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 strategy is to show us a young man who is potentially another Chief Nanga himself (though of a more recent model).”17 Odili’s slaphappy car rendezvous bears a striking resemblance to the depiction of Joe Koomson’s flamboyant, free-wheeling car tour in The

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Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In both episodes, each personality expresses a penchant for theatricality that elicits a sad reflection of the avid “thirst for prestige, honors, deference” known to characterize “the liturgies” of official state ceremonial performance in postcolonial Africa.18 Strikingly different, however, are the tones of the depictions of the events in the two novels. In the event of Koomson’s happy-go-lucky drive around town, the full contours of the ostentatious exploits of African politicians unfold themselves in their entirety, whereas it appears that A Man of the People turns a blind eye to the odious elements of the act. The symbolism of Odili’s car mania commands an ambiguous status, for the indulgent narrator does not get it and appears totally absorbed in his enchanted car journey, showing no moral questioning, no self-examination, or doubts about the connotations of his actions. Neither does the reader sense much criticism from the novel, overt or implied, of the rituals and idols of bourgeois civilization symbolized by the unalloyed adoration which is professed by the narrator for the long car. The portrait of Odili’s luxury car shows no indication of the viscerally manifest social anxieties and revulsion typically directed toward the obscene display of wealth, which, especially in this part of the world, have generally attached themselves to the image of the long car. If anything, the razzle-dazzle event projects an overpowering glamor toward which atavistic longing is drawn. Odili makes such a grand celebration of the opulent show of affluence that no other image of the idealistic but dishonest hero is more grandiloquent than the one brought out in the car episode. Instead of puncturing the vanity with unremitting contempt, the tone of detached amusement conveyed through the comic matrix of Odili’s behavior deflects attention entirely away from the lack of restraint bound up with excess which the mimicry of the bourgeois lifestyle signifies and rather on to how the poised manner of his bearing and fixation with elegance makes him feel elevated to nothing short of the height of a demigod. Odili himself chiefly fetishizes and formalizes the tour. Humorously luxuriating in the tantalizing, facile stately aura the enterprise evokes for him he shows not the slightest hint that he understands the reprehensible behavior which the plush car symbolizes politically. To the extent that it offers a platform for staging the drama of a protagonist with such little selfunderstanding he makes a fool of himself, ambiguity hangs heavy over the character of satiric portraiture in A Man of the People. Odili’s self-absorption and the theatricality of his attitude display very useful materials for parody, though the development of the discourse in this novel seems not to be carried out to good effect. The narration appears to confer an unequivocal authorial seal of approval upon Odili’s susceptibility to artifice over

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authenticity. This is due chiefly to a poor interlace of humor. Rather than having Odili’s growing tendency toward pomposity serve as a satirical object against which a most overt aversion is registered, the text glamorizes it. With Odili’s enthused embrace of a peculiar flamboyance becoming an occasion upon which a most open, abundant, and enthusiastic attention is lavished, the text leaves the reader with a problematic impression that A Man of the People betrays insensitivity to the political implications of this kind of behavior. Odili says he is one with the common people but his actions prove otherwise. In a society newly emerging out of colonialism he never really questions the prevalent inequity, the fact that people have unequal access to resources and the gaping disparities between the living standards of the rich and the poor. Instead, Odili glorifies pomposity and pretentious display of illegally acquired wealth, and his attitude can be legitimately considered unconscionable and artistically inelegant by those who take their dreams of standing up for a fair society to heart. Odili lives in a context where affluence is not growing for the majority and the culture of poverty is taking its toll in joblessness, under-employment, hunger, and disease, and so the kind of gaze focused upon his state of enthrallment at material grandeur can be interpreted as constituting gratuitous applause for widely stigmatized aspirations. All through its pages, A Man of the People centers outlandishness as the main attribute by which both Odili and his former teacher Chief Nanga are defined. This manifests itself in the appearances of the two key figures; the suggestive force of the many faces of their privileged existence or aspiration toward such existence on which this novel throws glorifying light therefore occludes the opportunism and rank greed of the flamboyant political ruling class that visit economic violence on the poor. Reading A Man of the People by interrogating the part played by humor is revealing. It underscores how the corrective and critical narrative tone has been effectively disabled by a playful and far from serious disposition. This is revealed through the narrator’s slangy language. Laced with clichés and commonplace idiomatic expressions, this impish strain imposes a lighthearted mood on the chilling and somber realities deliberated upon, thus heightening the precariousness of the balance between farce and tragedy, which makes it difficult for the socio-political and cultural criticism to be taken seriously. In A Man of the People mimicry reinforces the degree to which the comic aspects of Odili’s behavior have tempered its discomfiting nature. Through an overlay of drollery, the narrative over-extends the function of humor to the point of making comedy out of an unsettling situation and thus fatally weakens satire’s role in its customary assignment of holding up folly to censure and ridicule.

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In the long history of satire, there is an indication that to function effectively in a corrective way it has always had to alter the strategic character of humor significantly so that the most effective uses of satire become those in which the entertainment purpose of humor is under-stressed. The exploration of satiric humor in the traditional sense, as in, for instance, the Roman verse satires of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, is often a great balancing act—one in which extreme precautions are taken in order not to allow the moral criticism or instruction to lose its force to the pleasing element which is added to make the moral message more palatable. One indication of poor narrative strategy is the immoderate humor which confirms and expounds upon the confusing moral bearing of A Man of the People. Efficient satire is never mistaken in its function (or form) to raise the issue of guilt and condemnation, hence Eustace Palmer is accurate in his description of A Man of the People as “that rare bird in the corpus of African literature—a comic novel.”19 Due to undue superabundance of humor, the reformative ambition of satire in this novel becomes hijacked, with a resulting diminished effect of the seriousness of the subject. Yet Odili’s behavior would have been funny were it not for its tragic implications; he may make light of sleeping with Jean, the married visiting American woman, for instance, but his actions compound an act of indiscretion that does little to relieve readers’ already growing doubts about his character. Even in the much-discussed issue of his break with Nanga and the series of actions he takes while in the hospital at the end of the novel, this debilitating structural blemish persists. As readers of the novel are reminded, most notably by Rosemary Colmer, the problems with Odili’s characterization are monumental. While “The main evidence on the moral state of Odili at the end of the novel must come from the voice of the narrator throughout the novel,”20 what we observe is that He approves of his past idealism, but laughs at his own naivety. He invites us to admire his prowess, both as speaker and as lover, and his recognition of his own craving for admiration does not lead him to any radical reappraisal of his own self-concept. He is honest enough to let the truth appear to the reader, but not honest enough with himself to change his concept of himself. The most important change in him is his recognition of the importance of honesty and integrity in the individual, coupled with his new understanding of what it means to be “a man of the people,” but these are not enough to prevent him, by the end of the novel, applauding murder as an unselfish act and embezzling party funds.21

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For its entire attempt to detach itself from the convention of anthropological descriptiveness, the narrative precedent for its precursors, the evidence indicates that A Man of the People’s quest to insert itself into the satiric tradition is hindered to the extent that it pitches the associative devices of satire with so little depth or range. The renderings of experience, lacking in realistic and psychological penetration, become circumscribed because of how the text over-exercises playful humor in its attempt at revealing political insight. In A Man of the People, the employment of the first-person storyteller as a main narrative ploy may represent a distinctively new direction for an author well-known for the third-person omniscient frame. But it is ironic that so good a story should be spoilt by questions of appropriateness that arise regarding the management of narrative angle, especially the narrator’s comportment of himself—his excessive playfulness and moral instability. The reader of A Man of the People is confronted with elaborate tactics of prevarication which are closely intertwined with the narrative viewpoint. Though it was used to good effect in balancing admiration for both the seductive allure of village life and the more tantalizing aspects of the “civilizing mission” in Achebe’s own two earlier novels of rural life, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the same narrative ploys not unexpectedly prove a challenge in the postcolonial context since the new situation now requires clearer lines to be drawn between bad and good, and the narrative of compromise that worked well in the earlier fiction, in meeting the goal of celebrating the worth of Igbo tribal ways while simultaneously making accommodation of some of the benefits that trailed the budding program of colonial expansion, is here found to be inappropriate. It must be pointed out that complicating this major impediment imposed by A Man of the People’s stylistic design is the narrative’s overall failure to find an adequate strategy to accommodate realities outside the visceral. The shift from proverbs as the bedrock of story to interiority constitutes a constraining factor in A Man of the People due in part to the fact that the devolution into extensive subjectivity deprives the text of literary energy; the switch in narrative emphasis from objective realism to psychological projection sidelines the agenda of scenic descriptiveness, leading to a lean texture for the setting or background to the action. The privileging of interiority over the social environment in which the characters act out their parts is in this text an exercise that comes at a huge cost: the abandoning of novel-writing as a process of retrieval of cultural memory in favor of novel-writing as an act of psychological investigation into the complexity

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of subjecthood which is compounded by the use of primal clownishness and extreme self-consciousness as the axes of narrative fixture. The disquisitions on Odili’s consciousness satisfy what is clearly an interest in achieving mental realism but they are accomplished at the expense of the opportunity for display of a more intimate knowledge of the outer world. Invariably, a style as obsessively preoccupied with subjectivity as this becomes disappointing to the reader who wants to see more details of the environment in, and against, which a novel’s centering consciousness acts out his role. Emmanuel Obiechina makes the important discovery that A Man of the People shows “little integration of setting with narrative and little use of it to further psychological insights.”22 A fully achieved work of fiction is aptly expressed not just in a language that carries the accent of the characters but also in a specificity of habitation or background; parading de-contextualized characters and incidents, A Man of the People becomes a register of the difficulty that arises when art has an indefinite (universalistic) canvas imposed on it. As context is assessed in terms not just of how a text references a specific political and historical moment but also of how a concrete cultural frame is captured, in the long run, A Man of the People’s narrative voice becomes part of a warning of a botched aesthetic strategy of fiction. This definitely is the height of irony in the sense that an attempt to fill the gap created by the absence of proverbs turns out to be a project of narration that unwittingly forces upon the text a firmer possession of the very European tradition it so earnestly wishes to abrogate: creating deeply introspective characters. There can be no better way for a chronicler of the contemporary African experience to provide an in-depth analysis of the prevalent malaise afflicting the continent than by giving a mirror image of the social environment. The failure to advance the pressing claims of verisimilitude undermines the very viability of the metaphor of the military coup employed conclusively in A Man of the People as a central symbol for universalizing the story.23 Short on its documented accounts of events, objects, and its depicted natural world, A Man of the People’s narrative strategies offer a touchstone for re-examining the unresolved debate concerning representation. This is the question regarding how a writer can best achieve universality—whether it is better to come at it from the particular (stressing the localized character of an experience, its concrete and specific features) or map it from the generalized perspective (giving diffused aspects and generalities of events). As will be shown, the generalist and abstractionist approach adopted in A Man of the People stands in marked opposition to the particularistic sensibility of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

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By the time that Achebe wrote A Man of the People he had honed his considerable talent to a state where he crafted a novel by which all other novels of post-independence disillusionment in Africa will be measured— certainly there is a sense in which the text could be regarded as a feat in its use of mirth and understated humor. But in his novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Armah takes the fictional exploration to a different register. He usurped aspects of style associated with A Man of the People that centralize African leaders as a factor in the travails that followed in the wake of political freedom, but the tendentious cynicism and other forms of political humor give way to a vicious criticism of manners in a work committed to producing a slice of reality. Thus, instead of chasing after the ghost of Achebe, he brings entirely new forms into being. Eric Heyne’s comments about mimetic representation, that “inaccuracy is not necessarily fatal to a nonfiction text; neither, of course, does accuracy necessarily guarantee a work of literature. . . . Moreover, there is never one version of any event that is best for all purposes,”24 are relevant for a comparative assessment of A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Since, we are talking about a world in which, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have indeed argued, there can be no “knowledge that bears no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. . . . blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence,”25 the issue cannot be whether an observer can maintain absoluteness of neutrality. Rather, of import should be what George Levine describes as “absolute commitment to the faithful recording of things as they can be perceived, to the realist enterprise (as Victorian writers were to understand it). It means that, within the category of epistemology . . . the writer is committed to finding ways to represent the world accurately.”26 The issue we are dealing with is implicitly about faithfully representing observed life, real or imagined, offering a dependable picture of the world as it is and as it could be. With this in mind, one can see the worst thing which can happen in the reading process is to assess a work mainly in terms of a historical credibility which pushes to the sideline the more crucial question of its determinant rhetorical design. The reader should be guided, instead, in evaluating a text’s informing representational methods not so much by whether he or she can adduce a falsifying idiom as that he or she should test for competent use of appropriate strategies—that is to say, the search should be about methods that assist each text in holding a compelling mirror to its material since the matter is ultimately about judgment regarding how each text establishes its logic for presenting experience.

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Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is also reported mainly from a single spokesperson’s viewpoint, but it impresses one as being more like a montage cinematic close-up of a walk through a city than the “still life” of a photographic snapshot. Neither entirely an impressionistic rendering of the narrator’s consciousness nor a detached reportage, this place-centered novel is an attempt at a sustained pictorial portrait of an era. His vivid evocation of the horrors of postcolonial Ghana is attained through a combination of narrative methods. With an exceptionally sharp and sympathetic eye for visualizing and sound, and an acute ear for recording events and sounds, this novel presents vignettes of moving pictures (or rolling images) especially of, but by no means limited to, familiar sights, sounds, tastes, feels, and smells of what is transpiring in the outer world. Evincing the obvious results of lessons that might have been learned from previous efforts, especially from Achebe’s A Man of the People, concerned with similar experiences, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born builds upon a highly original aesthetic, combining psychological exploration with sociological investigation. Its shrewd mobilization of the resources of satire enables it fully to deploy the entire force of the style that calls a spade a spade. While O. R. Dathorne calls it a “frank and fearless realism,”27 another critic, Charles Nnolim, links the dominant mode facilitating the effort of mimetic depiction of the universe to a proclivity to “articulate in bold language what others are too modest or too nice to put in print.”28 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a compelling and provocative account of conditions that thrust upright individuals and their country apart, exposing exigencies that stand between the romances which citizens want to carry out with the state. Everywhere readers witness human drama, as real people come alive in their daily struggle to gain status and wealth or merely eke out a living. Through comprehensively convincing reactions to those experiences, throughout this novel the tone of realism asserts itself emphatically. Right from the opening lines, with their vivid portrait of the rusty bus that “moved uncertainly down the road” (1), in which a closeup is provided of the activities of the conductor, who receives a cedi note as a bus fare from one of the passengers and is seen holding back a part of the change due him, the reader is treated to an evocation of the culture of graft threatening to annihilate the polity that is daring and breathtaking. The novel, through the conductor’s treatment of the imagined agent provocateur, figures the relation between the rulers and their subjects as one driven by crafty calculation. The visual impact of this scene is profound and unforgettable. Matching the spectacle of shady human behavior are the smells, sounds, taste, feel,

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and mood of the stage, which are literally evoked by the novel in capturing a sense of the claustrophobic air with which the under-handed conduct is saturated. The bus is as rotten as the state; the attitude of the bus conductor, who is obviously not possibly acting without the connivance of the driver, is emblematic of the rulers’ treatment of the citizens. When the conductor suspects he may be caught pilfering, he attempts to get out of the compromising situation by humoring the suspected informer—the man, the novel’s protagonist, who unbeknown to him is actually sleeping soundly—only for the panic of the petty criminal suspect to turn swiftly into vituperation with his discovering the presumed potential witness to be other than he has believed him to be: the man is no snoop after all but simply a regular passenger caught in his own moment of weakness. In this incident, where a bribe that was not even actively offered to begin with is taken, the act is depicted as both particular and paradigmatic: the action of the conductor, with the tacit complicity of the passenger, is simultaneously localized and representative of a nationwide pattern. The episode serves as a microcosm of the Ghanaian society in which the dishonest rulers loot with impunity the nation’s coffers, employ rhetorical cunning and deception to hoodwink or coax, and, if need be, then bully its weak citizens into submission. Samuel Omo Asein makes a rather startling claim that West African novelists do not usually employ setting quite as functionally as do their South African counterparts. According to Asein: Unlike the novel in, say, West Africa where setting functions more or less as a mere backdrop against which the drama is played out, the setting in the South African novel is more often than not enriched with a symbolic value and function in the total fictional realization, defining as is very often the case the thematic reference and the depth of characterization. Thus there is a more direct relationship than in the West African novel between setting and theme, character and authorial attitude to the subjects.29

But The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is one novel, woefully overlooked by Asein, which can be taken as an exception to the rule of West African writers’ alleged tendency to produce novels with poorly added textures. Armah appears the least shy among West African novelists in cashing in on the resources of documentary realism. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born disproves the sharp distinctions presumed to exist between South and West African writing in terms of the fusion of fiction’s disparate parts. It showcases with absorbing detail the places and objects which threaten to trade positions with characters—the environments and the people that strike

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symbiotic connectivity with intimate intensity. Its impact derives largely from the coherent synthesis of character and setting and from the vividly presented descriptive passages bordering on poetry of a very high order. The novel not only portrays a harmonious collaboration between character and environment but it gives a near-photographic picture of the decadence eroding the moral fiber of the nation, showing corruption as so pervasive that it quite easily rubs off on the decrepit buildings and even the physical appearance of the peoples themselves. Undoubtedly one of the great maladies of the postcolonial African state is making location into a space of contrasts. The essence of the once colonized space, inequality occurs when channels of communication are effectively closed between the elite and the general populations. A condition often depicted in the African novel as a carryover from the colonial era, this social disparity is relayed by the uneven distribution of social amenities between the members of the elite (who supplanted the erstwhile white overlords) and the exploited generality of African peoples. Just as in A Man of the People, where the distinction between rich and poor is so sharp that it is emblazoned in their living spaces and the poor are treated as if they are non-persons, so in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It is the breakthrough cinematic montage technique which allows this novel to give full expression to the narrator’s anxiety-driven, almost obsessed concern to establish direct relations between the scale of environmental problems and the health of the urban center as a living space in a way few novels have succeeded in doing. Throughout the novel, the protagonist’s bus ride around the city is grounded in the logic that the well-being of the environment is as pressing to the narrator, and, by implication, the author, as that of the humans who inhabit it. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born throws a huge beam of light upon a key danger facing a community that neglects its environment. In so doing, it establishes concrete links between environmental degradation and the society’s cultural, moral, mental, psychological, economic, and political decline, giving full weight to disconsolate images of the terrible sights on the filthy streets and the foul smells in dilapidated buildings. As will be demonstrated at greater length later (in the close examination of the state of the Railway Administration Block and the neglected African quarters in the Loco Yard, especially), the reader will meet an anatomy of disgust. Some of these present bewildering faces of urban foulness. The Loco Yard, for instance, is one place about which the reader is told that “thick short men in overalls thickened with grease that never comes off” work amidst “blunt rusty bits of iron mixed up with filings in the sand” and where “old water

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. . . has stopped flowing and confused itself with decaying oil from brokendown boilers” (40). Although the images of this location are so graphic that they might be revolting to many readers, they do succeed in bringing bad news about urban disorder to the table. The shocking depictions of squalor certainly make pointed the ties between the states of infrastructure and of mind, the connections between failed social policies and their human cost. At home, for example, being trapped within the depressed sector of the community makes life a living hell for the man, the novel’s protagonist, and is what distresses Oyo, his wife, the most. This family’s inability to move higher in society becomes the main cause of a strain in the relation between husband and wife because of the material implications of the couple’s lower-class status. For disadvantaged people like the man and his wife, it seems there’s always something to worry about; having the finances to stay afloat becomes a constant concern as their poverty is so pervasive it is apparent from their domestic circumstances; from their old and rusty furniture, for example. Oyo does all her cooking with coal, but it is clear that she would have preferred gas and electricity. In addition, the family breakfast is said to consist of just a cup of tea. Also, the couple even lacks the money to buy a bed for every member of the family; so the children have to sleep on the floor. Not only is the family forced to live in a one-room apartment, where they must share a filthy communal bathroom with other tenants in the compound, but they have been forced to make their home in the loco yard, a “hot and dusty environment” (40). Here the drainage system has collapsed and reduced the place to foulness, one gigantic stinking lavatory. Chronicling the ravages of environmental devastation becomes an effective means through which The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born pictorially juxtaposes the monstrous contrasts in the living standards of the rich and the poor. The extent of the environmental degradation is even reflected by the breeze that blows at the bridge from the sea fronting the depressed section of the town, which comes with a stale air, “fresh in a special organic way that has in it traces of living things from their beginnings to their endings” (40). The inhabitants of the abandoned market, for example, have been forced to live amidst “dust and perpetual mud covered with the crushed tomatoes and rotten vegetables” and rotten fish heads around which flies swarm, which reduces their habitation to a space, a world of the central rubbish heap, where terrible odors “hit the senses like a strong wall, and even the eyes have something to register” (40). This is the reality to which the man, the novel’s hero, has grown accustomed because of his background, and which adds fire to the attack which he delivers with

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virtuoso virulence on the corruption and hypocrisy of the political leaders who pay no more than a lip-service commitment to the environment and its poor inhabitants. Both through the aristocracy’s own exploitative actions which are dramatized and the bitter tone of the man’s report on them, readers witness the beastly insensitivity betrayed by the political henchmen over the scandalous lack of uniformity; even the management of waste is skewed in their favor against the disadvantaged. Conveying a powerful environmentally friendly message while indicting social discriminations, the novel draws out one clear implication: that a clean surrounding is what is needed to make life peaceful and lasting for all. Parading scenes teeming with disarming squalor and poverty, which graphically depict the horror of environmental decline, becomes an effective way of lending exceedingly rare moral authority to the anger and the rage of the protagonist toward the long and continuous unjust practices by which the majority has been denied its entitlement to healthy living conditions while the privileges of sumptuous livelihood go unhindered to the minority elite despite all the promises of equality. In this narrative’s manner of summoning a doleful fury, it not only attacks the injustices embedded in the social system. In truth, the amount of disgust which is piled up in these images of inequality is more than enough hint that radical redistribution of wealth is probably the only option which will constitute a just restitution for the aggrieved. As liberal aesthetic strategy dictates, the words come only just short of calling outright for retaliation—as in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, for instance—on behalf of the offended underprivileged people. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Armah appears to have found the perfect formula for realist fiction: the combination of characters who exhibit extremes of emotion and behavior covering a wide spectrum of attitudes and a raucously dramatic, attractively dandyish style. Much in the fashion of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in Armah’s novel this recipe makes for an exciting read. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born articulates a broad and deep awareness of context. With portraits and uses of setting and symbolism which are poignant and detailed, it builds up with extraordinary attention to detail the specificity of individual characters’ experiences as they go about as flesh-and-blood humans, running the daily rounds of the business of living. Armah’s novel enacts the environment in which the characters play out their roles in prose possessing a pace which clearly matches the thematic and emotional intensity of their collective story. Prodigious problems, challenges, and ills facing Africa like corruption, inequality, filth, colossal fraud, intemperance, and excessively degenerate sexual urges of the rich and powerful may be cosmic (or continental) but in

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The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born the horrors come down to the particular. Some of these tasteless elements, like the debaucheries among postcolonial leaders concretized in the obnoxious career of Minister Joe Koomson, will undoubtedly offend the sensibility of those easily nauseated by unpleasant realities, as they definitely confirm standard stereotypes of the continent conventionally retailed by outsiders. But the stories do not just take an anecdotal form: since this matter borders on the most intimate, the perverse sexual appetites of the nouveau riche especially add to the embarrassing situation. The inability of these men to repress or sublimate feared and forbidden impulses is rendered all the more disgusting by the shockingly inordinate attraction they have toward women who are young enough to be their daughters and who are exploited and degraded, girls so “horribly young . . . fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags” and some “wigs of dead white women’s hair” (89). One need only take a good look at the depths to which Joe Koomson has sunk in surrendering to his own internal passions to gain a sense of the rottenness of the political system feeding the deviant behavior of the elite. His ravishing instincts and unbridled lust are deployed to highlight some general principles about the chauvinistic attitudes of the rich and powerful elite, who take sexual conquest of women as a measure of male prowess and masculine invincibility. Topping Koomson’s meteoric rise to eminence from nothingness is his vividly dramatized ostentatious living, but nothing better illustrates the corruptive influence of power than the gaudy visibility and arrogant self-display of the political overlords who do not treat women as fellow citizens with equal rights but as objects of conspicuous consumption. Though verbally professing socialism, in practice, the habits of the elites suggest that this is just a disguise, a cover for materialism. The political despots are careless and blatant in flaunting their privilege and hedonism, displaying a high propensity for unregulated consumption. The camera closes in on many members of the African bourgeoisie, and readers catch a revealing sight of them pursuing a wild social life, wallowing in the abyss of pastimes such as feasting and over-eating. So wanton are they in moral indiscipline it is as though there are virtually no limits on what they can do. They live in huge white bungalows, drive long and heavy cars—all acquired with looted public funds—and so big are their egos that the political autocrats are chauffeured around by drivers garbed in “white men’s uniforms” and sitting “ages in the sun” (89), as the reader sees Joe Koomson and his wife Estella on the night that the man meets up with them while they are on a shopping spree during “passion week.” “Passion week” is the period of general economic depression preceding when

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Ghanaian civil servants got paid their paltry monthly wages. As it is a time of general severe austerity for the common citizens, the novel relates how Joe and Estella Koomson could not have chosen an occasion more propitious for a display of the reach of their uncommon affluence and power. Well aware that the only people who feel welcomed at home during the week of excessive financial hardship are the rich, the man is walking home reluctantly after work. The man crosses many other “walking dead” people like himself; in fact, “many much worse off” (35). Then, quite unexpectedly, the air becomes “filled with the sharp sweetness of arm-pit powder hot and moist . . . the vapor of a well-used wig” (36). A woman, who is promptly identified by the man as Estella Koomson, rises as “an object of power and darkness and gleaming light comes shimmering down in a potent moving stream” (36). This is the Koomsons’ limousine. Out of the car steps the driver, who is being accosted by a horde of street fruit hawkers, all clamoring for his attention, and “Above the cool murmur of the engine the voice of a female [recognized by the man as Estella Koomson] rises from within, thin as long wire stabbing into open eyes” (36). While she is instructing the driver to pick up dozens of oranges, “from the back seat of the limousine a man dressed in a black suit [pinpointed by the man as Koomson] comes out and makes straight for a little covered box with bread in it” (36). There is a mad stampede among the hawkers as they compete wildly for Koomson’s patronage, but “The man turns and walks confidently back to the car” (36). “‘Big man, I have fine bread,’ one pleads. ‘I have bought some already.’ The voice of the suited man had something unexpected about it . . . forcing itself into unaccustomed English rhythms” (36). “My own lord, my master, oh, my white man, come. Come and take my bread. It’s all yours, my white man, all yours,” one wails desperately (37). Of course, amid the heated protestations of Estella Koomson from the comforts of the car, putting everyone on notice about “fridges too full to contain anything more and of too much bread already bought” (37), most of the hawkers leave empty-handed as only one other succeeds in exacting a tip for which, in return, she pays her benefactor with the customary deferential acknowledgment: “You are a politician . . . a big man . . . I have seen your picture somewhere” (37). Notwithstanding, the point could not have been put across more convincingly regarding not only the bourgeois platitudes but the vanity and self-aggrandizement of the people in the limousine. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’s recuperation of the symbol of the long car thus innovatively develops ideas originally put forward in A Man of the People. The car metaphor is an element borrowed by Armah and

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then transformed into something of his own, but it is remarkable that the awesomeness of the experience of being chauffeured in the expensive car developed in the original text is here not only low in transitivity; it is entirely mocked in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In fact, the splenetic attack mounted on this image’s genealogical assumptions in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born does not merely suggest, in its entirety, authorial innocence; the explicitness of the assault on the essences of the expensive car which disgust and ought to have sickened Odili’s heart is a calculated strategy of subversion, and it is one specifically intended to deflate his strange enchantment with regality. With the Koomsons’ vulgar display of power through the instrument of the luxurious private car placed alongside the terrible ordeals of bad public transport endured on a daily basis by poor people like the man, the brutality of the disparities of wealth becomes even more marked. The brawls that take place in the cramped, filthy buses and the indignity of insults from discourteous taxi drivers such as those witnessed repeatedly by the man mirror the precariousness of life for those who have to depend upon public transportation. The instance on the Wednesday night that the man meets up with Komsoon and Estella on his way home from work readily comes to mind. In the drama of the man’s encounter with the public transport system that unfolds, what strikes a chord with the narrator, the reader can observe, is the disorientation and humiliation to which the less privileged people are subjected by operators of the system, and the resulting trauma. The bus pulls up and there is a wild stampede to board it by “the waiting people”; but “the conductor walks away down the road” to pass “urine hitting the clean-your-city can” (39). He is shortly joined there by the driver. “For a long time they stand by the heap laughing and talking. . . . The driver wanders back, climbs in and goes to sleep over the wheel. The conductor is aiming to go down in the direction of the sellers. A few, fed up with the waiting, climb in anyhow and put their heads to rest against the remaining panes” (39). When the uncivil conductor returns to the bus and barks at the prospective passengers to “Get down! Get down! Have you paid and you are sitting inside?” (39), the reader is informed that those who are inside “climb meekly down and hold out their money to the conductor” (39). In this way, totally insensible of the obligation which both duty and good sense lay upon them to serve their customers, and unwilling to discharge that responsibility, those in charge of the bus show their true colors as two haughty individuals who have a misplaced conception of public service as one in which they will be served rather than a venture of dedicated service

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on others’ behalf. The exasperated narrator is so unnerved, reporting the goings-on from the protagonist’s point of view, as to wonder aloud how it can be that “the poor” are so “rich in patience” (39). What the episode of the man’s bus ride does zero in on is thus the severity and ubiquity of a deteriorating social situation in which the underprivileged people have been conditioned to accept not only overcrowding and poor sanitation but also official insolence as the natural and inevitable realities of their lives. The issue is thus not just the fact that the convenience and luxuriousness of the pleasure car, on the one hand, and the discomfort and squalor of public transport, on the other, should co-exist so uneasily in the same world; not just that readers are sorry that their beloved novel’s hero is handed the short end of the stick. There is the obvious injustice. The laboring-class people are in the thick of the battle, both as workers and as private citizens. It is evident that they are important to the national economy and are alive to their family responsibilities, but they seem condemned to perpetual suffering. However, those in the higher echelons of society are idle yet they enjoy all the comfort in the world. The provocatively and aggressively irreverent outlook in which Armah is steeped, as posited by the overwhelming wash of splenetic tirades and expletives which the narrator issues toward this unjust arrangement, contrasts with the guarded attitude which is expressed in A Man of the People through the gentle and amused irony relayed in the depiction of Odili’s car episode. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is by no means the first African novel to suggest direct links between private morality and public service; but it is certainly a key work in which unapologetic floating of the charge that political elites have too much power and need to be reined in assumes a crucial significance. In pushing this message of democratic equality, dramatizing how the form of socialism practiced in Ghana during Nkrumah’s regime validated lawlessness by the elite is the novel’s manner of providing evidence, if any were needed, of the economic and moral violence inflicted by the political cabal on the state. Above all, the novel shows that the cabal’s inveterate insincerity and its contempt for its own legislation express themselves in how the members violate the laws against free trade by smuggling in banned alcohol and cigarettes while spending time in “some hired place paid for by the government,” where “young juicy vaginas” lie in wait (89–90). To appreciate the fact that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born draws the pictures of moral laxity as historically specific Ghanaian misadventures is thus to see that its perception is opposed to the vision of unsettling continental calamity presented in A Man of the People.

