by Harold Bloom in his exploration of the Oedipal theory of art, the condition famously termed by him as the “acute anxiety of influence” suspected to exist among American literary artists generally.3 It makes some sense that the sentiments that lock younger authors in particular in combat with some mighty predecessor should be especially heightened among minority writers. The contemporary African artists’ community, even more than the American society of Bloom’s study, places such tremendous emphasis on individual accomplishment that there is a pervasive misconception that influence necessarily denies an author’s 1

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2

Chapter 1

claims to originality. It is an idea which fatally undermines any ability to understand the fact that originality lies more in what a writer makes of his or her borrowed material—the individual touch that an author can put on his or her inherited forms.4 Emerging African writers act out even greater fears and anxieties, under the pressure of influence politics that seem to force them to peer in every direction for ways to conceal their creative motivations. Having to be told, again and again, that a truly original work—rather than being an act of creative negotiation—is a lone-ranging venture done with no dependence upon or assistance from any quarter and then, simultaneously, unfavorably compared with those they are judged to be lesser than has, without doubt, left many promising young African writers doubly vulnerable and particularly susceptible to acting as though they are under a compulsion to stake a claim for their own greatness. Here, the phrase “doubly” is used deliberately: to define the ambiguous yoke of unfair comparison that underlines the young African writer’s putative inability to measure up to some revered Western standards as well as some presumed local benchmark. Commenting in a 1969 essay, “Cyprian Ekwensi: An African Popular Novelist,” critic Bernth Lindfors invokes this kind of criticism when he isolates the work of the then fledgling Nigerian author for critical attention. Setting out to establish Ekwensi’s clear contrast not only to such masters of European fiction as Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace, and Charles Dickens, to whom Ekwensi is unfavorably compared, but also to Africa’s elite writers such as Achebe, Soyinka, and Camara Laye, among others, Lindfors accuses Ekwensi of drawing inspiration for his writing from “juvenile adventure fiction,” and places a significant distance between his writing and that of those “other African writers who address themselves to Europe or to an educated African elite.”5 Lindfors characterizes Ekwensi, in no uncertain terms, as an author who “possesses a peculiar talent for imitating bad novels well.”6 In this essay, Lindfors censors Ekwensi’s writing as marred by “amateurish blots and blunders,” essentially because he distinguishes what he calls a “literature of imitation and adaptation” that, to him, is produced by bad writers like Ekwensi, from a more genuine “literature of imagination and original invention,” which Lindfors thinks is produced by the authors he esteems.7 Despite the stout defense of Ekwensi offered by his compatriot, Ernest Emenyonu, there is evidence that simplistic views of inventiveness such as these have influenced many young African writers.8 One crucial fact is thus unknown to, or rather not well understood by, many inexperienced African writers: that the plurality of genuinely new works is often pulled from pre-existing texts. Among people with literary

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When an Elephant Rustles the Bush . . .

3

interests who are better informed, this is a fact that is generally taken for granted. Among such enlightened people, there is uniform acknowledgment that—as all texts, by the very nature of things, are understood to be necessarily derivative of existing works—the only requirement for a fresh work to be of any consequence is that it asserts its distinctiveness. But, being grossly misled about the concept of originality, many apprentice African writers have a fatally impoverished notion that they are in a peculiarly intolerable situation—one in which they feel as though, in order demonstrably and unequivocally to establish their own names, they must fight off not only the specter of Western writers but also the ghosts of their indigenous African predecessors. This is of course a phenomenon compounded by the legacy of cultural domination brought about by colonial rule, which presents a unique dilemma that puts African literature in a separate class from, say, living European literature, which bears no equivalent pressure to subvert the force of an imposed foreign idiom. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach’s robust, broad, and wide-ranging analysis of the distinct changes and variations in the thoughts, aspirations, and character of Europe as expressed in its literature through time, suggestively outlines some of the key elements that tie Western authors to a common heritage, and that explain the relative amity that exists among them.9 To the question of whether European authors, generally, through the ages from Homer to Woolf and down the line, have a settled sense of being heirs to a common estate, Auerbach is unambiguous: in a profound meditation on the history of the conventions of realistic portraiture that the writers have drawn on and from which they continue to draw to represent the world, his seminal study deductively and inductively makes connections that are not necessarily obvious but are always illuminating. There is in the European tradition a deeply felt and proud sense of an attachment by the writers to a joint birthright, an oft-repeated idea of a shared destiny. The satisfaction a writer takes in perceiving a stake in a common estate helps to account for the stability of student–mentor relationships that appears to be so ingrained in the Western tradition; within this context, the Richardson–Fielding rivalry of the 1740s, fueled largely by issues of class and personal temperament, and extensively analyzed by Michael Mckeon in The Origins of the English Novel, certainly comes across as an exception rather than the rule.10 A comprehensive study of cooperative Western author relations is neither feasible nor called for here; but a few examples will help to put this matter into context. One might point to, for example, the Conrad–Gide case, reported in Conrad and Gide: Translation, Transference and Intertextuality

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by Russell West, relating particularly how Gide, the younger writer, heartily gloried in the influences exerted on him by the older author.11 Charles Bernheimer, in an equally exacting and dense study, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure, argues that, had he lived to witness it, Flaubert would have basked in the influences he brought to bear on Kafka, as much as the younger author relished proclaiming them.12 The list of Western writers who have fruitfully depended on each other and have unabashedly disclosed or even boasted about their legacy can be further extended. There are the well-known events of Ezra Pound’s devotion to Robert Browning, shown eminently by George Bornstein in Poetic Remaking: Browning, Yeats, and Pound;13 James Joyce’s romance with Dante, uncovered in Mary Reynolds’ lucid analysis, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination;14 and James Joyce’s fruitful, if not untroubled, but acknowledged relation with George Bernard Shaw, powerfully illuminated by Martha Fodaski Black in her baggy tome Shaw and Joyce: “The Last Word in Stolentelling.”15 Even as exemplified by author relations of the kind Michael Mckeon has appropriately termed “tacit opposition,”16 such as that between Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, turf wars among the major continental European authors have nearly always been waged with surprising cordiality. The fact of this politeness is clearly also borne out by the Tolstoy–Dostoevsky spat; George Steiner reports in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky that the two Russians were cognizant of the fact that originality is what it means for a writer to possess a mind with a distinctive landmark, and both constantly acted in a manner that confirmed they knew they could draw comfort from an awareness of their places within the European literary lineage, which considerably tempered the bitterness of competition between them.17 The relative contrast with Africa is clear enough, where many upand-coming authors appear to confuse inventiveness entirely with the mere absence of another’s ideas because the notion of patrimony is itself not consciously nursed. Fledgling African authors, unlike those elsewhere, often crack under unrelenting pressure to make their work new because they wrongly equate literary debt with outright devaluation of imaginative status. Many buckle under the weight of tradition because, for them, influence necessarily calls up charges of copying or parroting of another’s ideas and thus naturally suggests something with negative connotations. Seeking exclusion from the effects of others’ works as the defining quality of imagination, inexperienced African writers are especially prone to harbor unusual anxieties about inspiration; having to see their own works continually unfairly compared with those of writers to whom they may feel no connection whatsoever at a conscious level has created among many beginning

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African authors a characteristic feeling of being persistently hunted down to be put on trial for literary theft, and has thus created a situation of distrust that has done little to inspire them with confidence in themselves.18 Indeed, in light of the propensity of accusations of indebtedness to fulminate imperfectly concealed primordial human passions, it should be clear why the phenomena of allegations of influence might appear fascinating to the disinterested scholar, but is no laughing matter to emerging authors who have continually to contend with a feeling that faint ghosts of plagiarism hang over their careers. One obvious consequence of the misconception of inventiveness has been a rise in exaggerated originality claims among new African writers, a phenomenon as potent in its potential destructive power as is the psychological condition of overcompensating masculinity foisted chiefly on the racially oppressed by emasculating cultures. Yet, it cannot be stressed enough that to be original is simply to possess not only the power to express a new thought or idea but also the capability to articulate one’s resources in a uniquely refreshing manner; to demonstrate individuality within contexts or confines imposed by convention; to contribute a genuinely fresh perspective; to be able truly to overcome limits set by what already exists; to put a sense of individual touch on tradition; to be all-inclusively authentic. To invent is to use one’s tools responsibly. A primary mind sets up to absorb and it also extends and reorganizes all the borrowed stuff which it makes distinctly its own through the creative alchemy of assimilation. Imitation, borrowing, and allusion, except when bordering upon plagiarism and plain stolen words or outright theft, or when done irresponsibly, then, can all be vital components, in differing, varying gradations, of the creative talent. Writing in Myth, Literature, and the African World, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka puts the perennial debate on novelty in perspective. He asserts that an appropriated work can still make “an original contribution to literature, in spite of the borrowings.”19 He is of course quick to add in the same context that “the moral offence” which un-attributed borrowing must be perceived to constitute cannot be made light of. There can be no question that the implications of Soyinka’s remarks ramify well beyond the specific context of the scandals surrounding the work of Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who is alleged to have infused his 1968 novel, Le Devoir de Violence (Bound to Violence), with numerous undocumented sources.20 Soyinka’s superb reading both of Ouologuem’s work and of other texts should provide a sound basis for understanding the ramifications of literary grafting more generally, especially in light of his contention that originality is not all about the absence of influence but more suggestively about

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the resourceful uses of it—the ability on the part of a writer to redeploy recycled patterns of communication innovatively. Soyinka shows that any reader of African literature, from the lay person to the expert, will find attentive consideration of the significant artistic connections among African authors a source of delight and enlightenment. Using the Malian author Yambo Ouologuem, his Senegalese conterpart Sembene Ousmane, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and his Ghanaian compeer Ayi Kwei Armah for further illustration, Soyinka frames a substantial discussion highlighting the chief ways in which local influences mould the works of African writers, taking particular care in outlining what, to many, would undoubtedly seem most improbable links. In his study Soyinka argues that imitation of texts or models—a major form of creative interchange—is the central means by which the works of African writers are nurtured and brought into being. African writers seldom work in utter isolation; nor do they have only Western models. Principally because an indigenous canon of literary works with a variety of styles and visions is vigorously being thrust into prominence in the continent, aspiring African authors have many local sources from which to draw. That is precisely what Ayi Kwei Armah did in his novel about African colonial resistance The Healers as well as Ngugi in Petals of Blood, Soyinka shows, with Ousmane Sembene’s original text God’s Bits of Wood. Of course, the fact of this coming from Soyinka who himself attained canonical status by rewriting preeminent Western authors (Brecht, Euripides, Shakespeare, and Sophocles) makes it all the more compellingly clear that he sure knows what he’s talking about. Within the current context of the critical labor to apprehend the manifest concerns of African writing, the many years of studious work in which readers and critics have steadily applied their practiced eyes to the works of individual African writers have now more than adequately prepared contemporary readers to step back a pace so that they can view and savor the larger intertextual patterns revealed by the network of details relating to how the writers stand collectively in relations of affiliation to and difference from one another. Readers of African literature can now begin, with a measure of confidence hitherto unavailable to them, to measure how African writers fare, for example, within the terms set out nicely by Thomas M. Green with regard to “the adoption of a given author’s vocabulary, syntax, and stylistic mannerism, the adoption of his themes, his sententiae, his moral style, or the adoption of his characteristic genre with its associative topoi; or the specific adaptation of a single work.”21 Evidence here examined indicates distinctly that the culture of striking likenesses in African writing is so vast and so pervasive it would be

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foolhardy to continue to downplay or deny it; the creative strategies of African authors are so intertwined, the tradition of work being continually retransformed or repeatedly redeployed or recycled in African writing is so staggering it compels critical attention to itself as a grand act of invention. If we pay careful attention even to the works of the few African writers, such as Ayi Kwei Armah and Chinua Achebe, who have gone out of their way to obliterate the links between them, the pressure of the similarities may surprise us.22 Here, one does not merely have in mind such obvious impacts as those Achebe has exerted on those pejoratively described as “his sons and daughters”; i.e., writers of local color who are mostly of Achebe’s own Igbo ethnic origin, and all of whom employ an expressly transliterated Igbo-based English idiom to reflect Igbo locale—important as that occurrence is: Onuorah Nzekwu (Wand of Noble Birth [1961]); John Munuonye (The Only Son), Elechi Amadi (The Concubine [1966] and The Great Ponds [1969]); and Flora Nwapa (Efuru [1966]).23 Of course, representing the intricacies of the daily panorama of daily life as it is lived in specific geographical and cultural settings or locations cannot be lightly dismissed as influences of cultural specificity are important in their own right. Nevertheless, the more substantive kind of influence, with which this study is primarily concerned, transcends mere espousal or adoption of local color. Superceding mere repetition of the obvious, it makes emphatic how the copy squares with the source; how the revised duplicate stacks against the original in essential detail, in the manipulation of deep angles of narrative structure, and which appropriately puts it out of line with studies which are preoccupied with the minor role played by what Terence Hawkes calls the concern with mere physical accuracy of description which does not take account of “the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between” things.24 The kinds of significant transmutations with which this study is concerned involve therefore not only wholesale remodeling of plotlines, of one text by another, but also borrowings that show up either in the form of parody or as acts of reversal. Thus, the investigation opens up questions not only about the processes by means of which one text simply gives another a new gloss and recasts some of the ancestor text’s striking parts—an image or an icon, a linguistic turn, a thematic province or moral sentience. The inquiry also covers the provenance of echo (the hint or ghost or shadow of one writer or text hovering over the pages of another). This is the sense in which Nwankwo’s recasting and Launko’s amplifications of Okigbo are as noteworthy as Bessie Head’s reworking of Achebe, Nwapa’s glosses on Ekwensi, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s renovations of Achebe, all of which are less well known and therefore a point of focus in this book.

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As will be shown, for example, South African author Bessie Head’s Maru (1971) and her Nigerian counterpart Flora Nwapa’s One is Enough (1981) stand out in their maneuvering of literary debt. Maru is an innovative recasting of the themes and style of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) and One is Enough offers an astonishing revision of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961). In utterance after utterance, Achebe has attempted to erase Ayi Kwei Armah from the entire universe of his associations as he obviously gets no pleasure from hearing of Armah’s lineage claims and therefore would rather have this matter swept under the carpet. But as even Armah himself has admitted, whatever Achebe may say, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born cannot be omitted from the list of works which can claim immediate derivation from the writing of Anglophone Africa’s most prominent novelist.25 This study of the character of influence in African writing therefore has great implications for a number of debates currently gaining momentum in African literary history: about how African writers are taking advantage of and extending resources available in the existing literary tradition; about the level of cultural independence they have attained since the formal end of colonial rule; about African attitudes toward evolving commonly owned traditions; about the texts that developing African writers consider their canon; about the works that matter and that are taken to be worthy of replicating by writers in training; about strategies of literary invention and composition; and also about the state of erasures—erased texts of the palimpsests that still unfold with awareness of their origins. This study of African intertextuality, of how African writers’ works flow into and shape one another, is a study of the unexpected connections and formal complexities which are spawned by African writers’ influences one upon another. It is an inquiry that will undoubtedly thus contribute significantly toward the overthrow of what has been christened by the troika of Nigerian bolekaza critics Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike “the hegemony” of western imperialism “over African culture.”26 In other words, it is hoped this study will further the aim of combating what, more recently, has been termed by Zimbabwean scholar Paul Zeleza “the erasures, omissions, fabrications, stereotypes, and silences” that continue to attend “the textual conquest of Africa and the European models of literary imagination, production, criticism, legitimation, and canonization.”27

NOTES 1. Conventional wisdom has it that African writers—often dependent on nonAfrican institutions for publication and marketing—are atomized, in dialogue

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with European and North American texts more than with one another, prompting accounts in the scholarly apparatus to routinely detail the inspiration Achebe drew from Yeats and Hardy; Ngugi’s borrowing from Conrad; Soyinka’s debt to Beckett, Euripides, Shakespeare, and Sophocles; Ayi Kwei Armah’s appropriations of William Faulkner and Henry James; John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s confiscation of Shakespeare; Okigbo’s reliance on Eliot, Pound, and Hopkins, and so on. Clearly, in the critical approach to African literature, no other subject has been as fashionable as the search for the Western roots of African writing as attested by the extensive scholarship on the subject. For instance, Eustace Palmer mentions the similarity of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in An Introduction to the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1971); Achebe alludes to influences on Armah by Sartre, in “Africa and her Writers,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975); Margaret Folarin refers to Plato, in her article “An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African Literature Today 5 [1971]: 116–29); Arthur Gakwandi refers to Kafka in The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1977); Charles Nnolim sees the ghosts of the Goncourts, Walter Pater, Paul Verlaine and Joseph Conrad, Dante and Dickens, in his essay entitled “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah,” (African Literature Today 10 [1979]: 207–23). The explosion of knowledge relating to the Western sources of African writing has come about, thanks largely to studies by critics, who have added their voices, such as Ken Goodwin (Understanding African Poetry: A Study of Ten Poets, London: Heinemann, 1982); Sunday Anozie (Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric, London: Evans Brothers, 1972); Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (London: Heinemann, 1980); Obi Maduakor, “On the Poetry of War: Yeats and J. P. Clark,” African Literature Today 14 [1984]: 68–76; Catherine Acholonu, “A Touch of the Absurd: Soyinka and Beckett,” African Literature Today 14 [1984]: 12–18); Emmanuel Ngara (Ideology & Form in African Poetry, London: James Currey, 1990); Bernth Lindfors, Comparative Approaches to African Literatures (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); and David I. Ker (The African Novel and the Modernist Tradition, New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 2. Perhaps with the exception of the issue of African writers’ external influences on metropolitan artists, there is no area of African writing in which such a huge gap continues to exist in the knowledge of African literature as in the close affinities which the writers bear with one another. Among the few studies in which this under-appreciated subject has been broached are Jonathan Peters (A Dance of Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1978); Kandiouri Drame (The Novel as Transformation Myth: A Study of the Novels of Mongo Beti and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1990), Kole Omotoso (Achebe or Soyinka: A Study in Contrasts, London: Hans Zell, 1996), and Evan Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). On their part, the creative debts that African authors are owed by their American, British, Australian, Indian, and other counterparts—described by Eileen Julien as “modernism’s inspiration from things

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African” in “Visible Woman; or, A Semester among the Great Books,” Profession [1999], 229—are yet to be fully explored. Clearly the influences that African texts have exerted upon metropolitan Western authors have received barely any serious scholarly mention, in part, because the subordinate status of African literature is widely assumed. Since undoubtedly significant in their own rights, however, they comprise a subject that must await another study by someone more competent to handle them. 3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). A recent study, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), by Pascale Casanova, lends support to the theory of the special anxieties experienced by dominated writers. Cases cited by Casanova include: “the difficult situation of double-edged dependence in which Canadian writers find themselves” and which therefore “leads them to pit one capital against the other”; “the Irish writers, who in their struggle against neo-imperial influence seek to take advantage of the growing power . . . of the United States” as part of the effort to sound “the possibility of shifting the balance of literary power away from London”; and writers in “Portuguese-speaking Africa today who seek to attain literary modernity and autonomy by opposing the influence of Lisbon” through invoking “the example of Brazilian poetry” (p. 129). As emphasized by Pascale, “constraints are exerted unequally upon writers; and . . . these constraints weigh more heavily on some writers rather than others . . . To point out that dispossessed writers are subject to such constraints is not a way of blacklisting or ostracizing them; to the contrary, it is a way of showing that their works are even more improbable than others, that they manage almost miraculously to emerge and to make themselves recognized by subverting the literary laws laid down by the centers, through the invention of novel literary solutions” (p. 185). The ideology governing subversive borrowing by the subject peoples must thus be distinguished, as Marilyn Randall says in a splendid study Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), from that of the powerful, such as the later Renaissance and classical European writers, for whom “borrowing from foreign sources” was “a form of conquest, itself seen as a positive activity” (p. 106). 4. Bloom’s study of inevitable Oedipal rivalry and resentment has of course been the object of much controversy. The hardest-hitting critique has come from leftist British scholar Terry Eagleton who, in Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2003), dismisses Bloom’s enterprise as pure baloney, while acknowledging, “it was original, audacious and exciting, and a spot of wild implausibility did it no harm at all. It was remarkably cunning. What it did was to blend a traditional idea of literature with a modern one, thus winning itself the best of both worlds. Literature was still a matter of great traditions and lonely giants bestriding history, as it had been for early Oxbridge aesthetics like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; but these mighty patriarchs were now pitched into a very Freudian antagonism” (p. 168). Eagleton goes on to characterize Bloom as “an embattled Romantic, speaking up for genius, inspiration and the creative imagination in a cynically postmodern world,”

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pooh-poohing Bloom’s concept of “literary heroes, masters and disciples” that “deconstructed each other” and were “poetic warriors locked in virile combat” as “good old American entrepreneurs in literary clothing, Davy Crocketts and Donald Trumps of the spirit who shaped the world to their imperious will” (pp. 168–69). The problem, for Eagleton, is that “Bloom spoke up for universal humanity in a New York accent” (p. 169). As demonstrated in this study, however, Africa and the United States have a shared experience of being once colonized territories, so that the position of African writers is closer to that of their American counterparts than that of their European colleagues exempted by Eagleton from Bloom’s theory of literary opposition. 5. Bernth Lindfors, “Cyprian Ekwensi: An African Popular Novelist,” African Literature Today 3 [1969]: 2–14 (3). 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid, pp. 2–3, 7. 8. See Ernest Emenyonu’s trenchant response, “African Literature: What does it take to be its critic?” African Literature Today 5 (1971): 1–11. As Emenyonu shouts out loud and clear to anyone who will listen in another context, “Cyprian Ekwensi,” (in Ogunyemi, ed., Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, vol. 2, Lagos: Guardian, 1988: 20–27), though “it is so easy to criticize Ekwensi, much more so by people who have not even read him . . . he has an undeniably important place in the development of the West African novel” (20). One might also want to elaborate Eileen Julien’s claim about the epistemic culture that dominates Western scholarship on Africa postulating that it is to defend their claim to be the sole begetter of ideas and values, to guard their patent rights the materially wealthy nations feel and act upon a compulsive need to strip Africa of historical presence. “With respect to the question of intertextuality, a Eurocentric press and academy are quick to point out in Latin American, Asian, or African arts the influence, borrowings, and adaptations of genres and media originating in the West”; but, Julien maintains, “hybrid forms emanating from the ‘margins’ are typically read not as appropriations, interrogations, extensions of their predecessors, as would be if the borrowing operated in the other direction, but as derivations, imitations with local color.” The industrially advanced worlds have set the stakes so high regarding ownership claims to native genius, Julien points out, because they are particularly desperate to corner the market on ideas so as to establish a hierarchical order in which the Other is safely placed at the bottom. Hence the industrialized nations portray “appropriations, interrogations, and extensions of their predecessors” and “the presence of any such forms or media” among the Other as constitutive of “an indisputable paternity” that represents “the incontrovertible triumph of Western modernity” (Eileen Julien, “Visible Woman; or, A Semester among the Great Books,” Profession [1999]: 229. 9. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. by Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). 10. Michael Mckeon, The Origin of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 382.