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Not only are all the events, including the coup which eventually topples this corrupt civilian administration, depicted as inevitable processes of localized struggles between competing social groups for the control of power and resources, but The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born seems unambiguous about its satiric goal of holding vice up to scorn and deploys scatological imagery thoroughly to debunk appalling situations, suggestively and openly registering the stand which the narrator takes over difficult moral choices. While in A Man of the People the narrator appears evasive with regard to moral demarcations and drifts all over the place, allowing melancholy, cynicism, and disillusionment to color his perspective, and thus becomes unable to sustain his credibility as an anti-corruption crusader, on its part, partisanship rather than denial or escape from it is the trade mark of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’s spokesperson, who becomes a tenacious and bracing gadfly, stinging the rest of his compatriots into a keener awareness of the concept of ethical boundaries. In fact, to mock any idea that two mutually exclusive patterns of conduct can ever present an irresolvable moral dilemma of choice appears as the priority of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which conveys the premise that the issue is not just to find the easier way out but to discover the ethically defensible option. As a contested form within the postcolonial context, where the role of the writer as pathfinder or teacher is held in sacred trust, ambiguity as a mode of cognition becomes—against the backdrop of a community fractured and threatened by intensifying terrible repercussions of appalling criminalized misbehavior—bare-faced diffidence concerning morality, which can be a costly form of mystification. In places that have wrestled and still continue to wrestle with moral, psychological, social, political, and occasionally religious coming-of-age dilemmas, there, expectation is uniquely high of literature as equipment for living; and many go to fiction, for example, not only looking for clear guidelines but also demanding room for an aesthetic response which can work side by side with a politically-motivated reaction. In such a location, where literature has always been seen as having an important stake in successful national development and the reading process is a moment when readers are treated not just to a feast of resonant formal and stylistic patterns, the ideal is for writing to represent events, images, and people which enhance each inquisitive reader’s knowledge as well as capacity to investigate and range over the political implications of those issues, images, people, and objects for him or herself. As a text that is there to be listened to, savored, and mined for information, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born meets some of these expectations well. Exhibiting recognition of the need for both

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aesthetic appeal and moral clarity early, totally absent from the novel’s structural design is anything to suggest a track of thinking fearful of the moral hard line. There is an exciting coherence in this work about the engagement brought to bear on apparently heterogeneous narrative devices such as the omniscient third-person and the participant first-person point of view. With perfect flow of dialogue and authorial commentary, all working in tandem with the witty play with ideas and words, the novel’s complex arrangement truly seems destined from the start to expand and profoundly deepen the reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the art. Without doubt, the narrated events themselves are discomfiting in the extreme. Through the quest motif from which actions and objects are explored, the narrator observes, reports, and comments upon events, people, and things. Doing so from a vantage point which is sympathetic to the protagonist, the man allows for a scrupulous examining of all the social issues that present themselves. The narrator is pungent in his display of expressive capacity and profound in moral discernment. To the style of social documentary, the narrator brings a blunt speaking voice which is clearly a carry-over from the oral tradition. The descriptions of the filthy streets, and of the actions that give rise to them, for instance, are vividly and painstakingly realized. To illustrate the problem of translating government’s wellmeaning objectives into reality, the narrator exposes how some privileged leaders sabotage the impressive campaign launched by the authorities to keep the nation clean. Huge sums of money are voted by the government for waste receptacles to aid the clean-up scheme; but the petty bourgeois leaders embezzle most of it. Thus, only a few of the required boxes are provided: “The few provided, however,” the narrator observes, “had not been ignored. People use them well, so that it took no time at all for them to get full”: People still used them, and they overflowed with banana peels and mango seeds and thoroughly sucked-out oranges and the chaff of sugarcane and most of all thick brown wrapping from a hundred balls of kenkey. People did not have to go up to the boxes anymore. From a distance they aimed their rubbish at the growing heap, and a good amount of juicy offal hit the face and sides of the box before finding a final resting place upon the heap. (8)

In contrast to Odili’s playful and dispassionate tone, which makes a cavalier dismissal of similar incidents in A Man of the People, the narrator’s satiric voice in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born launches an acrimonious at-

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tack which underlines the necessity for all parties to accept their own share of responsibility for the decline. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born reads in some ways like a novel about urban crisis, ingested as it is with scenes of grime. The blighted face of the city is well represented by “the gloomy building of the post office,” the culture of negligence that bedevils the buildings housing A.G. Leventis, the UTC (Union Trading Company), UAC (United African Company), the French CFAO (Conception et Fabrication Assistée par Ordinateur) and the banister in the dilapidated Railway Administration building. The depictions of all these facilities assist the author in poignantly bringing out the full force of the rage in the narrator’s satiric weaponry: Apart from the wood itself there were, of course, people themselves, just so many hands and fingers bringing help to the wood in its course toward putrefaction. Left-hand fingers in their careless journey from a hasty anus, sliding all the way up the banister as their owners made the return trip from the lavatory downstairs to the offices above. Righthand fingers still dripping with the after-piss and the stale-sweat from fat crotches. The calloused palms of messengers after they had blown their clogged noses reaching for a convenient place to leave well-rubbed moisture. Afternoon hands not entirely licked clean of palm soup and remnants of Kenkey. (12–13)

Relating a failing which is mainly private in nature, having primarily to do with personal hygiene, the indiscretion bemoaned here, for all its grotesqueness, may appear mundane; but the choice of excrement is not fortuitous since body waste is a moral and ethical category. On a deeper level, the story condenses several prominent issues connected to the absence of an exemplary mode of conduct, the lack of public display of decency tormenting this society, and the filth is a metaphor for many of the ills in the country with particular reference to infrastructural decay and official negligence but also the apathy of the general public. The problem of attitudes which look like small things and then actually build up to become bigger crises recurs frequently. In this respect, the story of the fatuous build-up of anal excretion on the walls of the communal restroom maps the intersection of the private and the public spheres and the great part played by small acts denoting absence of integrity, personal honor, hygiene, and responsibility in the individual’s most secret experience in the determination of the quality of life a community can reasonably expect to have. The most salient function of this motif of personal accountability is to indicate how the actions of ordinary citizens who defile their

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environment with apparent glee within the most secluded of public spaces are not any different from those of unscrupulous individuals in positions of authority who fleece with impunity those less powerful than themselves. The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born seems intent upon demonstrating that personal indiscretion, in whatever form and shape it manifests itself, can only lead to a predictable outcome: a horrendous consequence for society at large. In line with the traditional satiric method of exposing to redeem, the tone of disgust in the report of this bizarre incident of restroom obscenity conveys the narrator’s obvious outrage at the loss of common decency. Contrary to the belief of some of the author’s detractors,30 far from expressing the aesthetic discomfort of a foreign tourist, the narrative tone vents a vehement anger which falls within the spectrum of emotions a patriot can be expected to confront under this sort of circumstance. Expressly indignant at the ugly state of affairs—within the context of the mismanagement of the country in general and the indecency in this particular building specifically—the narrator throughout inveighs against the irresponsibility that over time has led to bigger problems in the life of the new nation: a culture of negligence, indecorum, and dereliction of duty, which is indirectly fueled by bureaucratic red tape, corruption, and nepotism ingrained in the country. The novel’s overall structure is plotted to draw fire against these common socio-political and cultural pitfalls by utilizing a plethora of narrative ploys—strategies of exposition and skeptical interrogation—through which the characters in addition profoundly reveal their own personalities while leading the readers to deeper insights into the narrated problems. The closelydrawn sketches of the untidy world all around the protagonist are projected with bold brush strokes made luminous by the power of a gorgeous prose. These life-like portraits make The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born a landmark work of fiction that attempts to capture reality in its full-blown complexity; in its rawness—not a Technicolor version, an idealized mirage. An attempt to pull in everything that is within the narrator’s navigational orbit as he journeys through Nkrumah’s Ghana, his is a true adventure story woven from a mix of smaller tales of ogres such as Teacher, semimonsters (Amankwa and Aboliga the Frog), lunatics and addicts (Maanan and her friends), saints (the man), wicked mother-in-laws (Oyo’s mother), temptresses (Estella Koomson and Oyo), political fraudsters (Joe Koomson), the ordinary Ghanaians and the economic and social torture which they are subjected to, and, in the background, the czar of all czars: the dictator, President Kwame Nkrumah himself. That is why anyone who would want to require the author who is not writing a children’s book to only have eyes

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for a perfection that isn’t there is misguided. The critics who relentlessly fault The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born based primarily on its depiction of the image of Nkrumah appear to misunderstand its consistently realistic ambition—the aspiration to faithful depiction of a recognizable milieu and people. During the years in which he was theorizing about neo-colonialism, it emerges in the novel that Nkrumah did not maintain his original dynamism. He failed to translate his vision of freedom into reality though his understanding of the dynamics of subjugation cannot be underestimated. Policies which looked so well on paper failed woefully; Nkrumah did not deliver, as promises that he made to the commoners failed to materialize. Somewhere along the line, despite his profound awareness of the mechanics of post-imperial control, Nkrumah missed the mark with the tools that he employed in prosecuting the battle against foreign domination. Nkrumah theorized astutely about neocolonialism, but he had no practical solutions to the dilemma of post-imperial misrule; these are the principles behind Armah’s decrying of the former Ghanaian president’s policies.31 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, it is evident, is a variant on the tale of Nigerian post-imperial decline narrated in Achebe’s A Man of the People, from which several of its overarching themes and stylistic patterns are derived. But there are signs that this novel takes the borrowed design to new heights. Intent on keeping political analysis on a strictly realistic basis, the picture which The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born provides of Nkrumah’s regime is much closer to that painted by other Pan-Africanists, such as the Guyanese political theorist Ras Makonnen, who worked under Nkrumah. Makonnen remained loyal to Nkrumah until the leader’’s overthrow in February 1966, though convinced that socialism had broken down and ideas of equality had fallen by the wayside in Ghana’s unsteady match to nationhood. The character of the nation had not altered significantly in favor of the common people precisely because the socialist aspirations failed in Nkrumah’s Ghana due to the fact that the Convention People’’s Party leaders who preached socialism were more deeply capitalistic than westerners, and one “can’t build socialism without socialists.”32 Armah’s account is much closer to Makonnen’s pragmatic insider’s version: both tie Nkrumah’s non-performance to the forces that brought the country to a standstill, dashing the hopes of ordinary people to be lifted from the grips of grinding poverty. It is hard to miss this text’s moral stance: through the conventional style of calling a spade a spade, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born establishes a non-negotiable hierarchy of values. It is evident that for the author, as for Makonnen, also a deeply unconventional thinker, those aspiring to

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leadership in Africa after Nkrumah should rather not be kept ignorant. Like Makonnen, Armah teaches us that, unpalatable as it may be, there are times when the hard truth is what is needed to secure the future of a nation; the cause of independence will be better served by having everyone informed about the intricate snares in the web of neocolonialism which crippled the person who led the first African nation to independence. For both political observers, only by acknowledging and transcending them would successive African leaders have any chance of overcoming the sorts of circumstances that cut the ground from under Nkrumah’s regime. Therefore, to say that ignorance of the issues which distracted the former Ghanaian leader is the worst way for those coming after the failed politician to go about doing the business of state is an understatement. Through the provocative invitation to readers to confront the reality of political corruption in Ghana, this unblinking depiction of his dilemma offered by Makonnen and Armah wields a far more positive service for the cause for which the former Ghanaian leader fought and died than the escapist and defensive posture of some of his critics, who do not deny that Nkrumah’s regime had broken down but would prefer to pay him homage nonetheless.33 The protagonist’s conversation with his wife, Oyo, in this regard, is an outstanding example of the revelatory nature of dialogue. One of the tactical decisions that he has made actually goes against the grain: his tendency toward holding off a debate with his wife, which arises out of his deeply held convictions regarding the value of action over rhetoric. The man scrutinizes Oyo’s expectations dispassionately and concludes that she might have misunderstood him and the ethical codes of his personal conduct, but is reticent about self-disclosure. Bottling up his thoughts only hurts both his cause and their relationship further because Oyo thinks that it is only a matter of time before his conversion to her side, which she is jockeying to pressure him into, is completed; to her, the man is only biding his time, and it won’t be long before he capitulates to undertake the sudden heroic, corrupt, act that will bring her the anticipated wealth. The man’s quiet persistence in his honesty speaks volumes. He perceives the breakdown of communication with his wife as a reflection of a larger barrier between two opposing systems of values. Accordingly, in order to solicit support to deal with the pressures applied by Oyo, he visits his friend, the Teacher, who, ironically, isn’t much help to him. In fact, in Teacher the readers meet an eccentric oddball; one of the most ambiguous characters in African fiction—a vehicle through whom the text’s satiric attack is astringently directed at objects, events, and people, while being himself not immune to the attack.

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Primarily a mode for the embittered swipe directed by the novel at the elite, Teacher opens himself to criticism by his unconventional convictions and conduct. Like the man, he too disapproves of corruption, materialism, and ostentation, but his cowardice and pessimism threaten to defeat the very causes which he advocates. Teacher is quite insightful about the historical background of the continent’s problems, but his negativity is entirely without remedial valence. An incurable cynic, he is thoroughly unreliable. He is doubtless an idealist, but the man provides a far more balanced perspective than any other character in this novel. Not only are all the text’s main episodes woven around his life, but he is the prime embodiment of the novel’s most laudable attributes such as courage, selflessness, and patriotism—concepts which are clearly the story’s governing ideals. Unique in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’s narrative technique is how it complements the man’s perspective with his teacher’s, so that the man becomes not quintessentially mere eyes and ears for his time but an exhibit of unwavering honesty and commitment. The man stands tall and high both among all his immediate peers and among all other pivotal figures in African fiction, including Odili in Achebe’s A Man of the People and the engineer Sekondi in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters. Cast in a far more heroic mold than Odili, when the man pays the Koomsons a visit that is analogous to Odili’s visit to the Nangas, like Odili, he too experiences first hand the temptations of power, but rather than allowing his nearness to the Koomsons’ riches to temper his contempt for corruption, as Odili permitted his proximity to Nanga’s wealth to do, the man is instead strengthened by it in his resolve to maintain his integrity, and so his revulsion for the banalities of power and political immorality only increases. Thus the material treasures of the Koomsons emerge from the man’s point of view as superficially glamorous but nonetheless worthless trifles. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born dramatizes with candor the man’s uncanny ability to see through material pretentiousness, exposing the stupidity of the wild scramble for toys displayed by the politicians while they discard those essential things that sustain life. In the end, and above all else, the man even rallies bravely to refuse to participate in the fraudulent boat deal, putting a great separation with this act between himself and those aligning themselves with the forces threatening the struggle to reinstate healthy moral standards. His wife has tied her whole hope of ever achieving a break to this business, but the man resists all the pressures from her. A true positive role model for all in the public sphere, the man’s behavior stands out in this respect, even from the conduct of his peers such as Maanan, Kofi Billy, Abednego Yamoah, Amankwa,

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and Zacharias Lagos, who all initially tried to live above board, only to slip under the water eventually. While some of them succumb to the irresistible pull of drugs, others give in to the centrifugal forces of corruption. Yet there is an absence of self-conscious boastfulness about him, even when he realizes that he is waging a lonely battle, which greatly endears the man to readers. The man becomes vindicated by the military coup which topples the civilian regime, but the form of political prostitution demonstrated by the actions of a trade unionist in the overthrown regime, who has quickly switched his loyalties to the new power brokers, offers a fertile hint supporting the suppositions of both the narrator and his office mate, the allocations clerk, that it would be naive to equate the mere change of government with fundamental social change. Clearly, the attitude of the man and his changed wife Oyo offer a reasonable starting point. Believable models of progressive action, the man’s vitality and his wife’s new openness toward him are shown when he takes a single leap that recalls his vigorous youth and embraces her while standing “just outside the hall door” (160). The actions on the part of the couple do not present merely a message of solace; they are symbolic expressions of camaraderie. Oyo does not mock her husband’s failures or even vaguely remind him of the material possessions and influence they do not have; instead, she resumes her position as an adoring wife seeking his affections. In the only tender scene involving the couple, the man looks into her eyes and sees “something he would only think of as a deep kind of love, respect” (160). The man’s prospects of succeeding in his future mission are vastly improved by an alteration in attitude towards illegally acquired fortunes that has occurred in his wife Oyo; the couple’s rekindled love exemplifies the vital support that will carry the man forward in his quest for both social and personal self-renewal. Although the signal devices of political satire deployed have varying degrees of effectiveness, Achebe’s denial that A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born share many commonalities of themes and style flies in the face of the evidence. A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born do function in the tradition of socio-political critique, and each occupies a fascinating place in African writing dealing with the important subject of postcolonial disillusionment. The historical and political contexts of the two works are quite similar, though each embodies its author’s unique impressions. The one constant is the unsatisfactory environments in which continental Africans found themselves in the years immediately after political independence. Despite the manifest differences in style that reflect divergences of attitude, talent, and design, the two nov-

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els are pioneering works of socio-political documentation, back to which all subsequent exercises in fiction writing within the genre of realistic postindependence fiction of the continent would lead. Achebe and Armah are two great writers, who now occupy seminal positions in African literature. For many students, if it was Achebe who undoubtedly generated their interest in the field—quite predictably, with his three early novels Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964)—Armah is most likely among those authors who sustained that interest in this now rapidly enlarging body of writing, notably with his splashy The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Conventionally, the two writers have almost always been perceived as representing opposing camps in African writing, but, as shown in the foregoing examination, they have major unifying elements, including a common interest in the trope of oppression and injustice emanating from maladministration in postcolonial Africa, though they approach it with dissimilar stylistic methods. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Armah launches an all-out attack which proposes for creative writing an audacious fighting role to put an end to the massive political improbity on the continent, but Achebe in A Man of the People articulates his reactions in a more subdued and restrained manner which exhibits some sort of moral decorum. Regardless of their common themes, the tenor and direction of their uses of key ingredients of fiction—setting, language, imagery, symbolism, characterization, and satire—are divergent. This is as might be expected; their differences can be ascribed to individual sensibility, in particular Armah’s search through an appeal to the precise reformative power of burlesque satire for the language and form of fiction to stamp his personal touch on techniques evidently borrowed from his Nigerian forerunner. Hence, much of the overall tone of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is distinguished from A Man of the People’s by being decidedly robust, trenchant, and colorful.

NOTES 1. See Chinua Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers,” in Morning Yet On Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 19. 2. See, Ayi Kwei Armah, “Interview with Dimgba Igwe,” Concord [Lagos] (2 Apr. 1987): 11–12). Dismayed at being so mercilessly excoriated by Achebe, Armah’s perplexity soon turns into outrage as he tells of his disappointment that a major challenge presented by his work for critical thinking, close reading, the scientific method, and the spirit of inquiry is lost to the imperative of opinion.

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Armah wonders aloud that opinion could carry such special weight in the thinking of someone like Achebe, whom many—including Armah himself—look up to for artistic direction, and asks how it could be that Achebe could have been so totally repulsed by a work modeled after his own as to be so virulent in his criticism of it. Indeed, so unbending had Achebe been in distancing himself from the work of the younger Ghanaian author that, Armah claims in another context, acting on Achebe’s prepublication advice, the Heinemann African Writers Series nearly sabotaged the publication of the novel to begin with (Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” Asemka 4 [1976], pp. 1–14). The fact that the perceptions of Nigeria’s foremost novelist were to spread quickly gives an indication of how interpretations of African literary phenomena have been clouded by the shadows of unoriginal thinking. Instead of developing their own independent judgments, other readers were taken in entirely by those views on Armah’s novel, to the extent of even giving them further elaboration—as a result of which an influential school of reading quickly developed around those ideas, with the critics joining forces with Achebe in finding Armah marginally short of their conception of an ideal writer in a formerly colonized territory. 3. See Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (London: Heinemann, 1966) and Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969). All page references to the two novels refer to these editions. 4. On the basis primarily of these two works, Achebe and Armah ought to be a natural comparison since they share a mutual thematic engagement. Paradoxically, the duo has so far remained among the least likely candidates for influence-hunting in African literature—some of the common grounds between the two having been obscured largely by the fury of the public disclaimers which one of them (Achebe) has stoutly issued to the feasibility of being placed in the same box with the very writer who is more like him than any other, whatever he may claim. Heated as Achebe’s voiced objections to being bracketed with Armah have been, Abiola Irele was the first to call attention to the “respective designs, references and executions” which link their fiction with a cluster of other African novels of the same period in a laconic essay, “A New Mood in the African Novel” (West Africa, September 20, 1969, pp. 1113–15). And at least one other critic, Emmanuel Obiechina, has not only extended the list to include Wole Soyinka and Okot p’Bitek but has given us an exhaustive inventory of those features that bind all of them together. In a probing piece of commentary, “Post-Independence Disillusionment in Three African Novels” (in Neo-African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn. Ed. Bernth Lindfors and Ulla Schild, Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976), which arrived at a particularly significant moment to outline the substantial common ground that exists between Achebe and Armah, and by implication dispels doubts about conversation among African writers, Obiechina outlines with methodological rigor those heady events that form the subject matter of the post-independence West African writers. Opening up the space for exploration of the evidence he will set forth for the conviviality with which authors flirt with common ideas and

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techniques, Obiechina displays a knowledge of how writers’ backgrounds lend vibrancy to criticism, and his description of the sociological contents which animate post-independence African texts is not only contextually sensitive to each writer’s background but his sociological imagination goes well beyond matters of content, taking in its sweep matters of form, charting the relationships between ideology, genre, and aesthetics. After noting “the economic equation” in the new states, whereby “those who maintain bourgeois standards do so at the expense of those whose fortunes must be depressed,” Obiechina lays emphasis on aspects whereby, because “most of the available resources are government controlled [and] the distribution of these resources is vested in politicians or those who have replaced them as government . . . the political struggle is so murderous because anyone in power never wants to let go of the reins” (135). The result is anarchy; in his words: “A vicious circle exists here. Everyone is eager to receive his fair share of the national cake. Those in power are aware that to make more than others they must continue as the sharers, that is, they must retain political control. But they are aware that there are many outside sharpening their knives and eager to get in and cut their own slice. So, while he is at it, the politician tries to cut as much as he can, for the rainy day. Those outside become more and more frantic as those within batten on the national cake. They may try to stop them through constitutional means, but this may not always be possible when those in power neutralize this machinery or those outside are too impatient to go through its processes. The situation generates instability, plots and counterplots, coups and countercoups, most of which may not bring fundamental differences except to replace one set of the ‘eating bourgeoisie’ with another set” (135). The comments by Obiechina can arguably pass for a review that is as accurate and thoughtful as can be obtained of the rapacious greed and venality handled in the novels of Achebe, Soyinka, and Armah. Obiechina’s identification of what he calls the use of identical stylistic devices by the three authors is now only in need of fine-tuning: what he refers to as the similar use of the persona, or narrators who “represent the author as well as have an independent existence,” “the blunt speaking” style that calls “things by their proper names,” and the employment of “scatology”—a technique used to “prick the vast bubble of false respectability blown up by the African elite”—are in need of critical examination in order that one can make a determination of the different tenors of each author’s employments of these devices, as there are clear distinctions that can be drawn between the three authors’ uses of those devices. Taking these issues up, sequentially, in relation to A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, we see not only affinitive links but areas of remodeling in the terms which the focus of Obiechina’s essay did not particularly make evident. The goal of mapping the individual texts in terms of their contrasting shapes, directions, contours, rearrangements, and of the effects of their deployment of satiric weaponry is to enable a composite picture of the variations in method

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brought into play in the two texts, between the original and the copy, to come sharply into view. 5. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958) and Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964). 6. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1964) and Petals of Bloood (London: Heinemann, 1978); Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood Trans. F. Price (London: Heinemann, 1960). 7. Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 156. 8. See, for instance, Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991, 138). Zabus has painstakingly provided a listing of proverbs in Achebe’s fiction, and observes, for instance, of his most political early novel, Arrow of God, that it is, “in Achebe’s oeuvre and possibly in the West African euro-phone corpus of fiction, the novel which has the largest number of proverbs—a minimum of 129.” 9. See Onuora Nzekwu, The Wand of Noble Wood (London: Heinemann, 1961) and Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds (London: Heinemann, 1969). 10. The case can be made, then, that the proverb has been the Igbo writers’ most potent weapon in a tradition of writing in which, to borrow Daniel Corkey’s words, they, as colonized persons, present a discourse that seeks “to explain the quaintness of the humankind of this land, especially the native humankind, to another human-kind that was not quaint, that was standard” (Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, Cork: Cork University Press, 1931), pp. 7–8. 11. See, for example, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (London, 1801); E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (London: Harcourt Brace and World, 1924); Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1984). 12. Igbo masquerade performances in their traditional contexts, then, were activities with a role not unlike that of the “entertainment-mask celebration” show cases of the Baule people of Cote d’Ivoire reported by Susan Vogel, in which “People stress that their reason for producing these masks performances is only because of pleasure (fe, sweetness). The adoption of Goli at a time of social anxiety and political reversals, and the dancing of Goli and of the Mblo dance Gbagba for funerals, are connected to their value as distractions offering psychological relief in times of stress. It is difficult to describe the sense of rapture that invades a village toward the end of a day-long performance; it is almost impossible to evaluate the pride felt in this thing that belongs to the village, and the satisfaction of having helped to produce such a marvelous spectacle. As knots of people drifting home describe and relive the high points of the day, exhausted but having eaten and drunk their fill, the euphoric afterglow spreads a remarkable peace and cohesiveness among the villagers” (Susan M. Vogel, African Art, Western Eyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 140). 13. Rosemary Colmer, “Quis Custodies Custodiet? The Development of Moral Values in A Man of the People,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 97.

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14. In an otherwise insightful study presenting a dissenting view in Writers and Politics in Nigeria (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), critic James Booth argues that if there is any redeeming quality in Odili, it may well lie in the absence of any form of moral self-righteousness about him. Odili becomes for him “a most subtle device for exploring the relation between ideals and reality, the moral world and the world of politics” because his “harshest verdicts” are often passed on himself. Odili’s “underlying integrity and high ideals never waver” but he “continually points out to the reader the failure of himself and of his society to achieve such integrity in practice,” leading Booth to the conclusion that his “characteristic tone is one of self distrust” (101–102). If the observations by Booth were accurate, then, at a time when education was assumed to be a major weapon of empowerment and there was high expectation about the role the educated elite could play in the making of the country, to exhibit the kind of apathy and arrogance associated with Odili is to have rendered oneself feeble and totally irrelevant to the political struggle. In any case, since he doesn’t quite sound like someone with a troubled confidence either about the clarity of his visual sense or about the rightness of the views he puts forward with such evident force, reading self-irony into Odili’s actions would appear far-fetched. The tone with which Odili delivers his vision of the good society and citizenship that he stands for when delivering his critique, both on the poor and on Nanga, as well as on other entities throughout the text, typically is without self-deprecatory humor; as such, the knife of irony wielded by him doesn’t quite cut like a double-edged sword. 15. As to why A Man of the People is thin on texture and makes its narrator a character such as Odili, who demonstrates a heinous dearth of empathy toward a problem many would consider the postcolonial state’s most pernicious, Obiechina surmises that it is because of the author’s own “uneasiness in the Lagos setting,” adding “He had lived in Lagos, with only a few intermissions, between 1954 and 1966, during his career in the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, but it is likely that he never really got into the spirit and rhythm of life of that turbulent city. Lagos must have seemed to him, in his quiet, self-possessed, sober, introspective life, a threatening whirlpool round which it would be necessary to pick one’s way cautiously to avoid being drawn in” (150). Identifying Achebe’s own compatriots Cyprian Ekwensi and Wole Soyinka, respectively, as examples of those writers whose “outgoing temperament” and “dramatist’s cosmopolitan temperament, by contrast, prepared them to explore the physical realities of Lagos in a way which Achebe’s more retiring, introspective nature must have inhibited” (150), Obiechina underlines something inexorable—the latent life of an author in literary expression. The remark by Obiechina, in stark terms, thus zeroes in on A Man of the People’s main limitation as a novel in the realm of satire. As a novel in the realist mode, where art is expected to help readers understand the difference between right and wrong or at least assist them in scrutinizing the nexus of ideas, thoughts, and other forms of action that underlines the principles of upright and exemplary living, the limitations of A Man of the People become all too self-evident.

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16. David Carroll, Chinua Achebe (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 128. At the root of the scandal of the adopted first-person point of view as a preferred narrative ploy in A Man of the People is the character of the narrator, Odili Samalu, who, in critic Rosemary Colmer’s apt terms in her essay “Quis Custodies Custodiet? The Development of Moral Values in A Man of the People,” (Kunapipi 12. 2 [1990], p. 100), “constantly vacillates between moral sentiment and underhand action, so that what audience sympathy he has is established by the narrative form, not by his firm stand for a moral philosophy” (90). A good question is why A Man of the People has endowed a narrator who totally lacks, in Nigerian scholar Biodun Jeyifo’s words (“For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience and the Predicament of Obierika,” Kunapipi 12.2 [1990], p. 60), “positive currents of values, predispositions, identity” with such a major role. Another Nigerian scholar and critic, M. J. C Echeruo suggests in his essay “Chinua Achebe” (In A Celebration of Black and African Writing. Ed. Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan, Zaria and London: Ahmadu Bello University Press and Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 161): “A Man of the People is not Achebe’s best novel,” and blames its point of central fault on “the moral character of the world of the novel . . . the absence of a system of accepted values by which the character of Odili or of Chief Nanga can be evaluated independently of history.” Echeruo maintains that the novel’s main defect arises from how “Achebe allowed himself a cynicism which did not permit him to invent such ‘accepted’ values” (161). This thesis of cynicism can be extended to indicate that the author’s sympathetic handling of both Odili, and, to a lesser extent, Chief Nanga, indicates an uncertainty in his own values at this time. Although Achebe, in his essay “Africa and Her Writers,” expresses the ground of his disliking of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born as being its espousal of a luxury of cynicism that Africa cannot yet afford, it might not be incorrect to say that this criticism could be applied even more to his own novel A Man of the People than to The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. “Perhaps when we too have overreached ourselves in technical achievement without spiritual growth, we shall be entitled to despair. Or, who knows? We may even learn from the history of others and avoid that particular fate,” Achebe states, emphatically (“Africa and Her Writers,” p. 38). Achebe refers to what he describes as the dominance of “the existential ennui,” to which he says the novel fell prey. He can grant that “European art and literature have every good reason for going into a state of despair,” but states, perhaps in an implicit explanation of what he refers to disparagingly as “the human syndrome,” that he is not yet willing to extend such an indulgence to Africa because “the worst we can afford at present is disappointment” (38). Expounding the terms of his disaffection with what he regards as Armah’s capitulations to “universalistic pretensions” further, he disparages what he dubs Armah’s “attempts to have what Europe would call a modern story and Africa a moral fable, at the same time, to relate the fashions of European literature to the men and women of Ghana” (40). He attacks the novel for supposedly failing to give a faithful representation of what he describes as the “Ghanaian” experience. But, not only does the critique’s vagueness manifest one of the shortcomings of a generally impressionistic style that finds itself unable to grasp the complex artistic devices with

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which Armah responds to the political situation in the continent, the allegation that not even the employment of “a few realistic ingredients,” like Kwame Nkrumah, to bolster the novel’s setting, could modulate its inherently nihilistic thrust toward an expression of the modern conditions of alienation and isolation in general is more applicable to Achebe’s own A Man of the People. Achebe’s novel could certainly use his own prescription that “just as the hero [of Armah’s novel] is nameless, so should everything else be” (39). See Chinua Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers,” in Morning Yet On Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), pp. 29–45. 17. Gerald Moore, Twelve African Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980): 137. 18. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 123. 19. Eustace Palmer, An Introduction to the African Novel (London: Heinemann, 1972): 72. 20. Rosemary Colmer, “Quis Custodies Custodiet? The Development of Moral Values in A Man of the People,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 100. 21. Rosemary Colmer. Ibid., p. 100. 22. Emmanuel Obiechina, “Post-Independence Disillusionment in Three African Novels.” Neo-African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn. Ed. Bernth Lindfors and Ulla Schild (Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976): 135. 23. The view that A Man of the People sounds a prophetic note which looked forward to the spate of military coups in the 1960s in Africa was one that gained considerable authority. For example, Bernth Lindfors, a leading proponent of it, claims in his essay “Achebe’s African Parable” (now reprinted in Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Ed. C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, London: Heinemann, 1979) that “Achebe ended the novel with a military coup in order to enlarge the picture to include Nigeria’s neighbors, many of which had experienced coups.” For him, “by universalizing the story in this way, Achebe could suggest to his countrymen that what had happened in other unstable independent African countries might easily have happened in Nigeria too. The coup was meant as an African parable, not a Nigerian prophecy” (254). It is Lindfors’ further conviction that “the novel owes as much to what Achebe had observed in his own country.” However, since the story is not anchored in a uniquely Nigerian locale, one which makes an explicit distinction between the provincial and the universal, the lack of corporeal locus makes the situation presented in A Man of the People inapplicable to “other independent African countries,” rendering the overall assessment by Lindfors, especially the argument that by “ending with a coup, an event anticipated yet still unknown in Nigeria but familiar elsewhere in Africa, Achebe added a dimension of universality to his story,” unpersuasive (254). 24. Eric Heyne, “Towards a Theory of Literary Non-Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 488. 25. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007): 17.

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26. George Levine, How to Read the Victorian Novel (Malden: Blackwell, 2007): 33. 27. O. R. Dathorne, African Literature in the Twentieth Century (London: Heinemann, 1975): 105. 28. Charles Nnolim, “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” African Literature Today 10 (1979): 223. 29. Samuel Omo Asien, “Symbolic Setting in the South African Novel,” Studies in the African Novel. Ed. Samuel Omo Asein and Albert Olu Ashaolu (Ibadan: Ibadan UP, 1986): 209. 30. Foremost among these are Kofi Awoonor, Arthur Gakwandi, and Ama Ata Aidoo; see, for instance, Kofi Awoonor, “Panel on Contemporary South African Poetry,” Issue 6.1 (1976: 5–13, 22–40; Arthur Gakwandi, The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1977), and Ama Ata Aidoo, Preface to Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969): vii–xii. 31. Attempting to clarify the grounds of his objecting to being classified with Armah and another African writer, Yambo Ouologuem, author of Bound to Violence, nearly ten years after first voicing his disapproval, Achebe says that he and these two writers are “committed to different things altogether. You must find out what is going on in the society. Even in your anger you must feel kinship to your society, not alienation from it. Nkrumah was one of the few leaders in Africa who understood what was going on in the world and tried to do something about it. Armah’s The Beautyful Ones . . . is a cold, uncommitted indictment of Nkrumah, of the only serious political experiment that has ever been attempted in Ghana” (37). But here it becomes clear that Achebe’s argument does not unfold unproblematically because it once again begs the question, for at issue is not the clarity of Nkrumah’s understandings of the tentacles of colonial control. Rather in question is Nkrumah’s answer to problems he appears to have all too fully grasped. For Armah, it is not sufficient that Nkrumah “understood what was going on in the world and tried to do something about it”; it becomes a necessity that, in assessing the first independent African country with a symbolic history, Armah indicates that the quality of the leadership should be filtered through the prism of dispassionate evaluation as leadership is more about solutions than diagnosis of problems which does not necessarily require the marks of a torchbearer. See Chinua Achebe, “Panel Discussion,” Issue 6 (1976): 37. 32. Asante, S. K. B. “Obituary: Ras Makonnen.” West Africa (24 Sept. 1984): 1944. 33. See Ama Ata Aidoo, Preface to Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968): vii–xii and Ben Obumselu, “Marx, Politics and the African Novel,” Twentieth Century Studies 10 (1973): 107–27. For a dissenting view, see Neil Lazarus’s “Optimism of the Will, Pessimism of the Intellect” (Research in African Literatures 18.2 [1987]: 137–175), a solid defense of Armah against accusations that his “expose and repudiation of the Eurocentrism of Ghana’s elite” represents “the expression of a misanthrope’s disapproval of people in general.” Lazarus argues, instead, that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is centrally concerned not with life-negating but with life-giving values.

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4 ON THE POLITICS OF LOVE Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Bessie Head’s Maru

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he emblematic treatment of ill-fated compatibility challenges connected to culturally prohibited inter-class/ethnic group formalized romantic attachment initiatives, as a result of irremediable prejudice, is the binding preoccupation of the respective novels of the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and his South African compeer Bessie Head, No Longer at Ease (1960) and Maru (1971).1 With the publication of Achebe’s early novel No Longer at Ease, written in response to historical and cultural pressures in the wake of the colonial encounter, the trope of the Berlin Wall in human relationships that was to be picked up and re-examined from several perspectives in subsequent West African fiction became firmly established. No Longer at Ease can be said to have heralded the increasing interest within the region during the century in the volatile issue of differential treatment, which complicates our picture of discrimination occasioned by ethnic barriers such as the obvious ones existing between blacks and whites prominently depicted, for example, in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? (1972). The treatment of this subject helped to expand the landscape of favoritism horror stories to include those associated with the latent or overt cross-ethnic strife that routinely sets the Yoruba and Igbo apart, eminently portrayed in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper (1965), and the drama of simmering ethnic hostility of Itsekiri and their Igbo neighbors toward each other, enacted most poignantly in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1983).2 Part sentimental novel and part socio-political chronicle of the explosive issue of inequality, while training a sharp lens on the hugely disempowering effects of relationship crises induced by fractious identity politics, No Longer at Ease memorably extends the reach of the narratives of coupling. Remarkable for how it is loaded with ironies, this novel’s structural design 123

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is built on its subtexts of unexpected twists and turns of events. In every dimension of ironic exploration in the novel, emphasis is placed on how event outcomes painfully turn out to be entirely the opposite of what is expected, with the central unifying element being how marriage—which ought to unite people—becomes a venue for divisiveness. In this context, the chance encounter of the two key individuals, main character Obi Okonkwo and his girlfriend Clara—the reference points through which the terrifying reality of exclusion connected to class among the Igbo of Nigeria is pried into in the text, one might say—is the obvious place to begin a discussion of the ironic pattern to which the novel is cut. The occasion of the first meeting of Obi and Clara is of course a dance held by the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons. During this initial meeting a strong passion sweeps over Obi, who is instantly struck by Clara’s glowing beauty and drawn like a magnet to her in a sexually provocative episode. She, however, is unimpressed by him—especially as he is clumsy and steps all over her feet on the dance floor. Theirs is thus not exactly a mutual love-at-first-sight situation—as even their brief conversation on the occasion testifies. However, falling head over heels for Clara and eager to woo her, Obi attempts to maintain some sort of communication, even though she doesn’t give a second thought to him or the idea of any future with him. It is not until the two coincidentally meet up again on a ship, the Sasa, during their return journey to Nigeria after their education that Obi’s persistence finally lights the romantic flame which, in a manner of speaking, ends up burning Clara’s heart to ashes. One glaring fact worth noting at the outset is how origins anticipate the ends in the text. Every minute detail of the experience of Clara and Obi exemplifies this circularity of circumstances. The two immediately find solidarity in their resistance to the bigotry that commonly constitutes a routine reality for the members of immigrant communities in England, but become torn apart by a home-made variant of the same condition upon returning to their Nigerian homeland. It is particularly ironic that when the protagonist Obi, son of Nwoye and grandson of Okonkwo (the hero of Things fall Apart), and the woman who will become his fiancé, Clara Okeke, a descendant of the stigmatized osu caste, encounter racial discrimination in England they cope with it by retreating into the cloak of ethnicity, speaking their native Igbo language whenever they feel the pangs of exclusion, whether subtle or blatant. Then, returning to their own country of birth (Obi with a degree in English literature and Clara a diploma in nursing), they find themselves torn apart by a variation of the same menace, which lies hidden within the same ethnicity that once was a source of succor. The pair

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can clearly see that the awful and persistent chilling experience of ethnic prejudice cuts just as deeply and with equivalent intensity. Travel generates contact with difference, which gives rise to discrimination, but in the case of Obi and Clara return does not alleviate or avert the same dilemma. It is quite out of keeping with the context of a courtship which seems initially to be nurtured by reciprocal romantic love, and in which everything about the partners gives early promise they will make an ideal couple, that the customary rewards of intimate relations are quickly superseded by the anxieties that come with the knowledge that Clara is thought to be beneath Obi’s family station. The reader certainly sees in the paradigmatic couple two parallel personalities, but Clara’s complementary personal attributes make her the perfect love match for Obi. Gifted with a big heart, Clara is benevolent, compassionate, courageous, cool, steadfast, pragmatic, selfless, rational, flexible, and imbued with a high sense of purpose and deliberativeness. Clara shows her true colors, for example, when she generously puts her buoyant economic status at Obi’s disposal at his time of need, lending him fifty pounds. And, though personally shattered, Clara is also the first to try to offer to walk away from their relationship when she comes down in support of dissolving it before the controversy that arises over their engagement can gather steam. It is a magnanimous thing to do that Clara encourages Obi to act in his own best interest regardless of how, as agonizing as it might be, the break-up would negatively affect her. The contrast with Obi is clear enough. Tending in sensibility more toward the escapist than the realist, more toward the reckless individualist than the team-player, Obi is a bookish, faint-hearted individual: self-serving, egocentric, perfidious, and not particularly streetwise, kind, or reflective. Prone to a shady attitude, Obi’s dismal failure despite his high hopes shows that he could definitely have leaned upon Clara, as relying on her commodious capacity for sustaining support could certainly have facilitated his growth in the areas of his personal attitude deficiencies, where there is plenty of room for improvement. Foremost among the arenas in which Obi is completely lacking is heightened consciousness of the code which says that one should never quit fighting to put oneself last in any serious relationship. There is no doubt that maintaining his affectionate loyalty to Clara could have ensured a steady supply of something more than joy that is palpable for Obi: Clara is represented as a woman of means as well as of immense strength of character, and, together, the two balance each other out. Enlisting Clara’s support fully would have significantly eased for Obi the onerous burden of grappling alone with the myriad problems confronting a young graduate trying to settle down into a senior civil service

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post. In addition to the challenges of acute financial difficulties triggered by not living within his means while trying to meet societal expectations and the demands of high civil service status, Obi has to contend with other temptations of power such as bribery and corruption. But being not only a man so thoroughly blind to himself as not to know who he really is but a weakling to boot, Obi shows he does not possess the moral strength to hold out single-mindedly against the opposition. So, instead of standing by his woman, once Obi allows class prejudice to come between them it is easy to understand why he allows himself also to be seduced by the other temptations of power. The violation of the individual’s right to self-determining choice of a spouse is unjust; the breach of the freedoms of Obi and Clara to honor a pledge of engagement in particular attains tragic stature. This is the case not merely because the imposition represents an assault upon the companionate ideal—the claim to free choice of partners—and personal autonomy, but, more importantly, because of the voluptuousness of the bond of affection they already enjoy: the high quality of their love. From Obi’s perspective, throughout the early period of their involvement with each other, so thoroughly unutterable is the pleasure of Clara’s company that all his stories emphasize his enchantment with their chemistry—the dizzying effect of Clara’s love. Obi refers repeatedly to how mind-blowing Clara’s love is. Such is the strength of his love object’s personal attributes it is all-consuming, and the value that Obi places on his moments of rendezvous with Clara is higher than anything else in his life. The sparks of dazzling energy which the mere presence of Clara releases involuntarily about her enclose Obi in what might usefully be thought of in terms of what Felicity Nussbaum has described elsewhere as “a heightened utopian fantasy confined by its own rules.”3 It is surely as if Clara’s love transports Obi to a powerful state of utopia that overwhelms him and leaves him suspended in an intensely emotional attitude. As readers learn, there is something special about Clara: “Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention. It was not that he was indifferent to women. On the contrary, he had been quite intimate with a few in England—a Nigerian, a WestIndian, English girls, and so on. But these intimacies which Obi regarded as love were neither deep nor sincere. . . . With Clara it was different. It had been from the very first. There was never a superior half at Obi’s elbow wearing a patronizing smile” (63). Despite her being the first fulfilling love for Obi and the strong pull of passion that Clara feels for him too, the all-out attack on her class status in-

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validates the ideal of wedlock as the natural climax of a love affair between two individuals. It clearly reflects Achebe’s accomplishment as a natural storyteller that in No Longer at Ease readers comprehend the intransigence of ethnic intolerance that mars the perfect companionate love of Obi and Clara from a rich, multiple perspective. The bewildering experience of the trauma of second-class citizenship is conveyed in this novel not only through the personal catastrophe and account of the aggrieved victims of the injustice but also through the eyes and conceptualizations of the history of this unjust practice offered by witnesses of the unfairness both distant and near. From the moment Obi makes his intentions known to her, for instance, the fears Clara entertains concerning conjugal commitment are relayed in no uncertain terms, and her misgivings about incompatibility justifiably have less to do with accord in temperament. It is certainly not insignificant that the story does not celebrate the fact that Obi shares none of Clara’s passion for the cinema. But what really sets Clara apart is the lack of commonality of background rather than companionability. Thus, while Clara does have deep concerns, they are about her “outing.” Clara’s fear of imminent disclosure of her secret forbidden caste status is all the more momentous since she is conscious of the inevitability of ethnic class union given that her society mandates a bipolar choice between marriage of the free-born on one hand and that of the bond people on the other, with no room ever provided for innovation or compromise. It is not exactly that Clara is engaged in the practice of “passing” (the phenomenon of an Igbo bondswoman sophisticated enough to pass for free born). But she is clearly apprehensive about winning the conjugal consent of Obi’s parents on account of her family connections. Hence, in as much as she is just as anxious as he is “to be formally engaged,” Clara is hesitant to let Obi announce their engagement or indeed to tell “his people about her” (40). And Clara’s anxieties of harmony are confirmed by the tide of opposition to their marriage proposal, the resistance to embracing the other registered forcefully by both Obi’s parents and the members of the Lagos branch of the Umofia Progressive Union, the extensive group of kinsmen who paid for his berth to England. While Obi’s Lagos kinsfolk are clearly far from encouraging of his announced plans of intermarriage with a member of a subordinate group, those most sensitive to the class designations are his parents. Undoubtedly, as a culturally invincible woman who is ardently loved by her suitor but not esteemed by him—or by his parents or his associates— the lot of Clara is an unenviable one. Indeed, the ambivalence toward and mistreatment of Clara that appear so blatant bear all the plot ingredients of

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romantic mishap. In this context, the lack of willpower summoned, especially on Obi’s part, to defy the establishment ideas regarding the assumed inferiority of outsiders like the osu peoples dramatizes how the novel bows to the tyranny of conservative values—the triumph of the real over the ideal. The way in which the ideal of lasting love being crystallized around the couple is sacrificed for conservative values, and both Obi and Clara are made casualties of the divisive forces of bigotry, underscores the almost unthinkable cruelty of those entrenched conservative values and the insensitivity of peddlers of obsessive and over-bearing self-importance. To be an osu among the Igbo is a hard fate; it is to be excluded, persecuted, isolated or cut dead with no sympathy, no matter how physically or attitudinally attractive one is. It is therefore with absolute diffidence that Obi attempts to dismiss the problematic nature of the question of ethnic diversity, and to shrug off the importance of the division of people into classes and the associative standings thereby designated by birth, vainly alluding to and drawing spiritual support for his arguments from Biblical precedents of the democratizing annulments of such practices. With resonant force, Obi is sternly issued an injunction by his father to back down from a path that is bound to visit subjection upon his family line; the father’s ruling “You cannot marry the girl” (120) conveys the finality with which objections raised by him are communicated in ramping up the effort to force retreat upon the young man. Refusing to let his son marry an osu, Obi’s father reveals his own complicity with the reigning societal ideology of class supremacy. He lets it be known that the idea of marriage with class enemies is beyond the pale, anchoring it in the ritual origins of the belief. Within this ideology, one simply cannot conceive of the possibility of such a matrimonial transaction as it will amount to unholy wedlock; therefore, Obi’s father gives his son no option except to conform to the prescribed social order. Obi’s father explains the matter that weighs heavily on his mind as follows: I know Josiah Okeke [Clara’s father] very well. . . . I know him and I know his wife. He is a good man and a great Christian. But he is osu. Naaman, captain of the host of Syria, was a great man and honourable, he was also a mighty man of valour, but he was a leper. . . . Osu is like leprosy in the minds of our people. I beg of you, my son, not to bring the mark of shame and leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generations will curse your memory. It is not for myself I speak; my days are few. You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry?

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Think of that, my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters (121).

The passage underlines the potent nature of the deeply ingrained belief among the Igbo concerning the irremediable status of caste; in particular, how the dominant Igbo culture treats membership in a marginalized group as a deadly affliction that cannot be remedied. Not even Christianity can diminish the force of xenophobia here; and so stalwart people of the Christian faith, of the likes of Obi’s parents, become unable to overlook difference or to allow that the social distance created by it can ever be bridged. This is a measure of the intractability of the effect of otherness, the dominance of the ideology of class purity. For all his professed confidence in the redemptive power of the blood of Jesus, for instance, Obi’s father is unwilling to rise above the sinister hold of ethnic chauvinism and employs countervailing scriptural evidence justifying his action. The Bible is awash with incidents of bigotry, Obi is warned by his father in the heated exchanges between them, and he is enjoined not to threaten the purity of his family line by assimilating with those upon whom society has heaped scorn; instead he is exhorted to rise to the occasion and tightly hold down the lid that is keeping the commoners and the nobility in their respective compartmentalized spaces. On her part, Obi’s mother does not balk at the task of taking on the crusade to extend the purity of her family. She shows she will never concede her baseline authority as a parent who does little to question how both official and unwritten legislation strengthens the construction of the ethnic hatred prohibiting the intermingling or yoking of people of unequal statuses. She couches her indignant disapproval in terms of a fearful and ominous dream that she had: I dreamt a bad dream, a very bad dream one night. I was lying on a bed spread with white cloth and I felt something creepy against my skin. I looked down on the bed and found that a swarm of white termites had eaten it up, and the mat and white cloth. Yes, termites had eaten up the bed right under me. (122)

The connection with her future, especially its meaning of impending doom, is clarified, Mrs. Okonkwo explains, with the arrival of a letter from Obi’s friend Joseph that breaks the dreadful news of her son’s plan to marry an osu: I saw the meaning of my death in the dream. Then I told your father about it. . . . I have nothing to tell you in this matter except one thing. If you want to marry this girl, you must wait until I am no more. If God hears my prayers, you will not wait long. . . . But if you do the thing

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Images of fury and frustration, anger, helplessness, utter incomprehension, mortified bewilderment, unending agony, existential anguish, immobilizing shock and despair, terror, outrage, and pain permeate this scene of horrified reaction to the imagined threat posed by the very idea of intermarriage. It could, in fact, be argued that the emotions that are thrown up here do not differ markedly from the almost instinctive, panicked reaction to miscegenation once prevalent in several parts of Europe, apartheid South Africa, and the United States. The cry that pours forth from Obi’s mother’s mouth is extraordinary for its urgency and intensity. It comes from the heart. Jittering, she is wondering if he will carry through his disconcerting plot to give up his privileged inheritance. Conveying her palpable dread and dismal view of the prospect of wedlock between her free-born son and a presumed outcast, Obi’s mother entreats and cajoles him to pull back from his declared intentions. Through the intermittent use of theatricality, she permits the flow of her emotive delivery to be interrupted at intervals, and garners the force of atmosphere, employing over-determined pauses and silences, body movements or gestures to ground the swell of her claims. Obi’s mother is thus saying more than just that he should not marry Clara on account of their incompatibility. She is declaring, much more ominously, that marrying Clara will not only be his personal ruin but that it will spell doom for the future of his whole family. In the wake of the enormous sway exerted by the ideology of class purity, Obi starts to yield: from this point on his spirit of inclusiveness begins to lose its force and with it goes Clara’s great appeal for him. Obi argues cogently that Igbo society’s failure to accommodate difference harmoniously is an irrefutable sign of arrogance. Surprisingly, however, faced with the critical question of whether or not to marry Clara he acts sheepishly and ignorantly by buckling under the weight of the oppositional pressure. Failing woefully to realize the great asset she is, Obi’s eventual separation from Clara, following her wicked rejection by him, serves to provide first-hand proof of his own gullibility and comes with a consequence that far exceeds the moral repercussions of the abortion which she subsequently undergoes. A separation that is in neither Obi’s nor Clara’s best interest, at one level their disengagement is an allegory of the defeat of the elemental egalitarian instincts by repressive forces that hold powerless people down and dispossesses them by insisting on genetic differentiation due to a lack of recognition by all parties of the need for mutual respect and tolerance.