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11. See Russell West, Conrad and Gide: Translation, Transference and Intertextuality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). 12. Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 13. George Bornstein, Poetic Remaking: Browning, Yeats, and Pound (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). See also James Longenbach’s illuminating study of the creative dialogue and collaboration between Pound and Yeats, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 14. Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 15. Martha Fodaski Black, Shaw and Joyce: “The Last Word in Stolentelling” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). See also Patrick Colm Hogan, Joyce, Milton, and the Theory of Influence (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1995), especially pp. 48–112. 16. Mckeon, Origin of the English Novel, p. 382. 17. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, second edition (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1996). 18. The exasperation of African writers with some of the issues that crop up in discussions of influence in African literature is manifested notably by the anger with which the late Senegalese novelist, film-maker, and short story writer Sembene Ousmane responded to a question he was once fielded in an interview by David Murphy, as though he had never heard of pan-Africanism or the unity of all black people of the world: “During this period [the 1950s when Ousmane wrote his first novel Black Docker] did you identify more with the work of black writers from the United States like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, than with the works of African writers who wrote about a mythical past?” To the emphatically demurring suggestion, Ousmane thundered: “But I am African. Why should I go looking for something in the United States? I don’t have to search for an identity. I’m an African. For me, Africa is the centre of the world. The United States and Europe are on the periphery of my world” (“Interview with Ousmane Sembene at Filmi Doomireew, Dakar, 30 November, 1995,” in David Murphy, ed. Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction, Oxford: James Currey, 2000: 227–40, 228). 19. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 98–99. 20. Yambo Ouologuem, Bound to Violence. Trans. by Ralph Manheim (London: Heinemann, 1971). 21. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 171. 22. It is of course a critical blunder to downplay or overlook the real differences that do exist in African writing, such as ethnic wedges, as naïvely done by Simon Gikandi’s uneven Encyclopedia of African Literature (London: Routledge, 2003) which makes the erroneous claim that the Idoma scholar, translator, and playwright

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Samson Amali “has published a collection of Idoma and Tiv oral texts” (p. 20), a claim as improbable as any unlikely suggestion that fire and gasoline can be safely stored together! 23. The phrase “Sons of Achebe” is Charles Nnolim’s; for details, see his essay “The Sons of Achebe,” Kriteria 1.1 (1988): 1–14. Surely as deserving to be added to this distinguished roster is the up-and-coming Igbo novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Decisions (London: Minerva Press, 1997), For Love of Biafra (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1998), Purple Hibiscus (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Knopf, 2006), and The Thing Around Your Neck (New York: Knopf, 2009). It must be remembered, of course, that Achebe is hardly alone, among first-generation African writers, in affecting the work of his younger colleagues. The same could be said of Wole Soyinka’s impact on writers of his own Yoruba. The works of authors such as Kole Omotoso, Zulu Sofola, and Femi Osofisan, for instance, contain many extended, continuing dialogues with Soyinka. So substantial, indeed, is Soyinka’s influence on these playwrights, it is exhibited (as Sandra Richards makes obvious in Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996), pp. 13–29) not only in the themes of ritual, anti-ancestor worship, encounter between tradition and modernity (otherwise known as conflict of cultures), and the pantheon of Yoruba gods and Yoruba mythology, but also his theatrical techniques such as colorful language, parody, satire, traditional expressive idiom, use of mime, dance, songs, folklore, and the metaphysical realm. 24. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 17. 25. Ayi Kwei Armah’s response is contained in “Armah’s Celebration of Silence,” Concord [Lagos] (August 12, 1987): 11–12, in which he grudgingly admitted to Achebe’s influences on his work. 26. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1984), p. xi. 27. Paul Zeleza, “Colonial Fictions,” Research in African Literatures 38. 2 (2007): 11.

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2 IS A PICTURE STILL WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS? FROM DOCUMENTARY TO INVESTIGATIVE REALISM Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and Flora Nwapa’s One Is Enough

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lora Nwapa’s One Is Enough (1981) and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961) are two novels with stunningly shared literary and sociological sensibilities. But the two works have significant formal differences, and we need to pay attention to both the similarities and the differences because Nwapa’s text is an innovative reply to Ekwensi’s. On the momentous topic of women’s prostitution in Nigeria, a subject of common interest to both authors, Nwapa not only gives a more comprehensive survey, which carries the exploration of the prostitute’s plight to a greater depth of psychological insight, but contests the very ground on which her predecessor’s subject image is built, consciously revoking it in its entirety. Cyprian Ekwensi presents an important contribution to modern African fiction by exposing the horrendous conditions faced by female sex laborers held in bondage to facilitate men’s prolific sexual incontinence outside marriage, but it is to Flora Nwapa we must turn to clearly apprehend how and why female sexual commerce became ingrained in the society. In Jagua Nana Ekwensi paints the figure of an apathetic, docile, sexually self-destructive, and seemingly cheerful member of the oldest profession who accepts that it is perfectly all right that a woman’s body should be the object of the lascivious male gaze. This image of the whore conforms to the general view of the subject in the largely patriarchal Nigerian society of the mid-twentieth century. Giving leverage to the possibility of a different picture of the strumpet from the familiar one that blames the victim, however, in One Is Enough Nwapa inverts Ekwensi’s iconic portrait of prostitution. Nwapa constructs the figure of a strong-willed, radical, resourceful, and fiercely independent female who resists and exploits the lasciviousness of men to her own advantage. In so doing, she effectively combines a novel judgment with ideas that were in the air during the movement to empower 15

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Nigerian women in the 1970s, when one form of women’s power, the variant commonly known as “bottom-power,” was at its peak.1 For what is unquestionably the first close-up picture of the female harlot in all of early African fiction one need look no further than the eponymous heroine of Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, a seductive, frolicking woman whose extravagant sexual accessibility imparts an entirey new meaning to the standard terms by which the behaviors of prostitutes are measured. Availing herself readily of the high demand the men in her society have for her services, she uses sex neither to further economic or political causes of her own nor to push those of her community. Rather, she simply appears ecstatic in the exercise of her sexual license as well as in employing her elegance and beauty to excite and titillate men. She can be seen performing everywhere—celebrating, flaunting her tantalizing body with gusto, enjoying her night-time romps and reveling in the power to gain and hold the male gaze. No circumstances seem to be uncongenial to her—from the open streets of Lagos to the more private bedroom settings and the spaces in-between. In short, whether roaming the natural world, walking the streets of the capital, or prowling the indoor settings of bars and hotels, Jagua acts upon her erotic impulses in ways which break down all of the barriers between the public and the private—ways which entirely blur the lines between decency and indecency. Jagua is portrayed as a seemingly lustful, docile fancy woman who provokes her own abuse. The tight focus on her mercurial temper and subservient traits emphasizes how she tantalizes men with her seductive appeal and is dependent upon the male attention: She walked along the front of the Tropicana, among the taxi drivers and sellers of soap, candles, matches, sardines, toasted corn and peanuts. The lights played with her and she was glad. Glad to have been at the Tropicana. She heard the steady sound of footsteps behind her. Without glancing back she whispered to herself: “Dem done start to follow me, awready! Ja-agwa!” The sensation of being followed brought with it a new kind of self-importance. She tried to guess from the rhythm of the steps what kind of person it was. Not an old man, certainly. The steps were light, but hesitant. When she stopped, the sound ceased. She looked round and saw him: a young man.2

Jagua—sketched as being euphoric in offering herself, not just for hire for sex to anyone with the purchasing power but especially to the most ablebodied young male chasers—thus fits the stereotype of the female prostitute as a person who courts her own violation by the provocative way in which

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she carries herself. A slattern clad in clothing that barely conceals her body, amorous Jagua appears anxious to satiate the lecherous male gaze with her brazenly lewd behavior. How she is presented thus has unmistakably identifiable ideological implications, for she is depicted in a way that reinforces the supposition that she bears the evidence of her own degradation in the shackles that encircle her mind, imagination, and aspirations. As the reader learns, at the club, “when she bent forward to fill a man’s glass with beer, raising the glass from the little stool and tilting it so that it did not froth too much as she poured the beer from the bottle, her breasts hung down pendulously. He could see them clearly in the nylon brassiere inside the loose transparent blouse” (31). Indeed Jagua’s self-conscious spectacle of sexual arousal, as she confesses, is unusually democratic. Her clientele includes “criminals, Senior Service men, contractors, thieves, detectives, liars, cheats, the rabble, the scum of the country’s grasping hands and headlong rush to ‘civilization,’ ‘sophistication,’ and all the falsehood it implied” (128). Jagua’s promiscuity gives her an attractive energy. Not surprisingly, despite the offensiveness of her slovenly conduct, fancy man Freddie Namme, from her home region in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, who becomes entangled in a tormented love affair with her, can neither detach himself from Jagua nor contain her zealous resolve to let no obstacle get in the way of her decision to trade in sexual labor. Freddie is heartbroken seeing she is never quite as happy as when she is enjoying the voluptuousness of the power that she has over her other clients; his own inability to resist her enchantment illustrates the control that Jagua has over men. So Freddie is as good as lost—a wounded lover, spurned like the cuckolded Leopold Bloom, the hapless protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He is both repelled by Jagua’s stock-in-trade—her immoderate exhibition of seductive tactics—and at the same time incapable of disaffiliating from her. A perfect representative for the extreme acquisitiveness and materialism of her age, Jagua persists in taking a certain perverse satisfaction from being able to thrive in her unfaithfulness to her main partner Freddie but goes almost completely berserk with grief when she discovers the affair he is having with Nancy. Jagua justifies her own unfaithfulness to her partner, but will not put up with any semblance of disloyal affections from Freddie, for, as the story puts it, she will herself brook no opposition, especially competition from a younger woman who was as “clean, sweet, desirable” as Nancy (18). Not only will Jagua’s life focus the age’s fears and anxieties, but her identity from now on will become divided by conflicting loyalties—torn, as she comes to be, between devotion to family, as conceived in the traditional pattern, and pursuit of personal freedom, between decency

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and indignity, before being swiftly and dramatically converted from an ordinary housewife into a common prostitute. Embodying a part of the divided sensibility that comes to define Jagua’s character, as Eustace Palmer correctly notes, is one ruling passion: a craving for melodrama and suspense revealed in her “forceful, willful and relentless” nature which makes her in some measure, it must be granted, “really a most unscrupulous woman.”3 Focusing largely on the prurient exploits of a charming and vivacious prostitute, who sees herself as belonging to all men in common and takes in everyone from wage laborers and itinerant peddlers to government ministers, and whom not even the emotional investment of the naïve young man, Freddie Namme, can hold down, Ekwensi’s master narrative, Jagua Nana, would then seem at first glance to be—as Adewale Maja-Pearce says—a work in which the author “set out from the beginning to write a pornographic novel.”4 While there is nothing in it that rises above the level of PG-13 eroticism from the western standpoint, Jagua Nana definitely set a new standard for the display of immodesty in African literature. Jagua Nana turns all conventional African ideas about sexual decency upside down, and cannot but turn the stomach of a readership over whom traditional family values hold sway, for it is unquestionably graphic in its amatory exhibition. It is not without significance, as Ernest Emenyonu notes in a more recent commentary, that Jagua Nana holds the singular record of remaining “to date the only work of fiction in African literature to be debated on the floor of parliament, and by act of parliament, judged and condemned as pornographic.”5 Jagua Nana certainly anticipates the African novel’s tendency to draw animation from the weaving of the personal and the public. But, unquestionably, the hub of this unsettling tale of steamy sex and exploitation revolves around the protagonist’s hedonistic lifestyle. Although it attempts to incorporate into its plot themes of political corruption, emotional and physical battery, evoking a semblance of Nigeria’s dirty underbelly—especially the dark side of Lagos, the country’s then capital city—the preoccupation with the riot of sexual urges hijacks the focus of the story in a way that hinders the social struggles endured by individuals from assuming prominence. In this tale of debauchery there is an effort to superimpose serious socio-economic and political analysis upon its lurid documentary concerns, but the other horrific acts of inhumanity that a society cannibalizing on its weaker members has unleashed upon itself are ultimately overshadowed: mainly, the collage of images through which the diagnosis of the new polity’s state of socio-economic and political decay is collectively offered coalesces primarily around sexual exploitation. Even as the

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people seek aggressively to advance their personal ambitions in a setting in which corruption, political intrigue, thuggery and violence, urban filth, and dispossession run amok, and where the dehumanization and ascription of inferior status to a key segment of the society’s populations leave their ugly effects, a predominant concern that impresses itself is sexual indecency. One of the inferences that it seems reasonable to take from the hints provided by Jagua’s story is surely that the reader might feel that Ekwensi should have been interested in the underhand behavior of the predators and perverted men, the rakes who patronize Jagua and thus not only made her a prostitute but promote her profession, but the narrative leaves no one in any doubt that he is only concerned with celebrating the woman’s sexual energy, the woman’s sexual hyperactivity. A chronicle of aborted dreams, the main narrative thread of Jagua Nana is supplied by issues surrounding sexual decadence, for, while abounding in images of the nightmare reality that prevailed during the turbulent post-independence era, a world of moral confusion—lives controlled by indiscriminate sex, alcoholism, vindictiveness, ostentation, and social climbing—Jagua’s tale of woes centrally describes the sinister consequences of prostitution for many young women of her generation, especially those of the underclass, who found themselves employed as sex workers mostly against their will. The disproportionate attention to the provocative nature of Jagua’s actions tends to deflect attention from the underlying nefarious roles of the male patrons of prostitution who give her behavior a fillip, the vile activities of licentious men who prey on helpless women like her. A woman of great beauty, Jagua turns away one local suitor after another in a doomed quest to find her Prince Charming from a distant land. Then a polished, smooth-talking urban socialite finally emerges out of the blue and instantly wins the hand in marriage of this spoilt daughter of a clergyman and a respectable mother with rural roots—only for his initial radiance to vanish just as quickly as it had appeared. This turn of events eventually leads to the break-up of the marriage, a knock-out punch; and Jagua tries to pick up the pieces, heading to Lagos.6 Admittedly, at the time that Jagua makes the move to the city, she does not fully grasp the urgency of financial independence. Nor is there any indication that she either has a sharp sense, or anticipates the destructive capacity, of the other forces of the age soon to overtake her: the excessive decadence, dehumanization, commoditization of the body, and aggressive individualism associated with urban sprawl in her part of the world. Once she is caught up in a search for meaning in her life in a time of rapid social change, however, Jagua’s progress becomes a study of the very nature of the human being undergoing transformation by the cruel forces of

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modernity. In the narrative’s depiction of her elaborately un-artful behavior is presented the case in which the conventional wisdom that seeing stops wrong-doing in its tracks is violated; even when her importunate attitudes stand glaringly exposed in all their grotesqueness, Jagua the self-admitted and shameless slut still makes no bones whatsoever about valorizing her indecorous behavior. Presented as someone who betrays no iota of embarrassment in stirring autoerotic activity in the public sphere, by general consensus of opinion Jagua is a paragon of the shameless slut. Seldom does she carry herself, for example, in a manner which shows that she “remembered that if her son had lived he would today be roughly as old as her lover” Freddie, who was “hardly more than a boy, with his whole ambitious life before him” (6). Ironically, while Jagua’s obsession with her young lover’s main assets takes the form of a neurotic desire for possessive control of his youthful vigor, it is clear that she wants to reserve for herself also the right to solicit other male clients, old and young alike. So, in the course of her career as a prostitute, her clientele includes “the ‘expatriate’ bank managers, the oil men and shipping agents, the brewers of beer and pumpers out of swamp water, the builders of Maternity Block, the healers of the flesh. German, English, Dutch, American, Nigerian, Ghanaian; they were all here, bound together in the common quest for diversion” (13–14). The image of Jagua that strikes the reader in the early parts of this story is thus clearly a capricious one; it is truly of a woman who supposedly lusts after fame, fortune, and attention, and is seemingly spontaneously enjoying and celebrating her extravagant erotic poses. The sheer number and multicultural diversity of her clients clearly give conclusive evidence that it is within her role as a woman who commands immediate attention, not just of one man (Freddie) but of a diverse male population, that Jagua sees her personal socio-economic aspirations and her identity. Such is her demonstrable sexual recklessness that Jagua can be justifiably described as a grateful sex worker who not only willingly ministers to the sexual fantasies of men but who somehow luxuriates in posing nude. Notice the unrestrained fervor with which she seems to strive to fall indiscriminately into the arms of men: “When she walked down a street,” we are told, for instance, “male eyes followed the wiggle of her hips which came with studied unconsciousness” and “when she painted her face and lifted her breasts and exposed what must be concealed and concealed what must be exposed, she could out-class any girl who did not know what to do with her God-given talent” (6–7). Clearly, male lust here becomes the primary reflective mirror through which Jagua essentially views herself.

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How she appears to be regarded by men provides the main measuring rod through which she defines her value and through which she locates her place in the world, her reason for being. It is undeniable that, failing to understand that her liaison with these men merely provides the platform for the affirmation of manliness for those who solicit her services, Jagua has a poor self-image. This theme of misplaced self image runs through virtually Jagua’s entire story and is its main attraction. It becomes particularly prominent in that emotionally-charged episode in which Freddie is beside himself with grief over watching his lover literally surrendering to other men the most private parts of her body that he believes should be reserved for him. “She got dis habit of runnin’ after men with money. Now if she don’ sleep with one man every day, she never feel happy. Den on top of dat, she takin’ me as small chil’ and she always deceive me under me own nose. If I catch her, she begin to tell a long story. I got too much pride, Nancy. But jus’ now, it won’ be de right thing, if I let her know. I mus’ wait till ah enter de ship firs’. Till I land in Englan’. Den I will show my hand” (39). In the heat of heightened sexual jealousy, often all Freddie has to assist him in coping with his shame, humiliation, and the degradation instigated by Jagua’s unfaithfulness are the many tears that he sheds. Getting things off his chest—while it is not exactly like taking the bull by the horns in a bid to repair his own honor—becomes a way for Freddie to regulate his emotional distress. He has constantly to release his pent-up frustrations by speaking out. Evidently, for him, railing against Jagua’s inconstancy has a therapeutic function. There is, of course, a biblical analogue that puts Jagua and Freddie in good company: the well-known Old Testament account in which another fated man, Samson, is similarly pulled on a string by the charm of another infamous prostitute, the capricious temptress Delilah. In each situation, an impressionable male is the prime fetish object of a fickle woman. Even more than pointing up the mischievous, manipulative cast of Jagua’s character, the function of the empty promises of reform that she pledges to Freddie is to communicate a sense of the desperation with which she sees her entire sense of worth wrapped up in her relationship with him. Jagua is so possessive that she makes every effort to keep Freddie degraded and subordinated by retaining him within the category of property. We learn that she “would take him to bed and whisper to him she would not be bad any more. ‘True, Freddie, ah mean it dis time.’ She cuddled him and kissed him, and mothered him, bubbling over with love as she always did whenever she knew she was in the wrong and wanted to be restored to his favor. ‘I goin’ to return proper to mah trade. Ah already arrange to speak

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wid de manager of de company. He goin’ to open branch shop for me, where I kin sell Accra and velvet cloth and lace. When ah pay security, de shop will be under my control.’” (24) In this tale of her devastating spiral into moral decline Jagua’s coquetry in and of itself can be said to be set forth clearly enough to be understandable without the dirt and scum, rumors, and innuendo about her that her jealous lover Freddie digs up, but the documentary on salaciousness is certainly the better for his serving as an informant. Freddie’s testimonies overlap with the scenes of Jagua’s permissiveness to extend the scope of the teeming varieties of narrative technique deployed by this novel to portray the prostitute’s miserable activities. They doubtless give an intimate witness, insisting on evidence in his determination to locate the origins of her manners, her social tastes, and her mindset—allowing the drama of her manipulative, unblushing promiscuity to repeat itself endlessly. In the novel’s delineation of the prostitute’s career, there is one heavy implication to be drawn: with his eyes set on hanging out the laundry of her dirty life, Ekwensi merely alludes to the institutional and other constraints that produce prostitution, as though he were concerned to focus the lens more on the self-display of the victim of men’s atavistic sexual fantasies than on the lustful appetites that support prostitution. Hence, as if half-heartedly to erase the cumulative evidence of sexual degeneracy, contradictory facts are called forth, but only obliquely; so that they supply only a sketchy basis for understanding the totality of the context of her conduct. Evidently, Ekwensi in Jagua Nana is more preoccupied with how the prostitute acts than he is interested in probing into how her life came to be as it is, making her story more an art of surfaces than a novel in the interrogative mode. Jagua is portrayed from the outside looking in, as an enthusiastically fallen woman, with the emphasis placed on her presumed expansive aptitude for submitting to solicitation. In a work composed in the documentary idiom as opposed to one in the investigative frame, it’s assuredly not without reason that the description of how Jagua has carried herself includes an emphatic reference to how “when she walked, she whistled.” This is a signification of the cheer, contentment, or even obvious glee with which she supposedly has accepted her situation. But, in truth, on a deeper level, one of the speculations to which Jagua’s career in Ekwensi’s novel gives rise concerns what life must really mean for a woman who makes a living by selling her own body. What status, if any, does a female commercial sex worker really have? If the absolute innocence of female prostitutes doesn’t command our universal assent, what is the level of moral culpability to be legitimately apportioned to her; how much of

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the blame should a prostitute take for having found herself in her situation? Who created prostitution; for whom was the demand created; and how are we to understand the practice? An extensive study of prostitution in Europe’s early modern history by the historian of medieval England Ruth Mazo Karras suggests an answer. In a study marked by a thoughtful analysis and ability to see into the darker issues implied but seldom found in approaches to the topic, Karras argues that the subject has often been discussed in a one-sided way in mainstream scholarship, usually from one or other side of the equation, so to speak. But it should be understood that the topic of women’s prostitution is more complex than is customarily assumed. “Only because of the gendered structure of power in medieval culture,” Karras observes, “could women be made into prostitutes to meet the perceived demand—‘made into prostitutes’—in that they were forced into the job by violence, deception, or lack of attractive alternatives, as well as in that they behaved in a certain way to fill men’s needs and then were stigmatized for that behavior by being defined as whores.”7 Yet, as Karras warns, overstressing “the patriarchal nature of medieval (or any other) society” can misleadingly “cast women as helpless victims.”8 Although “casting women as victims by working from the logical assumption that they made the decisions about participation in the workforce and marriage” oversimplifies the matter, seeing women prostitutes as totally complicit in their own victimization also presents only a partial understanding of the situation. And so, “placing too much emphasis on women as agents can lead to the obliteration of the oppressive context in which they exercised agency and to putting the responsibility for their straitened economic circumstances or their sexual objectification on women themselves.”9 To come up with a more rounded position, “The only solution is to find a balance between the history of oppression and the history of achievement . . . between ‘traditions subordinating women’ and ‘traditions empowering women.’”10 Karras’s ingenious study bristles with striking facts, citations of participant testimony, statistics, and a careful weighing of other forms of data; it seems, therefore, a helpful bridgehead for exploring prostitution as depicted in early Nigerian literature. Obviously, we have to keep in mind that African women’s experience is in no way identical in every respect with that of women in Europe. Even so, we seem better equipped to open up the space fully to understand all of the complex ramifications of the experience of African women prostitutes if we acknowledge, along with Karras, the acute tension involved in the profession “between subordination and empowerment.”11 There is a clear impression that in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, for instance, the title character is

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someone who has a sexual craving with an ample and exotic touch, making the author therefore strikingly guilty of falling into one of the categories against which Karras warns—especially the practice of seeing the woman prostitute in a simple-minded way as participating actively in bringing down her plight upon herself. What we see in Jagua is what looks like an immoderate eagerness to market her body as merchandise, as the novel skirts around evidence suggesting she does it out of economic necessity and habitual indulgence. The indication that prostitution is Jagua’s last strategic economic option, her last window of opportunity—coming as her move to it does at a time when there appears to be no better means of earning a living available to her—is buried beneath a plethora of conflicting evidence: “That was the law of her survival. After all, Freddie was only a school teacher in the National College. His salary was not sufficient to buy her one good cocktail dress. He had no money and he knew it. He was living in one room with his houseboy Sam before he packed away. How could she reserve her body for him alone? In Lagos it was not possible” (60). Reversing the picture, however, in One Is Enough, Flora Nwapa’s quest to imprint the image of the prostitute leads to counter articulations of female subjectivity. Both a feminist polemic and a chronicle of its times, Nwapa’s One Is Enough clearly marks a major reversal of the predominant gender stigmatization of Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana. While writing about the subject of prostitution after it had long been made famous by Ekwensi might seem a disadvantage—as the immediate successor would need to depart from the source material significantly in order for her work to attain the status of an original contribution—it is on the other hand what offers Nwapa some open doors, for it allows her to revise the story as she pleases, dismantling male prejudice through satire, parody, and an enchanting method of role reversal. Nwapa’s Amaka is undoubtedly an attempt to redeem the battered image of the female prostitute projected by Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana—the treatment of women as chattels. She develops protagonist Amaka from a woman excluded from the public labor market into the image of the new woman, a woman more acting than acted upon. For Nwapa, the story of the impetus for women’s prostitution needed to be told, and by a woman. Critic Gay Wilentz appears to have grasped this matter when writing at the start of a prescient study of black women’s writing in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean: “In her work, Flora Nwapa illustrates dialectically that, as upholders of tradition, women are powerful figures, economically secure and socially vibrant, yet they are limited in their choices by the restrictive cultural milieu.”12 This disquieting reality is pretty much the conclusion to which