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The glory of Obi’s pedigree had grounded itself on irreverence and revolt: through his father Isaac’s disowning of the general character of the tradition of warriordom, violence, brutality, rigidity, severe bearing, and imbalance associated with his own father, Okonkwo, in favor of the fringe of convention, as well as his grandfather Okonkwo’s renouncement of his own improvident father, Unoka. So why is parental permission (or conformism) so important to Obi? Obi is hopelessly fickle and passive where the rubber meets the road; that is why he does not keep faith with the gallant stride of his forefathers in the exercise of independent thinking. By submitting rather meekly to the dominant prejudicial scorn, Obi thereby effectively robs himself of the ability to make the good judgment to stick with the plan to marry Clara. The decision by Obi to go with the public’s word against Clara of course renders him liable to the charge of not taking personal responsibility when it comes to things that really matter. Obi’s finally giving a nod to the pressures that demand Clara’s repudiation is particularly ironic because he is someone who has flouted convention in other areas. For instance, upon first returning from overseas Obi, fancying himself the exemplar of originality and out of contempt for the pretentiousness of ceremonial fanfare, goes against the public expectation of him to check in at an exclusive hotel and instead sleeps at his friend Joseph’s modest apartment. He then naively turns up at his welcome party in the wrong attire, doubly disappointing the audience by adopting the wrong language of address by choosing to speak in monotone English that is devoid of affectation and the highfalutin or ornate idiom typical of Nigerians who return home from years of overseas residence. The implications for all Obi’s future enterprises of Clara not being in his corner are monumental. Draining all the energy out of him, her loss makes life begin increasingly to lose the sense of coherence that it has for him and Obi becomes not only financially but morally bankrupt. Following Obi’s estrangement from Clara is a calamitous loss of his emotional and cognitive control over many critical circumstances in both his public and his private lives. First, readers notice the difficulty that arises in Obi’s handling of his financial woes, which are exacerbated by the decision of the Umofia Progressive Union to attempt to regulate his behavior at this inauspicious moment. Obi rejects the notion of dialogue as intrinsic to freedom, construing the move by the Union as controlling behavior and accusing it of meddling. It is with such a passion that Obi takes the conduct of the Union to be in bad taste, and elects to put an end to his continuing exposure to censure and abuse from that body. Obi makes up his mind to

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split up with the fraternity and to refund the entire loan he had obtained from it, an action that compounds his money problems even further. Obi refuses initially to participate in the corruption-infested, moneygrubbing, and libertine culture of the pre-and post-independence Nigerian capital, Lagos, but, if he poses as an anti-corruption crusader, readers are not fooled for long. It is not a coincidence that we soon discover the foolishness of his behavior when, once separated from Clara, he capitulates. At a time of momentous and rapid transition, financial responsibilities begin to overwhelm Obi due to an income that is inadequate for his expenditure. Obi’s financial straits are easy to understand from a simple calculation of his expenses: money sent home to his parents and for the upkeep of other dependent relatives, utility bills to pay, car insurance premiums, loan servicing, and salaries of housekeepers such as the cook, the gardener, and the steward as well as the driver. As if things are not already bad enough, Obi hears the news of his mother’s death shortly after Clara breaks off their engagement. He is instantly devastated and overtaken by paralysis of will. With Clara not being there for him to lean on, to depend on, Obi is unable to take the initiative to undertake the journey to the funeral to pay his final respects to his mother; as a result, his inaction leaves him with a permanent sense of guilt at his mistreatment of her. He becomes unable to hold out in perpetuity against the corruptive influences and readers witness the total and irreversible disintegration of his moral frame. Obi’s integrity is eroded to a point where he becomes completely incapable of reasoned decision-making. Not only does he succumb to the scourge of bribery, accepting money from male clients, he begins to take sexual advantage of young women who seek to get their scholarship applications approved by him. The guilt arising from Obi’s inability to pay his mother final respects joins forces with the disgrace of his eventual trial for corruption to terminate his civil service career. From an otherwise thorough and stimulating exegetical analysis of the novel, undertaken from the perspectives of Achebe’s employment of narrative technique, characterization, theme, language, plot, and setting, critic David Carroll questions whether “the ironic distancing device he employed so effectively in Things Fall Apart” is appropriate in the new context. Carroll describes No Longer at Ease as “an exercise in diagnosis,” arguing that while the first part “diagrammatically sets out the various ingredients” of main character Obi’s “background as he journeys from Umofia to Europe and back again . . . despite appearances, the ingredients remain quite separate and unsynthesised,” citing as corroborative evidence “when Obi settles

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in Lagos” and there “his career and Clara undermine even further the values which had briefly coalesced, and through increasing disillusionment he quickly reaches the cul-de-sac of his final, uneasy scepticism.” It is Carroll’s thesis that whereas the “diagnosis is meticulously conducted . . . the central character never crystallises out of these disparate fragments. His character is carefully built up and then dismantled before our eyes, but Obi himself remains shadowy.” Carroll reasons that it is “the author’s intention” to make Obi “an alien created out of a miscellany of cultural elements, and the scaffolding of his character is meant as a ramshackle,” yet expresses a conviction that “it would be a fallacy to accept this as justification for the disturbing void at the centre of the novel.” The alleged shortcomings of the novel are summarized by Carroll as follows: The diagrams of forces, the exemplary episodes, the schematic journeys fail to conceal the absence of any graspable self of the main character. It is not simply that Obi’s career is confused, muddled and an anti-climax. Achebe is aware of the nature of his hero’s tragedy and seeks to justify it at the civil service interview early in the novel. There, Obi theorises glibly about the “happy ending” of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter . . . But even if we agree with him that “real tragedy is never resolved . . . It goes on hopelessly for ever,” we still need at the centre of the action an individual we may not only understand but sympathise with. This is especially true of the tragedy of the everyday where the anguish lies in each subtle response to the prosaic and the frequent. No such individual emerges from Obi’s relations with his parents—they are simply the two components of his childhood—nor with Clara—their relationship is conveyed in threadbare romantic cliché. Obi is a thoroughly passive character compelled to act occasionally by the exigencies of his various dilemmas. It might be argued that these dilemmas which arise from his inner contradictions represent Obi’s character. But surely this is too deterministic a view. As several of Achebe’s minor characters show, one is simply the result of a cultural and hereditary dialectic. But this is what the author seems to believe with regard to his hero. When he has carried out the construction and dismantling of Obi’s character there is nothing left, no carry-over from the conflict and alliance of forces to the self of the hero which is their real battleground.4

There is a fair amount in Carroll’s observations about the qualities which account for the distinctiveness of No Longer at Ease as a work of art, if one discounts the fact that speculations about authorial intentions threaten to become exercises in futility (for, as is well known, only achieved authorial aspirations can be fathomed with any scientific exactitude and so criticism

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is best when it avoids the grey areas of mere conjectures which can easily degenerate into idle reports); and also if one overlooks the unfairness of incongruous comparisons being made between a rural novel and an urban novel. Misapplication isn’t a term that critics would want associated with their methodology, but a portion of Carroll’s reading of No Longer at Ease certainly has the flavor of it. For one thing, in a somewhat invidious comparison, Carroll complains that, relative to Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, Obi is not sufficiently heroic. Describing Obi’s character as “shadowy,” Carroll alleges a striking “absence of any graspable self of the main character” who is in his view a “thoroughly passive character” involved in a career which is “confused, muddled and an anti-climax,” then makes the claim that Obi is not “an individual we may not only understand but sympathise with,” calling Obi’s filial and other relationships “threadbare romantic clichés”—all of which sounds like the usual complaint we hear about the soulless, indistinct characterization to be found in African fiction generally.5 But rather than seeing Obi’s apparently disinterested personality as one that unfolds seamlessly within the context in which his career is played out, Carroll says that “the disturbing void at the centre of the novel” and the “miscellany of cultural elements” in Obi’s constitution should be attributed to other factors. Carroll not only suggests that these elements are all faults that arise from a failure of imagination on the novelist’s part, but his claim that Obi’s dilemma arises from “his inner contradictions” goes so far astray as to represent a baseless attempt to formulate abstract theoretical attributions for problems that arise out of concrete sociological and cultural realities. In concluding that “[t]he method of narration should have been a decisive factor here,” Carroll references the absence of “a mind—even an alienated, deracinated mind—trying to impose a pattern upon the events of the novel.”6 Carroll does not find the way in which events are reported through “Obi’s eyes” particularly enlightening; he thinks Obi’s motives remain unexplained and claims “it is this absence of particularity which, according to the paradoxical logic of fiction, limits in a drastic way the general significance of the hero’s career and the novel as a whole. Because he does not come alive as a unique individual, we are never encouraged to see in his predicament the more universal theme it implies.”7 Yet comparing the main characters of Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease is really like comparing apples to oranges. Not only are the settings of the two novels entirely different (one deals with pre-colonial Africa and the other with post-colonial Africa: the modern Nigerian capital, Lagos, as paradigmatic of all Africa south of the Sahara) but their themes also vary

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considerably. Things Fall Apart is a novel about the origins and establishment of colonial rule in one localized part of pre-colonial Africa (Igboland), while No Longer at Ease is a novel about the sweeping legacies of the colonization project years later continent-wide. Things Fall Apart presents the heroic exploits of a flawed personality, Okonkwo, who stood up to the assault by a foreign occupation force and lost the battle. But No Longer at Ease occupies itself with the doomed experiences of the assimilated subjects of the new hybrid state, where the transplanted Western European culture and the indigenous Igbo culture sit in tension and thus predetermine that people operate under the very frustrating conditions that preclude the possibility of the heroic act that was achievable under the old-fashioned ways. In point of fact, therefore, Obi in No Longer at Ease is presented as an anti-hero due to the fact of his being circumscribed by the predicament of hybridization; the reality of his constitution is as a formally educated subject who is a product of an imported Western European culture which is in conflict with the indigenous Igbo culture, resulting in his alienation and rootlessness. Throughout his career Obi continues to maintain some form of contact with both cultures while belonging to neither, and the novel does not frame his personality in the mold of a hero or of someone undertaking a defining act intended to bring about a sudden and unexpected removal of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Obi’s conflicted nature is triggered by the heterogeneous matrix of his cultural make-up, the result of imperfectly digested values. In any event, is it not a characteristic feature in illustrative representation for character portraiture to be generalized rather than minutely particularistic? It is only by indirection, then, that Carroll makes prescient remarks about how No Longer at Ease establishes its essential difference from Things Fall Apart. One should be careful, therefore, not to read No Longer at Ease as Carroll largely does, projecting in the main upon this novel, which arises out of the particulars of a critical historical moment, the demands of a universalistic moral ethic and so largely misjudging it as being inferior to its predecessor, Things Fall Apart. In this regard, the interpretation by Roderick Wilson in an important article from the 1978 collection Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe would seem to be better attuned to the structural design of the novel, especially in light of his consideration of the handling of the conflicting forces that confront the characters in this story.8 There is one aspect of Roderick Wilson’s interpretation that particularly stands out: he draws attention to the fact that No Longer at Ease garners sympathy for the plights of the characters through the way in which “conflicts which are interrelated in the novel in complex ways centre around a

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number of incompatible expectations, each having a certain force, both in Obi and in those around him.”9 What receives emphasis, not unexpectedly in Wilson’s effort to advance his argument is the role played in the design of the novel by the intricacy of the tripartite forces brought into play to throw up the murky emotions and ethical matters connected to the difficulty Obi encounters in reconciling the demands placed on him by the Lagos Branch of the Umofia Progressive Union—which wants him “to pay back the money loaned to him—and the need to maintain a European standard of living, while at the same time fulfilling his financial obligations according to the requirements of ‘the extended family system,’” as well as by “the conflict between traditional beliefs and Christianity, and between both of these and a non-religious, superficial rationalism,” especially as they collide in the debate on Obi’s proposal to marry the osu girl Clara; and also around Obi’s ghastly battle with institutionalized corruption.10 Roderick Wilson is convinced that, though No Longer at Ease contains within it evidence of indebtedness to the idiom of desolation and fragmentation popularized by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Achebe’s is an extremely original story, decidedly situated in a convincingly drawn cultural, historical, political, and socio-economic context. While not presenting an entirely new account of what constitutes its structural coherence, Wilson’s analysis of how Achebe’s novel localizes what could otherwise be seen as a foreign idiom, deployed to “enforce the sense of a divided society in No Longer at Ease,” certainly restores attention to the chaos both in the characters’ lives and in a society undergoing “the complex experience of culture collision” in which the characters act out their roles.11 Achebe’s No Longer at Ease placed on the map of West African historical fiction an age-old problem of the culture of ethnic intolerance, which was increasingly to boil over from the turn of the nineteenth century onward (it remains of continuing pertinence all over the continent), serving as an informed and persuasive introduction to the subject for those who desire to know about the topic. In this light, it is small wonder that the publication of the novel should have inaugurated the vogue for fictional explorations in the region that give expression to the frustrations compounding the experiences inspired by colonial contact. In apartheid South Africa, in particular, the subject was already well established, and activities in other parts of the continent from genocide-prone Rwanda in East Africa to the Sudan in North Africa and the Congo in Central Africa were later to add stories of their own. Without a doubt, however, Bessie Head was one of the earliest authors of stature on the continent who were provided with a point of access to a narrative voice through Achebe’s fictional exploration of this reality.

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In making the subject of the unbridgeable social/ethnic distance, a topic that few writers in African literature want to broach for a variety of reasons, one she could call her own, Bessie Head shows more than just infatuation with her source or influence, and instead brings an uncommon vision to the subject. Head’s complex short novel Maru represents more than a mere nod to Achebe’s No Longer at Ease; it radically transforms the established values and the traditional way of thinking about the topic of class/ethnic difference to which the text by the Nigerian author pays an unstinting devotion. Whereas in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease the protagonist osu girl Clara is forever mistreated and confined by her birth, in her novel Head stages an imaginative scenario that effectively reverses the heroine Margaret’s disadvantaged origins, enlarging her estate to a scale beyond what even she herself could imagine. Maru entirely neutralizes the assigned inequality of the deserving but misjudged female protagonist Margaret and, symbolically, that of her despised Marsawa ethnic group. Investing its longsuffering main character with abilities to overcome the barriers of ethnic/ class discrimination that try to keep her from attaining her lofty romantic dream of marrying someone above her class, Maru has her ultimate achievement in marrying no less a figure than a prince completely upstage the dynamics of race/ethnic relations in the society in general. Bessie Head emerges in Maru as a consummate storyteller. Working effortlessly through a tangled love triangle, Maru offers the compulsion which impels Prince Maru to abdicate for the love of Margaret, a Marsawa woman, as the love force that will break the barriers of race in the region. Though Maru and Margaret have to overcome numerous obstacles before they can get married, Head stresses that the transforming power of their relationship will reach out beyond them as individuals and change Botswanan society, where the novel is set, entirely. First, both have to deny their feelings for Moleka. Maru recognizes that he and Moleka are “kings of opposing kingdoms” but still treats him as a great friend because those “he wanted or loved became the slaves of an intensely concentrated affection” (34, 50). But, while Maru is silently suffering from his infatuation with Margaret, Moleka is the man she really loves. A strong-hearted person, proud of her Marsawa identity, Margaret’s love is returned because “he had communicated directly with her heart” and, with her love, Moleka felt “reborn, a new man” (32, 38). As a result of the transforming effect of their love-at-first-sight, Moleka changed from being an exploiter of women into a passionate individual. Similarly, with him, Margaret was “really no longer lonely” (31). The greatest demonstration of Moleka’s love for Margaret occurs when he frees all the Marsawa slaves in his possession:

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Chapter 4 Moleka, who heard that the principal and the high-up were planning trouble for the new mistress, could not make allowances for the slow removal of prejudice. He removed it all in one day. He told Seth, the education supervisor, that there was good food in his house on Sunday. When Seth arrived he found all the Marsawas in the yard of Moleka also seated at the table. Moleka took up his fork and placed a mouthful of food in the mouth of a Marsawa, then with the same fork fed himself. (53)

Moleka’s action signifies a renunciation of his former oppressor status due to the overpowering influence of love. Ironically, in the power struggle for the possession of Margaret, it is Maru who gains the upper hand, thus thwarting the materialization of Moleka’s dream. All things considered, the series of intrigues, through which Maru realizes his ambition, are less important for the structure of the narrative than the role that he plays as the voice of reason, clamoring for the social ideals of ethnic tolerance. Nor, in the distinctly shadowy figure of Margaret, is the narrative’s interest affected beyond her insignia as a mere pawn in the power struggles of two idealistically identical characters: Maru and Moleka. Within the context of the novel, the character Dikeledi similarly serves as a foil in the working out of the narrative’s central conflict: love entangled with social prejudice. Dikeledi, Maru’s sister, who loves with the sensitivity of a humane person who feels the pain of social abuse, is in love with a man—Moleka—who loves another woman. Patiently, she puts up with the man who said “the wrong, crude things that jarred against the delicacy of her love for him” (81). It is ironic that Dikeledi hits it off instantly with her would-be rival Margaret. When the two women meet for the first time, Dikeledi finds the newly-arrived Margaret the target of social scorn at Leseding School, where she teaches, and she becomes protective. But, although Dikeledi rightly understands that the schoolchildren, who look down upon Margaret, their teacher, are acting out the prejudices of their parents, she considers her brother’s decision to marry Margaret an instance of bad judgment. Margaret emerges accidentally to fill a void, and is, therefore, a symbol for an absolute and pure love that Maru desires and obtains at great personal cost, as well as a means by which he gains escape from his social frustrations. For Head portrays Maru as a person who is so utterly disgusted with privilege that he is seeking to upturn the social structure that legitimizes it. When Maru opposes the loaning of the Leseding school bed to Margaret, his real desire is to show the authority that he has. Indeed, we learn that “Almost everyone groveled before him, because of his position” (64). It is more a ploy to

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press his advantage in the power struggle with Moleka for the possession of Margaret’s affections, and the narrative endorses the direction in which Maru seeks to use this power. The narrative of Maru thrives on the possibilities of freeing society from the mental lethargy and irrationality which pervade its soul. This is the task charged to Prince Maru. He rediscovers his inner being and tells his sister Dikeledi: There was a world apart from petty human hatred and petty human social codes and values where the human soul roamed free in all its splendour and glory. No barriers of race or creed or tribe hindered its activity. He had seen majestic kings of the soul, walking in the ragged clothes of fifty beggars. (67)

To be worthy of Margaret, and to reach the goal of the new society, Maru has to deny his ascribed status. He cries out: “I was not born to rule this mess. If I have a place it is to pull down the old structures and create the new” (68). He is opposed to rulership over his fellow men, and declares an intention to “remove the blood money, the cruelty and crookery from the top” (68). Maru is narrated from a point of view sympathetic to Prince Maru’s new social ideals, the dreams of the dawning of “a day when everyone would be free and no one the slave of another” (69). And so, Maru is portrayed as a seeker after truth who has to discard his former self in order to attain a new identity. For Maru, therefore, Margaret is a spiritual goal, and saving her from the grip of Moleka is a divine calling. “Life with Moleka was a series of high dramas, always ending in paternity cases. There were already eight motherless children” living with his mother, all of them products of Moleka’s affairs. The late Arthur Ravenscoft once asked: “Are we sure, at the end, that the two chief characters, Maru and Moleka, who are close, intimate friends until they become bitter antagonists, are indeed two separate fictional characters, or that they are symbolic extensions of contending character-traits within the same?”12 The excesses of these two characters definitely mirror Head’s perception of African royalty as a group of depraved, self-indulgent and lazy people, whose lives consisted of “giving orders: Do this! Don’t do that!”(74). Maru once boasted: I’m not like you Moleka . . . I still own the Marsawa as slaves. All my one hundred thousand cattle and fifty cattle posts are maintained by the Marsawa. They sleep on the ground, near outdoor fires. Their only

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Chapter 4 blanket is fire. When the fire warms them on one side, they turn round and warm themselves on the other side. (59)

This confirms the observation that Head adopts a patently bourgeois approach to African history. For her, history is made up primarily of the antics of the rulers, who are basically a bunch of lunatics who indulge in indiscriminate sexual adventures and acts of sodomy, and, like the Buchanans in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,13 carelessly leave a mess everywhere they go and expect other people to clean it up. Maru protests, “Why must Moleka have everything? He’s always touched gold and handled it carelessly. I’ve always touched straw” (84). But the distinction lacks merit, since they are both spoilt children, characters used to support Head’s belief that the history of a society comprises mainly the activity of the leadership; and that once you can change the quality of the leadership the life of the masses will follow the pattern. Head’s effusions at the end of the novel articulate such a vision: When people of the Marsawa tribe heard about Maru’s marriage to one of their own, a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the fetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else. They started to run into the sunlight, then, they turned and looked at the dark, small, room. They said: “We are not going back there.” (126–127)

The defiant stance reflects the transformation that Head intends the marriage of Maru and Margaret to cause in the lives of the oppressed Marsawa people. But, while the narrative is engagingly believable as a literary and imaginative piece of work, we need to return to the question: can we extrapolate from it an authentic view of history? In her essay “Literary Biography or Autobiographical Literature? The Work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner,” Carol Durix defines fictionalized biography or autobiographical fiction as “a moment in the life of the author” which contributes immensely to “the life that is being recounted.” However, she warns, “As a historical document, it is possibly untrustworthy but as a work of art it provides the critics with an intimate declaration which constitutes a precious link between the author and his writing.”14 To es-

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tablish Head’s particular personal experiences, which provide the broad framework for the novel, we need only to recall that Head and her fictional double Margaret were born under similar circumstances, were raised by Christian missionaries, and both chose Botswana for exile. Margaret’s Marsawa identity, which crushes her, equates nicely with Head’s mulatto identity in the South African context, although Margaret’s marriage promises to be successful whereas Head’s ended in divorce. Furthermore, the reader cannot turn a blind eye to the issue of Bessie Head’s confusion, which is gaining increasing attention in current criticism. For example, a study by Modupe Olaogun has analyzed Head’s use of the construct of schizophrenia—a “disordered thinking and behavior . . . hallucinations”—in the portrayal of characters in Maru. Particularly suggestive are her observations regarding the “English missionary, Mrs. Margaret Cadmore, who bequeaths to her ward not only her names but a schizophrenia traceable to her ideological ethos.”15 Olaogun notes further that: “The schizophrenia of colonial discourse emanates from a civilization whose agents do not have an intimate interest in the individual natives. Mrs. Cadmore exhibits a defining attitude of the benevolent colonizer, but she cares for a natural, not a personal entity” (74). It could well be that similar abuses were responsible for the mental problems which afflicted Head herself. Bessie Head has said that, inspired by her South African experience, she “longed to write an enduring novel on the hideousness of racial prejudice. But I also wanted the book to be so beautiful and so magical that, I, as the writer, would long to read and re-read it.”16 In Maru, a novel in which a received literary tradition is animated by a regional social reality, Head realized this ambition—even if, because her approach to the racial problem in the novel takes little cognizance of her own observation in the same essay that “Most of the tribes in South Africa were landless by the 1830s when foreign invasion reached the southern tip of Botswana,”17 the historical vision explored in Maru is superficial. As a novel, Maru has a stunning effect: it gives vehement expression to the hurt feelings of one woman writer, narrating history with a vengeance, but as history the narrative lacks depth. Although not anyone’s favorite subject, social scorn is an unpopular issue that cannot go unnoticed in that it holds a key place in the pluralistic African setting. Because of the general discomfort that surrounds it, one must especially commend the writers who are so alive to the social responsibility of art; in defiance of all personal risks, they walk on spaces where angels fear to tread even lightly, and courageously and routinely give this sensitive matter of intolerance—in whatever form it manifests itself—pride of place in their works. Texts such as The African by William Conton, Why

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Are We So Blest? by Ayi Kwei Armah—which offers a variation of the subject—Toads for Supper by Chukwuemeka Ike, as well as The Last Duty by Isidore Okpewho—these are certainly among the few platforms in which elaborate attention is devoted to this delicate topic.18 Chauvinism can indeed appropriately be compared to a deadly virus that few want to touch and fewer still want to be associated with in public, in light of the stigma that attaches to it, but it is definitely an issue that in one way or another inescapably features in African creative expression as a part of African writers’ attempt to not only reflect but examine pandemic social problems. Class bigotry can doubtless be said to be the immediate, basic problem complicating the leadership crises explored in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Bessie Head’s Maru—two texts that demonstrate some of the most deft and unquestionably the most robust treatments of the riddle of prejudice in all of African fiction. A deeply humiliating and puzzling experience, social prohibition against human contact across ethnic or social class lines can be a nasty affair. As a matter of fact, in the respective novels of Achebe and Head, social contempt is represented as a deliberative behavior, not merely intended to set people apart but with the purpose of alienating individuals and groups as much from themselves as from each other, altering the emotions irretrievably. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is often described rather narrowly as a novel about the moral decline of a promising young man who returns to his country after receiving his education abroad, only to fail dismally upon assuming one of the leadership positions once occupied by Europeans before political independence was granted to his country. But, as has been shown, No Longer at Ease is, equally, centrally a text about an unfulfilled romantic attachment, about a promising love affair that never reaches its full potential because of barriers of class bigotry. Taking her cue from Achebe, Bessie Head imposes on her subject a transformative agency that puts on display how even a tradition as recalcitrant as the stubborn genre of the tragic love triangle, with the added interest of fortifying a well-established ideology of class supremacy, cannot be indifferent to modification when subjected to pressure in the imagination of a radical artist. Proposing an action model that opens up the endless possibilities offered by change, Head’s novel puts forward ideas about human relations that can only be articulated by someone who knows the importance of stories that give hope to those trying to escape a humdrum reality; someone who has a precious investment in the campaign to empower a category of the socially stigmatized so they can visualize the possibilities of living in a make-believe world, a utopian universe antithetical to the one

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they know and currently inhabit. Here is a work of art in the mode of what Janice Radway in Reading the Romance has called “compensatory literature.” As Radway says, this is a kind of literature which “supplies” women readers with “an important emotional release that is proscribed in daily life because the social role with which they identify themselves leaves little room for guiltless, self-interested pursuit of individual pleasure.”19 Moreover, with Head in particular we see an earnest attempt to cut through the expected results, as she labors hard to bring about a real paradigm shift. Right from the onset, like Achebe, Head’s novel Maru concerns itself with the problem of social prohibition against human contact in ways large and small, and through details about social/ethnic prejudice strives to portray how social regulation of feelings and desires affects not only the private but also the public spheres, with discrimination emerging as an unrelenting form of repressive social attitude. Like Achebe, Head too designedly writes with dazzling aesthetic force, as is clear from how she manipulates the genre of the novel to produce a work of considerable craftsmanship which is also a compelling page-turner, although her informing ideological stance is diametrically opposed to that of her Nigerian precursor. Regardless of whether one sees Head as a slavish imitator or one is less disposed to consider her text as a direct emulation of Achebe rather than taking it as an appropriative frame of reference, what seems indisputably spectacular is how and why she snatched the concept of abolished human contact straight from Achebe. Bessie Head modified the appropriated concept by imaginatively rephrasing and adding to it, and then made the idea assume an entirely new and vibrant form: one complete with a definite character of its own and providing a compelling and a revealing measure of the different ways ideology can change the language and shape of romance conventions. It can of course be argued that the culturally constellated references which both Achebe and Head have drawn upon for their respective compositions suggest reliance upon a figure that has come down from the oral tradition. Although the great tradition of stories of doomed love affairs is undoubtedly a common feature of the folklore which continues to circulate freely all over the continent of Africa, as far as one can see, Achebe appears to have been the first modern African writer to give this hideous subject the scope of fictional expression seen in No Longer at Ease. Sharing more than thematic similarities, Head and Achebe also have many stylistic commonalities; though while drawing her main stylistic inspiration from Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, in a classic case of generic mutability, Head takes a different tack to fashion an ideology and aesthetics that witness the birth of a new fictional genre from the spirit of the old, turning the subject of the abandoned woman into a new creation story of power and love.