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the experience of Amaka, the chief character of One Is Enough, will lead both her and the reader of the novel. Not surprisingly, the proposition that men fill a huge gap in women’s lives that is embedded in the female consciousness—the bedrock of prostitution—is the subject treated comically and satirically but overall charmingly in Flora Nwapa’s One Is Enough, a text that obliges us to read Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel on the subject backwards. Considered in tandem—against one another’s insights and in each other’s silences—the two novels constitute a precious document on the varying collective popular conceptions about prostitution in the earliest phase of post-independence Nigeria. Although not entirely uncritical of patriarchal attitudes, Ekwensi does not make it his primary tool of novelistic exploration. Ekwensi appears to have seen the sex trade in multi-faceted and often ambiguous or simply misunderstood ways because the circumstances under which it flourishes are not only extremely challenging, traumatic, and chilling, but they reflect the historical moments he did not himself fully grasp as an author. But, in One Is Enough, Nwapa adds another twist to the story of women’s mistreatment. To the question of whether women are not being unfairly treated by men, Amaka—haunted by her own eye-opening experience—would assert that people should not jump to conclusions: men might be generally responsible for the restrictions being placed upon women, but only up to a point: there is a greater complexity to the matter than at first appears. What Amaka is to confront is an educative awareness that the greatest jeopardy posed to women’s liberty is not only men operating as masters, especially within the institution of marriage. It may also be fellow-women—in particular, older ones such as mothers and aunts—operating in collaboration with men within institutional arrangements that have generally been designed effectively to foster the subjugation of women. The problem of female–female exploitation and disempowerment is one which Amaka will come face to face with—to her great personal discomfort, and then eventual relief—making One Is Enough a story about personal trauma, a tale about the scars of conquest and of subsequent rehabilitation, triumph, and healing. The wounds sustained by Amaka during the first-hand experience that she gains from a bad marriage will force her to shed tears of her own. Not only will an unworkable marriage compel Amaka to confront critical questions about the real meaning of life for a woman. It will also force her to grow—to learn the hard facts of life and to take appropriate control of her own life. “Was a woman nothing because she was unmarried or barren?” she asks. “Was there no other fulfillment for her? Could she not be happy, in the real sense of the word, just by having men

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friends who were not husbands?”13 These are the uncertainties, to which the plot of the entire novel will be devoted to providing an answer, opening up an exploration of what the author sees as the exciting, if not painless, implications of the possibilities revealed by the proposed experiment in lifestyle change suggested by those questions. Because Amaka not only overcomes her challenges but prevails over them, One Is Enough is, ultimately, a story of a victorious effort by a woman over seemingly insurmountable odds—and, above all, a story in which the attempt to dramatize the feelings of a woman who has been betrayed by her husband and his family relies on the power of anti-hagiographic sentiments. Nwapa’s concept of adaptation involved designing One Is Enough to remedy the overwhelming concentration on amorousness in the early parts of Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana illustrated by Jagua’s passiveness under a climate of extreme terror. Amaka, Nwapa’s key depiction of the woman forced into prostitution (her name is selected judiciously to signify her independence; hence she does not, significantly, assume her husband’s last name), thus offers a striking contrast to Ekwensi’s Jagua in her critical perspectives and fundamental response to the things that life decides to throw into her path—even if both women bear a commonality of aspiration, nursed by each as a young woman, to be taken by the perfect man as a wife, a dream that quickly sours into a nightmare reality for both. For Amaka, who is more poignantly delineated than Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, the fantasy is so palpable in its intensity it reaches the level of a passion, mingling desire, longing, and envy into one frame so that “She envied married people, and when at last Obiora decided to marry her, she was on top of the world. She was going to show everybody that a woman’s ambition was marriage, a home that she could call her own, a man she would love and cherish, and children to crown the marriage” (1). Nwapa breaks with her Ekwensi model by giving Amaka personal agency, for Amaka is not as naïve as Jagua; whereas Jagua’s life seems driven by providence, Amaka acts with deliberation, such as her decision to set out to Lagos. Even when she is faced by provocations to marry quickly, in order to stem the tide of her advancing years, and even though the pressure to have children before marriage, so as to increase her clout, is persistently applied, Amaka will have none of it. Indeed, as we learn, her mother’s elaborate effort to enmesh her own daughter in the tangle of constructive sex exchange baffles Amaka because, alluring as they may seem, the terms of the transactions that connect intimate contact and interested claims go completely against the models of idealized feminine behavior taught by her missionary education, which stresses abstinence

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and chastity. So Amaka sticks tenaciously to her guns and vehemently renounces the influence of her mother. Reading Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana retrospectively, along with the benefit of Nwapa’s One Is Enough, helps to clarify what the pioneering author was attempting to do. There are hints scattered throughout his novel indicating that he might have intended her to be seen more as an allegorical representative of the fate of all underprivileged illiterate women who are lured from the village to the city by promises of opportunity, only to run into an ever-deepening disillusionment that forces them to sell their bodies, than as anything else, but he ends up portraying Jagua the prostitute largely as complicit in her victimization. In this respect, although Ekwensi is often incisive about some aspects of the prostitute’s life, his novel is out of its analytical and historical depth; this is a gap in categorization that Nwapa was to fill in her complementary work One Is Enough. Eustace Palmer partly alludes to the ambiguities of meaning in the portrait of Jagua. Pleading the claim of a probable miscarriage of artistic intentions, Palmer is moved to say that “if it was Ekwensi’s intention to present Jagua as a victim of social circumstances—a woman whose immoral conduct is necessitated by the forces in her society—then he has not achieved this in the novel that we have.”14 Indeed, understanding the character of prostitution in early postindependence Africa certainly presents no small challenge. The conditions surrounding Jagua’s personal story, for example, seldom lend themselves to clear and vivid witness. Whereas with Ekwensi, the overarching image of the prostitute is simply of someone who is more wronged than anyone is willing to admit, it is to Nwapa, writing over a decade later, we have necessarily to turn for a more nuanced portrait that shows fully why a prostitute’s dishonor cannot be simply judged to be self-inflicted. One Is Enough marks a great advance on Jagua Nana both ideologically and also in terms of its management of narrative techniques and use of reported speech and dialogue because Nwapa appears, for instance, to have a better intuitive grasp of timing and spatiality—when and where one mode is to be stepped up at the other’s expense. Whereas Ekwensi imposes education on his protagonist Jagua arbitrarily, Nwapa allows Amaka’s awareness to evolve naturally. Ekwensi’s depiction infantilizes Jagua, presenting hers as the story of a fallen woman etched with an extremely cruel irony. In a traumatic tale in which the heroine-protagonist emerges as a woman for whom there is no triumphant wish-fulfillment—only hope deferred until the very end—the heart of Jagua’s experience is that she never really strives for anything, but watches helplessly as her life suffers one detour and pitfall after another while she gets carried along with the

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events in her life. Jagua marries not for love, for instance, but in obedience to the dictates of her society that self-respecting women should seek life’s ultimate fulfillment in wedlock. And after the disaster of her marriage, it is upon the prompting of her brother that she takes to textile trading, which also ends in disaster. Even when Jagua returns to her home village of Ogabu, which turns out to offer no relief from her cycle of frustration, this act too is in response to persistent prodding by her brother; hence the journey constitutes another powerfully nuanced case in which the fated Jagua is acted upon rather than acting on her own initiative. For Jagua, the experience of displacement is devastating not only because the initial promise of restoration that her movement from Lagos signals soon sours into dismal disappointment. It is common to represent societies with deep-seated gender biases as ones that fatally limit their female members, and Ekwensi’s text appears to be a story cast in this pattern, with Jagua’s career seeming to support the idea that there is no means by which material success will ever be had by her. Even when Jagua aligns with criminal elements in society—the thieves and receivers of stolen property like Dennis Odoma—she does so as a drifter, not as someone who is exercising personal instrumentality. Here Jagua gets enlisted into Uncle Taiwo’s political campaigns, doubling as his kept woman; but she does not appear to have made a willing decision in this matter. When she is brutally attacked, if the experience suggests anything it is that Jagua is once again revealed as the victim. She has to be hospitalized. It is within this context we must appreciate the significance of the fact that the single event in which she acts as an active agent—in becoming an exploiter of other women—is very important. This cynical decision to take advantage of another human being comes when she makes the professional move into the pimping business. With age creeping up on her, the fear of declining business begins to loom larger and larger in her mind, and graying Jagua quickly yields to the overwhelming pressure to supplement her income through other means by taking in Rosa, a younger woman, so “she could be a useful partner” as she “visualized something akin to ‘retirement’ and ‘pension’ on Rosa’s work” (115). If Jagua’s original plan, that “Rosa could pay something towards the rent, help with the cooking, washing and cleaning up” (110), invariably, is ultimately aborted, it is because Rosa will not stand the idea of working for another woman, older or younger. Rosa will allow no one to monopolize her or her income; the expectation of gaining some sort of old age insurance from pimping therefore proves as false for Jagua as her lifetime aspiration to bear a child of her own, which

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is thwarted when she gets pregnant but then loses the child after barely three days. Not even the turning of Jagua into a self-proclaimed disciple of a new order will relieve her from being a tool, a pawn in the hands of others, for while seeming to hold nothing back in her role as a co-opted hand in the political campaigns of Uncle Taiwo, Jagua’s performance remains robot-like, which defeats any thought that the indignity borne by her is a reflection of the precariousness of life for uneducated females attempting to command their own destinies in a man’s world. By contrast, One Is Enough reads like a romance novel about an enterprising, tenacious woman. An intricate portrait of a marriage gone sour, it features the struggles of a woman who is determined to turn her life around in the wake of the romantic disaster. One Is Enough’s style thrives on in-depth psychological penetration, in which roles fall naturally in place. Remarkable in the novel’s survey of the prostitute’s plights is the unveiling of her agitated mind, underscoring the intricate details of her travails; the inner workings of her mind under extreme states of mental discomfiture. Under circumstances that threaten to negate her very being, Amaka’s consciousness conveys a powerful swirl of emotion: anger, humiliation, anguish, and incomprehension. A paralyzing sense of having been subject to an utter travesty of justice assails her; feeling so threatened, she becomes indefatigable in fencing in and enclosing herself; resolved to shore up her defenses against being a wife ever again, and resolute in her determination to construct a new identity for herself. Amaka’s commonsensical reaction to the monstrous behaviors of Obiora and his mother speaks directly to the new image of the woman that Nwapa wants to create in One Is Enough. Confronted with Obiora’s sinister capitulation and the profound confusion and disarray caused by his betrayal of her trust, she is initially paralyzed to the point of feeling herself helpless in offering any immediate resistance to the unpalatable idea of being in a co-wifely arrangement. But she soon makes explicit links between the very thought of sharing a husband, which constitutes a frontal attack on the romantic notions of marriage cultivated by her missionary education as a union between a man and a woman, and the proliferation of insults from Obiora that signals the disappearance of a disposition she has come to associate with her husband. Amaka has always appreciated Obiora’s customary cheer; as this genial demeanor suddenly gives way to mounting discontent, with increasing eruptions of Obiora’s temper, often threatening to explode into incidents of battery, Amaka is compelled to begin to wonder if “demons” are “talking through her husband” (20). Insults sound the death knell of their love. “You barren and senseless woman! You forget

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that you are childless. You will not raise your voice in this house if you were sensible,” Obiora thunders at Amaka (19). Obiora hammers the nails into the coffin by giving Amaka an ultimatum: “But let me warn you that if you step out of this house in protest when my wife and my two sons arrive, you stay out forever” (20). Amaka has been committed to her marriage from the start. But, in light of the disturbing turn of events, she is no longer certain that she can hold out forever; she now has good reason to begin questioning the continuing necessity of a life devoted to wedlock: Was that really the end of the world? Was she useless to society if she were not a mother? Was she useless to the world if she were unmarried? Surely not. Why then was she suffering these indignities both from her husband and his mother? She could adopt a son and a daughter. She could play mother to them. She would go to a distant place, maybe Ghana or even Zaire and adopt a boy and a girl. (20)

When Obiora begins, falsely, to accuse Amaka of infidelity, the brutality of his tactics of intimidation and blackmail stresses her to breaking point. As the going simply gets too rough for Amaka to continue riding out the storm brewing in her marriage, she packs up, resolved to stake a claim for her independence instead of living under such oppressive conditions and henceforth to “live a single and respected life. No one would point an accusing finger at her and call her a whore as her husband often had. She would find fulfillment, she would find pleasure, even happiness in being a single woman. The erroneous belief that without a husband a woman was nothing must be disproved” (23–4). The moment Obiora loses his equanimity and apparent decency is the moment he loses Amaka’s affections. Amaka, finding herself in a moment of crisis, strikes out on her own and heads to Lagos—a city with a legendary reputation for the opportunities in business and independent living it offers—determined to resist efforts by any man to put her “under his thumb” and to make her believe her “rightful place” is in the kitchen (27). Whereas the journey that Jagua undertakes to the city in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana leads to female degradation, Amaka’s city-bound quest produces female empowerment. Clearly, for Amaka, prostitution is not even remotely an option. So desperate is she to establish her difference that she does so by means of an ethnic slur; as she puts it, Igbo people are different from the Ishekiris, the ethnicity of the protagonist of Ekwensi’s novel: “Our land forbids that. Our gods and goddesses forbid it. Our women, we women of our land abhor it. I abhor it particularly not for any moral reasons, but because I was never cut out to be that. I could

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never make love to two men at the same time for money or out of what they call love” (26). Against the background of the fervor with which she is pursuing, in Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s apt words, a flight from “her Igbo cage to establish her true self in a more progressive world,”15 Father McLaid ought to know from the start that his aspiration of ultimately taking Amaka as his permanent possession is foredoomed. Reverend McLaid’s simple-minded pursuit of Amaka’s hand in marriage is clearly misplaced; his intent shows him to be a man chasing an illusion. At this point in her life, Amaka does not want to marry again. Marriage could not be further from the mind of a woman whose only drive is, quite simply, to claim the full rights of emancipation, and who will therefore accept nothing short of that. Far from desiring another conjugal union, Amaka is now dedicated to exploiting to the full the abundant opportunities that Lagos offers a single woman to advance in the business world, in the corporate areas that guarantee access to money and social influence. In Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s words, Amaka’s pilgrimage “westwards to the safety of cosmopolitan Lagos” is a strategic escape from matrimonial difficulties because the principal characteristic of the Lagos of the 1970s, to which Amaka heads, is its unregulated freedom. An environment where women were seen to enjoy “unbounded freedom, like men,” Lagos should, naturally, have a gravitational pull for Amaka because, unlike the depressed East, it was enjoying “a peaceful, postwar oil boom.” She points to the fact that the regional differences could not have been starker: “In contrast to Onitsha/Biafra, Lagos/Nigeria is an enlightened world where freedom and opportunities exist for women.”16 Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s characterizations of both Amaka’s personal aspirations and of the spirit of 1970s oil-boom-era Lagos are impeccable. Considering that Lagos enjoyed the distinction of being the undisputed Eldorado of Nigeria during the time in which this novel was set, it is inevitable that it should have been the place where Amaka wanted to be. Not only was Lagos then the commercial hub of Nigeria, it also had an unrivalled reputation as the center of high culture and was well known for welcoming all: rich and poor, old, young, women, and men. The laissez-faire atmosphere that prevailed in Lagos was particularly renowned for the great opportunities it offered to everyone. Amaka’s fortuitous meeting with the Catholic priest Reverend McLaid testifies to this well-earned reputation that Lagos had for immediately answering to the ambitious dreams of everyone. For Amaka, the dream coalesces around a diligently nursed aspiration to enter into a collaborative relationship with a man who will help her explore her sexuality

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while leaving her with room enough to keep intact her personal freedom, independence, and identity. That this principal desire on Amaka’s part to forge an association without liability will become directly at odds with the essence of Reverend McLaid’s own designs underlines a clash of ideologies explored in the novel. The image of Reverend McLaid with which Amaka is impressed when she first seeks him out professionally combines elements of projection and fantasy. It is the picture of a priest as a man with sexual desires long and laboriously held in check, and it is a highly conventional figure that answers to Amaka’s powerful female fantasies—her desire for a male body that contains superior libidinal energies. When contrasted, the tensions that precipitate the respective crises of Amaka and Jagua show how different the plot designs of these two stories are. Amaka’s role is quite unlike the one assigned to Jagua in crucial respects. The expectation that women in her culture should marry not for romantic love but for expediency is the issue that undermines Jagua. For Amaka’s part, during her burgeoning years, she is patient enough to go through several short-term relationships without attempting to force matters. Before Obiora shows up, looking like a match made in heaven for her, she is first courted by Isaac and Bob, and then presented with the unexpected suits of a divorcee with five children, whom she rejects outright. When Amaka meets Obiora, the story tells us, it is like love at first sight: Amaka is “instantly attracted to him. He was quiet and gentle in manner and behavior and Amaka felt she could trust and depend on him. Obiora made it clear to everyone that he admired Amaka and was interested in marrying her, and all concerned thought it was an ideal match” (12). The natural attraction of this couple is represented as a model for matrimonial relationships in the society. So it is not difficult to understand the cause of the quite unexpected dissolution of the union: Obiora’s grumpy mother, the primary initiator of the intrigues that bring the crisis in her son’s marriage to a head. Obiora’s mother’s uncontrollable under-handed dealings certainly justify her notoriety as the ultimate villain in the text, a woman habituated to evil scheming. One can search, but it will be in vain, for an example of positive action by Amaka’s petulant mother-in-law upholding her son’s marriage. Amaka is already agonizing over her trail of crushing misfortunes, of which the missed betrothal opportunities which have left her disconsolate are prominently symptomatic. Her childlessness accentuates her despair even further. Moreover, the support solicited by Amaka from Obiora’s family is not forthcoming—her pleas for time to get pregnant fall on deaf ears, especially from her mother-in-law, who instead persists in subjecting her to ceaseless taunts. “And you, with ilk talk of my son, my lovely

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son who saved you from shame and from humiliation. How many suitors had you before my son came to marry you? I told Obiora not to marry you, that you were going to be barren. But he did not listen to me” (5). Were it not for the intimidating way in which Obiora’s mother treats her daughterin-law—her violent, fiendish, tongue-lashing—and his own complicit tolerance of it, the split-up of Amaka and Obiora might not happen. With the distressingly conspiratorial incivility of attitudes culminating in the malicious verbal assaults on Amaka launched by Obiora and his mother, the terrorizing power of social prohibitions against female infecundity is on full display. They code childlessness as a moral crime committed by a woman and rail at Amaka for her barrenness. The vitriol with which Obiora’s mother couches her remarks as she meddles in her son’s marriage is barbaric. Even more vicious is Obiora’s failure to halt his mother‘s plot to undermine his marriage. How can a man watch his own wife being put through such difficulty with no show of indignation or any obligation to do anything to stop it? Obiora’s complicity in his wife’s humiliation resoundingly foregrounds his cruel irresponsibility. The boiling point of the pressure is captured as follows in the heated interrogative questions directed at Amaka by her mother-in-law: “Whether you hear it or not, it will end today. Everything will end today when I finish with you. The hold you have on my son will end today. Do you hear me? I have waited for six years, and I cannot wait for even one day more. Didn’t you see how I hushed up Obiora when he came to interfere? He is a stupid son. Sometimes I wonder whether he is my son. But I know he takes after his useless father, making a lot of fuss without backing his fuss with action. If my son heard me, if he listened to me, his house would have been full of children now. “Let me take your points one by one. You said you saw a doctor, or are about to see a doctor who could treat you and make you pregnant. I say you are a liar. All the doctors you saw said that you are incapable of bearing a child. You were dishonest not to tell your husband that he was wasting his strength on you. I know your mother very well. Do you think that if she had no child in her husband’s place that she would stay?” (13)

The blame game unfolded in the passage quoted above is a common denominator in the careers of the female protagonists of the two novels by Ekwensi and Nwapa. The childlessness debate sets up woman not just as victim but rather as someone at the receiving end of vicious unprovoked attacks. In their suggestion of extreme brutality, the particulars of the attacks directed by Obiora’s mother at her daughter-in-law in One Is Enough,

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however, give a new slant to the meaning of the wicked mother-in-law featured in literature—both written and oral—as a reflection of African cultural reality. Both Obiora’s mother and Amaka’s own mother emerge as cold, calculating, and callous. Through the clandestine ways in which they work to undermine the marriage, the two mothers offer an attitudinal pattern that provides illumination on the psychology of evil and the attractiveness of kindred spirits. They confess their mutual admiration for one another, and each considers the other the person she herself really wants to be. Thus, collectively gushing out their common mantra they both agree: “We have a lot in common” (13). In One Is Enough, unsettling invasive controlling actions are so onesidedly carried out by older women they acquire symbolic resonance as evidently harsh and unjust; as wiles of individuals who appear to derive a certain perverse satisfaction from the misery of their victims. Out of her own greed, for instance, Amaka’s mother seeks monied matches for her daughters; also an artist in wickedness, Obiora’s mother imposes upon her son the need for the production of children. The attitude of each of these mothers yields the question of boundaries—between freedom and oppression; between responsible parenting on one hand and trampling on the rights of one’s children on the other; between self-absorption and concern for others; between intrusiveness and respectful cooperation; between self-worship and self-respect. The future which Obiora’s mother wants to construct for her son is vile; it subordinates all other considerations to the wealth represented by producing children and so totally ignores his own feelings. Amaka’s mother, on her part, anticipates and begins to manipulate her daughter toward a life in which material gain alone holds pride of place; she too starts to lay out an evolving action plan bluntly and unapologetically, quite oblivious to her daughter’s own wishes. The marriage of Amaka and Obiora only provides the platform where these two conflicting interests of parents and their wards—or, more accurately, where the discordant concerns of mothers and their sons and daughters—clash violently and with tragic consequences. In a culture that puts a premium on producing children, where the blame for a marriage that fails to produce them falls squarely and inevitably on the wife, it is logical that Obiora’s mother should feel an inclination to encourage her son to remedy the situation by taking a second wife secretly. What is so unexpected is her undiplomatic and uncivil management of the matter. “My son has two sons,” she informs Amaka the barren wife, to her great shock, of the outcome of her husband’s previously hidden infidelity, “and tomorrow the mother of these sons will come and live in this house