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NOTES 1. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1960) and Bessie Head, Maru (London: Heinemann, 1971). All page references are to these editions. 2. Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1972); Chukwuemeka Ike, Toads for Supper (London: Fontana, 1965); and Isidore Okpewho, The Last Duty (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1983). 3. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 114. 4. David Carroll, Chinua Achebe (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 83–84. 5. See, for example, Charles Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 18, 33; and John Povey, “The Novels of Chinua Achebe,” in Bruce King, ed., Introduction to Nigerian Literature (New York: Africana Publishing, 1972), pp. 97–112 (97). 6. David Carroll, Chinua Achebe, pp. 84–85. 7. David Carroll, Ibid. p. 85. 8. Roderick Wilson, “Eliot and Achebe: An Analysis of Some Formal and Philosophical Qualities of No Longer at Ease,” in Lindfors, Bernth and C. L. Innes, eds., Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 160–168. 9. Roderick Wilson, Ibid. pp. 163–164. 10. Roderick Wilson, Ibid. p. 164. 11. Roderick Wilson, Ibid. pp. 165, 167. 12. Arthur Ravenscroft, “The Novels of Bessie Head,” Christopher Heywood, ed., Aspects of South African Literature (London: Heinemann, 1976): 174–186. 13. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1923). 14. Carol Durix, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 18.2 (1987): 3. 15. Modupe O. Olaogun, “Irony and Schizophrenia in Bessie Head’s Maru,” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (1994): 69–87. See also Linda Susan Beard, “Bessie Head’s Syncretic Fiction: The Re-conceptualization of Power and the Recovery of the Ordinary,” Modern Fiction Studies 35.3 (1991): 575–588. 16. Bessie Head, “Social and Political Pressures that Shape Literature in Southern Africa,” Cecil Abrahams ed., The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern Africa (Trenton, N. J: Africa World Press, 1990): 13. 17. Bessie Head, Ibid. p. 16. 18. William Conton, The African (London: Heinemann, 1960). See note 2 for details of the other novels referred to here. 19. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 95–96.

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5 MASKING THE INFRASTRUCTURAL 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

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n telling remarks contained in a little-known book published in Nigeria in 1978, Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor sum up what they take to be their subject’s defining qualities: Christopher Okigbo could not enter or leave a room un-remarked; yet he was not extravagant in manner or appearance. There was something about him not easy to define, a certain inevitability of drama and event. His vibrancy and heightened sense of life touched everyone he came into contact with. It is not surprising therefore that the young poet/ artist, Kevin Echeruo, who died even younger and soon after Okigbo should have celebrated him as ogbanje, one of those mysterious, elusive and often highly talented beings who hurry to leave the world and to come again, or that Paul Ndu, who died in a road disaster, every gory detail of which he had predicted in a poem five years earlier, should call Okigbo a seer.1

Without the least slight to the important intellectual and human presence that he obviously was, there is surely abundant evidence from Okigbo’s verse to tell us that the epithets “not extravagant in manner or appearance,” “something . . . not easy to define,” “inevitability of drama and event,” “mysterious,” and “elusive,” are all applicable to his poetry too. The immense authority of Okigbo’s larger-than-life persona finds its close analogue in the effect of his resonant voice and the unique influence his work exerts on his successors: As is becoming increasingly clear, during the decades following his death, Okigbo’s commanding style has cued the audience to listen attentively, just as his highly staged image gave the appearance of an undue craving for attention.

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Okigbo was a master at manipulating publicity and his personal charm may well be the nearest equivalent we have to the monumental clout his poetry has bequeathed to his heirs. However, in a way that Achebe and Okafor, writing in the 1980s, could not have envisaged, one might rejoin that even Okigbo’s dominant personality is now beginning to pale before his gift for penning great verse, as the far-reaching impact of the body of his work becomes increasingly evident. As will be demonstrated, what immediately strikes anyone keen on pondering the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of aesthetic and sociological properties in the encounter of Okigbo’s disciples with his work is an essence defined primarily by the technical lessons he appears to impart to them. Something should, therefore, be said at the outset concerning his staying power, about the issues of structure and style tied up and pushed to the forefront in appropriations of Okigbo’s work. The example of inventive phrasing and lineation in Okigbo’s parent poems appears not to be lost to those writers inclined to model their works after his. It’s as though, whether quoting directly, or echoing, alluding to, or lifting liberally from their illustrious and inscrutable predecessor, the students are ever eager to extend the Master-poet’s themes; but, feeling unable to resist the seductive allure of his craft, the emulators are all pretty much satisfied just to repeat the framework of symmetry that defines the tenor of the linguistic range of the renowned poet’s spellbinding free-verse lines. A sample of poems from Labyrinths,2 the definitive edition of his verse now available, makes it apparent that Okigbo’s poetry draws its vitality principally from his forcible and idiosyncratic style. The main signal which may allow one to perceive his presence in the work of his emulators the distinctive stamp of his craft that comes forcefully through the rhythmic and aural poignancy and the dramatic energy of the verse. Okigbo drives home his meaning by compressing several themes into something resembling the unified pattern of an extended unit; using strategies of paring down in a composition that takes the form of an address that directs itself to a superior being, every element of the verse is imbued with significance as no word or verse line can be out of place. This is the strategy that delights his legatees, who are irresistibly attracted to how he employs lyric rhythms to convey a meaning and a mood. The style of Okigbo’s verse, straddling the sacred and secular, possesses a commanding vivacity. The bellwether of the Okigbo phantom is, above all, the choice, order, and positioning of words that impart to the texture of his verse the extraordinary sparkle other writers cannot help but crave. Okigbo’s scintillating poetry is invested with a quiet exuberance that strikes the reader with the force of work composed with an extremity of care; his typical verse fuses peculiar diction (choice

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words and neologisms), startling lineation, distinctive syntax, eccentric sound, invocative imagery, and quirky themes harmoniously in a delicate architectural design. Okigbo himself, in the introduction to Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, stressed the organic unity of his compositions noting that, while “these poems were written and published separately, they are, in fact, organically related” (xi). The loss of identity; the sense of cultural disinheritance, of being divided from oneself, occasioned by colonization; the anguished search for selfhood; the battle with ennui induced by spiritual alienation; the struggle for artistic breakthrough and for political engagement: all these are topics woven inextricably with force and grave economy into the design of Okigbo’s stubbornly sturdy verse. A volume utilizing the quest as its organizing structural framework, Labyrinths is comprised of four main sequences, namely, “Heavensgate,” “Limits,” “Silences,” and “Distances,” along with an addendum, “Paths of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War.” With each subsequent movement charting the progression of the journey, the evolution of the poet-protagonist’s personality during a quest depicted as a search—from ignorance/darkness toward light, a search for agency, artistic illumination/inspiration, spiritual awareness, and self-discovery— becomes roundly established. Just as it proved an effective structural device for the great Arthurian chivalric romance quest for the Holy Grail, the achievement of which is expected to restore faith and social cohesion in Britain, so in Okigbo’s volume the quest provides the central structure around which the several interlocking themes of Labyrinths are suspended, as it is made clear that the speaker-protagonist must have his mettle tested on various planes as he ventures out there—both over the landscape of his sensibility and that of the outer realm. Quite fittingly, therefore, the inaugural moment of this pilgrimage is the scene of the poet-speaker/suppliant setting out in a posture of atonement (“naked” and “barefoot”). Prostrate before the awe-inspiring presence of Idoto, he calls upon her as his source of inspiration (“watchword”). A goddess in Okigbo’s village, Idoto is presented as both a muse and a guardian angel/love object, to which the poet-lover-speaker/suppliant confesses and professes his affection, love, adoration, submission, and dedication somewhat in the fashion of courtly romance. Above all, as an object that is all-powerful, Idoto is entreated by the speaker to bestow him with the legendary benevolence of her grace that is needed to equip him for his as yet undefined mission. The verse is also marked by a consciousness of the function of sound and rhythm, and its formal qualities can be instantly

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measured by how it has packed intense visual and psychological vignettes into the space of a few lines. Notice, in particular, how the line initial adjective (“Before”) and the line initial preposition (“Naked”) gain emphasis from their positions. As alternate lines duplicate each other with moderate variation, what we have is not just an attempt to experiment with a prosodic economy for its own sake but a pilot work with the sole purpose of achieving the echo that could result in a heightening of the metrical effect of the verse. The parallel grammatical structures and obvious inversion give this verse a solemn, lyrical tilt. The use of enjambment or run-on lines—the running over of sentence and sense from one verse to the next—enhances the free flow of the poetic discourse. Throughout the verse there is an intermingling of patterns. These include the iamb or one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (“Before,” “Mother,” “Idoto,” “Oilbean”), and the trochee or one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (“Naked,” “Watery,” “Presence,” “Barefoot,” “Hearken”), deployed toward accentuating the musical effect and the charge of emotion which the poetry elicits: Before you, mother Idoto, Naked I stand; before your watery presence, a prodigal leaning on an oilbean. Under your power wait I on barefoot, watchman for the watchword at Heavensgate; Out of the depths my cry: give ear and hearken . . . (3)

An exquisite poem of faith and spiritual devotion, this serves as an appropriate point of departure for the voyage. The perfected emphasis of this prayer, a petition to a goddess for something greatly desired but considered to be unmerited (“the watchword” or inspiration), is the humble stance of the suppliant-protagonist who makes his appearance before her stripped bare from head to toe (“naked,” “barefoot”) and waits under her spell (“power”). While appearing before an important dignitary when not decked out properly can be interpreted as disrespectful within the social context, just as would any lack of graceful carriage of the body, it seems

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a different ball game altogether when it comes to the spiritual domain— where appearing before a deity unrobed is evidence of the high reverence of the devotee. In spiritual terms the transparency of believers of a faith is best displayed through their modest, unassuming and humble stance; hence coming within view of the divinity while hiding nothing is the manner expected of worshippers coming before their spiritual ruling authorities. It is therefore fitting that Labyrinths opens in the form of divine worship, presenting the surrogate in a special decorum appropriate to the occasion; his humble state reflects his ardent search for the necessary credentials for the exercise of the requisite functions to which he aspires. This arrangement gives an indication that it is vitally important that the voyage frames itself as a story not only of the thoughtful obsessions but also of the total demeanor or outward appearance of an individual who reverences and idolizes his goddess/love object highly because those are the things that matter the most in the ritual context of his mission. The poem establishes at once the status of the speaker-worshipper as being that of someone who has appeared in the presence of his goddess in a state of total openness and submissiveness. The deferential speakerprotagonist’s presentation of himself in the image of a “prodigal” suggests that he as a worshipper doesn’t feel deserving of the favor he is seeking; but he goes ahead to ask for it anyway, because he has total faith in the mercies of the one prayed to. By “leaning on an oilbean,” the point is clarified that this worshipper has come armed with the relevant totem of worship and the appropriate demeanor; the needed object and comportment to pacify the goddess or put her in the requisite frame of mind to listen and act magnanimously. The “oilbean” is the specific intermediary object that will assist in pleading the speaker-protagonist-worshipper’s cause. The poem is indirectly a panegyric on the higher authority of the goddess. The portrait of Idoto, as being waited upon to endow her humble subject with power and wholeness, directly underscores not only the elevated status in which she as a goddess is held by the worshipper but also her bounties that are held by him to be so vast they can be depended upon without equivocation by any weak devotee of the caliber of the one seeking his recuperation. Yet his assurance of the benevolent admission of the petition denotes the absence of remoteness in the manner of the goddess. There is therefore an elusive quality to the depiction of the goddess’ character: though held up to be high and mighty, she can be addressed directly; the petitioner can speak on his own behalf, and does not need an intermediary—a litigant, such as a high priest, for instance—to plead his cause for him, because, at the same time, he believes the goddess to be open and not inaccessible.

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The opening lyric of “Passage” shows why the worshipper’s faith in the stabilizing qualities of the goddess isn’t misplaced, for subsequently the reader is literally made eye witness to the unfolding drama of the dispensation of the characteristic legendary magnanimity and accessibility of the goddess. This act follows a profoundly devout process one can only describe as a form of sacramental offering, a procedure in which the suppliant extends not only prayers accompanied with the appropriate sacrificial ritual objects but his own body in an attempt to elicit the grace of Idoto, who eventually is moved to rise in defense of her honor to grant the contrite speaker-protagonist-worshipper his request. In turn, the worshipper renders himself worthy by accepting and showing more than a willingness to take on the serviceable life of the public poet, while fully cognizant of the brutal challenges presented to this mission even by his own divided sensibility. Indeed, by his own admission, the role of public poet is one which comes not without ambivalent external demands placed on the person upon whom it has fallen to take up the function of “a wagtail, to tell/the tangledwood-tale;/a sunbird, to mourn/a mother on a spray” (4). The last four lines quoted above underline the fact that, within the context of Labyrinths, the poet is a perfect sign of the multiple roles of the artist in traditional society. Functioning with progressive self-awareness as both a prophet reading the times accurately and a voice singing the anthem of the nation to rouse it to patriotic duty (i.e., a body with “a wagtail, to tell/the tangled- wood-tale”), the poet is also a gadfly ready to prick the conscience of his community by decrying present ills and charting the nation on a course to its future (i.e., “a sunbird, to mourn/a mother on a spray”). Seeing himself as at once a praise singer or entertainer and a critic of his community, he is warming up to take on the poet’s position as someone who is distinguished by the exceptional courage with which he warns the leadership not to deviate from the customs and traditions of the polity. Okigbo’s poet-protagonist thus has no difficulty slipping into the robes reserved for the artist in traditional society, for he perceives no insurmountable contradiction at all in maintaining the dual stance of proclaiming the good news and combating injustice, even though he is sot so naïve as to harbor any illusion about the considerable odds stacked against his work and the perils that attend the poet’s role, taking as he has as an article of faith that the path to national reconstruction is commandingly filled with the pain of parturition. As anyone upon whom it has fallen to take on such a major leadership role can reasonably expect, the kinds of vicissitudes brought in the train of the education and conditioning of the artist are not atypical. Playing a

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leading role in one’s society is a responsibility that carries with it its own burdens. Yet stories of aspiring African leaders severely brutalized by their hybrid experiences surface rarely, because most western-educated Africans are too reluctant to openly tell their personal colonial education horror stories. As a consequence, we have had many works in the form of romans à clef—novels that describe true events but are disguised as fiction—for example. It is certainly not insignificant that the accounts by an author such as Camara Laye of his European experience in his two noted works The African Child and A Dream of Africa take the form of a retreat into the past that romanticizes his childhood, or that overseas stories of the humiliating experiences of many other western-educated Africans have generally eschewed the autobiographical form, rather assuming the fictional mode to address the supposed ordeals of imaginary characters, as in Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence (1968) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? (1972).3 Herein lies the significance of Okigbo: quite unlike these other writers, he is himself his own self-admitted subject. Less discreet about it, and apparently readily taking the reader as a reliable confidant, Okigbo is willing to open up and bare his soul with brutal honesty about previously untouched issues and harrowing stories of fracture. Rather than suppress the harsh reality, as do some of his disingenuous and self-deluded counterparts, who withdraw from the disappointing present into the comfort of memories of their childhood, Okigbo gallantly owns up to challenging events without the least sign of embarrassment or despair. In the piece entitled “Hurrah for Thunder,” the mature poet even goes so far as to openly selfidentify with the predicaments explored in his poems, and so we encounter the rather alarming declamation, “If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell/I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell” (67). In that remarkable passage, of course, the poet is calling attention specifically to such dangers as the inevitability of persecution that are faced by persons who aim to devote themselves to the vocation of the artist who speaks truth to power. The poet-protagonist’s barely suppressed anguished longing to revert to the innocence of his childhood and the native oral tradition throughout the collection can therefore be taken as coeval with Okigbo’s own stance, since his own conversion to Catholicism and exposure to other cultures also were sources of his personal crises of identity.4 It is highly significant that the issue of the spiritual dimension of the cultural dislocation occasioned by colonization has acquired a special interest for the speaker-protagonist of Labyrinths. It is as personal to him as it is for the poet who, writing at the threshold moment of emergence from colonial

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control, has witnessed the primal scenes of the trauma first-hand and has not taken these brutalities lying down. The movement “Fragments out of the Deluge” proposes that the speaker-protagonist perceives a way to overcome this situation as pertaining to one asserting one’s right to decisively and aggressively fight off one’s dehumanization and not evade it but actually face it headlong. In the poem, that struggle for freedom therefore takes the form of a desperate search by the speaker-protagonist first to uncover Europe’s multifaced attack, which initially masquerades under the banner of a religious assault carried out by blindfolding the populations so that “. . . they took the key off/And they took the key of. . . /That none may enter” (29). We learn that Europe’s ulterior motives in undertaking the so-called “civilizing mission” then begin to surface when this “mission” takes a materialistic turn, leading to the attackers’ making off with “the hot spoils of the battle,/And they shared the hot spoils among them” (29). The European exploitation of Africa involves the taking away or maiming of that continent’s intellectual capacity or initiative, through deception as well as the siphoning of its economic resources and its cultural capital, and so the poem is not silent on the repressive and abject patronizing attitude that came along with the military, spiritual, and cultural invasion. In other words, the premise under which this poem operates is the logic that one who has gotten lost will remain so in perpetuity if he or she doesn’t know it, but awareness is precisely the place where the recovery can start. Thus disrupting the power of imperial control will entail not only an understanding of the turning of Africa’s western educated subjects into zombie-like individuals who move without will, but also attention to the fact of how the conquest following on the heels of partition united the three main arms of colonization—the Administration, the Church, and the Military wing that facilitated the sharing of the loot: “Estates among them;/And they were the chosen,/mongrel breeds,/With slogan in hand, of/won divination” (29). In the minds of many, nonetheless, the desecration of the traditional religions of Africa no doubt still remains the most insidious effect of colonization. They think that accepting the new religion entails not only denying one’s own culture, turning away from one’s heritage and taking on a new personal identity; the details of this occurrence therefore strikingly form a critical concern of Okigbo’s Labyrinths. Here is how in a characteristically pithy style the poem “Limits XI” tries to fit it all in: And the gods lie in state And the gods lie in state Without the long-drum.

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And the gods lie unsung, Veiled only with mould, Behind the shrinehouse. Gods grow out, Abandoned; And so do they . . . (34)

The flair of this poem’s plaintive evocation of a landscape of spiritual desolation and torment certainly puts it in the company of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.5 Yet, the language of near-deafening silence in which Okigbo’s poem is expressed chants a diatribe at a culture of spiritual terror with a specific context, one of a localized nature that occurred on a scale until then unheralded in African literature. Here Okigbo transmits an outpouring of grief over the plights of the neglected African gods so moving that it superseded even the high intensity of outcry in the incurably agnostic Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino,6 also composed around the time Okigbo was writing, the like of which was not to be encountered again on the continent before Chimalum Nwankwo’s refrain in The Womb in the Heart came along decades later. Specifically, Okigbo’s “Limits XI” tells a shocking tale of transformation and disenchantment—a disorientation with a reach that is beyond what can be verbalized. This poem is an attempt to capture a gruesome horror that transpired during the uncertain times of evangelization, and its reappraisal of the impact of Christianity is all the more damning because it is conveyed in a form that mingles with its startling tone of genuine melancholy a nostalgic longing for an irrecoverably lost way of life. The poem is emphatic that the true point of departure for any discussion of Africa’s contemporary experience is the period when Europe began meddling in the religious affairs of the peoples of the continent. It reflects the fact that the encroachers did not have much regard for Africans and their native cultures with disturbing tales of the victims of violence. The separation of the African peoples from their indigenous religion exemplifies a particular form of violence perfected by colonization because the enterprise presented an ambivalent situation that suppressed the African’s character, creating a sense of the individual being divided from the self. By alienating the individual from his/her orthodox life principle without connecting him/her firmly to any alternative regenerative new one, conversion, in trying to make African peoples whole, leads them even further away from harmony; instead of conferring salvation, the mental and psychological torment of conversion becomes tantamount to earthly damnation.

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Against this background, it is understandable why the theme of habituated terror, unleashed by the colonial imposition of Christianity upon African peoples during the race to “civilize” their continent, became one of the key concerns of the independence struggle and is one developed on various levels in Okigbo’s poetry. The denunciation of the violence of the onslaught upon westernized Africans, caught uneasily between the European and African civilizations, permeates the entire text of Labyrinths; it is especially and more specifically emphasized in the pictures drawn of the conversion to Catholicism in the fearful imagery of fire-branding: Scars of the crucifix over the breast, by red blade inflicted by red-hot blade, on right breast witnesseth (6)

The stark and dreadful images serve as a commemoration of the atrocities of evangelization. Here Okigbo’s poetry aspires to the role of photography. The intriguing portrait of the negative effects of acculturation initially portrayed in “The Passage” takes on new meaning in light of the ordeals’ reverberations in the “Initiation” sequences of Labyrinths. The portrait reiterates an endeavor to cover the wide range of the African peoples’ conversion experience during colonization, not just the bare facts of domination, and is remarkable for its provision of visual evidence. To bring the subject of atrocities into view is the object of the verse; in this connection, it is pertinent to observe that speaking volubly on a subject that has the moral weight of an event like colonization requires courage; a great many writers have looked the other way or reacted with denial or guilt. Not so Okigbo. The Igbo poet manifests a strongly expressed conviction to bear witness to the “unspeakable,” and brings into view both the physical bodily subjection and the raw mental and psychological wounds inflicted by conversion. With what amounts to nothing short of an epochal fleshing out of an agonizing affliction that the mediation of conversion presented itself as, his poetry conveys a highly moving verbal construct of the cruelty of deracination. The uneasiness, and, indeed, the vulnerability, caused to the African Christian converts by the imposition of the Western religious hegemony, is registered unmistakably in the poem through turbulent and agitated imagery. Attention to the vocabulary of its expression tells us a lot about the identification of the initiates with melancholy: the texture of feeling they have to juggle encompasses outrage, depression, anxiety, fear, and hopelessness because they feel themselves laboring under the burden that weighs

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so heavily on them. The stress from constant and persistent reminders of mental and psychological shackles that have been inflicted on them by a foreign overlordship is the object of attention. The poem captures scenes of the imposition in terms of an apocalyptic combat in a zone where the casualties are caught up as “Silent faces at crossroads:/festivity in black . . . /Faces of black like long black/column of ants/behind the bell tower, /into the hot garden/where all roads meet” (5). The image that imprints itself from these lines is of conversion as a coercive act perpetrated against the tragic innocence of people who look like having been dragged as unwilling participants into alien rites performed on unfamiliar terrain—ceremonies that have neither meaning nor significance for them as new initiates. The cry that issues forth from the speaker, seeking intervention on behalf of his aggrieved compatriots, gives eloquent testimony to the depth of the community’s accumulated anguish: “O Anna at the knobs of the panel oblong,/hear us at crossroads at the great hinges/where the players of loft pipe organs/rehearse old lovely fragments, alone” (5). The intensity of the sense of ingrained cultural confusion and puzzlement within the pioneering educated African cadres can be surmised from their desperation; they are casting about, wildly searching not only for an anchor and solace for their souls but for spiritual and metaphysical bearing. Their outcry is couched in a blend of the traditional Igbo religious and Christian idioms to reflect the state of uncertainty, how really mixed up things are for them. As Donatus Nwoga, too, has noted, clear echoes of the Bible, especially Psalm 130, can be heard in the lines “O Anna at the knobs of the panel oblong, /hear us at crossroads at the great hinges/where the players of loft pipe organs/rehearse old lovely fragments, alone.”7 While Okigbo’s Labyrinths provides ample space in which the psychological and mental predicaments of the individual are first explored and then used paradigmatically to illustrate what transcends the personal crises of identity of an individual, it is important that the verse next gestures toward a group experience, the predicament of the western educated elite (as in “Limits I–V”), finally turning to the fate of a collective community, the lot of common people, which is handled with great sensitivity. Rendering this observation in a non-innocuous language—that is, in an idiom not only intelligible but arresting—seems to be the primary delight of the speakerprotagonist-adventurer. “Limits II” and “Limits III,” for instance, stand out in the vigor with which they extend rather than make a complete break with the communal spirit of oral tradition, employing figurative language rooted in the Igbo locale in presenting a subject to which the text attaches great significance: the path that will prepare the individual who takes it

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upon himself or who has had a circumstance foisted upon him to play an interventionist role in the communal mission of his society; in the poem, this is a service firmly reposed within the court of the artist. In taking the opportunity to give a succinct account of the process of artistic growth, of the making of an artist and how the fledgling artist can grow into his/her socially defined role in society, the poem develops the axiom that every artist has to experience years of struggle. Tracing the path that leads from the status of a struggling artist without an audience to that of an established one with a ready listenership becomes a theme integral to the overarching design of the quest in the text. In a nutshell, this is a poem about how reputations are made. The poem is composed in the popular ballad or fairy-tale tradition, with permutations: For he was a shrub among the poplars Needing more roots More sap to grow to sunlight, Thirsting for sunlight, A low growth among the forest. (24)

As the framework in which the poem’s various strands are crystallized according to the work’s organizing or unifying principle, the figure of the artist is where the formal, generic, and thematic designs of the text intersect. The character of the artist is a motif pivotal to Labyrinths’ structure. From the lyric “Limit II” it emerges that the artist must walk his or her way up the minors. Before any beginning artist (“a low growth”) can make that leap into the limelight and ringing approval; before he or she can move from being indistinct (“grow to sunlight”); in other words, preceding that rise above the other contenders for glory, facing getting clobbered by trials (“Thirsting for sunlight”) comes with the territory. In “Limits II” this adversity that a beginning artist will have to overcome before transiting from secondary to major status is conveyed in terms of a struggle largely internal or within the individual rising artist. To get a further sense that this poem is based on substantial metaphorical expression, here is how the process of the artist getting out of the shadows is put: Into the soul The selves extend their branches, Into the moments of each living hour, Feeling for audience

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Straining thin among the echoes; And out of the solitude Voice and soul with selves unite, Riding the echoes, Horsemen of the apocalypse; And crowned with one self The name displays its foliage, Hanging low A green cloud above the forest. (24)