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with her sons. We have performed all the ceremonies and she is coming” (14). The drama surrounding Obiora’s mother’s participation in the politics of motherhood re-enacts the perniciousness of the patriarchal ideologies pursued under the mission to extend the patrimonial estate that holds women in subjugation. In this climate, it is difficult to see how the marriage of Obiora and Amaka could be saved. The dramatic revelation marks a decisive juncture in Amaka’s life. “At this, Amaka was utterly shocked. She began to tremble. She could no longer control her emotions. She held on to the bed, so she did not faint. Obiora has two sons by another woman. And he never told her? Impossible. How could he do that to her?” (14–15). Aggravating Amaka’s anguish is the disclosure of the secret plot hatched by Obiora and his prospective second wife to have her “thrown out of the house” (15). However, with the evidence suggesting otherwise, Amaka does not buy the wicked mother-in-law’s argument in which she gloatingly takes credit for the critical intervention that aborted the plan to have the daughter-in-law thrown out of the house but correctly reads the false benevolence claimed by the mother-in-law as an act that fulfills a devious end to leverage for herself the figure of a supportive, humane, and affectionate person. Even in the heat of emotion the disliked daughter-in-law clearly sees through the posturing in the claim, “I am not unkind to your wife. Other mothers would have thrown her out, not me. Amaka’s mother, if she were in my shoes, would have thrown her out, not me. That’s me. I am fair, and there is nobody fairer than I am in this community of ours” (15). Amaka instantly recognizes in these words voiced by Obiora’s mother to him a perverted reasoning. Her attempt to reinvent her own image exemplifies the force of her ego, and a contradiction underlies her motivation and pronouncements. It is worth asking why Obiora’s mother persists in employing vicious tactics, eventually resorting to the ugly habit of name-calling and framing her son’s wife. What Obiora’s mother desires to gain from falsely accusing Amaka of impeding her husband’s progress and of living at his expense is not quite clear to the reader. But while Amaka herself has little difficulty in ruling both the slander and the simulated act of magnanimity accurately as no more than rapaciously controlling and exploiting self-interested strategic plots designed to put the rejected daughter-in-law further into debt to the cynically calculating and domineering older woman—the poise which she exudes in dealing with the crises in her marriage is a subtle illustration or dramatization of her integrity. The violated, rejected wife, over time, learns to read signs more carefully; she comes to gain full understanding of the mother-in-law’s intrigues as an assault in which the innocent

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wife’s integrity is tested to the limit through a form of bullying. Given that Amaka’s role has been nothing short of nurturing toward Obiora, his mother’s improbable accounts are an example of the crudest form of narrative fueled by resentment and intrigues in which the evidence contradicts the claims. “What then was her mother-in-law talking about? But for her, Obiora would have been fired from the ministry because of his carelessness and over-trusting nature” (16). Not only has Amaka helped to enlarge Obiora’s material estate by buying him a car but she has facilitated a promotion for him at his job. But, for Obiora’s mother, control of the mind of her daughter-in-law, by whatever means and for whatever reason, is a self-justifying exercise of her own maternal authority. Conceiving her campaign as a battle over power and influence, Obiora’s mother manipulates the narrative to her own advantage: trickery, intimidation, and deceit are the basic tools of her actions. The divergences with Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana are clear enough for the reader to recognize, but we might note one striking aesthetic one: the incessant randomness of the inexplicable ploys which usurp the narrative of the earlier novel, which seems to have been constructed with little care for either plausibility or novelistic functionality. In Jagua Nana, one moment of such rhetorical failure assumes the form of a conspicuous linguistic deficiency, the inconstancy that inheres in the register in which the title character Jagua’s thoughts are conveyed, complicated by offthe-wall philosophical contradictions. The code-switching competencies ascribed to Jagua are not only certain to jar with the sensibilities of more sophisticated readers but are also likely to attract outright skepticism, as she is here invested with the capability of speaking in high-brow polished English that sits oddly in contradiction to the pidgin language—the expressive mode of commoners—through which her speech is conveyed in the earlier parts of her story. We may add to the extensive list of this novel’s other less noticeable lapses the definitively purposeless, elaborate reception arranged by Chief Ofubara for his visitors which falls flat in Ekwensi’s hands—it is perhaps a throwback to the farewell ceremony organized by protagonist Okonkwo for his Mbanta kinsfolk in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but in Ekwensi’s treatment is clearly lacking in proportion. Just as questionable is Jagua’s improbable journey to Freddie’s village of Bagana while he is away in England; singularly unconvincing is the melodramatic seduction scene involving Jagua and Freddie’s rich and powerful kinsman, Chief Ofubara, in which he is said to be so impressed with Jagua’s wonderful love-making that he instantly offers to marry her. Jagua and Chief Ofubara’s bedroom moment may offer the reader some

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titillation, but it presents no original or intriguing premise. Neither a lasting aesthetic pleasure nor serious artistic intentions that could broaden, deepen, or sharpen a reader’s insights into the complexity of human action could be derived here; the event is merely a contrivance devised for the reader’s diversion, to help the reader escape from the real world. Therefore the episode is in consonance with formula fiction or the thriller tradition and thus is definitely at variance with action in the terrain of fiction with serious aesthetic ambitions. Likewise, it seems that the unexpected and timely appearance of the huge bag filled with money, which Jagua discovers that Uncle Taiwo has left her just in time before he was killed, is in a similar escapist frame and should perhaps never have been included. Along with the awkward dialogue between Uncle Namme and Jagua in the scene where the latter is offering herself up to the hostage takers in exchange for the kidnapped Nancy, the mysterious bag of money seems unrealistic; both considerably weaken the novel’s artistic integrity. Nor can the discerning reader turn a blind eye to the ambivalence which attaches itself to Jagua’s sophisticated political analysis—though she has no record of advanced formal education. The novel is surely impoverished by these improbabilities. The instability of the linguistic register particularly makes it harder for the reader to know just which aspects of the story are actually reliable. Jagua’s improbable linguistic performance is disabling to the goals of her ongoing political campaigns. Her expressive capacity may have been intended to puncture one of the polity’s most enduring social pretences. This is the prevailing assumption that characterizes political awareness as almost an exclusive prerogative of the educated elite—as a power conferred solely by education within the four walls of a classroom. Jagua’s demonstrable political engagement attempts not only to undermine this presumption, but also to throw off balance the standard construction of linguistic performance in its entirety. By virtue of her exposure, it is implied that Jagua has acquired the tools through which ideas about expertise with regard to politics and expressive power can be re-conceptualized. Through Jagua, the novel stakes a claim to redefine authentic political awareness, to relocate it to the category of values cultivated spontaneously and directly by and through the struggle to create an egalitarian society. Within this context, articulation is projected as a key both to making a pitch and to political action. Appropriation of the linguistic and cultural knowledge of educated people is ostensibly thus turned into an effective device in the political struggle, as a weapon which enables common people like Jagua to apply this knowledge toward their own designs.

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For Jagua, collecting information and disseminating it become the scientific means of constructing and accumulating power for one’s own use to demonstrate that activists like herself come from within the nation; they are individuals who have been shut out from citizenship of their country, forced to look in from outside, robbed of their share in the inheritance of the nation’s wealth. They are neither morally nor intellectually superior to those in power, but by their very positioning in the margins, by virtue of being rejected by their original community, they bring a perspective unique to the first-hand experience of having walked a path familiar to the downtrodden. Among other things, their messages provide positive proof of the reality that interpretations of events and experiences are inextricably tied to class positions. Jagua’s aspiration may have been to offer the downtrodden a voice—an instrument with which they could force the attention of the powers-that-be—but her sophisticated class analysis raises grounds for skepticism. Some readers might take it more as an attack intended for the ear of the international community in need of an updated report on newsworthy happenings in a formerly colonized territory than as a constructive critique geared toward the reform of society. Taking into account the habitual character of the ruling junta, and the thick skin it developed in responding to the drives and needs of poor people, to say that the purpose of Jagua’s diagnosis of the situation is far less the reform than it is the public embarrassment of society is to acknowledge that this is the way things have been; it is not to question the genuineness of her convictions. The fact that neither the political nor the material needs of the poor are eventually ameliorated, despite the persistent struggle for political power which is to come increasingly to dominate Jagua’s thoughts and the preoccupations of other poor people, demonstrates the complexity of the cultural character of disorder ingrained in the structure of this society. The savagery of the dispossession of the rural and urban poor of the wealth of their country is perhaps nowhere in the world better illustrated than in the extreme squalor and sordidness of the living quarters to which extensive poverty has condemned the urban underclass. The grime in the communal bathroom in Jagua’s living quarters towers above everything in drawing educated attention to these atrocious conditions under which the urban poor must live: She stored away the food, then she took out her towel and went to the bathroom, but when she knocked a man answered her from the inside and she went instead to the lavatory. The same old bucket, piled high; the floor messed about, so she could see nowhere to put her silver sandals. It was all done by those wretched children upstairs. Why blame

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them when their mothers did not know any better? Where was the landlord? Where was the Town Council Health Inspector? This inspector was supposed to come here once in a while, and whenever he came he made notes in his black book but nothing ever happened. She would talk seriously to him the next time. The unpleasant side of Lagos life: the flies in the lavatory–big and blue and stubborn–settled on breakfast yam and lunch-time stew (they were invisible in a stew with greens). But Jagua closed her eyes and shut her nostrils with her towel. The bathroom was free now, slippery and green, but thank God for the shower. (108)

This near-perfect image of what may be referred to as a zone of urban disorder, used in the novel as a potent symbol for the suffering endured by the underprivileged in general, is crucial to Ekwensi’s evolving conceptions of the prostitute’s plight, as well as his changing strategies for representing key events in her life. It is in consonance with his interest in providing the reader with a vivid glimpse into the living circumstances of the poor, a social world that will confound even the most heartless observer of human behavior. Residues of developmental problems that formerly colonized territories carried over from European rule into the post-independence era are everywhere in evidence. One of these is unequal distribution of resources, resulting in the huge difference in the living spaces of rich and poor people. The filth that has visibly trapped Jagua emblematizes a key aspect of the throes of underdevelopment typical of the embattled living quarters of the disadvantaged population, disfigured by crime and its degraded status. The crisis offers a compelling portrait of one of the costly legacies of the economic and physical turbulence that in this nascent state’s transformation into a post-colony has marked its cities’ segregated landscapes.17 In this carefully choreographed portrait, which falls within the tradition of the narrative of urban decline, disgust, shock, horror, dread, and terror are all inscribed in the images of decay, as one dereliction of duty often feeds another. The reader can see the corruption, in which the health inspector, the landlord, and the state are all implicated as much as the willful negligence on the part of the tenants of the compound—mostly the adults who often under-inform children about their roles on hygiene matters. The pictures that emerge of the urban landscapes in run-down parts of developing cities like these are ones of dehumanization and degradation which are coterminous with political corruption. Often in such places, which are thickly populated by lower-class people, there are harrowing stories of crimes visited on the inhabitants by criminals. These lawless elements can come both from within and from outside their community, giving them a

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ubiquitous presence. Urban crowding, dirt, disease, and rank promiscuity become festering ailments that threaten to destroy any semblance of sanity among the populace. With this disorienting picture, Ekwensi accomplishes a remarkable stroke. He paints a visual portrait of the lower class stuck in the projects, a morally ambiguous underground world of slums and criminality, an environment where all the social norms are broken down. Ekwensi uses every measure to cast a revolting image of the filth under which the denizens of the earth, robbed of their entitlement to common decency, now live. Equally, he is uncompromising in his search for the origins of the unsanitary conditions, tracing them to sources that are complex and intertwined. Attributing the complications to a silent complicity among various governing bodies, he comes up with an image of the disadvantaged that is as compelling as it is disconcerting: degenerate orphans who are wallowing in shame and debasement for reasons they do not even understand, trapped as they are by contending forces beyond their control. For the poor, there seems to be no way of exiting this dire and harrowing condition. This fact is powerfully brought home by the catalogue of Jagua’s personal woes. Capping all her misfortunes is the terrible news from the village of her father’s death, which could not come at a worse moment—though, in a curious way, it is to cause the momentary good fortune of giving her temporary reprieve from the stultifying ambience of Lagos by reconnecting her, even if only transiently, with the rural bliss of her village where, as Eustace Palmer rightly observes, “There is fellow-feeling, cooperation and even a desire for progress.”18 Yet, how the same village setting becomes a site of terror that threatens to bury Jagua alive under the dust of shame is a main supporting factor explored throughout the narrative. It reinforces the theme which suggests that the platform called life on which Jagua walks is a double-edged sword on which it is virtually impossible for her to tread undamaged. Eustace Palmer alludes to this point when remarking on the ominous fate awaiting Jagua like a deadly ambush in the village, a backwood where Jagua’s “city ways” will “stand condemned by rural values.”19 No doubt, early upon her arrival in the village, Jagua does begin to breathe in the fresh “air of the countryside” and to bask in “its luxuriance and naturalness.”20 However, no one who has the presence of mind to sense the claustrophobic spirit of the place would miss the quiet hint of the blighted future awaiting her in the long term, or the fact that Jagua’s return to the village will become a futile quest for a lost innocence. Facing a grisly situation that takes us back to the persistent refrain of the theme of the irreversibility of corruption that is sounded throughout the entire novel, Jagua finds herself doubly alienated. Neither feeling at home in the

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city nor accepted in the countryside, Jagua is in a serious displacement, in an advanced form of the condition of acculturated non-being. The critic Ernest Emenyonu describes Jagua Nana as a novel “written from a woman’s point of view,” arguing the protagonist is distinguished by the enormous agency with which she is invested. In the same passage, Emenyonu suggests that, “in choosing Jagua as the chief character, Ekwensi intended to emphasize the influence which women wield in Nigeria, and, in this light, Jagua can be seen as the symbol of women’s power and versatility.”21 But another reader, Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi, sees things differently, stating that Jagua’s career represents a “negative treatment of bottom power.”22 The truth definitely lies somewhere in-between these two extreme positions, for, rather than serving as a focal point for the release of unremitting denouncement by critics, any reasonable attempt to capture the real life of an emerging country with the objective of social re-engineering should surely be complimented. It is an understatement to argue that to view Jagua as someone who is eager to offer up her body as merchandize is to grossly overlook all of the presented evidence, for, quite frankly, there is nowhere in the novel where she is eagerly waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. Notice, on the contrary, how, quite unlike the prostitute’s self-presentation in Aphra Behn’s restoration comedies, Jagua is rendered as reluctant accomplice in her own degradation.23 Ekwensi does not quite connect all the dots, but explanations for Jagua Nana’s prostitution cannot be sought within the context of deviance and crime alone because her situation is not really unlike that of the majority of the illiterate women who make their entrance into the trade as a result of poor job prospects or failed marriage situations. This is a significant fact of African social life that is poignantly brought to light by Jagua’s career.24 Peter Brooks argues that “Any character in any novel of course is first of all, and literally, a linguistic structure, a set of signs that we imaginatively decipher and construct as a ‘character.’”25 In so far as Jagua is a stark palimpsest of a lived reality at a particular reference point, she comes alive as both a linguistic construct and an emblem of a concrete historical moment gorgeously amplified. Jagua is one of those fictional characters who stand for their age; she is thus simultaneously a “linguistic structure, a set of signs,” an aesthetic locus, as well as a quintessential victim of the social atrocities of a male-dominated society. The paradox is that, while so much ill-repute is attached to prostitution by the powerful patriarchy, ironically, it is the same men’s patronage of prostitutes that continues to support the sex trade. Denied her dignity by such a society, the prostitute retains her low self-esteem; thus, reflecting the self-perpetuating morass into which Jagua

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has been led is the way that she continues to consider herself the sole architect of her own woes. The perniciousness of this misconception is revealed in the way it begins progressively to weaken what small positive shred of moral stature that Jagua has left, serving as proof positive that containment—whether it be of anger, remorse, frustration, bitterness, selfreproach, embarrassment, or of any other form of emotional turmoil—can be exhausting. This is why she is doing such a bad job at it and why she is not a very positive model for female prostitutes who might be seeking recovery, against the background that the self-recriminations associated with her are far from offering a recipe for fighting off her disappointments. Jagua is conditioned to accept how her society judges a woman by her appearance, but expresses no equivalent interest in exhibiting the kind of moral conduct that might be expected to go with the perfect female body to complete a woman. A character, like Jagua, who is afflicted by overwhelming distortions in her vision of herself, therefore provides a critical opportunity for the text to open up several important identity questions—for instance, about the duty of self-constructions; about the corrosive power of the lascivious male gaze; and about realities that run beneath appearances. Undeniably, the function of mental divulgence is indicative of the novel’s interest in extending its documentary frame by means of psychological penetration. In this documentary on prostitution, the style may be taken as aspiring to offer a multiplicity of perspectives by focusing the spotlight not only on the public’s perception of the prostitute’s situation but also on her own myopic self-understanding of it as well as the sinister effects of her background. Perhaps the most crucial evidence emerging from the isolated scenes of intellectual reconnoitering featured is the one pointing to the underlying factor in Jagua’s entrapment in the egregious conditions of prostitution: the notion that having a man’s roof over her head is the primary thing that can give a woman her stability. When, instead of negating its premises, Jagua succumbs to the idea that marriage is women’s ultimate insurance against the potential vicissitudes of life, this patriarchal doctrine proves to be a costly misconception for her. Marrying not as a fulfillment of her romantic inclination but rather out of obligation to the wishes of a patriarchal order, Jagua suffers a disastrous frustration that is aggravated by her unrealized romantic expectations. The connection between the life of her marriage and the social and cultural circumstances under which it is brought about is presented as follows: She found that she had obeyed her parents but now they were not there to see her misery and they would never understand her longing, the

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hot thirst for adventure in her blood. She refused to adapt herself to his humdrum life and she wondered how she had been able to remain with him as she did for over three years. What grieved her most was that no child came. His mother and father and brothers and sisters came and made a fuss about it, and told him to take a younger wife as Jagua was too old. At first he did not listen to them, but after a time he began to weaken. Jagua knew that he took periodical leaves to his home town to look at some maiden who had been procured for him; she heard also that they brought him brides to the petrol-filling station. She took the blame for sterility, and it was becoming a thing between them. (167)

The imminent dissolution of Jagua’s marriage is attributed to the custom of arranged marriage in her culture, the root cause of all her crises. Since in her culture a person does not choose a family by marriage, family is not socially constructed by a married couple; a husband’s ties of kinship to the biologically given family into which he is born continue to be stronger than his conjugal and affinal ties assigned by marriage. Complicating Jagua’s marital problems is the couple’s childlessness, for which she is blamed, which precipitates the withdrawal of her husband’s family’s support necessary for the survival of the union. She gets caught in the fray of disparate family allegiances, and her capitulation into prostitution is depicted as ultimately a slip from a safe harbor of being (marriage), a turn from a legal border, as it were, to a point of no return—a crossover on to a no-go or a socially prohibited domain which demarcates a zone of moral ineptitude from which no one ever recovers. Indeed, the contingences following the collapse of Jagua’s marriage make plain that desperate measures create and perpetuate desperate results. The excitement from all the attention received from the men, and the power that appears to come with being in such a status of evident high demand, simply become too powerful in their sweep for her to resist, and so the addiction that prostitution yields creates a self-perpetuating situation that Jagua is unable to break off successfully. Once she is sucked into prostitution it becomes virtually impossible to ever overcome the overwhelming razzle-dazzle of the bright lights associated with that life in the fast lane—a situation that reinforces the notion that prostitution offers no road to recovery; therefore, a woman gives up an unworkable marriage, no matter the circumstance, at her own peril. Limited though the strategy ultimately proves to be, the rare moments of psychological elaboration yielded by Jagua’s memory reveal key dimensions of her ongoing struggle, uncovering for readers the various ramifications of the trauma inflicted by social injustice and memory’s role in the perpetuation of human degradation.

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On the other hand, diverging from the philosophical outlook of Jagua in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana is protagonist Amaka’s resolve, in Nwapa’s One Is Enough, to devote her entire life to leading an assault on the constraining force of male dominance. For her, this restraining male control is not only authorized but also facilitated by, and thus is emblematized in, the institution of marriage. Her resistance to matrimony is indirectly an attack on the core of all the truth her own mother knows and lives for. It is a defiance of the might of male dominance: That’s why Izu’s outburst frightens me. I thought he was going to shy away from it all. I never thought, knowing his background, that he would want to be associated with any children that resulted from our affair. And what really bothers me is that he wants me and the twins. I don’t want him. I don’t want to be his wife. I think he is realizing it, and wants to have the twins for a start. Ayo, I don’t want to be a wife anymore, a mistress, with a lover, yes of course, but not a wife. There is something in that word that does not suit me. As a wife, I am never free. I am a shadow of myself. As a wife I am almost impotent. I am in prison, unable to advance in body and soul. Something gets hold of me as a wife and destroys me. When I rid myself of Obiora, things started working for me. I don’t want to go back to my “wifely” days. No, I am through with husbands. I said farewell to husbands the first day I came to Lagos. (127)

Here the passion with which Amaka resists the idea of remarrying is extraordinarily intense. Ironically, the more intensified the swelling sexual passions motivating Catholic priest Reverend Father McLaid (now self-renamed as Izu) to abandon his religious calling in her pursuit become, the more Amaka’s distaste for the idea of marrying again increases. To show the extremity of the limits of Amaka’s aspiration to a long-term conjugal relationship, the more Father McLaid wants to marry her, against the tenets of the Catholic Church and the office which he has sworn to uphold, the less she wants him, and the more elusive she becomes. It turns out to be in some ways an inversion of the situation in which Jagua hankers unsuccessfully after Freddie in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana. Here we see that the tables are entirely turned, for, in a fashion almost like revenge, instead of a woman being the desperate chaser of a man, Nwapa has a woman as the jewel being hopelessly sought after by a defeated male—someone whom a woman has apparently successfully used as a mere sperm donor to produce children for her. In a fine case of imitation with a difference, Nwapa similarly relocates Ekwensi’s idea of a woman’s rhetorical ability, previously thought

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to reside in the forum of public debate, to the domain of the animated private conversation. Moreover, in presenting Amaka as the polar opposite of Jagua in Jagua Nana, Nwapa shows how a woman can exercise not only her personal agency—her will to self-definition—and forge her own identity, independent of a patriarchal society’s fossilized attitudes that seek to constrain women, but can equally insist on being identified and related to under terms of her own self-governing code of values, and thereby assert a commanding presence as a self-respecting human being. Amaka’s life is one lived in pursuit of a personal freedom—economically, emotionally, physiologically, as well as sexually; which is to say, it is a life of a struggle to subvert being fully possessed by another. With the idea of self-sufficiency in play, of attaining the status of the self-made person, Amaka searches frantically for methods that could assist her in overturning the socially constructed codified structures of power. If Jagua is sexually out of control, Amaka’s life by contrast is perfectly controlled. “Amaka had succeeded in tempting him [McLaid] as she said she would. She was going to play her cards very well. It was the first time in her life that she had planned the total annihilation of a man, using all that her mother taught her, which she had sadly neglected because the spinster missionaries had taught otherwise” (74). That it will take one missionary to free Amaka of constraints imposed on her by her missionary education is ironic; just as damning is how McLaid converts himself into a conduit for inflated and bogus contracts delivered to Amaka, and all “it entailed was twenty five percent of the profit” (77). With his assistance, Amaka gets a “contract paper and nearly swooned. Half a million naira’s worth of contract for building a wall round some barracks. She was a go-getter” (77). One cannot know for sure whether author Nwapa was a hater of men, but in this novel she certainly proves to be an endorser of women who exploit men.26 It is not disingenuous to use the progress of Amaka’s career to prove this; neither is that to justify nor to berate Nwapa’s authorial viewpoint, but simply to track the control she has exercised over her creation; to put our fingers on her narrative modes for presenting the consciousness of an audaciously progressive feminist viewpoint. Closely examined, in Nwapa’s novel One Is Enough, the anti-male satire tying Amaka with the Catholic priest Father McLaid, with whom she strikes a clandestine relationship that produces a set of twins in Lagos following the break-up of her marriage with her former husband Obiora, elucidates the extremity of the destructive power of satire to explore a deeply disturbing subject. Taking a bemused look at a combination of popular stereotypes and fact, the story enacts the ugly spectacle of priests as secret violators of

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the ascetic, spiritual codes of conduct they have sworn to keep and which they represent. According to many who have researched the subject (e.g., Alvin Kernan, Robert Elliot, Felicity Nussbaum, Claude Rawson, and Charles A. Knight, among others), satire is a ruse through which the wielder achieves distance from his or her fictional creation. An author can use satire to achieve distance from the persona in poetry and from fictional and dramatic characters, with the ultimate objective of the satirist almost always being to convince audiences to take satire for what it is: a mere literary tool.27 In Nwapa’s hands, one can see very explicitly the changes undergone by satire as it evolves from being an anti-women genre into an anti-male frame. The satiric barbs launched at Reverend McLaid illustrate how a form of lampooning expression can transform itself through the pressure of gender and religion. McLaid’s portrayal mirrors with peculiar force how reality can be deformed by the power of ridicule. He is projected as so insatiable in his lust, so wild in his pursuit of woman as a sex object, as to be all phallus—the penis magnified—and so the image in which he is cast falls only a little shy of that of a male sexual predator. Perhaps this image also records and preserves the overpowering force of revenge. A study of the constitution of recompense in African fiction will explicitly reveal one staggering trend: in the economy of total and full compensation, conceived again and again by a variety of African writers as necessary for the restoration of the honor of an aggrieved party, writers habitually devise means of punishment which are as disproportionate to the original crime as to border on spiteful vindictiveness. For a disinherited individual such as Jagua in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, it is impossible to divorce personal and public interests because anger, envy, and patriotism all evoke and promise the same sentiment—the passionate desire to exact retribution. A personal longing to settle an old score with Freddie, her former lover and Uncle Taiwo’s stiff opponent in the local elections, who had spurned her by marrying Nancy upon returning from his studies overseas, does not contradict a hunger for social equity through retaliatory action that is welling up inside Jagua, for example. Jagua’s electioneering campaigns are therefore inspired by a blend of revenge motives and a nationalistic vision to transform the new nation. To salvage Nigeria from the culture of corruption and greed crippling its moral base, those forces undermining the very foundations of the soul of the polity would have to be uprooted. In Jagua’s mind the lines between her personal enemies and those of the country are blurred; she thenceforth not only vows to give Freddie the fight of his life all by herself, but to augment her effort she mobilizes a grassroots

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population of women for political participation, and she cloaks her campaign under a fiery rhetoric of ire against injustice generally. This pursuit of personal retribution with Freddie especially takes on a new edge when he returns from his overseas studies only to spurn Jagua by marrying Nancy, her younger rival, forcing Jagua to scheme for revenge. Though Freddie is killed by thugs in the hire of Uncle Taiwo, Freddie’s political opponent at the Lagos municipal council elections, it is not clear what his murder practically contributes to the campaign for social re-engineering. In addition to these aesthetic and philosophical gaffes, it is observed that some of the acts of reciprocation that the narrative of Jagua Nana advocates not only smack of vicious vendetta but appear tokenized. Within the context of an acquisitive society ruled by an elite that shows little concern for ministering to the needs of the poor, for instance, the stolen trinkets and other objects taken with force from the rich by Jagua and her accomplices initially look like signs of the poor succeeding in visiting a little bit of economic retribution on the rich and powerful, but the exploits in the end fail to amount to much. The items stolen from the rich and powerful do seem to assure the burglars of some momentary comfort; however, what appear like vignettes of economic counter-violence being mounted against the rich by the robbers on behalf of other poor people will not last for long. The group carrying out this underground act of restitution is not only broken up, and the culprits apprehended by the police, but many of the petty thieves end up in jail—thus allowing the law of the unjust ruling class to prevail in the end. With this turn of events comes a personal defeat for Jagua’s own dreams, too—though with her involvement with Uncle Taiwo things do begin to look up again, temporarily, for her. Casting some further doubts on her action, as will be shown shortly, is the linguistic skill with which Jagua is invested and which she attempts to use to her advantage in fiercely discrediting the clandestine designs of the incumbent party. Coaxing her target audience of market women one after the other to begin “taking down their head ties” and throwing them “on the floor” as they “stamped about, slapping their hips in anger,” Jagua spoke into the microphone. “I am still coming to the end of my story.” They listened and she went on. “You see the sort of people you will be voting for, if you vote O.P.1. You will be voting for people who will build their private houses with your money. But if you vote O.P.2, the party that does the job, you will see that you women will never pay tax. Don’t forget that. O.P.2 will educate your children properly. But those rogues in O.P.1? They will send their children to Oxford and Cambridge, while your children will only go to school in Obanla . . .

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Chapter 2 These people will open a hundred businesses using the names of their wives. But you? You will continue to sleep on the floor with grass mats while their wives sleep on spring mattresses. You will carry your things to the market on your head, and while in the market, you will be bitten by mosquitoes, and your children will be bitten by mosquitoes and develop malaria . . . Tell me, what are you struggling for? Or are you going to struggle all the time? Now is the time to enjoy! On Saturdays you will kill a small chicken and call your friends. You will shake hips to the apala music and deceive yourselves that you are happy. But look! The roof of your house leaks when it rains. The pan roofs are cracking with rust. There is no space in the compound where your children can play. The latrine is the open bucket, carried by night-soil men who are always on strike, so the smell is always there. The bathroom is narrow and slimy and it smells of urine. You call that life! . . . Yes, that is the life they have given you and will continue to give you if you return an O.P.1 government to power. (145–46)

The problem here is not that the educational project is valorized, but that the plan of catalyzing social conscience is under the sponsorship of the most unlikely person, Jagua, who, in this powerful piece of demagoguery that is ascribed to her, completely reframes the politics of public debate. Intent upon the moral rightness of the campaign to mobilize public opinion in support of emancipation, she lashes out at the corrupt establishment and lets the people know that they are already downtrodden, down and out; they have sunk to the lowest level that any human being can suffer: that’s why the actions of their enemies—the powers-that-be—who want to take them even further down represent overkill. While through the ages inflammatory rhetoric has come to define the genre of the political rally, the transformation of Jagua into a political demagogue is logically un-compelling. In speeches that are given to her, she charts the selfish interests of the straw men, the political rogues, that sit in tension with the welfare of the audience members; attempting to attain heights of eloquence, appealing to both the audience’s intellectual and its emotive faculties, with her speech combining invocations to fear and to ideas of burning retaliatory justice, anger, and revolutionary power. Striving for deadpan analytical force, Jagua articulates a hodge-podge of imperfectly assimilated Marxist ideas of class struggle, deploying a contrastive mode of address to push her agenda of inspiring her audience to take up arms against oppression. The attempt fully to expose the shabby injustice and terror of dispossession rings hollow because of the hyperbolic method. In her speech Jagua attempts to reposition the target audience to

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imagine a frightening hypothetical scenario, in which a corrupt regime were to go on ad infinitum cavalierly carrying out its nefarious activities of exploiting the poor with appalling impunity. There are many ways of responding to such a probability, Jagua maintains; sitting idly by to watch the situation get out of hand, she implies, is not one of the best ways to put an end to such an ugly state of affairs. On the contrary, the poor should rise up against their enemies and right the injustice. Though the argument is sound enough, the ascription of these speeches to Jagua is preposterous; her sophisticated analysis simply doesn’t seem plausible and the juxtaposition is as awkward as the way in which politics and personal revenge get mixed up in the story, reminding the reader of the muddled case of Odili, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. In Nwapa’s One Is Enough, in contrast, while the excess which habitually attends the avenger’s pursuit is also a key framing device, notwithstanding this affiliation, the difference is considerable. Unlike in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, where the instinct to fight back is instigated by a miscellany of motives, private as well as public, the defense of personal honor figures as the dominant passion that arouses it in Nwapa’s story. It is safe to say that the revenge plot is not quite fully developed in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and will remain a motif that Nwapa in One Is Enough will appropriate and develop with a more intriguing dexterity. The emotion of revenge is so intense in Nwapa’s novel that hers is perhaps the work with the most oddly open and most abrasive celebration of the pleasures of successful retaliation in the whole of African fiction, to the extent that some readers might accuse her of adopting a polemic that pushes the envelope a little too far in her treatment of the motif of vengeance. Yet, in as much as One Is Enough expresses special interest in feelings of reprisal whose sources are unrelated to politics but are restrictively tied to romantic disappointment, it deals with emotion the reader can easily understand. No doubt, the propensity to get even is endlessly one of the most overpowering emotions explored in African fiction, and Nwapa’s One Is Enough is not atypical, as many writers are eager to illustrate the theme that not only will there not be any turning of the other cheek, but more than a pound of flesh will often be demanded for a pound of flesh, since those who do others wrong will ultimately pay dearly for their actions.28 And so in this spirit Amaka pursues her passion for revenge to a level where it becomes a preoccupation that could appear intemperate. The desire for requital forces Amaka to go to “war” against her former husband Obiora and his mother as well as motivating her to advance her fortune. But, even with massive economic success and social standing fully under her belt, Amaka still does not forget for a moment the traumatic experience she endured during the

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six years of being constantly taunted by her former husband Obiora and his mother for being childless; for the slighted Amaka, the ridicule she faced for being without issue becomes a misery for which no other future accomplishment could fully compensate. Not even the tremendous material prosperity which leads Amaka to a broader vision of female freedom and metropolitan polish, nor the honor of being a party socialite who walks in the circles of the rich and powerful and hobnobs with the political as well as the military elite, could make her original insult go away. Even when Amaka attains her dream of getting pregnant and delivers her two children by Reverend McLaid, her anger is still not assuaged. The Obiora–Amaka reunion incident, in which Amaka finally seeks out her former husband so that she can tantalize him with the glamour of the riches she has acquired after their marriage ended, is without a doubt the most fabulous showpiece in the African novel. Anxious to demonstrate to the now extremely destitute and prematurely aged Obiora and his mother how foolishly they acted by throwing away the only jewel they will ever know, the rejected wife re-appears in front of their eyes with such immeasurable wealth, glamour, elegance, and magnificence of power that mother and son are not only astonished but also cast into the utmost depths of envy, regret, and humiliation. On the surface, Amaka’s lavish party in One Is Enough may recall the spellbinding bedroom event in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where the novel’s vainglorious protagonist Jay Gatsby uses his colorful wardrobe to stun the vulnerable and mesmerized Daisy Buchanan, exalted object of his affections, into breaking down at his knees—as each is surely an exercise in opulent exhibitionism.29 But that’s the farthest the comparisons can be taken because, as far as their underlying motivations go, the differences cannot be any starker. Where Gatsby is fired into seeking to impress Daisy with the grandeur of his material possessions by a burning desire to revive the flames of a dead love—where Gatsby is seeking to reclaim a lost love—Amaka has anything except romantic intentions. Not only does Amaka not want to take Obiora back—not at all—far from looking for a joyful dalliance with him, in fact, what Amaka longs for is to overwhelm Obiora with a sense of his own foolishness, to wound him mortally. Whereas Jay Gatsby’s famous bedroom moment is a love scene, Amaka’s reunion party is thus a hate act in which vengeance is the overriding motive. Indeed, as Amaka sees it, nothing should damn Obiora more resoundingly for the idiotic choices he made in spurning her love than the unexpected position of affluence she has attained. Obiora thus makes a foolish decision by not resisting the bait offered by Amaka’s mother to “come and see Amaka and her twins”:

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Obiora came, bringing his own boys. It was not a bad meeting. Obiora had aged a good deal and was not the handsome man Amaka had known. People change so much. It was only three years ago that she left Obiora, and a lot had happened in those three years. It surprised both of them that they had nothing to say to each other after the first pleasantries. Amaka was not even sure what had motivated her desire to see her ex-husband. Obiora felt so inadequate to talk to her. Amaka’s wealth was everywhere for him to see, and it embarrassed him. (118)

The picture that Amaka wants to get across is how the once proud and grand figure of Obiora now stands dwarfed by the opulent presence of his ex-wife, to the extent that it causes embarrassment to both. Nothing better highlights the crushing degradation to which Obiora’s hitherto enlarged manhood has been reduced than Amaka’s newly acquired elevated status. She is understandably reluctant to admit it, but Amaka’s real motivation in desiring to have Obiora over in their infamous reunion scene is a deepseated animus toward her former husband. Whereas Jay Gatsby’s bedroom scene is a seduction scene, complete with an elaborately dramatized libidinal energy, driven home by the fantasy of sexual conquest in undertone in Gatsby’s erotic banter, Amaka’s grandiose banquet is a revenge act—like giving the enemy a crushing victory taunt. In the reunion episode, Amaka is not only looking to be famous, seeking attention. She is also searching for a dignified way to return the spite of Obiora and his mother. To publicly embarrass her former husband and his mother with their own idiocy is Amaka’s ultimate goal. Instead of the amorous passion of courtship, Amaka is thus driven by what might be summed up as the bile of hatred or enmity. Propelled by real hostility that would ravage any jilted lover, especially an abandoned wife, her ultimate goal is not in any way to indulge in any type of flirtatious behavior with her former lover and husband, but rather to wound him. This monstrous passion takes on a special urgency that is met with a ruthless epic boast about coming upon sudden and surprising riches. In essence, Amaka’s vengeful rage is rendered all the more deadly by the fatal combination of the sense of defeated womanhood and bitterness arising from personal scorn. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald emphasizes Daisy’s vulnerability and youth by having her subdued by her flamboyant male pursuer Jay Gatsby. But unlike Fitzgerald, Nwapa in One Is Enough stresses Amaka’s growth. A woman who develops into a self-assured, sophisticated, and independent personality by learning to manipulate and control men, Amaka goes to Lagos to reinvent herself and, at the end of the novel, has blossomed into a polished,

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perceptive socialite. To reconstruct her identity, she has had to sever her allegiance to the inferiorizing traditions that hold women in bondage. It has to be conceded that, notwithstanding the great experimentation in narrative method that underpins it—particularly with respect to Nwapa’s deployment of dialogue as the main technique used to relay events—One Is Enough does not mark much of a dramatic shift in emphasis from those traditional modes of telling employed in Jagua Nana. In an effort to capture those significant changes that have occurred in Nigerian culture, Nwapa retains the use of an abundance of visual imagery, the main frame upon which Ekwensi’s narrative depended for its unfolding. Moreover, One Is Enough does not merely duplicate a number of the crucial plotting techniques that tend to impede Jagua Nana’s aspiration to verisimilitude; it somewhat compounds these with textual slips of its own. Clearly Nwapa has pushed the envelope on imagistic construction to its very limit in her management of Amaka’s flow, in the articulate back answers yielded through her main character’s interiority. Woefully awkward are the valence of the omniscient narrator as the pivot of narrative structure and the control of both point of view and characterization; the attempt to direct appropriate language or speech to persuasively portray the moral, intellectual, and emotional properties unique to individual characters strains the story’s flow significantly. It surely does not seem credible, for instance, that Amaka could have been involved with so many promising lovers, all of whom died prematurely one after the other. First it is Isaac, the perfect lover who is supposedly killed in a car wreck; and then it is Bob, the bad guy who is reported to have met his demise in an undisclosed event described as one that occurred “tragically” (10). It is also difficult for the reader to accept other odds. First, that Amaka should run into none other than Adaobi, one of her former classmates, during her very first shopping expedition in the Kingsway Stores in Lagos. It is equally highly improbable that the stranger who gives her a ride from the bus stop in Surelere on her way to Lagos turns out to be the very man whom she needs to certify the recommendation letter that would help to secure the registration for her contract business. The novel’s claim of realism is thus considerably weakened by these numerous coincidences in the young woman’s life. However, by far, the most obvious misjudgment relates to the use of narrative ploys that gratuitously employ an amalgam of stereotypical images. In an apparent attempt to defuse one type of negative image—the phenomenon of the hegemonic patriarch who subjects women to what Stanley Cavell elsewhere describes as “the appropriative, unreciprocated gaze of men”30—Nwapa’s One Is Enough ends up

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supplanting it with another as glaringly negative: the figure of the authoritative mother who uses her daughter (or son) as she pleases. One Is Enough is not only held together by a play of one stereotype over another in an amplified way, but exaggeration, or the narrative of the gigantic, is the strategy on which it rests its plot. Each representative character acquires overstated or immoderate features and gloss. For instance, protagonist Amaka is dressed in the garb of the conventional innocent, naïve, and trusting young woman who is spurned, victimized, and spat out by a spiteful and ruthless world. The primary agents of Amaka’s victimization, on the other hand, are given a stereotypical expression: the wicked mother-in-law and her dependent son, who carries out briefs received from his mother in ruining his marriage—an image that permeates the literature and folklore of many cultures and is certainly a well-known convention among Nwapa’s Igbo roots. The figure of the Catholic Reverend Father McLaid, around whom most of the story revolves, is a perfect fit for the classical image of the priest who carries out clandestine sexual relations while hiding under the sanctified cloak of his office; in much the same way, the picture of Amaka’s mother is the familiar one of the wicked mother who sponges on her children. For Amaka, it is Reverend McLaid that best represents this image of delayed sexual gratification. Cast under the sign of one believed to postpone carnal pleasures in his service to God and his saintly quest to find his soul, Reverend McLaid’s special appeal for Amaka lies in precisely this: looking at him, he arouses in her imagination provocative romantic pictures of an undersexed entity, exhibiting the qualities of a body that has long ostensibly resisted the flesh and its desires. In her conscious actions Amaka cannot help but momentarily repress these subterranean libidinal desires. They slip out, however, sooner rather than later; inevitably the urge breaks free when, soon after arriving in Lagos from Onitsha, Amaka declares the purpose of her visit to Reverend McLaid’s residence. Beginning with the statement that she is merely looking up to him to help her secure “a permanent contract here” (53), she cannot help but follow up with the startling petition for his support to have a child of her own. In an explosion of imaginary drives and desires she cannot hold in, Amaka declares, “It would be much easier for me. Then I could be more relaxed and take care of myself. For, I believe, Father, that I must have children. The gynecologists have had their say, but I know that a child will come in God’s own time” (53). Foremost in Amaka’s mind during this visit, then, is evidently sexual temptation, and, as she herself admits privately, she would leave no stone

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unturned in her carefully worked-out and outlined plan to “put into practice what her mother had been teaching her. She was not going to wait, she was going for the kill. A priest was also a man capable of manly feelings. Father McLaid was a man, not a god. Father McLaid had never been tempted. She, Amaka, was going to tempt. That was the task that must be done” (54). Reverend McLaid thus does not appear to disappoint Amaka when he not only responds warmly to her romantic advances but succeeds in doing what Obiora failed to do: getting her pregnant. With this singular and pivotal show of manliness, McLaid practically, if unintentionally, lends Amaka’s projected image of his masculinity powerful affirmation. This is the confirmed myth of McLaid’s potent sexuality. It is the belief that not being a person known to be profligate with sexual acts—as a matter of fact, being a man known to control, delay, and withhold long-bottled-up sexual appetites—a priest must therefore be an unusually immense reservoir of sexual pleasures that should be especially powerful because periodically released in over-abundance. Not surprisingly, images of sex with the priest as storms dominate Amaka’s accounts of their intimate moments. Ironically, the absolute lack of expansiveness in the transactional interests that Amaka seeks to exploit with a man cannot be suppressed permanently. McLaid’s obsession compels him to ask for her hand in marriage, but with this he literally turns himself into a known enemy, against which Amaka must summon all countervailing forces. McLaid wishes to extend himself, to give Amaka the gift of marriage, but she doesn’t want it. His proposal becomes for Amaka an effort to force her back into what she is frantically taking flight from: the confining space called marriage. In a society such as the Lagos of the 1970s, where appearance is everything, the celibacy of Catholic priests is something taken for granted by all but an insignificant section of the general public. To sketch a Catholic priest, a man taken to be a symbol of God’s love and holiness, in a light which gives a lie to his appearance, as Nwapa does, is to make the Catholic Church an easy target for a satirical attack; to subject the Catholic religion to devastating ridicule. The use of Father McLaid as the butt of mordant criticism by Nwapa could be perceived as an act exemplifying the burlesque form at its worst, a weapon deployed in bad taste by a woman who has an axe to grind with men in general, perhaps because of a personal hurt. Or, on the other hand, the satirical strategy could be viewed as a battle tool at its best, one deployed to serve a reformative function by a writer concerned about the moral health of society. What no one can deny is the fact that Father McLaid stands in this novel as some sort of symbol of moral failure.

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With the portrait of Father McLaid, some readers might be inclined to think that Nwapa’s audacity and sense of humor, in their exposure of the sham of holiness maintained under a religious privacy and the socially ordained practice of concealment, are exhibited to the full. McLaid could be considered as standing exposed as an effective goal of sardonic assault, these readers might be willing to grant, because he is someone of whom a transparent ascetic lifestyle is expected but who turns out to be undisciplined and wanton in his display of a want of morals. This is not to rule out the grounds for objection by those who may consider the matter of the conduct of a Catholic priest too solemn to be an appropriate subject for humorous banter. That is why Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi is right to suggest that Nwapa is throwing stones out of a glasshouse in her depiction of male sexuality, which renders her vulnerable to reprisal. By giving the impression that, since there is a long-standing tradition of satire by men against women, a reversal of the roles is in order (because what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander), Nwapa exploits the weapons that some women have used to access power, to show that there is nothing shameful about them except that men have made us believe that they are reprehensible, even when used to serve men. If brute force is acceptable in men in sports, for example, why should female eroticism not be equally amoral; or, put in another way, why are only women blamed for their sexuality when it only becomes a reality when men exploit it? Thus, she criticizes the narrowminded socialization that invariably binds women in a double-standard morality that is silent on their male partners. Her handling of this aspect of the palava is intended to be controversial: not only does she open up the issue of male adultery, she also breaks the embarrassing silence on the licentiousness of Roman Catholic priests, especially their problematic siring of children in the face of their vows of chastity.31

Okonjo-Ogunyemi’s interpretation is accurate enough. It has to be added, however, that some readers may accuse Nwapa of being more a peddler of stereotypes than a dealer in incontrovertible truths, which makes one wonder if winning sympathy and belief by convincingly representing reality is ever her concern. Through her presentation she may be viewed as daring in what may be considered a commendable effort to expose skeletons lurking in a closet, but it is equally true that she has stirred an unending controversy. By unmasking what some would consider the corruption behind the Catholic masquerade of piety donned by Father McLaid, Nwapa might be

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considered to have broken a taboo on a formerly forbidden arena: treating the sacrosanct office of the priest with derision. Though some are supposed to find this courageous, others are bound to be outraged—especially those who can’t stomach the violence of the invective directed against individuals they revere. Without question, defenders of the office of the priest will not just find this satirical approach un-amusing; they will consider the sexual scandal in which a priest is needlessly mired especially offensive. They might then put the attack down to spiteful anger on the part of a writer who could be seen as seeking a way, on behalf of all women, to avenge herself on men for all the despotic powers they have enjoyed at women’s expense. Those who hold papal celibacy in sacred trust will, justifiably, particularly scoff at the idea of anti-sexist sexism as offering women the possibilities of freedom and of paying back a long-standing injustice and thus will take Nwapa to task for violating their tastes. It might not seem fair to individuals who have a high regard for the priesthood that Father McLaid should be made the target of savage mockery. Nwapa’s scathing criticism of the Catholic priest can be seen by his supporters as an instance of mean-spirited vulgarity, which anticipates, and perhaps in more recent times equates to, the virulence of the apostasy of Salman Rushdie’s alleged desecration of Islamic religion in his The Satanic Verses.32 Though a part of a strategy of giving the underdog something to cheer about, the extended critique that forms the pivot of the narrative structure of Nwapa’s One Is Enough distorts Ekwensi’s ideas about women significantly. Even when her resources are more factual than imaginary, even when Nwapa attempts to avoid a reductive view of her subject, it is clear in the way she exercises her artistic license of caricature why she errs in her depiction of the image of women that she associates with her predecessor. For example, while Ekwensi may have mischaracterized certain problems afflicting some segments of the African female populations, it is unlikely that he would have been confused about a particular woman’s role (even assuming what seems likely, that he could have based his ideas on observation of many women). The representation of women in Ekwensi’s work would hardly, therefore, seem to warrant some of the contentious reactions it has elicited from Nwapa; because Ekwensi does not present readers with a way of seeing women that is consistent with a derogative and vindictive intent to put down or humiliate his female subjects, it hardly seems warranted to level charges of male chauvinism at him just for writing a novel crafted to give an anatomy of the career of a prostitute. Granted, consistent with the demands of Jagua Nana’s documentary frame and its aesthetic options, the ordering of facts about the hidden