Here Okigbo has improvised to great brilliance in the Igbo idiom, stressing the notion that there’s a price to pay before securing the spotlight, before becoming a seasoned artist: gaining respect does not come cheap, so the young artist just has to keep on working (“Into the soul/The selves extend their branches,/Into the moments of each living hour,/Feeling for audience”) if he or she wants to acquire credentials. Not only does it take a while and take persistent effort to be heard and taken seriously while learning the ropes via self-instruction through imitation of predecessors (“Straining thin among the echoes”) but it takes strategies such as not just feeding off predecessors but finding a harmony of one’s original theme and style (“And out of the solitude/Voice and soul with selves unite”) to break through (“Horsemen of the apocalypse;/And crowned with one self/The name displays its foliage”). And so to emerge from obscurity, or leave behind “Hanging low,” to become widely celebrated (“A green cloud above the forest”), the price of fame is high as it takes pushing, longing, determination, absorbing years of neglect and seclusion, and incessant soul-searching as well as self-exertion, reflection, fortitude, the humility of a learner, good judgment, and more, to make a name for oneself. To gain recognition, one has to angle for it; one has to dig deep to improve upon one’s early faltering steps. In “Limits III” other conditions weigh more heavily. The anecdotal frame of the previous compilation here gives way to epigram. Also, the attachment to the idea that getting established does not come easy but takes personal effort shifts vector from the notion of environmental support to the supposition that attaining canonicity is dependent on other factors: the willpower and ability on the part of the aspiring artist to surmount all the hostile forces or obstacles that are necessarily placed in victory’s path, the

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“Banks of reed./Mountains of broken bottles” that must be vanquished (25). “Limits III” does not dispense with the matter of the neophyte artist’s personal efforts needing productive cooperation with a nurturing climate, but insists that all contenders for artistic glory will have to muster the requisite endurance, strong mind, patience, and perseverance because attaining success is contingent on the recognition that forces of attrition both internal and external, which appear perversely to undermine good fortune, are inescapably the irreducible essence of contest: Then we must sing, tongue-tied, Without name or audience, Making harmony among the branches. (25)

The young artist should prepare to just hang in there, say these lines, as winning laurels and accolades later is contingent upon preliminarily enduring initial lower-class status and anonymity for a while. “Limits IV” presents these obstacles that attach themselves to artistic fulfillment in terms of distractions and mishits: “AN IMAGE insists/From flag pole of the heart;/ Her image distracts/With the cruelty of the rose. . .” (27). Not unexpectedly, therefore, “Limits V–XII” posits that the fulfilling of artistic intuition entails the shedding of a phenomenon termed “the second self.” The “second self” refers to the vision-degrading aspect of a viewer’s personality: the distorting instinct that has to be excised so the artist can perceive with clarity and discernment. The poem unravels the primary importance of absence of presumption to the vocation of the artist, with hints at how the diminishing of this phenomenon can result in not seeing what one is looking for or what one has set out to perceive but rather what one might see. When confronted by the vast challenge of rising against all the odds out of the blindness to discover the hidden but inspiring truth, what will be of singular importance? “Limits V–XII” surmises that the ability to self-identify the objective reality in face of the pressing claim of subjective impressions is without a doubt the sine qua non: suspending all one’s expectation or one’s intuition is the singular gift any artist must have who wants to assume the role of conscience of the nation, pathfinder, and fact-checker calling out corruption, hypocrisy, injustice, and other moral and political depravities. This, in a nutshell, is the trajectory of the complex preparation that enabled poetry to assume for the poet-protagonist of Labyrinths the function of fulfilling his spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic needs; needs that in turn culminate in perhaps the essence of all his aspirations, the crowning goal of his work, so to say, the pinnacle of all his artistic objectives, one to

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which the other ancillary goals perforce individually and collectively lead: political responsibility. While each movement of the collection carries with it its own different plane of emphasis, allowing Labyrinths to convey several layers of experience simultaneously, nowhere is it more sharply revealed than in the collection’s remarkably titled movement “Silences” that attaining the ultimate expressive idiom of political commitment is what the exercise has been about all along—one to which each segment of the quest has progressively looked forward. In this context, “The Lament of the Silent Sisters,” the opening section of “Silences,” derives its greatest significance from the fact that it represents a stage in which the poet-protagonist has turned away fully from the private to the public, from the national to the international, with political engagement becoming an all-consuming act for him. The caption, “The Lament of the Silent Sisters,” itself embodies a form of signifying practice: a trope that requires clarification; for what is involved is not simply the effectiveness of verbal irony, in which the opposite of what is stated in the title is implied—though that order of meaning applies as well, since the dirge form has been utilized in the poem by a group of individuals self-identified as women who speak out loudly as fearless combatants against an obvious misdeed, as opposed to keeping mute. When we read between the lines, we understand that, rather than keep their lips sealed in face of a situation which indicates all is not well— rather than look the other way in diffident obeisance to authority—these women speakers exhibit great courage in their outspokenness. They are crying out against what may well be regarded as violation of the most sacred kind—one involving the most important thing human beings have: life. The context of the wrongdoing publicly mourned by the women speakers in the poem relates to the atrocities spawned by the uncertainties that were inspired by the Western Nigerian crises of 1962, leading to the pogroms in the years following and the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese prime minister and a strong advocate for total emancipation of the region from Belgian rule, who was rumored to have been murdered by the CIA. On another order of meaning, the title signifies in the convention of the Igbo dirge a strong confession of sorrow. It lays emphasis on the notion that these women speakers appear to lose themselves in their grief. The singers have suffered an affliction of distress that has literally silenced them: that is to say, their bereavement is one so colossal in scale that words are inadequate to express it. This suggestion that the application of the term “silent” has a relative uniqueness, signifying being rendered speechless to the point of muteness, is corroborated by the poem’s dominant tone of intense

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mourning. Not only has the state of violence left these women speakers utterly mystified, but the loss of human lives is so monstrous it has turned the women’s sadness inward. That is why the rhetorical ploy of “The Lament of the Silent Sisters” is rooted in the technique of understatement rather than based on the rhetoric of bombast or hyperbole: How does one say No in thunder . . . For in sea-fever compass or cross Makes a difference: certainly makes Not an escape ladder . . . Where is there for us an anchorage; A shank for a sheet, a double arch— (39)

These women can neither comprehend why people should show such callousness toward each other, nor articulate the enormity of their sorrow. When one realizes that cognitive ability and linguistic competence are mankind’s two most distinctive aptitudes, one can begin to truly grasp the gravity of the situation faced by the women singers. The women dirge singers do particularly feel that their momentary linguistic deficiency sinks them lower than the status of humans, but the exchanges that follow between them—as conveyed by the remainder of the poem’s communal voices, the “Chorus” and the “Crier”—flood the piece with pointed pictures reporting the horror unleashed upon the nation: the terrible massacres that have precipitated the activity of “scavengers” combing “the afternoon . . . /For scented shadows above the underrush. . . In this jubilee-dance above the carrion . . .” (39). Here, the poem is emphatic about the legacy of the upheaval: the gory sights of the dishonored bodies. Exposed and degraded, the victims of the unrest are shown as fatalities that the community has neither the time nor the respect nor even the resources to give a decent burial. Or, perhaps, the society just doesn’t care enough even to arrange mass burials, which is why the bodies have been left to the mercy of the elements and vultures. The very fact of the identification of the dirge singers as women carries another level of significance, reflecting an attention paid to the cultural specificity of the practice: since dirge singing is usually the province of women among many ethnic groups such as the Igbo and Yoruba, attributing the performance to these women imparts to the contents of their delivery extreme emotional authenticity. In many parts of Africa women must be silent and obedient in the public square; dirge singing is one arena of the

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public space where there is a reversal of this order and women’s oratory shines through, their voice ringing out loud and clear. In “Silences II” the reader glimpses the hideousness of the tragedy that has befallen the country and left it teetering on the edge of anarchy. Graphic images put on display the machinery of mass murder employed in the mass slaughters: “cast-iron steps cascading down the valley/all forged into thunder tanks;/And detonators cannoned into splintered flames,/in this jubilee-dance of fireflies” (40). The resulting cannibalistic atrocity is almost surreal in its outrageousness. “They struck him in the ear they struck him in the eye;/They picked his bones for scavenging” (40). From “Lament of the Drums” on, it is obvious that the poet has left his apprentice work behind him, creating a poetry that departs progressively from the modernist idiom in coming down on the side of the African oral tradition. In the first lyric of “Lament of the Drums,” which is quite clearly taking aim at what might be described as the calamitous implications for the nation of the beastly treatment by people of one another, the verse specifically employs the techniques of the traditional Yoruba incantation interwoven with Igbo women’s improvised antiphonal laments: LION-HEARTED cedar forest, gonads for our thunder, Even if you are very far away, we invoke you: Give us our hollow heads of long-drums . . . Antelopes for the cedar-forest, swifter messengers Than flash-of-beacon-flame, we invoke you: Hide us; deliver us from our nakedness . . . (45)

In mourning the country’s forlorn state on behalf of the community, the impetus of the speaker is outrage at the irreversible gravitation to an impending breakdown of law and order, termed the “feast-of-seven-souls” (45). The focus of this prayer is the protection of society from the oppressively dreadful direction in which it is headed. The praise epithets— “Many-fingered canebrake, exile for our laughter” and “Thunder of tanks of giant iron steps of detonators”—work collaboratively with the pleas “We invoke you” and “Fail safe from the clearing, we implore you” (45) to ground the earnestness of the passions attached to the speaker’s wish to reverse the situation. Notice how the poem draws its invocative idiom largely from the Yoruba Ijala chants usually associated with the worship of Ogun, the god of thunder. These familiar forms of address evince an

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impression that one is hearing the weeping done in the vernacular tongue, which gives a peculiar luster to the composition, lending credibility to the speaker’s claim to be a voice for a community’s aspirations rather than a mouthpiece for his own narrow personal interest. In the terms of the poem, the imprisonment of the leader of the opposition party Action Group (AG) in the Federal Parliament, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, following his conviction on charges of treasonable felony, and the death of his oldest son Segun Awolowo in a suspicious car wreck that happened at the same time become the summation of the state of utter chaos into which the nation has plunged itself or found itself thrown. The remaining lyrics in the movement “Lament of the Drums” tell with varying degrees of somberness the same story of the disaster that has befallen the country. What the series of concentric portraits does is give the reader a composite picture of this hopeless era. The second segment, for instance, finds the speaker casting about for a fresh idiom of expression, a voice that would be appropriate for conveying the power of his perception of the unprecedented upsurge of violence that is now rocking the land. In words that will immortalize and objectify the assault that has been carried out on the soul of the polity, he talks about “The unheard sullen shriek/ Of the funerary ram” causing an overflow of “Liquid messengers of blood/ Like urgent telegrams,/We have never been deployed/For feast of antelopes. . .” (46). In the third and fourth segments, Nigeria remains a hotbed of violence, but a new symbol is deployed to explain this stage of the historical process. The section opens with the speaker inveighing against the vagaries of fortune. The notion is that of a nation in the making, or rather of a polity in the process of unmaking: disintegration. Its personification as a fisherman “FISHING today in the dark waters” (47) reiterates that conception: like the fisherman blindly casting his net or line into murky waters, the outcome of the country’s labor of nationhood can only be unknown, unknowable. Extending this dominant water imagery, the poem establishes a relation between the destiny of Nigeria and that quintessential victim of fate from the Roman literary tradition, Palinurus, in Vergil’s Aeneid,8 the helmsman of Aeneas, who, subdued by the god of sleep, falls overboard, is washed up on the shore of Italy and there murdered by the inhabitants who deny his body burial, making his unplacated ghost an object of perfidy to haunt the region for a long time. Visiting the Underworld, Aeneas meets up with this ghost; later a tomb is built for Palinurus on the west coast of Italy. The simile is not a strain but a good match: the burden of the theme of this poem is to stress a commonality of experience of two personages in

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dire circumstances. Instead of saying Nigeria’s downward slide is of its own making the allusion to Palinurus implies the influence of an outside authority. The poem suggests the tragic death of Segun Awolowo finds a suitable parallel in Palinurus’ demise: It is over, Palinurus, at least for you, In your tarmac of night and fever-dew: Tears of grace, not of sorrow, broken In two, protest your inviolable image; And the saltry waters, touched by the sun, Inherit your paleness who reign, resigned (original emphasis, 47).

Transiting swiftly from lament, the poem waxes panegyric and takes on the qualities of a paean to Segun Awolowo by way of Palinurus, floating as a consolation the idea that each of these presumed victims of a cruel fate via the instrumentality of defeat in life attained heroic stature in death and ultimate redemption, at least in the estimation of the speaker. The fourth segment is unrelenting in its display of over-determined images of sterility, giving testimony of how “. . . like a dead letter unanswered,/Our rococo/ Choir of insects is null/Cacophony/And void as a debt summons served/ On a bankrupt” (49). The fifth and final segment develops this barely concealed theme of betrayal more fully by laying down the blame for Nigeria’s drift toward the state of disorder and chaos—if not total collapse—squarely at the feet of the leadership: “Her pot-bellied watchers” who “Despoil her” (50). In inquiring after the health of the country, specifying its growing pains of nationhood as both the consequence of the misdeeds of its leaders and of destiny thus could be interpreted as implying a perception that no clean demarcation can ever be verified in the matrix of such happenings and so culpability must be distributed among various agencies. For instance, as already stated, the two events under review, bearing testament to life’s arbitrary cruelty to the innocent, reveal the implication of treachery. Therefore, it is not too much to say that the order of human events perhaps cannot be entirely immune to providential determination. This issue of the abuse of power by those who wield it (the god of sleep in the case of Palinurus and the rulers in Nigeria’s) will comprise the dominant concern that inspires the agitated mood of the final movement, “Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War”; but it is a subject delayed and addressed by way of a preliminary in-depth expedition into subjectivity and the patterns of the poet-protagonist’s shifting emotions as they are brought

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to their penultimate peak in “Distances.” “Distances” and “Path of Thunder” thus represent two extremes. After speaking despondently throughout “Silences” of the claustrophobic air overhanging the Nigerian space, there is a marked shift from his castigating tone. Homing in on his flights of fancy, a monumental imaginative leap occurs. The territory recovered is beyond the material world. “Distances I” gives something like a model portrait of a state of transcendence, the experience of nirvana. The poem sounds like a deposition of hallucinations: “FROM FLESH into phantom on the horizontal stone/I was the sole witness to my homecoming . . .” (53). It presents a surreal process of psychological exploration in which contact is made with a realm of existence beyond the everyday world: Serene lights on the other balcony: Redolent fountains bristling with signs— But what does my divine rejoicing hold? A bowl of incense, a nest of fireflies? I was the sole witness to my homecoming. . . (53)

In magical realist fashion,9 in terms of the wackiness of ideas and their conveyance in the mode of the fantastic, the speaker tells of having been transported into a mysterious planet of pure ecstasy and absolute serenity. He reports back to our mundane earthly realm a vision of transcendence: For in the inflorescence of the white Chamber, a voice, from very far away, Chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of earth, Paddled me home through some dark Labyrinth, from laughter to dream. (53)

The texture of emotional transport of magnificence undergone by the enchanted protagonist of this astonishing poem puts him in the exalted company of the likes of Moses as he waited to receive the Ten Commandments in the Bible. Just as Moses in Exodus 19 ascended to the heights of Mount Sinai, rapture-like and in a trance the protagonist feels himself transported. And he hears a voice, just as Moses heard God call him. For each person, the scene is a sacred place; each experiences a transfiguration—an encounter whose depths render all descriptions inadequate, transforming his countenance visibly from expectancy to awe and exhilaration. Of course, there are marked differences: first, the speaker-protagonist’s vision is a jour-

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ney undertaken into the depths of the origins of the earth (hell?), whereas Moses rose through clouds onto a mountain-top (heaven?). And last, but not least, the speaker-protagonist’s journey is presented as a retreat from the intrusions of the outer world for purposes of discovering his own inner essences but Moses answers the call to public duty in devoted spiritual service to God, thereby receiving on mankind’s behalf the very holy context of our Christian faith. However, whatever the speaker-protagonist’s desire to escape the dreary world may be, he is soon unavoidably drawn back to face the harsh reality: scenes of the ruin that Nigeria threatens to become. The next lyric, “Distances II,” therefore, records a unique and troubling event that should scare every reader: an imagined experience of someone –the speaker himself—undergoing transformation from the state of being to non-being. In the poem we confront the speaker-protagonist reporting on being tortured by a nightmare in which he helplessly watches his own life being quite literally drained out of him piecemeal—bit by bit and moment by moment. It is not that his existence is torpedoed or abruptly snuffed out permanently at a fixed moment. No, his life is not brought to a sudden end but gradually withdrawn by installments. The speaker-protagonist inexplicably has found himself positioned under circumstances that put him gravely in harm’s way, in a place where “Death lay in ambush that evening in that island;/voice sought its echo that evening in that island” (54). He proceeds to provide revealing details of this process, stage by stage, beginning with how it started with his vision becoming impaired, “And the eye lost its light,/the light lost its shadow” (54). Next the speaker-protagonist turns his attention to the atmosphere, filling the reader in on the setting where the event happened. Presumably he is in the valley of death; total stillness and darkness rule the place: For the wind, eternal suitor of dead leaves, unrolled his bandages to the finest swimmer . . . It was an evening without flesh or skeleton; An evening with no silver bells to its tale; Without lanterns, an evening without buntings; And it was an evening without age or memory—(54)

As can be seen, the speaker-protagonist is not merely accosted by death, which is in hot pursuit of him; he is actually done in, and yet he still somehow lives to tell it all! The poem is about the vicarious experience of dying slowly, of the speaker-protagonist watching helplessly the slow-but-steady

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disintegration of his body parts, limb by limb, organ by organ. Amazingly enough, through all of this process in which he is in a state of hazy confusion, the subject of this macabre event maintains enough poise and composure to commit the energy, willpower, ability, and acumen to mobilize an array of images to provide a telling report on the occurrence before he takes in his last breadth and it’s all over. Any other mortal would certainly have been discomfited by the terrifying ordeal of feeling his body slowly give way, to the point of freaking out. But not this one, who keeps a painstakingly chilling record deploying participant eye-witness authentication: And in the freezing tuberoses of the white Chamber, eyes that had lost their animal Colour, havoc of eyes incandescent rays, Pinned me, cold, to the marble stretcher, Until my eyes lost their blood And the blood lost its odour (54)

This description of the end point in the speaker-protagonist’s existence before transiting from able-bodied state into lifelessness is skillfully done. There is nothing more mysterious than death; there are very few people living who can presume to know it: these graphic images depicting the process of life being gradually drawn out of the body of an organic entity and replaced with expired matter present perhaps the most poignant pictures of the stages in the death experience ever recorded in African poetry. The most puzzling thing, in all of this, is the speaker-protagonist’s characterization of the nature of the active element that in his mind is causing his body parts to go through functional decline, “the everlasting fire from the oblong window” that “forgot the taste of ash in the air’s marrow” (54). What this implies is that the destructive “fire” responsible for his body undergoing degeneration doesn’t produce ash or use up an oxidizing agent like oxygen. It is difficult to reconcile the character of this “fire,” however, with the enormity of devastation it has left in its trail: anguish and solitude . . . Smothered, my scattered cry, the dancers, lost among their own snares; the faces, the hands held captive; the interspaces reddening with blood; (55).

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The reader is thrown further off-balance, and overtaken by a bewilderment that is little diminished, by learning about the one overseeing all of these atrocities of so many, gagged and held captive and languishing in pain in the great slaughterhouse: “and behind them all,/in smock of white cotton,/Death herself,/the chief celebrant,/in a cloud of incense, paring her fingernails . . .” (55). This is quite disorientating, because death is personified here in highly unlikely images that deepen the confusion even more. First, death is dressed in Christ-like and angelic white robes, as opposed to being swathed in the spectral form in which the scavenger is traditionally painted. Second, death is described as taking all the pleasure in killing people, and jubilantly celebrating its victory: As opposed to exhibiting the ghostly habits of a supernatural entity that it is conventionally associated with, we see death uncharacteristically in a mood of exuberant gaiety. Finally, death is depicted as at once a seductive female doused in agreeable perfume (“incense”), relaxed not only in pleasing scent but in great cheer (“paring her fingernails”), yet, quite ironically, carrying out the most dastardly sadistic act imaginable: the ruthless execution of human beings tragically attracted to her terrible beauty, even going so far as to further viciously abuse the corpses by decapitating their violated body parts. The picture thus painted not only announces the sleight of hand of a creepy and brutish creature invested here with the luster and bravado that contradict its widely received image; it also points up the tear-jerking double jeopardy status of the victims. Death’s pitiful casualties have to endure the disappointment of having their deep romantic aspirations squashed, a predicament exacerbated by the pain of being faced with the cold truth of having to pay the ultimate price: “At her feet rolled their heads like cut fruits;/about her fell/their severed members, numerous as locusts” (55). While we are told that “Like split wood left to dry, the dismembered/ joints of ministrants piled high,” at the same time, “She bathed her knees in the blood of attendants;/her smock in entrails of ministrants . . . ” (55). The motley assortment of contradictory images we unexpectedly encounter here, mixing our received ideas of the character of death as evil or incarnate horror with ones of an untrustworthy seductive matron or dame, definitely represents a new invention and leaves us totally clueless as readers. After the apparent detour, Labyrinths’s inaugural revelation is recaptured in “Distances III” with the return more fully to the preoccupation with the communal experience. Here, the speaker-protagonist rediscovers that the trials that dog his personal journeys are shared by many, by a heterogeneous group of patrons, including “prophets,” “martyrs,” “lunatics,” “dantini,” “dilletanti,” “vendors,” “princes,” and “negritude politicians,”

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who are all foster children of the tumult and upheaval. They come from different directions, from various professions, social classes, and regions, and are of different political stripes, but are all in this together: journeying towards a common destination, propelled by a joint mission of salvation, and a shared destiny of disappointment. The speaker’s suffering parallels the others’. “Distances IV,” generally regarded as the highest artistic point in Okigbo’s poetry, brings all the spiritual questions of the quest in Labyrinths to a resolution by having the speaker-protagonist turn his sights fully toward the traditional creed represented by the goddess of Idoto while making a mockery of the dogma of salvation preached by Christianity, which is rejected as holding no promise for him. The hatchet job of belittling the Christian faith is carried through in this poem in the form of parody ridiculing its chief tenets: the belief that Jesus Christ is the only pathway to salvation, the second birth as the beginning of a new life for those who are born again, and the biblical creation story that upholds that God brought things into existence through the spoken word: the only way to go through the marble archway to the catatonic pingpong of the evanescent halo . . . after we have formed then only the forms were formed and all the forms were formed after our forming . . . (original emphasis, 57)

Not only is it true to say that the various strands of religion encountered along the way by the protagonist are harmonized in “Distances IV,” but it is also evident that the verse gathers all the architectural and mathematical signs, shapes, and symbols undergirding the structure of the entire collection. Not unexpectedly, much time is devoted here to questions of artistic form and style. With the strangeness and wonder of the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, of the new birth, and the biblical creation story serving as the butt of comedy and satiric attack, conducted via the medium of the quizzical humor that is obtained through wordplay, in the terms of the poem, all the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith come across as nonsensical garbage. The work of influence in Nigerian literature is generally thought to be one that predominantly follows a strong ethnic line. It is customarily

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believed that when Nigerian writers draw upon the works of their compatriots, they, by and large, do so within the bounds of indigenous linguistic and cultural filiations. That is to say, it is usually assumed that Nigerian writers are mainly inclined to take from those who share their ethnicity. In light of the particularly highly intense rivalries of their ethnic groups, the Yoruba and Igbo, therefore, to consider Okinba Launko (Femi Osofisan), a writer of Yoruba extraction, to be a likely candidate for influences by the enigmatic Igbo writer Christopher Okigbo might seem unwarranted and disingenuous, if not a downright oxymoron.10 Yet as will be shown in this study, Osofisan’s singular book of poems, Minted Coins,11 supplies an intimation that he stands in incontestable debt to Okigbo. A feisty evocation of an idyllic view of life, Minted Coins has roots that stretch back to the lyric tradition pioneered by Okigbo and extended by his immediate contemporaries such as John Pepper Clark (Bekederemo), Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, and M. J. C Echeruo.12 An engaging, flamboyant work, in which art serves as a tool for socio-political commentary denouncing the injustices, oppression, and inhumanity of the post-independence leadership of Nigeria, Osofisan’s Minted Coins expresses a passionate bonding of private and public concerns, revealing strong imaginative powers that make indelible the marks both of the poet’s genius and of his sources. Perhaps Osofisan found Okigbo’s craft congenial to his own vision because the Igbo poet himself, as we have seen, also drew heavily on Yoruba sources.13 Whatever the case might be, while Osofisan’s Minted Coins bears the unmistakable trace of a highly original imagination—as there is less than total concordance between his compositions and his primary idol’s—it is primarily an evocation of the themes and style of Okigbo’s poetry. Minted Coins is an adept illustration of continuity and change, tradition and innovation. Indeed in Minted Coins one sees clearly how a student’s departures from the master’s paths can be as consequential as his borrowings. It is evident, for instance, that Osofisan’s collection covers a more limited philosophical and epistemological ground than his model, even if his informing historical account is more expansive. This is especially the case with respect to the echoes of the successive ugly events that have followed Nigeria’s independence. Though these events, as we have seen, were anticipated in Okigbo’s later poetry, they have had to await full elaboration in Osofisan’s Minted Coins. The real tipping point, of course, concerns the issues of injustice, disempowerment, and corruption that are firmly placed by Osofisan within the general context of the history of military dictatorships in Africa. With a keen attentiveness to the implications of the dominance of military

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control in the years between Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain in October 1960 and 1986 (just a year before it was published), Minted Coins gives maximum dramatic intensity to the unthinkable atrocities witnessed during the, by then, over 20 years of military rule in the country’s now more than 50-year post-independence history. As is well known, Nigeria’s first military coup, led by General Aguiyi Ironsi, barely six years after independence, on January 15, 1966, was quickly followed by a second when Ironsi was overthrown in a counter coup in July 1966 that brought another officer, then Lt Colonel (later Major General) Yakubu Gowon to power. Gowon’s nine-year-rule was terminated by the coup of General Murtala Mohammed in 1975. When General Murtala Mohammed was killed in the unsuccessful coup of Lt Colonel B. S. Dimka of February 13, 1976, his second-in-command, General Olusegun Obasanjo, took power and ruled until October 1979, when he handed over power to the first elected civilian president of the country, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, who, upon re-election for a second term of office, was ousted from power by the coup that brought General Buhari and Brigadier Idiagbon into the limelight in 1983. Then, on August 27, 1985 the nation was again shocked with the news of another coup, when General Ibrahim Babangida ended the rule of Buhari and Idiagbon. Babangida stepped aside on August 25, 1993, only to be replaced six months later by his former colleague, General Sani Abacha, who held on tenaciously to power until his sudden death from undisclosed causes in June 1998. Throughout the period of military rule, but especially during the Babangida and Abacha eras—the period covered in Minted Coins—the soldiers projected themselves as powerful, benevolent leaders who were in power to “restore law and order” and, above all, were themselves beyond the rule of law: softly on the sand the moon spreads his mat for the children to sit on. (“The moon and me,” 10)

It is the perfection of this ideal world that makes the despoliation of the earth by humans a squandering of the opportunities abundantly offered them to realize their potential happiness, something that is bemoaned poignantly by the speaker. The images of pain and sorrow that dominate the articulation of man–woman relationships in Minted Coins bespeak the speaker’s genuine sadness over the painful dilemma in which humans are caught up.