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dimension of reality that principally has conditioned the streetwalker’s actions is so obfuscating that the reader is in danger of missing the wood for the trees. That is to say, it grants the reader an alternative means of apprehending her situation but the narrative’s framing of Jagua’s story uses a method which is so oblique, that, to make sense of the plethora of facts being thrown up without any obvious connecting threads, sharp detective skills are called for as one must read very carefully between the lines. An example will illustrate this point: It takes close detective reading to know that Jagua can run about naked in the streets as long as she wants but there is no way she could become a prostitute without the lewd attention that she draws to herself from the men; that is, the men’s wild sexual fantasies to which she panders. So, the sexual prejudices against women generally ultimately make Jagua a prostitute—hence this is what makes her story a record of a betrayal slapped on her by her own society, and why the text is not mindful about the joke rebounding on that society as Jagua’s predicament becomes a piece of slapstick comedy with a tragic conclusion—one for which the society is the worse off: a social set-up which, by denying full citizenship to its members, severs the ties that connect a significant proportion of its female members to the productive forces of national development. That is the sense in which Jagua’s story is, in the end, an object lesson in how no decent society should treat its citizens. But it implicitly accords with the tenets of the novel’s focus on her zombie-like state that in the early parts of the story even she herself would never once question any of the key issues at the root of the anxieties that permeate her life. One of these is the controlling notion that a woman can never live a self-fulfilling life without a husband or the ability to bear her own biological children, which, instead of repudiating Jagua initially blindly accepts. When she attaches herself to Freddie, for instance, primarily so that “If he would give her the security she craved, if he would give her a child of her own, she would help him,” she gives in to the subconscious pressure that every woman needs a man to complete herself (170). Thus, everyone—with the exception of Jagua— can see that Jagua’s involvement with Freddie has placed her in the deadly grip of another incompatible relationship that has already raised many red flags. Still, Jagua is unprepared to let go of him, because she cannot restrain herself; her decision to go so far as to sell her body to pay for Freddie’s berth to law school in England in a last-ditch, desperate measure to keep a grip on him makes evident how she is willing to do whatever it may take to keep the young schoolteacher as she counts on him, upon his return, to keep his part of the unwritten contract and honor his pledge to marry

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her. The constant “prayer to God to stay back the years” (6) expressed by Jagua, powerfully communicates a sense of her acute anxiety to conform to what she perceives to be bedrock of her society’s other conventional ideas: its standard of beauty. In her judgment, at the heart of the society’s notion of the perfect woman’s body is external radiance—pure glamour—which is what a woman needs to increase her prospects of being taken as a wife. That is why, not being so consumed by religious piety as to leave everything to providence in this respect, Jagua has to make every effort to meet that standard of external glitter by challenging herself to “employ all the coquettish arts to help Him” (6). Similarly, Jagua Nana is not explicit on this but if scenes like the one in which protagonist Jagua is gearing up to take her first customer tell us anything it is that they give the observant reader the pulse of what passes for her enthusiasm and one can see that there are clearly mixed messages. From the gloss which the narrative gives on the male customer, it cannot escape the notice of the reader that anyone casually looking at Jagua can mistake her mental state entirely. “He lef’ him wife for dem country. ‘Es lookin’ for some fine lady, special.’ They looked at her with approval. She was Jagwa: nothing exaggerated, the ear-rings, painted cheeks and lips, the cut of the Accra-style printed blouse and sarong-type wrapper, the smooth shoulders elastic and supple in the sun; the toes, waxed and peeping through highheeled shoes. And when she walked, she whistled” (169). Then, consider also the other ideas that are floated about her: Could it be true? Suppose there was some big practical joke in it somewhere? But Jagua believed in daring. If the worst happened, at least she could still find her way back to Tinubu Square. They later picked her up by the taxi park and sped to Ikoyi. When she stepped out of the taxi she glanced round her with breath suspended. She had never in her life dreamt of being in such dazzling surroundings. The deep soft carpets and well-padded chairs were things she saw in films. As she sat down the boys brought her something to drink and with trembling fingers she took the glass from the tray and sipped at the red liquid. Her head seemed to spin round. She lit a cigarette and the white man leaned over the enormous radiogram and put on a long-play record of some Nigerian music. His name was John Martell and he told her that his wife was in England. He had come out to work with a firm of builders. If she pleased him, he would treat her well. She must have satisfied him for he took a room for her and furnished it, maintaining it till he went on leave. He told her he would be returning with his wife and two children. (169)

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Here, as throughout this novel, there is a marked divergence between the facts which the public and the reader have about Jagua; her public appearances are different from her private ones. The public, which only sees a character from the outside, is bound to have a partial view, but, witnessing what’s going on in her mind as well, her appearance is less likely to command the careful reader’s attention exclusively. For such a reader with full knowledge of the situation, far from the impression that she’s well disposed to prostitution, the case of cold feet developed by Jagua as she is about to take her maiden customer gives a different perspective altogether. The fact that this incident is marked with great tension has great implications, especially the revelation that Jagua’s first customer is “a white man, just come out from England” (169). The portrait reveals a key reflective moment in Jagua’s life, and provides the reader with a rare and enlightening experience of what it means to be in her shoes. Unlike the public, the reader can follow the immediate train of her thought and thus can begin to understand her predicament. We may set aside for the moment the symbolism of her first customer’s being a British national—a veiled allusion to the specific imperialistic role that his country, the Britain of Empire days, had played in the subjugation and exploitation of Nigeria and Africa in general, culminating in colonial rule—and turn our eyes exclusively to the immediate subject at hand, to which the passage here gives a concrete, thematic, human reference: Jagua’s corrosive fear of the unknown that lies within intimacy with a total stranger. The acute anxiety that has noticeably overtaken Jagua—is this not precisely the idea laid bare here for the reader’s contemplation? Nearly every really significant fact about the universe of Jagua’s world is relayed by indirection, and takes close reading to decode. The reader must probe beneath appearances, the surface of her apparently calm body, to experience what’s going on: the quiet storm brewing in her mind. If we go beyond lingering on her appearance, the picture of Jagua that emerges from a close observation in this scene suggests a near nervous wreck: in obvious distress, she is fighting back an utterly paralyzing fear, shaking and trembling. Confirmation that Jagua is far from enthusiastically looking forward to the impending event is provided starkly by her fallen heart at the scene of her subjection to the first client—how truly petrified she is. The observant reader is unlikely to fail to notice the nerve Jagua is trying very hard to summon up to deal with the terror written all over her face. All a bundle of nerves, Jagua’s violent fear, expressed at the precipitous moment of her fall, points to the feeling of being taken advantage of as she appears more like a vulnerable being—more like a person being preyed upon by the demons of insecurity—than a lustful entity invoking sexual advances from

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men. So badly shaken, all she can offer is quiet resistance to her violation; her reaction suggests her sense of being faced with a menacing situation. Although the picture that comes across of Jagua is resoundingly of a barely contained apprehensiveness which is ferocious in its intensity, the text prefers to state the essential elements and allow the reader to supply the finer details. Tending to rule out unbridled sexual libido by indirection, the novel presents evidence suggesting that she might be more a reluctant than an eager prostitute. Our sense is that it is with the utmost diffidence that protagonist Jagua is compelled to exchange sex for money, as it is what she has to do just to make ends meet. With its diminished access into her fears, anxieties and social possibilities, however, Jagua’s community can make no sense of her disposition; the particulars of her reaction inevitably escape it. By leaving much of the deduction to the imagination, the method employed by Ekwensi of randomly dropping hints here and there in the novel, without making space to elaborate them, therefore gives an impression that his is a text that refuses to step beyond the bounds of objective reportage; that it wants to leave critical marshalling of the evidence out of its remit. This is thus a text that is by no means meticulous in its design to enter systematically into the consciousness of the prostitute with the objective of uncovering her sustained worries, anxieties, passions, and interests. Ekwensi’s way of presenting facts about women’s prostitution is to evoke, rather than explicitly state them. We see this through the way in which Jagua deals with her initial apprehension right from the very beginning of her career as a pick-up. But it takes close reading to detect her reluctance and to deduce what that implies. The denial of this privileged access is what jeopardizes the community’s chance of apprehending her palpably near-manic trepidation at that pivotal moment of her fall. Some readers might well argue that it is Jagua Nana’s over-dependence on surface realism that imparts to the few occasions when it ventures into the psychoanalytical mode more nuance than would otherwise be the case. Through the intermittent prominence given to her state of mind that reveals the hesitancy, worries, and anxieties in her heart, the novel gestures toward forcing a rethinking of some of its own basic assumptions about Jagua: namely, that Jagua takes more than unusual delight in arousing men. The novel undercuts the notion of Jagua’s extremely sexually stimulating nature by inscribing in her behavior how repressed memories affect not only her attitude but her day-to-day perceptions and interpretations of reality. Here, it could be argued, psychoanalytic interpretive critique inserts itself into the narrative, inscribing its force by disclosing important information about Jagua’s past.

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This introspective moment, through which a social problem in Jagua’s background that otherwise would have remained under concealment is unveiled, is the closest Ekwensi in Jagua Nana comes to the use of the stream of consciousness technique: She was the only daughter whom her father loved and doted upon. Her father had never denied her anything. He had seen her married off and she had been wayward and had come to Lagos to pursue the Tropicana lights and the glittering laughter of seductive men, the sequin sheen of the fickle fashions. She had forgotten that she had a father and mother who needed and loved her. Husbandless, parentless, she had roamed the Nigerian world, a woman among the sophisticates with hollowness for a background. (173)

The eruption of traumatic memory yields a special insight into an important area of Jagua’s life, providing the reader with some sort of background check on her by throwing up buried facts from her past. This information is particularly illuminating in the way in which it helps in peeling back layers of misconception, eroding the settled public assumptions about Jagua and exposing the limitations of what people think they know and believe about her. The construction of evidence which assists in the deflation of standard perceptions about Jagua has to establish itself amid the qualities in her public behavior as a prostitute that arouse a misconception of her character. It is possible to read in Jagua’s behavior how repressed memories affect not only attitude but the day-to-day perceptions and interpretations of reality. Once it reaches a point where Jagua can no longer hold things in or keep up the pretense, the intense inner turmoil buried beneath the lively and boisterous face she presents in public implodes. Jagua’s looks may suggest to her community that she has come to peace with her choice, but it is in this sense that she is ultimately some kind of a victim of overzealous prosecution—by her dejected lover Freddie as well as by the general public. There is no doubt that Ekwensi does not set up one woman to represent all African women, as European writers on Africa such as Joyce Cary, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene often do. Ekwensi merely foregrounds aspects of intractable crises, such as the female subjection to male dominance to which, over time, a cross-section of African women has succumbed. That is to say, Ekwensi’s novel does not handle the issue of women’s representation in a way which is degrading to the entire group, which is why the gall from Nwapa is not entirely justified. It is striking that, in reading Ekwensi’s text, Nwapa felt herself confronting a male ideology as pernicious in its framework and nature as the

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colonialist racial slurs that goaded African male authors, such as Achebe and Ngugi, among others, to mount a counter-offensive. She appears, therefore, not without some vindication, to be answering fire with fire. As is clearly illustrated by her novel One Is Enough, the tensions that underwrite the work of re-visioning embodied in this project of re-conceptualization are noteworthy not only because they come from the alternative models of female identity on display, but for the unblinking act of critical selfscrutiny involved. A remarkable process of fiction-making, in a major sense, then, this project sees the younger author taking another look at her original sources and also re-examining her own previous remake of those texts. With astonishing openness, incorporating into her work new angles of looking at a critical social problem like prostitution, she expresses a rare willingness and a desire to keep up with the historical developments in the struggle for women’s empowerment. Naturally, the process opens out with nuance; the adaptation rejects bland repetitiveness and takes the form of repetition with a difference. Setting Nwapa side by side with her models—the original and the copy—thus becomes quite revealing because it shows in stark terms that the areas of remodeling are substantial. Both authors explore to brilliant effect their preoccupations with the career of the prostitute using the camera-like montage framework conventionally reserved for documentary realism. But they differ markedly in their emphases in that they do not uniformly give the physical landscape that permits prostitution equal attention. Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana presents the prostitute with a keen eye on the banality, vulgarity, and theatrical possibilities afforded by her actions—thus revealing an expertise in impressionistic techniques, in the requisite scenographic skills to make images that stand out and linger in the theatre of the mind. His expansive use of ambivalence in the prostitute’s constitution allows him to expose both the myth of the pathology of sexual disorder commonly associated with it and the arrogant male attitudes that actually promote policies that subjugate women to the extent of pushing them into prostitution. Jagua Nana is thus a documentary on prostitution with a focus not so much on the center of consciousness of the prostitute, the psychological dimension of her character explored to any degree of detail, but more on the sense impressions generated by the bodily exterior. At times the view is clouded because the surfaces of the female prostitute’s actions are cloned, stereotyped, and presented for public viewing with an intent which some readers may well justifiably describe as bordering on derisive mockery or voyeuristic display. Yet, because Jagua’s ambivalent profile contains qualities which are more likely than not also to elicit from some readers sympa-

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thy rather than derision toward her, there is therefore a sense in which it can be said that if it has been the author’s intent to solicit scornful laughter, by writing a work devoted to the humorous depiction of prostitution, he might not have been as successful as he intended. Despite the failure to establish an obvious linkage between the social matrixes in which Jagua is embedded and her becoming a sexualized female, no one can rule out the power of suffering to generate sympathy for itself. Much as one would like to be careful not to reinforce the traditional dichotomies between women’s and men’s literary practices, one cannot really wish them away because the areas where Nwapa differs from Ekwensi are marked by gender differentiation. The commonalities and differences in representation are particularly telling, because they bear witness to the governing authority of gender in the human cognition of reality. Much as he tried to present a woman prostitute sympathetically, Ekwensi could not help seeing her from the male, stereotypical perspective. In similar vein, Nwapa attempts to represent a fellow woman’s predicament realistically, but ends up projecting standard myths about men, male sexuality, and the alleged insecurities hidden beneath the facade of machismo maintained by them. When one critically examines how Nwapa has engaged Ekwensi’s work, it is clear she is as caustic in her denunciation of the observed mismanagement by Ekwensi of the image of African women as she is gross in her stereotypical portrait of the African male. Nwapa’s writing does much to deconstruct the dominant male image of women, however, due largely to the energies she drew from the particularities of the daily experience on which her work is focused and also because of the basis Ekwensi provided her for development and refinement. Nwapa’s One Is Enough destabilizes male stereotypical images of female sexuality, marriage, and domesticity, questioning the prevailing notions of family in traditional society, because for Nwapa prostitution is a tool of women’s empowerment. Women who find themselves forced into prostitution will turn their situation around by using it as a weapon with which to secure material abundance. Nwapa proposes and endorses a new family pattern, which is opposed to the traditional one that is ardent in its denunciation of an unwed mother because it flatly places a taboo on childbearing out of wedlock, giving single women her unequivocal approval to have their needs to bear children met by having male friends to whom they are not married sire children for them. Similar to Jagua Nana, One Is Enough does utilize in part the services of a third-person omniscient narrator; but that is where the stylistic similarities end. In contrast to Jagua Nana’s satirical treatment of the main character’s values and the lifestyle they predictably foster, Nwapa’s One Is Enough holds

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the rights of women to destroy the patriarchal conventions that restrict them higher than traditional morality and family values, and this is evident through her approval of the protagonist’s rebellion against enforced submission to concepts and conventions which women find stifling. In the shift from the construction of the woman prostitute by a man to the production of the woman prostitute by a female, to the extent that it brings penetrating attention to the imagery of prostitution, Nwapa’s revisionist fiction contributes immensely to an understanding and appreciation of the effects of stereotyping. Perhaps Nwapa’s most important contribution is her vision of the intrusive, wicked mother-in-law, who is notorious for being responsible for many a failed marriage in Africa. The novel achieves a high degree of depth in the issues it raises about the behavior of the evil mother-in-law, as can only be observed by an older woman who has experienced a tested marriage. Nwapa has an informed perspective that effectively draws the reader into the wronged wife’s world, offering compelling insight into the personalities of the women involved in the triangular intrigue that destroys what at first promises to be a poignantly stellar if not a flawless union. This divergence in the perspectives of the two writers is not unexpected given their different historical frames. At the later time in which Nwapa wrote, for example, not only was women’s use of their sexuality to gain economic, political, and social advantages rampant but it was presumed to be inevitable and therefore was considered to be as natural as the going down and rising of the sun. For writers to be as mindful, each in his and her own way, as Ekwensi and Nwapa have been, of history’s kaleidoscope is to show immense talent, to show sensitivity to the contexts of their works—even if, unlike Ekwensi, who tends toward soapbox rhetoric, Nwapa shows little interest in entertaining opposing points of view, or even the ability to do so. The question posed in this chapter’s title has perhaps now been answered: a snapshot—no matter what the camera holder chooses to focus upon and the grounds on which those choices are based—can indeed provide even greater illumination of its target object than any kind of oratorical pronouncement can ever hope to achieve, to the extent that the camera is focused steadily and pointedly. As has been shown, considering Ekwensi and Nwapa in juxtaposition and in relation with ideas about the position of women prostitutes in Europe would seem to yield even more all-encompassing insights than viewing either author independently would since neither, strictly speaking, gives us a complete picture alone. The seemingly diametrically opposed views offered by Ekwensi and Nwapa complement one another in crucial ways. Together they produce a rounded view of

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prostitution within the context of Nigeria. For example, certain physical details in Jagua Nana portray the title character as plagued with unbridled sexual appetites. However, the exclusive picture underscoring her absolutely bestial, morally fallen nature becomes more problematic if seen in tandem with Nwapa’s emphasis in One Is Enough, which strikes a significant, delicate balance between the prostitute’s partly victim status and her feverishly animated sexuality. Without negating the aesthetic integrity of Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, reading it along with Nwapa’s companion volume One Is Enough helps one to come away with a deeper understanding of both. With the publication of Nwapa’s One Is Enough, Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana now has a fuller context: by reading Ekwensi against both the notions about women and prostitution in his time and through the version extant at Nwapa’s time, one can gain a rounded picture of ideas held in Nigeria across time about women and the sex trade. It is clear that coming to Ekwensi’s novel from a close reading of Nwapa’s remake of it prompts intense new reading which helps to magnify evidence in his master text that would otherwise remain barely noticeable. Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and Nwapa’s One Is Enough have divergent scopes, narrative methods, and agendas. As the pictures—of the prostitute as a woman with a need to take money for sex, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the sex worker as an individual who relishes employing her seductive appeal to make her way in a man’s world—jostle, the reader is inspired to critically examine both perspectives. Overall, while life soon moved too quickly to be captured by art in the country, at the time that both Ekwensi and Nwapa wrote their works, life and art were still congruent and marched along in syncopated rhythm; a crisis of representation and verifiability was not yet in place as it was still being held at bay or offshore.

NOTES 1. Commenting on the question of the pressures on the production of African writers’ works, Florence Stratton remarks with disarming insightfulness, “While African women’s texts do establish a dialogic relation . . . with western texts, the primary engagement of these texts is with the African male tradition, as women writers have responded to the reactionary gender ideology embedded there” (Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 11). Stratton goes on to remind us that the “literary dialogue between men and women is particularly significant” because “it is occasioning major changes in the orientation of the African literature—a turning away from a concern with the issue of race to a concern with the issue of gender, as well as a turning away from

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an interrogation of European texts to an interrogation of or interaction with other African texts” (pp. 11–12). Extensive studies of how African authors are providing springboards for each other are surely now long overdue. 2. Cyprian Ekwensi, Jagua Nana (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 110. Subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers will be inserted parenthetically in the chapter. 3. Palmer’s is of course a modified view of Ernest N. Emenyonu’s claim in Cyprian Ekwensi (London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1974) that Jagua’s personality reflects “the influence which women wield in Nigeria, and, in that light, Jagua can be seen as the symbol of women’s power and versatility” (p. 80). 4. Adewale Maja-Pearce, A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties (London: Hans Zell, 1992), p. 39. 5. See Ernest Emenyonu, “Editorial,” African Literature Today 28 (Oxford: James Currey, 2010), p. xii. 6. Remarking on Jagua’s motive for leaving the countryside for the city, Eustace Palmer goes so far as to say that she is motivated primarily by “the need for the adventurous and exciting life of the city and the need for superior sexual experience.” See Eustace Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 46–47. 7. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 7. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 8. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. See Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 4. 13. Flora Nwapa, One Is Enough (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), p. 22. All page references are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the chapter. 14. Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel, p. 46. 15. Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel By Women (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 170. 16. Ibid., p. 171. 17. For more on the image of the postcolonial urban setting in African fiction, see Emmanuel Obiechina’s Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 36. 18. Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel, p. 51. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Emenyonu is more on target, I believe, in observing that with Jagua as “the centre of the novel, the author has scope to explore all the facets of life in modern Nigeria, because by virtue of her chosen profession she is bound to become

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involved in the affairs of a series of partners. She therefore automatically supplies the cohesion lacking in People of the City” [Ekwensi’s novelistic debut] (Cyprian Ekwensi, p. 80). 22. See Chinwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/man Palava: the Nigerian Novel by Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 169. 23. See, for example, Aphra Behn, The Forced Marriage or the Jealous Bridegroom (London, 1671). 24. Recently, in her study of prostitution in about the same period in East Africa, Louise White also documents a history of a profession which is spawned, fed, and sustained by the interplay of fundamental social factors of a complex nature. In the majority of the prostitutes’ self-definitions their job was like any other; conceptions of the profession seem to vary so wildly that “prostitutes could not be studied in isolation from the men who visited them,” or studied exclusively through “the generalizations of exploitation and degradation”; and we have to take account of how “Nairobi prostitutes described a world of hard work and opportunity in which prostitution was not evidence of social pathology or moral decay or male dominance, but a complex relationship between men and women and their respective families” (The Comforts of Home, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. ix. Certainly, seeing prostitution primarily from the perspective of the female participants does not allow for careful distinctions about matters regarding the ethical, psychological, socio-economic, and political complexity of the context of prostitution. It will certainly constrain the researcher’s effort to understand issues of male desire, money, and class implicated in prostitution; the social repercussions of whoredom generally; the economy of the neighborhoods where prostitution operates; and the often contrasting statuses of the women prostitutes and their known male patrons, a point emphasized so strongly by researchers such as Karras. 25. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 66. 26. Flora Nwapa’s death at age 62 in 1993 was announced (and celebrated) in a special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995), guest edited by Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi and Marie Umeh. 27. In Alvin Kernan’s words (The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, p. 4), satire is “an art,” which is to say, it is not “a direct report of the poet’s feelings and the literal incidents which aroused those feelings, but a construct of symbols—situations, scenes, characters, language—put together to express some particular vision of the world.” Within the context of the tradition of satire on women by men, Felicity Nussbaum (The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires of Women, 1660–1750, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984, pp. 5–6), contends that the mask may be “one of violence, of anger, of impotence, or of patronage”; the satirist may, “for a time, create a stance which releases him and like-minded readers . . . and simultaneously absolves him and his readers from responsibility for all that he finds reprehensible.” See also Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965);

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Robert C. Elliot, The Literary Persona (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981); Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 28. For instance, few readers can forget the bizarre form which revenge assumes in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1968, see the following chapter, below) where a vicious anger of retribution is encoded in the very kind of repayment that the nation collectively exerts on the novel’s antagonist, the desperate fugitive politician, Joe Koomson, for his graft. As the text has Koomson confront the bitter truth toward the end of his power, it is not just to his own but also to the reader’s unutterable horror we discover the fact that the only escape route available to him during a coup de t’at happens to be the hole of the same dreadfully un-sanitized, stench-choked communal latrine which, on a previous occasion, the once all-powerful high-ranking Ghanaian politician could not even bear to use to relieve himself while on a visit to the home of the man, the protagonist of the novel, in an overcrowded sector of Accra. 29. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Charles Scribner, 1925). 30. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 123. 31. Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/Man Palava, p. 170. 32. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: FSG, 1989).