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The piece “Fisherman” uncovers some of the ambivalences that attend such relationships, capturing the bittersweet tensions with mixed freedom and prison metaphors, as when the speaker wonders aloud whether to regard his female partner “as a liberation, a flag of freedom/flung to the air” or a “dungeon into which I tumbled, splashing/for air . . .” (21). Sensuality is an expression of the liberated state of mankind; the speaker rejects the denial of it as an oppressive action of an authoritarian environment; his lady love, “whose presence/rekindles an ancient ritual,” becomes a symbol of the native land, with whom he yearns to forge a lasting relationship (2). The look of your eyes proclaim their depth Deep like a lake of mystery, in whose Dark a monster breathes: But I laugh. I cast my net upon your waters For only a crab fears the promise of drowning. (21)

In “Queen” love is incarnated as the union of imagination (memory) and reality (the present), leading to further exploration of the links between the self-indulgent and political interests of the speaker, and imagery lifts the verse to significant heights. Love, or the mutual attraction of two individuals, is characterized visually and by auditory means as “a clapping of hands—startling/velvet with the weight of joy” (22). In this nostalgic evocation of a significant chance meeting of two lovers, Osofisan truly demonstrates that his forte as a poet is reminiscence. He begins by describing “Queen” as “The diary of our meeting,” of the moment when two lovers meet in the cold surprise of a harmattan season, where she emerges as “a tourist, bearing my curiosity/in the camera of my longing, plus a pair of/lanterns, a green smell of my eagerness/and chiefly, my exploring hands . . .” (22). The attempt to give a composite picture of the lady’s presence results in a model of woman worship, reminiscent of Okigbo’s rendition in the watermaid poems: You were the landscape from a faraway land, and I knew you first as one knows a painting: an artist’s creation, synthetic, a masterpiece of hills and sea and cinema houses (“Queen,” 22)

As will be evident, right down from the design of mixing long lines and short and the specific patterning of rhyme (mostly through assonance or vowel harmony), Osofisan’s poetry in Minted Coins owes much of its aesthetic effects to its having returned to Okigbo’s economical verse line

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structure. The movement from the weary rhythm of the line “you were . . . land” to the breathless cadences of “masterpiece of hills . . . houses” helps anchor the identity of the woman: she is an overlap of images from Yoruba mythology and modern communications media, of art and life, of memory and desire—in short, a perfection of imaginative fantasy. The stress on the evanescent qualities of the woman thus compels the reader to realize that the subject is not just a lady love but also the very symbol of creativity, the speaker’s muse: You brought me your youth, fragrant as a calabash of roasted crickets: I dipped my hand in, and my songs were the lavish spices I have tried to feed as one feeds from a queen. (“Queen,” 23)

The valence of the speaker’s romance with his lady in Osofisan’s poetry is one up on Okigbo’s, however. For one thing, love of a lady in Minted Coins is intertwined with the speaker’s love of his fatherland, which takes on a pan-African scope. Unlike Okigbo who, in Labyrinths, presents us with a protagonist who maintains a clear distinction between his love object and his political aspirations, and seldom conflates the two, in Minted Coins, Osofisan’s speaker illustrates perfectly how love can be celebrated with an array of images which have many political associations. With “Olokun (1),” for example, a poem written by the shores of the River Gambia, and composed in the tradition of Okigbo’s watermaid poems (which are in their turn clear throw-backs to “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats,14 in which a trout caught by the persona Aengus turns into a girl, who after identifying him by name vanishes and thus leaves him yearning and resolved to pursue her), a visit to the neighboring West African country from which the river took its name affords a rare opportunity to witness a display of fine lyrical flourishes typical of the speaker’s passionate involvement with the African landscape and the galaxy of the people’s myths and belief systems. In Labyritnths, Okigbo’s concern is with the idea of love in its aesthetic, sensual, and spiritual possibilities; but Osofisan in Minted Coins is occupied with love and nationalism: the wider ramifications of endearment sentiments privately directed on a personal level toward a love object. This contrast between the two poets is of extreme importance in telling us about the innovations the student brought to what he took from the master. In the “Olokun” poems in Minted Coins there is a childlike quality to the speaker’s sense of self-surrender to the seascape that resembles the

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submissiveness of Labyrinths’ protagonist to Idoto, his goddess; but there is maintained in Osofisan’s poem a distance from the object of the speaker’s admiration, absent in Okigbo’s watermaid verses. This distance is obtained through the shifting voices in which Olokun is addressed. The opening lines of “Olokun (I)” deserve to be quoted because they show the use of shifting voices utilized for purposes of attaining intervening space: Your voice comes in tides of a great river Upon my silt of loneliness I am an ancient land of colonial memories, my head is grey in the glass of noon From the distance I spy you—you are the one tenderly bearing the petals of flags upon the long calyces of the great ships, till your skin melts with the ambre garden of sky. (14)

In the first two lines it is obviously the voice of the poet-speaker addressing “Olokun,” the Yoruba goddess of the sea, an eternal presence within a large body of water. But the next two lines present the voice of the landmass of the Gambia as a country addressing its major river. An “ancient land of colonial memories” not only suggests the historical antiquity of the country but evokes its heroic past, the indomitable spirit that saw it through its darkest moment. Then in the following four lines the voice of the poet-speaker returns, as it becomes mesmerized by the vision of the goddess which arrests it. “Olokun” is, in general usage, an image for beautiful girls and, as happens also in J. P. Clark’s earlier piece of the same title, Minted Coins’ celebration of her “virgin waters” that are “saltless/in the purity of your long pilgrimage/ from ancient mythologies and primal hills,” is unequivocal in its depiction of the river and the goddess who inhabits it as ageless creations, creatures who are also eternally worthy companions. Demonstrating a love for a fatherland so great that it is suffused with a jealous bent, the speaker reveals a passion that is ferocious in its intensity, gleefully gloating in “Olokun (1)” over the number of men his lover has wounded by rejecting their advances while she reserves for him what he believes are her special carnal favors: Over there, desires are strong in your depths like a giant fish, prize of virile mariners And how many dead navigators in the legend of your ceaseless courtship of the sands! Oh in your ceaseless renaissance from sea to salt to storm, how many skeletons in the flotsam of your seasons . . . (14)

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The speaker takes the granting of sexual largesse by his love object as the more heroic because he thinks it is exclusive—she is faithful to him— and so the eventual shattering of this initial impression will bring on him no small measure of disillusionment, melting away his ego and his heroic image of himself, albeit he is resolved to accept his fate stoically rather than give in to despair: Yet I do not wear away. I am an ancient voice in the clang of chains. I am patient and ancient. And I know. I know my history is. And will always be. (14)

Here the voice of the speaker and his nation (the continent) fuse; the expression “the clang of chains” carries a double entendre, referring simultaneously both to the tension of love in which the speaker as an individual is caught up with his lady love and to the literal condition of Africa—the strings of neocolonial dependency dragging the continent down. The despondent treatment of Africa continues to expand the scenes of colonial conquest and economic exploitation as when the poem speaks of “the whitesmiths re-forging it all in the furnace/of the long harmattan” and of “the architects” and “the engineers/scanning my catacombs and mineral chambers/just for you . . . just for you only” (15). Simultaneously, the tones of sexual conquest, extravagant boastfulness, and physical pampering remain sustained from the perspective of an individual lover. For I am ancient. Wash me now as before. Wash along my shore. As many generations ago in the time of Ghana and Songhai. Wash me now as again, wash over me. (15)

In “Love’s Discotheque,” another poem evincing a similar tone of brash, exuberant sensuality, the exploration becomes even more involved than in “Olokun (1),” providing more painstaking summation of the spiritual fulfillment one can count on true love to bring about. In that exploration of willful longing, woman worship, and deep thoughts for the nation, an exquisite poetic program is fulfilled with unprecedented dazzling eloquence. “Love’s Discotheque” opens with a theme that is quite mundane. This relates to the speaker’s search for an overpowering love: a lady must come to “touch” his “salty voice/And taste my songs like sugarcane/into your heart” (17). In lines remarkable for the harmony in their coupled, driving aural and visual imagery, the speaker animates the union longed for as a love force that

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“will come so softly on paws/of muffled music”; “will open/the doors of your shyness, till/your love shall dance out, handsome/As a handshake” (17). From this original private preoccupation with the yearning for passionate love that will break through the lives of two individuals the theme quickly fans out to include a grander public aspiration that takes the form of a reaching out for a friendship and a discovery of understanding among lovers on a scale that will radiate through their entire community, making “the streets swollen/with the songs” of the lovers’ passage (20). The speaker says his ambition is to “forge” his lady love “a song of dancing feet/into love beats/as drunken/as a caterwauling deejay/let loose on the 7th floor” (20). What this means is that the speaker’s romantic fantasies are not merely of having access to power through control over a woman. Rather, the speaker dreams of triggering a flowering of love so big and full in its radiance it will stream through the entire society. Alas, when the speaker wakes from dream to reality, the fatherland has become more worthy of lament than celebration. In “Olokun (2)” the speaker had envisioned an ordered world where: There will be children and Their laughter in the rain Where once the dry clamour Of decrees. And leaves shall wear The prestige of greenness. (28)

However, in contrast to the rich splendor the speaker had looked forward to seeing re-enthroned, he confronts disorder, corruption, inequality, injustice, brutality, and hate all over the place. The harmonious union of the personal and public within the dominant concerns of Minted Coins is evidence of the speaker’s abiding patriotic zeal: he continues to explore the predicament of contemporary Nigeria against the background of lost private dreams, using the medium of a musical language simple to the core, reflecting the simplicity of sincere love. In the piece wisely entitled “Fidelity,” where the speaker first casts his glimpse of the lost ideals in terms of a disastrous love affair, contemplating his sudden desertion by his lady love, he is overcome by the fear that she might have been claimed by the fat-living tycoons, corrupt politicians, jobbing merchants and contractors, and thieves: Or may be you have long given up, folded your dreams quietly and gone home to wash; may be you have renounced the storm and walked into the salon of banqueting thieves, and joined the

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Chapter 5 feast? Perhaps you have chosen a new role already in this strange drama of Conquest, in which our people are always the defeated victims, their ribs out and screaming, when trusted leaders return from elections to become marauders. (34)

The woman’s former identity symbolizes the speaker’s wasted vision for the nation, while her new patron conjures up the ascendancy of the new crimes like thuggery, deceit, violence, exploitation, and selfishness. He especially fears that when he meets his former “darling” again, “I shall find/ only a stranger now, a queen superbly robed on a throne” (34). The socio-political situation that the speaker confronts all around him is so tragic it makes his aspirations appear hyperbolic, rather far-fetched in their loftiness. His governing ideals appear so self-evidently exaggerated, unrealistic because, in place of love, tyrants rule the land. and the incessant threat of edicts claw savagely into our faces and decrees knock us like hoofbeats . . . (for the keepers of the national flag have torn it down to sew their underwear) and the struggle for living has become a struggle among lunatics and reptiles in a jungle of terror. (“In these Times,” 30)

In fact, the image of society represented is one whose legal system is so bad a young man can go from an innocuous headline, straight into a prison cell . . . as justice acquired new meanings and needed guns to stand on its feet. (39)

This poem, entitled “For Thompson and Irabor,” was composed on the occasion of the release from detention of two well-known Nigerian journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, jailed for outspokenness against the repression perpetrated against the common people by the military dictatorship of General Buhari and Brigadier Idiagbon. It shows glaringly the sense of history we would expect from a committed poet when he surveys the Nigerian contemporary political scene. In it, Osofisan demonstrates the economic devastation caused to the lives of the underprivileged. One reason that the poem’s speaker warns the journalists against celebrating their regained “freedom” prematurely is because they “will come back/ different, and find the country/different: no longer the one you left behind”:

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You will find the streets clean, but empty of hope or dance; the beggars gone, replaced by the well-dressed unemployed; where the old hawkers used to stand, loud with their wares, shoving imported plastics in your face, You will arrive to find new hawkers—women with wailing infants on their backs (and watch out for their fingernails, their fingernails:) boys and girls aged beyond childhood by their desperate looks; men made cunning by the harsh realities of survival— (40)

According to the thinking of the speaker, Nigeria has become a society where “the families [are] ravaged by retrenchment” and by “our budget policies, our new thrift”; a place where “the same old barons” are behind “the same old/slogans, behind/the same old censuses/the same caucuses/standing/tall on the new soapboxes” (“I Remember Okigbo,” 49). Besides its critique of the state of the Nigerian union, Minted Coins embarks on another patriotic program that takes the reader on a guided tour around the calamitous events in Nigeria’s recent political history, and by so doing attempts to sensitize the public against the atrocities of the leadership. In “Blood Season” the focus is on the unmitigated violence visited by the police and the military in 1986 on the students nationwide. An unremitting gaze is fixed on the atrocities, and bitterness and anger dominate the poem. For instance, the bloodbath is so frightening because, when the speaker looks “into the sunset” all he sees are “the many mirrors of blood—/several students dead, how many gods/waiting to die” (37). What the lament protests against is a violence so widespread and grim it “sold tears/like the municipal/water corporation, in/tanks of profit” as there are everywhere “young corpses, where/bullets flower/ and uniformed murderers turn/to heroes” (37). The students are both the outspoken opponents of the violent repressions and the victims of the Nigerian injustices. Since the action of the students symbolized the hope for regeneration, by silencing them and their cry of hope the perpetrators of the ruthless injustices can go on with their dastardly behavior. By detailing the prevailing culture of fear in the country, and by warning the returning journalists Thompson and Irabor not to regard their release from detention as representing an authentic liberation for their oppressed countrymen and women, the poem executes an effective plan to rouse the educated elite in general to the full intensity of suffering under a military dictatorship:

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Chapter 5 You will find your friends (including me, Okinba) wise, strangely quiet now, saying little, parting quickly, Many of the hands shaking yours will be trembling hands, like nerves of fear. Tunde; Nduka; Welcome, but walk softly, for there is a drought in the air, like hidden snakes, a rage of sand in a gathering, gathering wind . . . (41)

In addition to the obvious fact that the self-referencing in this poem (“including me, Okinba”) will be recognized as similar to the one done earlier by Okigbo (“. . . I’ll soon go to hell/I, Okigbo, town-crier”) in his verse “Hurrah for Thunder” (Labyrinths, 67), it is notable that Osofisan’s poem is an extension of Okigbo’s political idealism. The extended image of the political violence as a “drought in the air/like hidden snakes, a rage of sand in a gathering, gathering wind” approximates the kind of cultural crisis at which Okigbo had registed his disdain more than a decade earlier, furnishing proof of not only the grotesque viciousness of the authorities which all lovers of freedom must unite to fight in a common cause but how things have not improved much in the country over time on this sad state of affairs. The general history of Africa revisited by the poem furnishes further proof of the ruthless persecution to which artists and thinkers are particularly prone under dictatorial circumstances. The current of deep anger and resentment that flows in the poem when recalling the fate of Christopher Okigbo in “I Remember Okigbo” and “Like a Dead Clock Now” shows the high regard in which the pre-eminent Nigerian poet who died in the Biafran war as a victim of social injustices is held. Other victims eulogized in “Fodder” are Nelson Mandela (who was being suppressed by the Botha regime in South Africa); Ngugi (exiled by the Kenyan authorities from his country of birth); Ousmane and Diop (repressed at home by Senghor in Senegal); and the dramatist Amadu Maddy of Sierra Leone, who was having problems with the regime of the late Siaka Stevens. the country eats them all writers and poets the country eats them all farmers, workers the bosses eat them all dreamers, builders

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contractors eat them all patriots and poets the traitors eat them all. (42)

This poem participates in the exercise of Okigboan imitation: the parallel verse structures vividly recall the lyrical flourish of Labyrinths. The lilting melody and the recurring refrain in Osofisan’s song express the exasperated mood of the speaker as well as his determination to give popular expression to the people’s anger in their mood of defiance. The vocabulary is simple, the rhythm memorable, and the anger is saturated; it is truly a moving poem which can rouse the oppressed to take up arms in a quest for liberation. Within the context of the Nigeria of the time, words such as “bosses,” “contractors,” and “traitors” are not merely political slogans and clichés but suggest real human enemies of progress—the special interests in Lagos (and now Abuja)—against whom the poem is sensitizing the proletariat or the rank and file that are equated with good citizenship: “writers and poets,” “farmers,” “workers,” “dreamers,” “builders,” and “patriots and poets.” Despite the depth of social and political decay, if the speaker sees a ray of hope, it is in the bleak atmosphere. In fact, he ventures that salvation will come out of the arrest, exile, and even execution of the artists and thinkers; out of the cold ashes of the decaying present. Thus, in “I Remember Okigbo” and “Like a Dead Clock Now,” the death of the eminent poet is conceptualized both as a “waste” and a consolation. Every time the politicians are at their old games of deceit there is “a cacophony of/numerous hammers/as carpenters and contractors/nail polling booths,” sad reminders of the calamitous past that make it seem they are nailing Okigbo again “as they once nailed a/Christ . . ./and many/are the cannibal manifestos/in the trembling air/many the iron syllables/that will kill you again Okigbo” (“I Remember Okigbo,” 49–50). But the poem also considers Okigbo’s death with tender irony, as an opportunity to place African artists as representatives of their erstwhile communities among the ancestral fathers, to whom ritual invocations can be made by the living to “save us/from the horror of/ naked thunderbeats and a/thirst that shrivels/our throats with lines of/guilt; from desolation” (“Like a Dead Clock Now,” 51). It has been suggested by Laurens van der Post that, “In view of the ominous breakdown in the religious machinery in Africa, writers, both in Africa and of Africa, have a tremendous responsibility laid upon them. Art to me is the technique of presenting unrealized and hidden values to people potentially capable of appreciating and understanding those values. It is a means by which men

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can penetrate places in their minds and souls they had never reached before. Writing especially can be a kind of magic mirror which holds up to man and society the neglected and unrealized aspects of himself and his age.”15 Many African writers have warmly accepted this responsibility of the intellectual class to be beacons of light in a neocolonial setting; so it is not surprising that Osofisan too is among their courageous number. He announced with Minted Coins that he is one of the most talented of the younger Nigerian poets, who composes lyrics of a very high order with Okigbo as a model, giving formal expression to the depressing social and political problems of his day. He gives substantial support to the advocates of oral forms in modern poetry and his experimentations help reshape the tradition of lyric poetry that comes down from Okigbo. He is able to look beyond the forces of corruption, greed, avarice, intolerance, and villainy threatening to shatter the Nigerian nation to reveal a vision of higher ideals, using a language that is characterized by mellowness, simplicity, and accessibility, indicative of a fertile imagination. Within this context, the vision of the piece “War’s Aftermath,” one of the last poems in Minted Coins, is particularly arresting. In it, the speaker takes an imaginative leap into the future of his country after the sociopolitical debacle and sees: . . . palm-trees shaking their hair above us, for that tree at the crossroads, pelting the earth with almonds . . . These forests where the earth has grown green in the ardour of creepers, so that rainfall after carrion a locust season May draw fresh wings on the statement of dawn: that my roads may meet where the fruits fall. (65–66)

The impulse to revive a belief in the fantasy world in this poem bears a remarkable resemblance to Okigbo’s “Distances I”: in both poems the envisioned world of abundance, order, and peace stands in sharp contrast to the tangled present one. Both share a spirit enshrined in another Osofisan poem, “New Season,” in which the speaker talks with comparable gusto about the new dawn of hope and enthuses: I hear the fields shake out their hair shout as with laughter. I know the farmer has left despair to the hoe and the blacksmith at the forge,

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he has left desolation to the bellows. Look; the palmtree wears a necklace of kernels. I with my kinsmen, we shall eat the first male yams of the season. Maize, owner of goodluck, dances to the many-fingered applause of his children. (69)

The employment of homely images rooted in the landscape is central to this poem’s formal properties and thematic content. The passionate celebration of the beauty and splendor of the flora and fauna incorporates the beliefs, myths, and other cultural practices of the Yoruba. The expressive idiom is interjected with Okigboan neologisms such as “palmtree” and “goodluck.” The language and idiom attest to Osofisan’s lyric intelligence: his ability to bring poetic expression to perfection by fusing orthodox and innovative methods. Through the mixture of fresh and conventional procedures, the verse reaffirms an underlying moral world view about the inevitability of change in human life through adept use of topography as an expressive resource. The vision of love, charity, and friendship projected with adroitness by Osofisan’s poetry lends it great appeal; and yet whether his country will witness the fulfillment craved in his own day—a life of relative abundance, justice and equality for the entire citizenry—is a matter that only the future can tell. Amidst all this, however, what can be established with certainty is that Osofisan’s verse has drawn with immense profit from the unrivalled energy, glamour, and elegance of Okigbo’s. As is evident in the mark left by him on his successors—such as Osofisan and, as we will see, Nwankwo—the sublime beauty of Okigbo’s verse has taken on an even larger life of its own after the death of the poet. Okigbo’s reputation for creating lively and vivid images continues to endure. It is, therefore, easy to understand why his presence in the Osofisan poetic canon is widespread; why Chimalum Nwankwo is also in the first rank of those for whom Okigbo provides the main source of influence. There is no doubt that Nwankwo is decidedly in the frontline of the contemporary Nigerian poets who turn to the recent past for inspiration and find it in Okigbo, beginning his poetic career by taking up the Master-poet’s radiance. But despite the thematic and formal debts many of Nwankwo’s poems owe to Okigbo, as evident in his assimilation especially of the precursor poet’s bright and sparkling compositions, it is particularly noteworthy that, where some of his colleagues might have been seduced by the drama of Okigbo’s life, Nwankwo has so far avoided the pattern of his predecessor’s attention-grabbing conduct.16 Without discounting the largely identical formative experiences that Nwankwo and his model have

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had, Nwankwo has chosen to stand alone in that key aspect of his career as an artist. In one of the defining moments in Nigerian history, Nwankwo too, like Okigbo, was enlisted in the Biafran army, where he saw military combat. The fact that Okigbo was not lucky enough to survive military action, of course, means that we will never know which direction his career might have taken; the subjection must remain a matter of speculation, some of it wild. What we do know for certain and can say immediately, however, is the fact that while the Nigeria–Biafra war did not exactly incite the ache for Okigbo to become a poet, the war experience was certainly a source of poetic inspiration for him, and has enabled or at the very least facilitated the extension of his poetic legacy by Nwankwo. In Nwankwo’s poetry we see the strain of the explicit use of Okigbo’s verse, and this manifests itself especially in areas of word choice, often comprised of neologisms, sound, rhythmic structure, and semantic resources. Nwankwo often recasts the master poet’s entire verse line structures. The creative mantle bequeathed by Okigbo to Nwankwo thus comprises not only a style of writing poetry that is based on a thrift or a paring down of words, otherwise known as minimalist verse. Nwnakwo’s debt to Okigbo also takes the form of a unique style of poetic composition rooted in a private myth-making strategy that regularly feeds on obscurity. It is a kind of gentle word play that is not opposed to rigor but thrives on the technique of restraining profusion. While searching for his major subjects and discovering his distinctive styles, Nwankwo came up with a disposition that has allowed him to develop the confidence not only to confront and assimilate but also to modify his predecessor’s method. Nwankwo may have begun by situating his work within a certain ambit of reverence for his model, but he has progressed beyond genuflection. Going over Nwankwo’s five successive volumes of verse to date,17 one can now observe a clear evolution in his technique. Considering Nwankwo’s wisely titled, largely apprentice, poetic debut Feet of the Limping Dancers, which maps a fledgling author’s adventure with language to explore a perplexing and deeply troubling and frustrating experience in a strange terrain, the late Donatus I. Nwoga was perhaps the first to notice an intensely passionate poetry of social engagement that showed a direct debt to Okigbo.18 Nwankwo’s main inclination, observed Nwoga, seems to be to use poetry as a platform for a naturalistic writing exhibiting what Nwoga termed a “strong voice . . . a mixture of strong insights into the human condition and an excitement with language”(v). This Okigboan influence, Nwoga wrote, is seen in Nwankwo’s insipient cultivation of obscurity, although the critic added that when it was “suggested to him that he was a

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disciple of Okigbo” Nwankwo was quick to express “dismay at this because he had always thought that Okigbo had no right to pose the difficulties he did to his readers” (v–vi). Concealment can surely be considered as one key poetic element that Nwankwo has imbibed from his reading of Okigbo’s poetry. It’s not simply that, as a young poet, Nwankwo had not assimilated his borrowings sufficiently for them to be indistinguishable at that early stage in the development of his poetic skills. Even Nwankwo’s more mature poetry continues to bear the imprints of Okigboan obfuscations. One has only to glance through the body of Nwankwo’s poetry—resplendent with some of the most riveting images, neologisms, punchlines, and verbal echoes—to observe, as Nwoga well puts it, that the primary quality of his early poetry is that it “expects the reader to accept that he, the reader, has to supply some of the connecting words which poetic concentration has squeezed out of the printed page, that dramatic presentation is a viable alternative to lyrical exploration, and that symbols are adequate evocations of meaning” (vi). Nwoga was surely correct in observing that the young poet’s proclivity toward the telling phrase, toward the evocation of “meaning in short expressions,” and his penchant to “dramatically recreate” scenes in short lines, all show Nwankwo’s verse feeding off Okigbo’s trademarks (vi). Therefore, given that no writer ever stands alone, as T. S. Eliot elegantly states in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”19 it seems that Nwankwo need not have been embarrassed to admit Okigbo’s influence. It is not only true that a young author who knows that his progenitor is a genuine rather than a false master will develop confidence, but the many improvements that Nwankwo has brought to his successive verse volumes bear out the perceptiveness of his early promise that Nwoga was quick to spot. Essentially free of some of the esotericism in Nwankwo’s earlier collection, which in practice rendered it ineffective in its effort to re-animate Igbo traditional culture, Toward the Aerial Zone utilizes a remarkably fresh language and idiom to echo his oral roots. Voices from Deep Water retains even closer associations with the Igbo oral expressive medium. With entertaining discernment and a penetrating blend of oration and inscription, Voices from Deep Water employs a diction that is both colloquial and topical. This volume is structured around a powerful key central metaphor: drowning used as an organizing symbol for describing both human existence in the poet’s homeland—the troubled Nigerian political culture—and in exile, offering in the process a compelling effort to foreground the predicament of Nigerian intellectuals abroad.