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3 LAMPOON, OR THE POWER OF SAVAGE SATIRE, AND THE VISUAL OBJECT OF DISTASTE Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

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here is a brilliant Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah, who seems to me to be in grave danger of squandering his enormous talents and energy in pursuit of the human condition.” So the publication of the work of his fledgling counterpart was greeted by Achebe. “In an impressive first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, he gives us a striking parable of the corruption in Ghanaian society and of one man who refuses to be contaminated by this filth,” Achebe added. “It is a well-written book. Armah’s command of language and imagery is of a very high order indeed. But it is a sick book. Sick, not with the sickness of Ghana but with the sickness of the human condition. The hero, pale and passive and nameless—a creation in the best manner of existentialist writing, wanders through the story in anguished half-sleep, neck deep in despair and human excrement of which we see rather a lot in the book.”1 In these despondent terms, Achebe’s characterization of Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born presents what might be an appropriate point of access to the contentions attending disavowals and counter claims of affiliation relating to these two pivotal figures in African literature. Perhaps no other statement has given clearer expression to the general ambivalence that attaches to the question of paternity in African literature. The cold shoulder with which Ayi Kwei Armah’s debut novel was greeted by Anglophone Africa’s most prominent novelist sketched out unprecedented claims that other critics were to expound upon. Admiring yet critical and reproving, Achebe in his commentary all too readily attributed the temper of Armah’s writing to a streak of mental colonization while reluctantly recognizing the singularity of the talent. Achebe’s reproachful critique met with an unexpected response from Armah, who attempted to smooth over the conflict, countering the claims of difference put forward 69

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by his Nigerian forerunner by placing his detractor at the root of his authorship family tree. This splendidly illustrates the disjunction that may well occur between the perspective of the student, who might be engaged in a contest to transmute or evade the influences upon him, and the outlook of the author of the appropriated master-text(s) pertaining to the structural soundness of the resulting product.2 There is no question that the strategic process in African literature, by which one literary text refers to another, has generated intense tension on both sides. One gets some sense of the combination of the anxiety and frustration over influence that has plagued African writers, for instance, from Achebe’s distancing of himself from Armah and the opposing perspective offered by the then emerging Ghanaian novelist, who says he has always admired Achebe and taken his Nigerian predecessor as a major influence. In a field where it is rare enough to find authors that are lavish with praise for each other—let alone willing to pay homage to others by openly admitting to their formative influences—one might have expected that the warding off of the perceived threat to his status as an author posed by the disclaimers of his Nigerian harbinger would call forth a self-authenticating rhetoric from Armah. However, how unpredictable Armah can be becomes eminently apparent, for he seizes upon the event of his criticism by Achebe atypically as an opportunity for a rare display of charity. Re-ordering the received ideas about his work—not through defensiveness or hostility but a readiness to deflect the misrepresentation by deferentially acknowledging the very one from whom he received denial of affirmation as one of its conceived presences—Armah put his startling forthrightness triumphantly on display. It is not unjustifiable that Armah’s candor in admitting that Achebe’s works furnished the model of form for his own should set a touchstone for the discourse of fictional genealogy in African literature. If we step back from all of the out-of-fiction debate between the two contenders for literary glory and keep a close eye on the aggregate of their aesthetic and thematic practices, we can clearly recover what happens when the properties of one text become absorbed by another. One fact emerges with clarity: notwithstanding the subtle nuances of style that might have prompted Achebe’s emphasis upon the profundity of their differences, his A Man of the People and Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born3 bring into prominence what has seldom been noticed before—the artistic and ideological unity of the duo, which cannot be denied as both deal with the precipitous decline in the quality of life in Africa in the period immediately following political independence of two West African countries, Nigeria and Ghana.

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Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born presents the Ghanaian equivalent to problems of nationhood earlier explored from the perspective of Nigeria in A Man of the People by Achebe. Each novel is simultaneously the story of a young man in search of meaning for his life and of the deteriorating conditions in Africa—the progression toward dictatorship following what was widely regarded as the setting of the sun on British imperialism in the region; the irony that political autonomy from formal colonial rule leads to a more heinous form of defeat and colonization. The ignoble role of the indigenous leadership in the new dispensation; dramatic disparities of wealth, income, and power; upswing of affectation; neurotic individualism; corruption that not only was pervasive but became ingrained in the culture; graft, sycophancy, incompetence, and rank distrust—all feature as key themes in the two works. The paradox that, within the entire canon of African literature, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is precisely the text which bears the greatest resemblance to his own novel of post-independence disillusionment is one which Achebe will thus, literally, have to live with. When the literary and ideological parameters which inform and govern their fiction are taken into account, what becomes immediately apparent is the mutual interest of the two authors concerning the possibilities offered by satire as a vehicle for socio-political and cultural commentary within the institution of the novel. A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born present unremitting barbs of satire, in varying degrees of effectiveness, against the non-performance of Africa in the arena of self-governance. Each text, of course, bears the marks of a distinctive talent, to the extent that it sets up the rulers and the ruled in differing scales of culpability as dual targets for the objective of lampooning. Despite some stylistic discontinuities, however, the two novels definitely share a common ideology and shaping vision. Two touchstone texts which should be read alongside one other in the study of literary influence, Achebe’s A Man of the People and Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born provide an extraordinary linchpin for gauging how a rising author might invoke a canonical master in stretching borrowed narrative patterns to lodge his own distinctive over-arching literary objectives.4 The dialogic relationship of Achebe and Armah is an important phenomenon that defines the patterns of development of African fiction. Both in terms of demonstrating the growing interest of African writers in each other’s works and the doors of opportunity that it opens to new possibilities that could enable the practice to pass into the lexicon of the literary and artistic culture of the continent, the interchange becomes

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a means that might awaken other authors to an emergent compositional resource. The best way to see the two writers is to describe Achebe as a forerunner, who paved the path for Armah. Thus, while with A Man of the People Achebe initiated the discussion on one of the ironies of postcolonial African writing relating to the conundrum surrounding the dispute between locality and globalization—the provincial and the universal—it was to Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which reproduces the foremost Nigerian author’s original text with multiple variations, it would fall to bring that matter to a head. In A Man of the People Achebe stages a battle to separate his art from the convention of expatriate writing of which critics uniformly accuse him of partaking in the two earlier novels of village life, Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964).5 This is a form of composing in which, instead of breaking with the dominant discourse, the indigenous author extends it and thereby unwittingly perpetuates the imperialist stereotypes of the colonized he sets out to correct. Many people contend that postcolonial expatriate writing is an apparatus of imperial state control and anti-resistance. A cultural instrument of paternalism, the idiom of postcolonial expatriate writing, they argue, forces its unsuspecting exponents in once colonized territories to open their native societies to the humanity test that subjects those cultures to evaluation based on externally imposed yardsticks. Pariah nations’ literatures, as instruments of imperialist domination, reveal a key aspect of the pathology of colonial conquest. By pandering to the metropolitan Western audience and its stereotypical expectations of native peoples, the new literatures strategically play a part in a process of identity formation that reinforces entrenched views of formerly colonized peoples, who become so susceptible to external manipulation they act as though they feel helpless, effectively and creatively, to attain self-fashioning and self-definition through changing or operating outside and subverting the stereotypes, categorizations, and roles assigned to them by their conqueror. Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (in his novels A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood) and Ousmane Sembene (in his novel God’s Bits of Wood)6 have of course successfully deployed Europhone writing as a strategy for contesting the authority of the former colonial masters. In the history of European-language postcolonial literature, however, the practice of writing-back (or writing in opposition to empire) has been relatively rare. It has been a mission near-impossible for the majority of the writers in this tradition to emancipate themselves from one of the spin-offs of the lingering effects of imperial conquest on the mentality of formerly colonized peoples: the situation that leaves the natives, who are deemed to need

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explanation, subject to the demands to continually open up themselves and their behaviors to understanding by peoples of metropolitan centers. Postcolonial expatriate authors of every hue, color, and shade find themselves predisposed to answering the clarion call to engage in the fruitless game of defending to empire the nobility of their marginalized alien existence. The experience of authors recently emerging out of colonization seems nearly identical everywhere—whether in Africa, the United States, Australia, the Caribbean Islands, or India: they all continue to foot the bill of writing for a Western audience. Achebe has denied this, but the expatriate style in his early novels can be linked to the ceaseless recourse made to proverbs in the illusory agenda of authenticating the Igbo culture. It is entirely in keeping with his literary goals that since proverbs are, as one critic says, kernels that contain “the wisdom of traditional people,”7 they should give structure to the over-abundant effort made in Achebe’s early fiction to deal with the pressure of cultural validation. Proverbs are undoubtedly powerful cultural items which do bear traces of authenticity and therefore have been important media of culture and identity negotiation.8 Yet, for all their magnificence, and for all their vitality as idioms of communal self-representation, proverbs are circumscribed by their very form since they do not have unlimited applicability. Admittedly, since Achebe set the example, many African writers have deployed them to telling effect: in providing insights on their ethnic cultures, and in capturing the grandeur of native articulate speech. Onuora Nzekwu in The Wand of Noble Wood (1961) and Elechi Amadi in The Great Pond (1969)9 are two writers, for example, well known as authors for whom proverbial usage has been a subject of major importance. But it must be recognized that, as with Achebe’s work, these other writers who have aligned their writing with his face the same inherent limitation of the value of proverbs—the fact they are not unlimited in their range, and so no set has ever been adequate to illuminate the national culture of any African country—least of all the continental identities of African peoples in general.10 Achebe himself must have recognized the fact that, beyond being an inventive speech act, the role of the Igbo proverb in his early fiction doesn’t much exceed reclaiming the essence of Igbo ethnic ways of life. Devoting his later novel A Man of the People to what was increasingly becoming a continent’s rather than an ethnic culture registers a major shift in the primary focus of Achebe’s writing. It is significant that, to achieve the recovery of the totality of the continent’s culture in lieu of a segment of it, Achebe transformed various familiar fictional methods to incorporate a broader continental canvas that removed his novel from an Igbo ethnic

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domain. Paradoxically, achieving the universalistic imperative—a concept to which Achebe himself objects—comes with an unintended consequence as evidenced in the many gaps in A Man of the People. The most pivotal vacuum is the indeterminacy of physical locus—the fact that the experiences have no terrain of their own, no specifically local character distinguishable from others. To the extent that it figures no recognizable physical objects in the material world, A Man of the People reads like a botched narrative in the anthropological frame. Despite a great command of character portraiture, an early indication of a devitalizing absence of tangible specificity of context in A Man of the People is the very opening scene reporting the Anata political campaign of antagonist Chief Micah Nanga. In an episode that is worth describing in detail, the high-ranking member of the ruling party, Chief Nanga, is seeking re-election. During this Ananta political offensive, however, in place of an objective report, the novel thrusts before the reader a narrative gaze so fixated on what the conflicted protagonist, Chief Nanga’s former student Odili Samalu, sees and why he sees as he does as to make the preoccupation with the reporter’s convictions excessive. For instance, here is his account of an incident in which, to him, the citizens have confused uncritical adulation of political personalities with love of country: Five or six dancing groups were performing at different points in the compound. The popular “Ego Women’s Party” wore a new uniform of expensive accra cloth. In spite of the din you could still hear as clear as a bird the high-powered voice of the soloist, whom they admiringly nicknamed “Grammar-phone.” Personally I don’t care too much for our women’s dancing but you just had to listen whenever Grammarphone sang. She was now praising Micah’s handsomeness, which she likened to the perfect, sculpted beauty of a carved eagle, his popularity which would be the envy of the proverbial traveller-to-distant-places who must not cultivate enmity on his route. Micah was of course Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P. The arrival of the members of the hunters’ guild in full regalia caused a great stir. Even Grammar-phone stopped—at least for a while. These people never came out except at the funeral of one of their number, or during some very special and outstanding event. I could not remember when I last saw them. They wielded their loaded guns as though they were playthings. Now and again some of them would meet in warriors’ salute and knock the barrel of their guns together from left to right and again from right to left. Mothers grabbed their children and hurriedly dragged them away. Occasionally a hunter would take aim at a distant

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palm branch and break its mid-rib. The crowd applauded. But there were very few such shots. Most of the hunters reserved their precious powder to greet the Minister’s arrival—the price of gunpowder like everything else having doubled again and again in the four years since this government took control. (1–2)

The effect of the narrative’s obsession with the observer’s consciousness is to drastically reduce the empirical status of the perceived actions and objects to a secondary importance. Undoubtedly apparent here is the effort at contextualization, but it is not fully sustained by the language. The crisp expressive idiom fails to attain regionalism. The invocation of the conventional name of the performance troupe, “Ego Women’s Party,” might have been intended to ground this dispatch in an Igbo cultural location. But the terminology is far too vague to provide more than meager evidence. The text evokes no local color, traditional topos, or geographical location. There is nothing in the story to suggest a uniquely Igbo mode of thought, pattern of speech, or dialect. The language of the narration does not succeed in breaking through the confines of conventional English usage. Even though the narrator’s voice here does not echo back to the Igbo communal speech pattern so carefully developed in Achebe’s earlier fiction and thus aborts the plan to achieve specificity of locale, the elaborate forms of distancing from native life developed in the report have the ring of familiarity about them. The detached, condescending tone is reminiscent of the colonialist travelogue, such as Rudyard Kipling’s and E. M. Forster’s narratives of India and Joseph Conrad’s and Joyce Cary’s documents of Africa.11 Usually such narratives are far more compelling as records of the emotional fluctuations of the traveler’s brooding on his or her experience than realistic depictions of the actual flora and fauna of a specific culture. True to the spirit of that form, the egocentricity of this report is odd. Emerging from the scene of the extravagant Anata reception composed by Odili is a misperception of the crowds as pliable and languid. In a characteristically acerbic manner, Odili’s recollection of the episode in which the political celebrity is being feted and lauded projects silhouettes of the crowds emphasizing a witless nonentity more than eager to pay unalloyed respect to one of those from the corridors of power who is nothing but a town rake gulling country dolts. The impression of the mobs as enamored of and unfettered in their fawning behavior toward their social superiors which the reader gets from Odili’s presentation does not differ substantially from the familiar trajectory of the “manner of natives” sketched by European writers such as Cary,

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Kipling, Forster, and Conrad. The image of the crowds—portrayed as showing untrammeled joy at someone for whom patriotism is the lowest in the list of his priorities—illumines brilliantly the dark edges of colonialist philosophies about the African subjects’ toadyish nature. The visual tableaux of the seemingly witless, teeming crowds, falling over each other in paying respect to those of higher status, projects and supports theories of African primitiveness—the recurrent claim of the peculiar dominance of emotion in the communal personality of African peoples. The element that stands out the most in Odili’s account of the presumed unruly behavior of those at lower social levels is the rigid opposition that obtains between the imagined objects of the report and the commentator’s profile of himself as a person who has made moral rectitude the ostensible hallmark of his public persona. In one of the most radical indictments of the celebrity status that coalesces around Chief Nanga, the narrator mocks the masses for being caught up in a pattern of attitude that suggests there is no price too high for them to purchase the trappings of power associated with colorful political personalities. But the frequent disparaging references to Nanga’s political opportunism and what is taken as the inappropriate behavior of the masses that purportedly support it—the lavish display of the commoners believed to encourage the political buffoonery of the leadership—show that, deep down in his heart, Odili would really prefer to be in Nanga’s shoes. The terms in which the vilification of Nanga’s privileged life and the hero worship indulged in by the masses is expressed therefore provides especially significant insight into Odili’s cultural arrogance and insincerity as well as the harshness of his verdict. The non-powerful people are dismissed with contempt by Odili as “silly, ignorant villagers dancing themselves lame and waiting to blow off their gunpowder in honour of one of those who had started their country off down the slopes of inflation” (2). Throughout the story, by contrast, the image in which he suggestively offers himself up, and which he creates and cultivates, but can’t keep up, is as a suitable alternative to the witless grandeur that typifies the politics of self-inflation dominating his young country. A self-appointed champion of moral reform, Odili centers his sense of the way-over-the-top behavior of the crowds towards the high-ranking people. The ostensible gullibility, disorderly conduct, and ignorance of the villagers, he claims, are excessive. It is not as though Odili doesn’t recognize the validity of people desiring the touch of politicians who look authentic. But the hunger to get together and feel something together that he sees galvanizing around the cabinet minister doesn’t have his endorsement as he

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distinguishes between truthfulness on the one hand and the politeness or sleekness with which he identifies Nanga on the other. Portraying the monarch as dishonest and therefore undeserving of ennoblement, Odili establishes a determinate connection between his gregariousness and graft, tying together Nanga and everything that is undesirable in politics. But Odili’s own unstable values dramatize the absurdity of one speaking from both sides of his mouth. Oddly enough, Odili is at first mistrustful—even contemptuous of his former teacher. Though initially uncompromising in reviling the glorification with which Nanga is being invested by the inhabitants of the small community, as soon as he is singled out of the crowd to be accorded social recognition, Odili makes a full about-turn, suddenly reverses a key stance, and becomes profuse with unmitigated admiration for the cabinet minister. A kaleidoscopic panorama of narrative techniques places the focus on Odili’s personality, crystallizing his fierce hunger for social recognition. Odili’s reluctance to blow the whistle on the cabinet minister adds significantly to our perception of the varying dichotomies between the pronouncements made by him, his voiced ideals, on one hand, and, on the other hand, his motives. There is a radical discordance between ideal and reality, underscoring the misery of Odili’s situation as what he professes to stand for, and what his actions signify, cancel one another out. The various ruses, through which the confusing (and at times distorted) accounts of events, people, and ideas are represented in A Man of the People, make the story double as a narrative of double-talk. In A Man of the People, nothing damns the self-indulgent narrator more resoundingly than his own behavior. As he comes to observe things firsthand and events are painted from his perspective, the sense of the community which the reader gets comes across mainly from Odili’s point of view. However, at the same time, his own actions are rendered readily accessible for inspection, so that the reader gets to watch the first-person participantnarrator closely as well. This makes the one whose consciousness is registering impressions simultaneously a critical object of the reader’s gaze. As striking as any in this context are the representational problems focalized in the episode woven essentially around the track which Odili the narrator is keeping of the community’s response to Nanga’s visit. Odili is unable to resist the temptation to bewail the villagers. But through fixing a negative estimation of the character of these commoners, the main target of his bitter scorn, Odili unintentionally unveils his own uncharitable nature. The unkind things Odili says about the villagers thus progressively diminish his own image as a crusading zealot rather than enhance it. The

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multiple ways formulated by the novel for viewing the events, people, and situations may obviate the authority of the first-person storyteller to set boundaries—the absolute power to appropriate and exclude—but the pulse on which Odili is keeping his finger as the action progresses, as laid bare by his fluctuating emotions, becomes so heavy that it threatens to eclipse the reported behavior of the villagers as the center of narrative focus. Odili’s self-absorption in his opinions eventually accrues enough solidity to relegate the behavior he is supposedly observing to secondary status because his technique increasingly attends more and more to the detail of his a priori assumptions than the empirical evidence which is before his nose, eyes, and ears. More than anything else, it is at this scene of the elaborate Nanga reception that we find the most egregious display of the drama of moral, political, psychological, and cultural tragedy of post-independence Africa. The disembodied calamity of the continent can be observed both in Chief Nanga’s obvious pretentiousness and duplicity and the contradictions and deceptions of the political rhetoric of Odili the narrator. All of the actions of these pivotal figures in the nation’s politics accentuate the novel’s depiction of the devastating reality of how common people’s confidence in the leadership aspirations of the western-educated elite has turned out to have been misplaced. In anticipation of the arrival of the noted political dignitary the village is bustling with activity, the people literally stirred into a state of frenzy. Chief Nanga finally arrives at the occasion, which is like a pageant held in grand style. Despite Odili’s posturing, as he seeks to impress onlookers with his holier-than-thou attitude of raising suspicion about Nanga’s motives and corruption behind the grandiosity of those in authority in general, the hype of Nanga’s self-marketing prevails. The inconstancy of the self-proclaimed defender of morality is demonstrated by his insistence that the deference being paid the politician is anything but deserved while he himself is secretly nursing an ambition to be like the very person being castigated by him. Odili persists in misinterpreting the source of the esteem accruing to Nanga, attributing it to what he deems to be ignorance on the part of the villagers, who in his view just don’t have sufficient intelligence to understand the implications of their actions. But he can neither make a commitment to giving the villagers a heads-up about the politician nor rid himself of the fear that he knows too much. In Odili’s eyes, being tight-lipped with the villagers about Chief Nanga is in order; the act is in their own interest, and arises from a concern to save them from the rude awakening that might occur were he to puncture some of their complacencies. However,

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the hollowness of Odili’s moralistic rhetoric rings loud and clear. While he drags his feet about trading in new ideas with the villagers, and insists on linking his professed anxieties to a purported concern for the well-being of the very people from whom he is withholding this vital piece of information, the evidence suggests an entirely different motivation for his action: the reason that Odili won’t give the villagers a clear picture of Nanga is his deep-seated social scorn. Odili is demonstrating his enlistment in the colonialist discourse that paints the natives as low in intelligence when he observes, “Tell them that this man had used his position to enrich himself and they would ask you—as my father did—if you thought that a sensible man would spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth” (2). The disdain shown here by Odili towards non-powerful people is damning, for his bigotry becomes so pervasive that it strips all his pretensions of social commitment. Odili’s hesitation to back words with deeds magnifies the discrepancy between soaring action and rhetoric in this novel. In Achebe’s novel A Man of the People social snobbery is so pervasive that it expresses itself through other aspects of the conduct of the choice class as well. The behavior of powerful educated folk like Odili indicates that the notables do not consider the common people to be thinking bodies. The members of the high society reject the need to explain anything to the masses. Their unwillingness to provoke an expansion of the dominated people’s horizon of awareness vis-à-vis the character and lifestyle of the people in and around power like Nanga especially denotes overtly how hegemony is anxious to protect the social order from disruption or reordering. During the Nanga rally Odili acts under the veil of a claim that curing the social body is the object of his critique. But he is now caught with his pants down, exposing the contempt with which those who are well-off like him treat the same people he is positing himself to be fighting on behalf of. Although keen to be perceived as deeply troubled by seeing simple-minded villagers in a light which suggests they are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous politicians like Nanga, the notion that his abhorrence is particularly drawn against the perversion witnessed by the time-honored masking tradition beggars belief. True, despite what many may say, a great many of the changes that in recent times have overtaken carnival are regressive and so they can be justifiably interpreted as a perfectly executed act of cultural assault. But Odili’s motives for raising the dust about them are not right. As is made manifest through its various forms that resonate in the pages of Achebe’s village novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, carnival was long a respected part of Igbo history before the onset of the modernization project

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known as European-style party politics. But as an event of the public sphere conducted with a spectacular variety of displays it traditionally had a central unifying purpose of serving the community’s greater good—spiritual and secular. Carnival always represented the voice and the spirit of the past in a collaborative endeavor that collectively and symbolically enacts the community’s corporate identity. The evidence is overwhelming–through the range of communal emotional sweep at the wrestling event in Things Fall Apart, where hero Okonkwo’s defeat of his famous opponent and reigning wrestling champion of his region, Amalinze the cat, is played out, for instance—that the Igbo carnival in its original context banishes egocentrism entirely as its provenance is primarily communal aspirations.12 The type of undue hero-worship of the political stalwart which one sees in A Man of the People around Chief Nanga is a far cry from, say, the traditional domain of Igbo carnival. Through the unabashed use of the form in uncritically honoring totally undeserving politicians like Nanga, the recasting of the generic habits of the masquerade away from its recognized roles in society becomes a regression. During the Nanga Ananta political rally, therefore, satire assumes particular importance. Within the context of the novel’s artistic and political discourse, it is an embarrassing fact that masquerade performance is shown in a light revealing not merely the shadow of a once communal event but of a tournament now in degraded form. Voided of the distinctive inflections of the original collective art, the joint practice now finds its mocking parallel in a contemporary event which—very much like its modern coronation counterpart, complete with all its highfalutin mania—is geared more towards the aggrandizement of one man (Chief Nanga) than it is structured to meet the public’s well-being. This manifest transformation of carnival signifies a social havoc wrought on a colossal scale, and can be read as justifying the violent diatribe on the deviation from convention which the character of this event has undergone. The portrayal of the masquerade performance at the Nanga Ananta rally mixes a combination of derision, disdain, and mild protest. The contemporary happening is portrayed as one that, in both substance and outlook, has strayed far from its roots. This implies that the employment of carnivalesque in A Man of the People is a form of parody: this novel’s representation of carnival as an event now in its attenuated form suggests that the ultimate target of the narrator’s elaborate attack upon the deformity that has occurred might be said to be a stress point in a society’s traditions. Through Odili’s perspective, the narrative portrays the dishonored masked performance as an outline of a problem considered to be too profound

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for the villagers who are caught up in it fully to comprehend the forces at play. Though Odili does make sense in this respect, the problem is his superiority. Odili’s pretensions insinuate themselves into what arouses his anguish and provokes him to the diatribe he launches against the implicit claims of modern political aspirations: As an educated person equipped with the force of intellect properly to grasp the evil ramifications of those changes, he is left aghast by the dishonor precipitated by the debasement of institutions which once were sublime sources of awe, wonder, belief, certainty, and aesthetic pleasure for a simple-minded people in a traditional social milieu. As these structures of orgiastic ecstasy and spectral thralldom are turned into objects for the satiation of the expansive narcissistic desires and acquisitive instincts of just a few privileged men in high elective office—for those in the ultimate location of power like Nanga—it is appropriate that all enlightened people register their offense against the ugly turn of events, especially in their progressively secularized world which has seen the elites become divided. The members of the political and educated personages fought side by side during the independence struggle. But a divorce occurred in their ranks soon after. As a result of increasingly divergent aspirations for the nation and differing class interests, political persuasions, and perspectives among the constituent parts, the educated people have now been pushed to the margins as the politicians and state functionaries gloat over their control of the economic and other spoils of power. The potential source of any enlightened person’s discontent can therefore be understood. There is a possibility for a constructive critique to be made along those lines of others and of events of doubtful value whilst at the same time shoring up a preferred value system. But a delicate balance is required to do so successfully. Odili appears to be unaware that, no matter how agile or perceptive, suspect criticism cannot inspire remedial action. His impassioned critique is not only unconstructive, but his tone conveys overweening snobbery and alienation, and his aloofness pretty much emblematizes the superiority complex of the educated. A disconnect exists between Odili and the general populace, making it virtually impossible for him to gain an appreciable understanding of the people’s cultural habits. Chief Nanga might have particularly gotten up Odili’s nose and aroused his self-righteous indignation. For all Odili’s voiced nationalistic zeal, the behavior which he is beginning to demonstrate and what he is saying do not add up. He has clearly stressed credulity to the limit, randomly throwing accusations at Nanga for comfortably playing the very role that

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he himself is yearning to assume. Difficult to reconcile is the discrepant nationalistic sentiment or rhetoric and the decidedly sneering attitude and skepticism of the narrator toward the common citizens whom he claims to be supporting. There is a debilitating paradox in Odili’s political action, for he has simply no practical solutions to propose for the national dilemma and clearly underestimates the villagers, who are by no means as slow-witted as he would have them be. It is evident, for instance, that the villagers undoubtedly have reason for their actions since it seems in the affairs of their nation that Chief Nanga is the capable representative bringing them their share in the combative competition for pieces of the national pie. Nanga himself makes this point sharply when unveiling the dreams he has for Odili: “By the way, Odili, I think you are wasting your talent here. I want you to come to the capital and take up a strategic post in the civil service. We shouldn’t leave everything to the highland tribes. My secretary is from there; our people must press for their share of the national cake” (12). Cultural dynamics can clearly be seen to be in operation here. Whether one views the practice of nepotism as an act of benevolence or agrees with Odili’s depiction of it as evidence of the corruption which is endemic in the fabric of national life, there is an air of inevitability about it. In as much as Odili himself has a very poor awareness of what is transpiring, in light of the magnitude of the event, it is quite fitting that critics should want to spend their time on the actual transformations that are taking place in his personality as he basks in the glory that he believes Nanga has conferred on him. Several questions about integrity are thrown up by the mixture of insight and blindness exhibited by Odili. These questions are brought into especially sharp relief in the scene focusing on the implications of his being in two minds about Nanga’s behavior; the imbalance in his personality that borders on schizophrenia; and the tangled web of instability in his moral frame. Particularly significant is the self-enthrallment provoked by the instant celebrity status that Odili thinks he has acquired, and which causes him to lose his sense of reality completely as all the intensity of his initial antagonism toward the minister quickly begins to attain modulation. From the very first, for all his grandstanding finger-pointing exercises, not even the conflicted Odili can remain unaffected for long as he too is soon carried away by the momentum of the tidal wave of Nanga’s charisma which is sending the boisterous gathering into raptures. Odili’s behavior in no way differs from that of the crowds already gathered in the grounds of Ananta Grammar School. Hours before Nanga’s arrival, the dancers, small schoolchildren, and the staffs of the school are queuing up to receive this august visitor, and, upon their finally being introduced, one immediately

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after the other, to him are being swept off their feet. Nanga has not seen Odili in fifteen years, but the politician instantly picks his former student out in the crowd and appears genuinely delighted at seeing him. “Our hands met. I looked him straight in the face.” “‘That’s right,’ said the Minister not to anyone in particular, but to some mechanism of memory inside his head. ‘You are Odili’” (8). Odili too is instantly mesmerized. A figure that embodies all that is egomaniacal with an insatiable need for attention, Odili is particularly consumed by the grandiose public acknowledgment of the powerful politician. As the bubble becomes too much for him to absorb quietly, he erupts in the glow of the glory it has conferred upon him: “I became a hero in the eyes of the crowd. I was dazed. Everything around me became suddenly unreal; the voices receded to a vague border zone” (9). Clearly this is not the case of a lapse in judgment resulting from good sense being temporarily overruled by ego. Rather, it is evident that, as the Nanga splendor results in immediate inflection of Odili’s disdain for the trappings of power, a new attitude emerges in which opulence becomes for him an attribute of royalty, but no longer connected with corruption, rather taking the form of a much envied position, because of the constitutive ambivalence in his ethic. He rationalizes, “I knew I ought to be angry with myself but I wasn’t. I found myself wondering whether—perhaps—I myself had been applying to politics stringent standards that didn’t belong to it” (9). The more Odili attempts to paint both Nanga and the villagers in a negative light, therefore, the more he damns himself through his own words and deeds. Plagued by conflicting motives, he constantly secondguesses himself, and he is so charmed by appearances that he becomes woefully incapable of perceiving inner essences. Odili’s expansive moral flexibility scarcely permits his seeing through Nanga’s pretenses. This might well explain his admission, “Somehow I found myself admiring the man for his lack of modesty. For what is modesty but inverted pride? . . . Perhaps it was their impatience with this kind of hypocrisy that made men like Nanga successful politicians while starry-eyed idealists strove vaingloriously to bring into politics niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere” (11). Even if only tentatively, the reader can discern here something pivotal about Odili’s character, about the stuff in his mental make-up, how he has lived his life and predicts how he will act in future, from the pattern of his conduct. The core foundations of his personality, of his essential being, are stripped bare in this scene. The omission of seeing through the infectious friendliness in Nanga’s public image proves how little attuned Odili is to

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the situation around him. Revising his initial hunch suggests that it was not only easily befuddled in his mind to begin with, but is merely skin-deep to the end. The fact that Odili can be so taken in by Nanga’s warmth, affability and seemingly effortless power to gain a rapport with the common people shows incapacity to distinguish candor from artifice. Odili’s simultaneous attraction to, and critique of, the politician has left him at a moral impasse which makes his behavior not only fatuous but insincere and hypocritical. The contradictory imperative in his behavior here is particularly troubling. Allowing proximity to Nanga to temper his initial reservations about him smacks of intellectual dishonesty, and contributes in no small measure in undermining Odili’s reliability as a focal point for analysis of the social order. A theme sketched with spectacular force in this novel is that even in Odili’s reaction to the conditions of the poor this evasiveness persists, a sobering reminder that old habits die hard. Odili’s vacuous analytical perspective is more akin to the stance of an escapist with a lack of human interest in his subjects than it is to the sense of depth of someone who wants to deal with reality. Witness his laments, for instance, conducted about pit-latrines while “reading about pails of excrement from the cozy comfort” of Nanga’s “princely seven bathroom mansion with its seven gleaming, silent waterclosets” (40). He reports about being both “amused and surprised that in the capital city, Bori, the urban-poor can afford only to live in shacks, or sleep in the streets, and can only afford pails for the disposal of human waste,” whereas “[i]n the same city he finds out that the members of the ruling social group, such as Nanga, live in mansions with basic amenities” (40). Those comments unwittingly confirm how a most extreme and unjust form of repressive segregation is firmly in place. Odili is spending the night with his girlfriend, Elsie, at the home of the Nangas. Several factors, including miscommunication, not leveling with his host, and a failure of nerves on his part, converge in assisting Chief Nanga to steal Elsie from him. Writhing in anger, Odili sits on his bed and “tried to think, with my head in my hands. But a sledgehammer was beating down on my brain as on an anvil and my thoughts were scattering sparks” (70). Odili finally gathers himself together, packs his clothes, and storms out of the lodge. Here is his description of the appalling sights that confront him on the streets of Bori: I walked for hours, keeping to the well-lit streets. The dew settled on my head and helped to numb my feeling. Soon my nose began to run

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and as I hadn’t brought a handkerchief I blew it into the roadside drain by closing each nostril in turn with my first finger. As dawn came my head began to clear a little and I saw Bori stirring. I met a night-soil man carrying his bucket of ordure on top of a battered felt hat drawn down to hood his upper face while his nose and mouth were masked with a piece of black cloth like a gangster. I saw beggars sleeping under the eaves of luxurious department stores and a lunatic sitting wide awake by the basket of garbage he called his possession. The first red buses running empty passed me and I watched the street lights go off finally around six. I drank in all these details with the early morning air. It was strange perhaps that a man who had so much on his mind should find time to pay attention to these small, inconsequential things; it was like the man in the proverb who was carrying the carcass of an elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grass-hopper. But that was how it happened. (71)

Disturbing as is the scene of the rat decapitations discussed below, the savagery of animal cruelty does not compare with the actions attributed to Odili in this incident. Here Odili meets human beings destitute and homeless, people cast adrift in the heartless city, and crosses the path of walking sanitation workers moving human waste with a putrid odor reeking from the cargo that is so downright nasty it has overwhelmed the streets. Yet Odili describes these entire terrifying struggles and sordid sights as “small, inconsequential things,” instructively invoking the proverb relating the anecdotal tale of the man “carrying the carcass of an elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grass-hopper.” This well-known reference becomes Odili’s fanciful way of frivolously declaring that the predicaments of the street destitute don’t equal the magnitude of his personal romantic disappointments. A misguided and evasive comparison, the slight to the travails of the underprivileged people is of course the result of a habit of misjudgments—of Odili’s lack of contrition. To be amused at someone else’s suffering is an act of villainy. Odili is criminally callous in his behavior; he does not merely overlook the dire predicaments of the urban underclass, but consistently takes a perverse and supercilious delight in watching appalling destitution from a respectably safe distance. Most puzzling is that his own first-hand encounter with pit-latrines, which at the age of 12 he found so disgusting that he “sometimes” went “for days on end without any bowel evacuation,” utterly does not make his heart beat as one with these lower class workers who are forced to endure similar circumstances. Rather than his own suffering making him become attuned to the needs of others, when the adult Odili confronts night-soil men disposing

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piles of these same “bucket-latrines” on the streets of Bori, the country’s capital city, the academically supercilious treatise that he develops as his reaction to human degradation is an autobiographical irony, a warning about his growing insensitivity. “Pit-latrines are not particularly luxurious or ultra-modern,” he declaims, but “bucket latrines are a different matter altogether. I saw one for the first time when I lived as a house-boy with an elder half-sister and her husband in a small trading town of Giligili . . . . the week when all the night-soil men in the town decided to go on strike I practically went without food. As the local inhabitants said at the time, you could ‘hear’ the smell of the town ten miles away” (40–41). Odili detaches himself so fully from this ugly experience to the point of romanticizing suffering, appearing like someone who views the scars of degradation from a comfortable distance and looks the other way. It is as though he takes some form of perverse pleasure in observing the poor wallowing in abjection, which suggests an overabundance of cruelty as a trait that has percolated from his youth, in pure form, from the cause of bad conscience elaborated in the activity of hunting down rodents with his compeers. The tale of animal cruelty occupies only a small segment of the narrative space of A Man of the People, but it is a definitive event which gives a telling indication of the effects of main character Odili’s upbringing. “The only excitement I remember in Giligili was our nightly war on rats. We had two rooms in the large iron-roofed house with its earth walls and floor,” Odili’s recollection of a momentous episode from his childhood goes: My sister, her husband and two small children slept in one and the rest of us—three boys—shared the other with bags of rice, garri, beans and other food-stuff. And, of course, the rats. They came and sank their holes where the floor and the walls met. As soon as night fell they emerged to eat the grains while we sat around the open fire in the kitchen . . . It was then we decided to go hunting. I, or one of the others, would tiptoe in the dark and quietly plug the holes with pieces of rags while the rest waited outside with sticks. After a reasonable interval those outside would charge in with a lamp, slam the door and the massacre would begin. It worked very well. As a rule we did not kill the very small ones; we saved them up for the future . . . . Now all that seemed half a century away. (41–42).

Odili may have intended this as an example of a childhood prank, but the reader encounters here a scene of visible gore that evokes numbing horror. It exposes the irony that Odili’s early life had nurtured him in the art of cruelty; the virus was early in his blood. Oddly enough, Odili betrays not a

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trace of embarrassment and certainly no sense of moral seriousness whatsoever here; his moral levity during a face-to-face confrontation with squalor can be read as symptomatic of how his sensibility insulates him from full consciousness of the essence of filth. He literally turns wretchedness into a subject of comedy. When he later unexpectedly walks into the slums in the city of Bori, the reader is afforded a more expansive view of how Odili’s behavior is so decidedly at odds with being the self-styled advocate for the poor as to make ludicrous what he professes. He is supposed to be someone who cares, to judge from how her rails against the greed and venality of public office holders such as Chief Nanga, but Odili’s essential detachment proves that the war he has declared with irresponsibility is merely a verbal one since he is yet to make more than a lip-service commitment to it. Odili does not take seriously the challenge of bringing about the material uplift of the poor, exhibiting a remorselessly cavalier attitude toward the arresting vignettes of outrageous misery of the poor, to the extent that it is clear that the only thing of close propinquity to his heart is himself. No episode better embodies this unrepentant insensitivity towards the plights of the poor than the walking sanitation buzzer episode. Confronted with his crass hypocrisy, many readers will concur with Rosemary Colmer’s judgment of Odili’s “blindness at this stage in the novel to the social issues which ought to concern an idealistic young politician.”13 During his headlong confrontation with a fundamental socio-economic failure of government, Odili’s absorption at such a critical moment in his sexual frustrations vividly illustrates his phoniness.14 A Man of the People’s choice to employ Odili as an instrument through which the realities of an emergent African polity are represented attains unusual significance in view of the fact that narrative in this context has a unique charge. Particularly acute within the postcolonial context is the question regarding which faces of society revealing light ought to be cast on. As a basic weapon for the conferral or withdrawal of official validation/authentication in the postcolonial situation, narrative strategically can either empower or serve as a lethal instrument of disempowerment. Story therefore takes on heightened importance within the context of formerly colonized territories. No wonder the matter of narrative angle or focus is one which colonialist authors, such as Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary, who wrote to de-inscribe Africa, seemed to have understood all too well.15 It is suggestive of cold-heartedness that A Man of the People gives details of the physical environment short shrift instead of revealing at full blast its repulsive features, when it’s clearly not because there isn’t an option. Odili

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is detailed the near-impossible mission of negotiating the tensions between agency and non-agency. The failure to find an adequate plan to house the social world extensively is a profound miscalculation which is responsible for the oppressiveness of the attempt at expanded psychological projection. The consequence of using Odili’s perspective as the main vantage point through which events are viewed and reported is insufficiency in the representation of the social order that bodies the supposed ills against which the ire of the idealistic young politician ought to be stirred. This leads one, naturally, to doubt, as David Carroll has doubted, whether this novel’s narrative design is uniformly successful. “In the uncertain world of the first-person novel the narrator’s comments upon his earlier self exercise the chief control on the trajectory of the novel as a whole,” Carroll says, and it is his overall verdict, based on consideration of this and other facts, that “At times the distinction between the narrator and his earlier self is blurred and with it the nature of his education.”16 The overall course of history clearly indicates that all through the entire story there is no growth in Odili’s character and personality. Odili has a tendency to drift inward, to become overly preoccupied with him self, but this leads to no expanded consciousness. Odili does not appear to learn from experience; it is not surprising that the evidence to be gathered from the picture is that of a static character. As the narrative’s centering consciousness, Odili myopically downplays the vision of social disorder when it ought to matter most. With no other text in all of postcolonial African fiction does the attempt to elevate the psychological or internal dimension of action so demonstrably reveal its limits as it does in A Man of the People. This novel does not avail itself of all the resources available for mapping the psychological scope of action, but the preoccupation with the aspects of inner reality which it does cover comes at a high cost to the outward material expression, the lived experiences of the peoples in their workplaces, classes, public spaces, and households. In A Man of the People’s centering narrative consciousness, a gaping vacuum therefore persists—making the text end up unable to offer any model of progressive leadership. Protagonist Odili may have the vision that the world could be better, but he has neither the talent for turning himself into a remarkable force for change nor the broad shoulders to be strong for others. Odili clearly exposes himself as a sort of jester who lacks the necessary gravitas for leadership. One of the most important attributes of a leader, lacking in Odili, is decisiveness, for he is immobilized by a vicious hesitancy at a critical historical moment. With all the holier-than-thou posturing exhibited by Odili, he fails woefully to reconcile his own motives and deeds with his pronouncements and critiques of the actions of others.

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Odili’s visit to the Nangas, where he is offered the chance to taste the politician’s opulence, arguably marks a defining moment. Here the true test of character reaches a peak for Odili as a candidate for revolutionary change. Will his actions match up with his unrestrained pronouncements? Will rhetoric and deeds square up? Odili surely does have an opportunity during this visit to make some of his most penetrating attempts at explaining the malaise attacking the nation. What completely undermines the value of his cutting critique of the conditions that result in the commoners’ unfulfilled aspirations and lost opportunities, however, is his capricious and imperious nature. Nothing gives a better idea of the regal aspirations of the supercilious narrator than his trance-like enchantment with the luxurious comforts of the Nangas’ palace. Odili is so charmed by the richness of his host he confesses that, were he to have a chance to be a minister, he too would want to remain one forever: A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation—as I saw it then lying on the bed—was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say “To hell with it.” We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us—the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best—had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. (37)

This is a scene evidently freighted with significance and the effect is to leave no iota of doubt about how totally blown away Odili is by the Nangas’ luxurious and princely lifestyle. Propelled by motives of personal ambition and social prestige, in a belated attempt to use poverty as a justification for the African politicians’ compromising behaviors, Odili begins to rationalize his sense of values. By so doing, he expresses a disposition that contributes in no small measure to the disillusioned and ominous view of the future portrayed for the country through the suggestion that not even the best minds of the age—not even the most educated and perhaps the most wellmeaning intellectuals of his generation—have the requisite moral fortitude and integrity to lead the country in a new direction. A Man of the People delivers a startling report on Odili. It reveals a consciousness that is driven, as it were, by obsessive craving for the fetish of command. It does this through extended exploration of the psychological horizon of the hero-narrator. Odili is conflicted about the extravaganza of the Nangas’ lifestyle, and his ambivalence comes sharply into focus as the

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codified factor denying him not only a higher moral ground than the position of the corrupt politician he has so regularly verbally denounced but the beacon of a hopeful future. Odili sternly berates Chief Nanga for his lust for sadistic power; it therefore comes as a bitter irony that he himself should turn out to be no different from his former teacher after all.The levity and scorn exhibited by Odili toward the common people reflect the basic values of a character with no room for those he considers to be lower in the existing social hierarchy. Odili aspires frantically to move up the social ladder, and his desperate yearning to gain aristocratic power is fired by a curious need to keep the multitude in awe. All that he really wants is to command the respect of his fellow countrymen and women to a point where he can will his aspirations into being with a flick of the finger, and nothing better conveys this obsessive pursuit of rank than the great space he has put between himself and the common people. There is something abysmally remote about his bearing; evidence for his infatuation with elitism can be gathered from the amount of disdain which he harbors toward the laboring-class people. The structure of the adventure story that is introduced with Odili being driven by Nanga’s chauffeur to the hospital to visit his girlfriend Elsie may at first seem like an irrelevant digression. However, it turns out that this Cadillac episode is a principal positive proof, if indeed any were needed, that inwardly Odili is a proud and arrogant man. What we glimpse in it is the convergence of the ecstatic expression of a worship of power and a neurotic attachment to grandiosity which strikingly projects the event as a consummate act of status striving—a form of crowning glory in protagonist Odili’s up till then most unremarkable career. Everything is vanity all around him; how Odili is held captive, in thrall to his own image, makes this just another ego trip; the exhilaration that overtakes him during the extravagant show of the joy ride gives an indication of a man suffering from delusions. Unquestionably an exercise in pure opulence, the car ride enables Odili to participate in an exploit of pomp and pageantry from which he has up until then felt excluded. Thus, describing his elation at that brief moment of power, he boasts: In our country, a long American car driven by a white-uniformed chauffeur and flying a Ministerial flag could pass through the eye of a needle. The hospital gateman promptly levered up the iron barrier and saluted. The elderly male nurse I beckoned to had sprinted forward with an agility that you would think had left him at least a decade ago.

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And as I said earlier, although it was against all the laws of the hospital they had let me into the female nurses’ quarters and woken up Elsie to see me. (56)

Much in this passage of triumphant glory offers food for thought, not least being the ideology behind Odili’s appraisal of the character of his nation, what he imagines the pulse of the community to be that breaks through clearly in his report. The reader can surely glean the quality of his personality from the remarks about his country and his willingness and even eagerness to play to the gallery of the national game of elitist privilege. Although Odili well knows the extremely patronizing nature of his young nation’s neo-colonialist culture, its exceptional susceptibility to exclusivity, displaying every evidence of extravagance, pretentiousness, swagger, self-glorification, and boastfulness he is not only agreeable to that culture but takes enthusiastic gratification in playing along with the undue deference promoted by the flamboyant regime that works in favor of the rich and powerful. The people with superior economic status, which is immediately recognizable and measured through the expensive cars and plush houses those in this group have, easily get selectively ministered to and worshipped in this country. Odili wants to partake of the culture, pandering to the egos of the upper class people who have their privileges reserved exclusively for their closed and fortified club. The accusations of exclusive influence leveled by him against the moneyed and powerful political classes for comporting themselves like feudal lords therefore ring hollow. As underscored by his elation during his lavish car ride, one does not get a sense that he himself is discomfited by his brief participation in the culture of conspicuous consumption indulged in by that parasitic minority group. Indeed, it is significant that for him the limousine ride is a heroic deed. Here Odili feels for the first time bestowed upon him a moment one can only imagine as one of near-absolute power. With the limousine comes the glory of the supreme laurel that Odili feels confers on him a luminous personality, a sense of triumphal rulership. So, ultimately, his attendant condescension toward the commoners confirms a realization of belonging—even if only momentarily—to an exclusive club of those conferred prestige and preferment, an aspiration that certainly sustains the judgment of egomaniacal pride and vulgarity against him. Gerald Moore is therefore correct in reckoning that, with Odili’s profile “Achebe’s s