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At the same time that Nwankwo may very well be regarded as Okigbo’s most daring re-modeler so far, nowhere more than in The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems, perhaps his most ambitious volume and certainly his most robust book of verse to date, do we find clearer evidence that he is probably the most devoted among the disciples of Okigbo’s craft. The Womb in the Heart is recognizably a fusion of oral and written modes of poetic expression, bearing several stretches that amount to nothing short of spectacular brilliance. Not only is this verse collection precise in diction; like Okigbo’s poetry, it is also highly rich in echo and sound; intelligent, yet highly suggestive. Here, Nwankwo exhibits a superb command of syntax, suppleness, and tone, a perfected blend of wit and phrasing, and keen observation. It’s thus a text that makes a remarkably powerful impression, one that reaches a level of sophistication in phraseology that few poets from Africa since Okigbo have attained. Even with its division into eight sections, the structure of The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems is carefully unified by a display of emotion which is intense and an evocative language reflective of the gift of a highly refined, intellectually mature, poetic sensibility. The blurb on the back cover of The Womb in the Heart quotes one critic as bearing witness that Nwankwo’s intense internalization of Okigbo has gotten him closer to developing his personal idiom in this consummate piece than in any of his previous collections. In that same critic’s words, experimentation has enabled Nwankwo’s verse to move beyond “the simple terms” of Okigbo’s influence into evolving “a voice of his own,” thus allowing another reader to describe the composition as displaying Nwankwo “at his best, not only because he surpasses himself ‘chanting and dancing’ in African (Igbo) veritable rhythm at its most sublime, but also for the issues Nwankwo raises in the preface, itself an enigmatic, if intriguing discourse—issues of pounding significance to both poetry as a genre and African Poetics.”20 On the sole basis of evidence brought forth by The Womb in the Heart, it would be remiss to question that chorus of acclamation for Nwankwo. In carefully working through the body of Okigbo’s poetry, it is apparent that he is equally comfortable with stylistic re-workings and broad thematic reiterations as well as with extensions of these parameters of Okigbo’s poetry. In a manner very much reminiscent of Okigbo’s Labyrinths, we find that in The Womb in the Heart Nwankwo opens his text with a lively introduction that provides a manifesto contextualizing his preferred poetic practice, one situated within his inherited indigenous African and the imported European-language literary traditions and intellectual discourses. The ideas expressed here not only recall those in the opening salvo of

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Okigbo’s Labyrinths with Paths of Thunder, where the late poet similarly grounds his poetry and in so doing outlines his poetic vision by pointing to his disparate influences. They also serve as Nwankwo’s way of taking over and converting the old into something he needs in a new context. A major part of the interest of Okigbo’s poetic statement is how it moves over an impressively wide field and territory, exploring most aspects of his practical and imaginative journeys; in that way, Okigbo helps to bring the reader into broader awareness of significant signposts in his protagonist’s quest. Similarly Nwankwo takes the reader on a vividly realized guided tour through several of the subjects he will take up in the rest of the collection, covering in so doing a wide literary and political canvas. One of these preoccupations relates to the use of landscape as a strategy for exploring the inward self and its response to combative social change. At a time when many writers from the formerly colonized territories are turning increasingly to indigenous sources to give shape and form as well as thematic focus to their creative impulse, ambivalence, the sense of loss, issues of cultural dislocation, and grief mark the literature of exile. It is quite logical that utopian themes should predominate among Nwankwo’s concerns in The Heart of the Womb, for they open for him a window of access by means of which he can imaginatively work out a way to escape a dreary existence. The past emerges as a cultural paradise, the memories of which generate in the exiled author/protagonist/speaker’s yearning to return home a consciousness ravished by elemental anguish. Counting the losses from the past in ways that emphasize the irreversible decay of the homeland is what enables the speaker to amplify the charm of the disappearing simpler life. The nostalgic frame of the verse is accentuated by amnesia, the burden of forgetting chronically afflicting the collective memory of this society. In the piece “The Revolution,” a compelling attempt is made to achieve a vivid recollection of the festive carnivalesque world of the village. The dominant tone of longing with which this poem is suffused ultimately itself provides the best evidence that the event which the poem seeks to recapture is now sadly an abandoned cultural phenomenon, one consigned to the region of distant memory, a terrain “Where suns and stars are forged/The foundry of the deep dance/ Where mountains of old ashes/Become gold in moon glow/And silences loose their tongues/In the tumult of all cycles” (4). Here Nwankwo sounds very much like the Okigbo of the watermaid poems, for his lines devolve around the all-encompassing splendor of the fervid perimeter where once the pain of loneliness would dissolve under the joy of human fellowship, where the physical presence of the beloved not only exhilarates but ignites

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passion and energizes and fulfills as well as empowers and lifts the occupants up even in the face of the frustrations of daily living—a thrilling sight indeed. If they make anything clear, it is that the entire set of idealizations, standing in sharp contrast to the disfigured landscape starkly confronting the speaker in his present waking moments, encompasses the capaciousness of the regenerative powers of optimism. In face of the alarming scale of social degradation the poem portrays the homeland, now embarking on an agenda of modernity, not merely as a dispossessed victim of a historical movement that has simply spiraled out of even its authors’ control but as one with the potential for recovery. Obviously, as implied in the cerebral mood of the poem, the vanishing past holds more emotional appeal than the stressful present for the speaker. Thus, putting society in remembrance of “the memory of colonnades,” the speaker dramatically summons to life “the journey under moon glow/The search for the naked mothers/Under the sweet udala tree,” where celebrants once were “lost in our first cries” and soaked with “memories of the deep dance/As our last cries forget/The coded dance of planets/The return to the colonnades/The forests to the seven rivers/And the love which frothed like wine/For the sacred udala tree” (5–6). The verse composition here follows Okigbo’s method closely—in phraseology, rhythm, and sound patterning. It exemplifies how, while distinctly still Nwankwo’s own, the verse is yet so thoroughly Okigboan in form as to indicate how the student pays homage to his master by taking over the chief features of his verse. By revolving repeatedly around tantalizing images of a tranquil bygone era, Nwankwo’s verse here underscores the paradox that any society should abandon a way of life that has provided it with a reliable source of social harmony, spiritual renewal, and reviving strength. Yet, the speaker’s reactions to the prevalent lack of human wholeness are neither extravagant nor in excess of the realities they decry. Rather than rain down condemnation at the human fragmentation and seeming evil with the harshness, scorn, and detestation typically associated with the satiric weapon of vilification, for instance, a fine, delicate tone has been used to convey disillusion with the twisted values that now govern society. While the verse is luxuriating in magically summoning up the excitement and order tied to a world now reportedly lost, all along the speaker remains aware of the reprobation in which the observed world is wallowing, a world over-run by the essential lack of vital spiritual connectedness. Understatement, a sparse and unpretentious language and diction, and a commitment to the blankness of raw factuality are the hallmarks of the

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poem’s style. The result is a realistic depiction that makes the verse itself a precise historical record rather than a staging of delusory memories or illusionary dreams. The juxtaposition of past and present, utopia and harsh reality, of beauty and ugliness, is done with such dexterity that one image irresistibly impresses itself on the reader: the picture of the ideal world that was ostensibly lost, which emerges as a powerful counter-image to the notion of the existing degraded world. The pervasive image of past tranquility paves the way for the dawning of the glimmerings of a sense of the perverse impulses that have impelled this now imperfect society to abdicate what it once held dear: the sources of its original identity that resided in its thoroughgoing embrace of core family values such as cooperation, decency, order, communalism, and sharing. But the image of the transformed chaotic world serves not just as an attempt to adumbrate those ugly events which have plunged the society into the abyss; throughout, the poem’s uncompromising obsession with beauty is animated by a desire to bring a glorious past back to life. For that reason, “Flower from the Tomb” takes as its theme the extolment of elements that most conspicuously symbolize the disappearing past: the primordial beauty of the countryside or nature in its original uncorrupted state, the “Elegance of palms in gentle breeze/Grace of duikers on hind legs/Emulsion of twilight on calm beach water/Whose ripples must beat seven eyes/Water of the crescent moon/Bathing the jungle at sunset” (9). Juxtaposed with the serenity and blissfulness of traditional life, of course, is the all-consuming misery of the reality of chaos and the dissonance that characterize the alternative contemporary society, a bizarre and terrifying world which the piece entitled “Serene Images” depicts, “the second coming/Of monsters from goldstone/Driven by diamond hearts” (32). This is a defiled world, a universe of inverted morality and disorder. Doubts about the future of this society grow even stronger when one looks closely at the forces threatening its very fabric, mainly because of the depth of their sources. Cold-hearted individualism, aggressive and shocking callousness, unfettered atrocities, armed robbery, man’s inhumanity to man, savage brutalization, and random and appalling violence—these are all forces bringing fear, economic distress, and political instability to the population. They present a sobering vision of reality that is complex and challenging—not just because the society is fighting an enemy that is formidable but also because the enemy comes from within. All the images that point to this society’s arrested future are summed up in the verse, which powerfully captures a sense of how its most central initiatives have been aborted prematurely by “night masks” that walk at “noon tide” and ventures like “demon wedding[s]” that run the show in the lawless society.

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This is a grim picture of a society cast adrift. Without a clear sense of direction, there is a disconcerting take-over of “apocalypse of hearts/At the outdooring of the still-born” (32). The depiction of the burgeoning state of political corruption continues in “A Chant for Charlatans,” as borne out by the dominance of “the throats of vultures/And the throats of hawks” that hover over the population and the “callused women” who rise “Like ghosts from their graves . . . /With voices hoarse with pain” while “The planets rock with cries . . . /the roar of restive crowds” (21–22). These uncertainties give rise to a fearfully traumatic state of mental and psychological dissonance, and the soul and intellect get separated from themselves, each left with no other choice than to embark on its solitary desperate search for a spiritual anchor. “Libation at Noon” exemplifies the fact that often the search for safe harbors can take the form of retreat into a sanctimonious religious sanctuary, where the speaker dreams in the fashion of Okigbo’s speaker in the “Heavensgate” movement of Labyrinths of obtaining relief from the allpervading dreariness around him, by finding “sleep there on the bare floor/ And end my one-eyed vigil for my head” while horrendous perversions such as lesbian and homosexual practices pervade society: “My brothers are falling in love with each other/And my sisters bury each other with kisses/Fear mounts sentry at the gates of their hearts/When every human breath is a tornado/Beyond our demon passions and fires” (60). When the alternating search for respite takes the form of longing for the more socially sanctioned, conventional romantic/sexual encounter with a fellow human being who is a member of the opposite sex, as in “That Absence,” “Iroko in the Wind,” “Lost Compass,” “Flower on the Way, . . .” “And She Walked On, . . .” “Colors of Loss, . . .” and “Waiting”), what the poems all show individually and collectively is the ability to frame ribald verse as humorous and as touching as any among the favorites within the corpus of this genre from Africa. “The Absence” vibrates with controlled libidinally charged energies: “Because I always feel your presence/The gentle petals tremble/When passion soldiers strike with force/The iron gates of your love” (65). The phrase “iron gates of love” is of course a faint ironic allusion to one of Andrew Marvell’s famous lines in his classic poem “To His Coy Mistress.”21 The reference by Nwankwo’s speaker becomes ironic because he places erotic desire in the nest, within the safety of marriage between a man and a woman, within the family, and within the bounds of a tenderness that divests it of connotations of lust, through inverting the self-serving, aggressively possessive tone of the out-of-control speaker of his Metaphysical

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carpe diem counterpart who pursues his love object with a dizzying sense of urgency that is reflective of his disdain for her. In contrast to such thoughtlessness, which transforms desire into lustful passion, Nwankwo’s speaker reveals himself to be a patient man who decries the actions of “Those who would take beauty with storms/And wish rivers up mountains/. . . Those who have missed armies at the foot of love/Because they know not the magic of flowers” (65). On the contrary, Nwankwo’s speaker evokes the ideal image of love as a friendship of the highest order in which esteem is enlivened by desire and vice versa, to borrow the title of Jean H. Hagstrum’s engrossing 1992 book.22 “Lost Compass” presents a phase of the speaker-protagonist’s affair that contains an ironic twist because the relationship precipitates the pain of longing of someone who obtained a love he idolizes, and then she vanishes quickly and he is left with a devastating feeling of abandonment, very much in the manner of the experience of Okigbo’s protagonist in the “Watermaid” movement of Labyrinths: I lost you my compass When I needed you most Here in the dust storms In life’s hurricanes Time has globed the flame Against my moth’s eyes [. . .] Your memory haunts always They will not stay away My own haunts are littoral I am beach bound always The waves murmur like you In the hour of passion Like you they go away Leaving me like beach sand With hopes for your return And the wetness in my heart (66)

Fired by love and torn by grief, the speaker-protagonist of the poem conveys his despondency; here what is at issue is as much the loss of conjugal

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loyalty, affection, and support as the painful betrayal of a sacred contract, setting off the agony of unfulfilled sexual passion: “The hours are cold and grim/Without your heart’s blanket/Your passion was a cushion/Your constancy was a mace/You moved in quickly always/Between me and the anvil of foes” (66–67). The more the poems bring the subject of unwelcome change under the microscope, the more pictures of the bygone eras sorely missed by the embattled speaker multiply. We are given a peek into a once wholesome polity now diseased by political corruption (“A Chant for Charlatans,” “The Forbidden”). Then there is the portrait of a previously peaceful and serene world now consumed with escalated violence that has resulted in wanton deaths and destruction (“Rodin in Biafra”), as well as a world once confident about its core foundational religious beliefs and practices, systems of faith that cushioned people against the fear of the unknown, but now under the invasion of new faiths like Christianity that have no immediate meaning for the populations (“Runners to Heaven” and “Ogbanje”). Some take as their object the uncertainty that has been unleashed by the sudden decline of other important cultural values that once were the mainstay of African rural life, such as love, trust, dignity, and commitment (“Lost Compass”). Others give priority to the decline of occasions for celebration, the loss of the pomp and pageantry—all the spectacle and grandeur—that accompanied festivals and provided many people in traditional society a raison d’être for their existence (“Lady Under the Mango Tree”). Many of these concerns go over familiar ground generally covered in African poetry. Significantly, Nwankwo does manage to take these presentations and extend them. For example, the invocative title poem, “The Womb in the Heart,” is about beginnings, and it powerfully foregrounds the issue of nexus: the question of roots and the tragic consequences of their demise. Though a topic also expertly covered in “The Passage” movement of Okigbo’s Labyrinths, Nwankwo’s refreshing handling of the issue, however, results in a highly embodied portrait that adds significantly to Okigbo’s grand depiction. Both orally and visually, the essence of Nwankwo’s compilation lies in the use of a fresh and updated idiom; the employment of a sure dramatic tempo, and an expansiveness of coverage. The poem opens by acclaiming a birthplace, describing the picture from memory of a place termed “The chair of kings/The throne of queens/The seed of the heart” (11). This sets the tone for the commemorative act that projects the glory whose disappearance the rest of the stanzas will mourn. “In the womb of the heart/In the cache of memory/The womb is the tomb/For all beginnings” (11). In this construction, we have a form that connects

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computer-age language with traditional idiom, leading to the creation of a new resource for representing experience. In this uncommonly new experimental poetry, the speaker’s power of recall is here set against the background of the romance with the idea of a pristine upbringing in an Edenic universe, and of the character of an immaculately endowed and enchanted scene of a world where everything is in its perfect state. The idealistic cast of the speaker’s mind is registered in unmistakable terms as being that of an individual whose emotional involvement with the object of his admiration is declared, and who is viewing the idyllic location from close quarters, not as a detached stranger or foreign tourist would but as an interested party—a son of the land, intimately connected to and proudly celebrating the places he describes. His work derives its value, therefore, not so much from its concrete quality of representation as from its sparkling evocative tonality: The moon glows Over the udala tree Burnish of new maidens Waiting for children Under the udala tree At the gate of spirits The moon glows Waiting for children For the nude maidens Under the udala tree (11–12)

In this melodious chant-like hymn of wonder at an awe-inspiring serenade, what is not stated is as important as what is expressed; and witnessing is everything because seeing and hearing are accentuated. Here the repetitions and the limpid liquidity of the lines indicate the depth of the speaker’s pained longing for a magical way of life, the drama of whose sudden and sad disappearance the poem seeks to capture contrastively using a language centered on the primacy of the economy of culturally-loaded words. Like Okigbo’s speaker, Nwankwo’s fascination with ritual is everywhere in evidence in “The Womb in the Heart,” the point of reference for him being a setting where once every stage of the life cycle in Igboland from birth through puberty or coming of age, marriage, death, and burial was accompanied by ritual activity.

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Taking us as far back as possible in the life cycle, in time as well as space, “The Womb in the Heart” leads the reader on a journey to the pre-birth stage when young women being prepared for marriage knew one goal: the gift of conception, the only means by which the human races perpetuate themselves. We know from both fiction and anthropological studies on the Igbo such as Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands 23 that Igbo women seek life’s ultimate fulfillment in motherhood and regard child-bearing as no ordinary event but a capacity conferred upon a woman by the spiritual forces. The young maidens in Nwankwo’s poem “The Womb in the Heart,” who go to the fountainhead, where the ancestral spirits make their appearance seasonally, to press their claim to the promises of procreation just before marrying, bear witness to this long-standing belief among the Igbo. The major episode here is the pre-marital fertility ritual, the ceremony where would-be brides patiently and intently await the spiritual visitation that will give them the power to make babies. It is portrayed in this poem as a process of waiting that expresses the humanistic values of a people keenly attuned to the spiritual essences, the ancestral presences. The success of this accomplished collection’s title poem lies in how it presents the frenzied dissolution of the idyllic past order as an ill wind that has denied all those living in contemporary society the opportunity to experience a bubbling way of life, one whose passing is all the sadder because the younger generation will never get to know it. Having to surrender the splendor of the simpler life for the madness which supplanted it forces the following lament: The bellows are silent Where the moon glowed Over the gonads of gods Under the udala tree The red forge is cold And the harmattan blows Over ashes over eddies Under the udala tree The great flames are dead The tongues are no more The tongue which licked the sky Under the udala tree [. . .]

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The queen has left the king And the ring of fires From the mountains of festivities And the bonfires of passions The halls of ears are vacant From cavorts and revels (12)

Elaborately captured in this scene is a consciousness that ultimately the quality of life that a people can experience in any society is predicated not only upon relations of human beings to each other but upon the links between them and the spiritual world. From “The bellows” that “are silent/ Where the moon glowed” through “the red forge” now gone “cold” we witness both the progressive undoing of a communal way of life and that of an activity that almost always stimulated communal singing (“The tongues” that “are no more”) as well as the disconnection between humans and the religious foundations of their society. That’s why “The queen” who “has left the king” evidences not merely the decline of a secular atmosphere that once promoted festivity but, more significantly, the spiritual presences required to fuel the “bonfires of passions.” With these suggestive images, Nwankwo provides inventories of the significant decline witnessed by a society where once the spirit of cooperation and ritual ruled; from the Igbo frame of reference, it can be seen that Nwankwo’s poetry conveys a memorial trip back to a primordial birthplace in an idiom which is not only remarkably fresh and original but nationalistic as well. Certainly the story of how the mantle of one of the most likeable icons of African poetry was passed on to a promising younger writer is one of the most inspirational stories of influence in modern African literature. In the same way as the greatest source of Okigbo’s authority (his tantalizing brilliance) is also a mark of his value and significance, it is also the greatest challenge he poses to anyone who sets out to duplicate his matchless elegance, for it is hard to stand tall beside him; Okigbo’s very presence will dwarf anyone who dares to seek comparison to him. For this reason, by daring to stretch language to new levels Nwankwo’s verse serves notice of the resistance and experimental nature of great art, which is the way in which The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems can serve powerfully as a direct reminder of the enduring power of Okigbo’s poetry. The chilling details of the heinousness of crimes engendered by the state of social fragmentation—cultural degeneration, political corruption, excessive materialism, sexual perversion, the spate of anger, and random violence—that has decimated a way of life now considered by the poet to be too precious to be

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lost; all these extend issues that Okigbo’s poetry anticipated and investigated long ago, and they make clear the unsettling forces that have entrenched themselves to undermine the nation-building effort in post-colonial Africa. Nwankwo’s newest contribution to African poetry lies in the finelyetched artistic transformation he brings to his reading of both Okigbo and his continent’s political and cultural landscapes. With the grand plan it proffers toward attainment of the alternative society, his verse goes beyond the level of mere critique of the post-colonial African condition, making ecstatic social rebirth the basis of his high-quality interrogation of the sources of the malaise afflicting the continent. Through principles of poetic composition first gleaned from Okigbo and then internalized and made his own, amidst all the events which leave a sour taste in everyone’s mouths, Nwankwo’s verse advocates a set of backup values and challenges the target community to redefine itself along healthier paths. The values espoused by the poetry as preferred codes are multiple, from the thematic vantage point: self-discipline (“A Chant of Success . . .”); political accountability (“A Song for Mgbedike . . .”); communality, charity, loyalty, and altruism (“A Song for their Second Coming”), all of which are associated with the past generation. These principles may all be considered universal subjects, but in Nwankwo’s verse they are contextualized firmly within a recognizably African socio-cultural and political setting. Through the poetry’s exuberant celebration of traditional African village life and the efforts at its preservation; through the emotions of longing and disappointment expressed over the collapse of traditional culture; through the barbs of socio-political criticism; through the dissenting voice aired about the current direction of events in Africa; through the effort at renewal that thrusts forward the ideal of the simple rural life; and through its expressions of hope for a bright national future, a vigorous patriotic fervor is self-evident everywhere. It is within the context of borrowing and carrying from the old tradition (the uses of Okigbo as a model through whom to forge a new path) that readers should situate the character of Nwankwo’s verse. From the outset, some of this verse is highly imitative. Nwankwo began by re-packaging Okigbo’s image-making devices and verse lines—taking the line structures of the older poet, for example, and simulating their equivalent echoes. However much such a show of mimicry has a teasing quality, it’s noteworthy that Nwankwo has attained a mature voice which is now resolutely his own. Okigbo’s poetry is written in a richly symbolic language teeming with a rhythmic pace and a lyrical cadence that confer on his voice its special enlivening quality, and the quest theme can be considered the most important foundational element around which his signature style is woven. As can

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be clearly seen, the themes and styles of his poetry fall within the ambit of spiritual, social, political, and emotional topics that recur relentlessly in the works of his contemporaries and even in that of the succeeding generations of African poets. The distinguishing mark of this verse composition is the flair with which it mixes private and public concerns, using a highly unified and encrypted language that makes great music nearly as much an end in and of itself as the communication of meaningful information. Okigbo’s is a poetry that evidently discloses hopes, fears, trials, torments, joys, and a way of life familiar to his generation; but, expressed through a linguistic idiom that might well have encompassed material borrowed from both Euro-American poets and the indigenous African tradition, its influence has transcended his time. To designate Christopher Okigbo the acknowledged master of modern African poetry, as contemporary African poets, their students, and scholars working in the field would all generally agree, will appear to be stating the obvious, for, just as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe have deservedly taken their places as the respective icons of the drama and the novel of Africa, so Okigbo’s reputation as the exemplar of vatic symbolist poetic expression is well-earned. Assuredly, there is nothing outlandish about this vibrant verse; quite the contrary. One can attribute the depth and resonance of Okigbo’s poetry with a great measure of certainty to its reliance upon minimalist modes of expression, to the stripped-down, austere building blocks that sustain its character. The imprint of Okigbo’s verse on the works of his successors is now unmistakable. As everyone knows, the highly allusive and cryptic nature of his poems makes them difficult to understand. Yet, incomprehensible though the pieces might be for many readers, and, despite its slimness, as is also generally acknowledged, Okigbo’s collective volume has remained, of all the modern verse from Africa, the most inestimably influential body of work we have. There is nothing surprising in this. In examining the sources of the seductive pull of Okigbo’s poetry what is in play is the inseparability of his personal charm and his work as a star. A contemporary of his at the University College Ibadan, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s comments might be regarded in this context as confirmation that what we are dealing with in Okigbo’s poetry is a verse utilizing a method that conforms to the notion of the bleeding of life into art or vice versa, recurrent in dandyism, the type of art to which all Okigbo’s verse compositions aspire.24 For this reason, even his most esoteric or abstruse poems have never lacked intrigue. Certainly, it is arguable that Okigbo’s ability to fashion an icon of the self, to project a distinct personal image, as Ogundipe-Leslie maintains, has more than

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translated itself into universal public love for his work: “In appearance he was small, fine and dapper, in fact somewhat of a dandy; in manner quaintly elegant, irrepressible and hilarious in conversation, animated by a divine madness. Some would say it was all a put on. Okigbo loved music and the effect of this is everywhere evident in his verse.”25 It has to be admitted, of course that, even among his most loyal disciples, not everything about Okigbo was thought to be in perfect alignment. “Combustible” is probably too strong an adjective to describe Okigbo’s personality. But, just as his military service in the secessionist army during the Biafra–Nigeria Civil War, where he was killed tragically on the Nsukka frontline in 1967, shows, controversy is one thing that Okigbo never shied away from but, rather, in fact, took pride in fostering. In this context, Okigbo’s active military service during the secessionist war might very well be taken as a reflection of his unstable disposition; his action stands to mean different things according to whether one is viewing it from the standpoint of the secessionists, on the one hand, or the eyes of the federalists, on the other. Since Okigbo’s is a war effort that has either to be included within or excluded from the category of patriotic duty, one cannot foresee the likelihood of the debate coming to a resolution anytime soon. Whether one is a sympathizer or a detractor of the Biafran cause—whichever way one sees the events leading up to Okigbo’s untimely death at the battlefield near Nsukka—what cannot be in dispute is the fact that the events leading up to, and including, the war have ironically turned out to be determining factors in both the tone and the overall character of the timeless volume of verse left behind by him and posthumously published under the title Labyrinths with Paths of Thunder. War literature is material one never wishes to see in any abundance, quite simply because of the profound trauma that invariably originates it; however, this is one wish that has not materialized but rather continues to shrink progressively by the day. Within the specific context of Nigeria the paradox of war turning out to have produced a prodigious flowering of creativity is one already borne witness to by a number of studies, most notably those by Chinyere Nwahunanya and the contributors to his significantly titled volume A Harvest from Tragedy.26 Although it may be accounted a lean output, one might add that the fact that Okigbo’s Labyrinths has become without a doubt the single most influential book of poetry to have come out of Africa proves the wisdom of the faith he kept with an aesthetic perspective privileging economy or quality over quantity of output. It will be reductive, of course, to restrict Okigbo’s notion of poetry to the category of “art for art’s sake”; but it nonetheless bears remarking that the center of his vision of poetry is held

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by the idea of a poem as an ornamented artifact, an inspired masterpiece. The defining mark of that poetry is precisely the syncopated rhythm that stresses the emblematic value of an inscriptive poetic statement, one famed for being able to represent both of the two key sides of experience simultaneously: routine, everyday event on one hand and ritual order on the other. Sunday Anozie, Okigbo’s astute literary biographer, argues that the charm which animates his poetry is no different from the power of his character that was so irresistibly felt in his day. The remarkable energy, glamour, and elegance of Okigbo’s verse compositions continue to give sustaining agency to his writing. In Anozie’s estimation, one reason that Okigbo could craft poetry of such exquisite beauty and stunning originality is because of the astonishing breadth and sweep of his reading. On his poetic assignment Okigbo brought to bear the same qualities of great aesthetic virtuosity, dazzling elegance, audacity, eccentricity, warmth of character, and avid hunger for experience that were his signature tones. Never afraid to take risks, Okigbo had a daring temperament that was predisposed to experimentation, to exploiting the resources of language in directions that few had the courage to take them; the result is the breakthrough poetry now associated with his name. What is therefore so impressive about Okigbo’s poetry, Anozie maintains, is the way his personal attributes and wide reading collaborated to move his art in directions never before considered in the African tradition. Drawing from a rare inner energy and a talent that was willing to submit itself to varied literary influences, Okigbo forged a trend in experimental versification that would captivate many. Much as he could not entirely set it aside, Okigbo did not feel obligated to follow convention, says Anozie; this is the approach to poetic composition that allowed Okigbo’s sensibility to remap the landscape of modern African poetry by adapting a wide “range of references to and echoes of other poets.”27 As is borne witness to by the poetry of his successors such as Okinba Launko (Femi Osofisan) and Chimalum Nwankwo that we have examined, so, in their turn, other writers like to borrow from Okigbo and echo his voice. He is widely regarded as an authority, as evidenced by how he wrote a masterpiece by sorting his way through a maze of inter-textual references and cross-cultural borrowings that he carried to great lyricism, refinement, and complexity. An ambitious and demanding poet, who was always one step ahead of all his peers, Okigbo thus owes his towering stature to the crucial creative innovations he introduced, changes that predisposed the retentions, variations, and mutations of imitations of his work, marking the beginning of the process by which each successive African author’s method

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of assimilating and altering convention or a dominant existing trend participates in the making of the African poetic tradition.

NOTES 1. Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor, eds. Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo 1932–67 (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978), p. v. 2. Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths with Path of Thunder (London: Heinemann, 1971). It is always with some misgivings, of course, that we receive a work such as this Heinemann edition of Okigbo’s poetry, in which someone acting for an author (an editor or a publisher) brings together material the author’s decision has gone in favor of keeping apart, as the posthumous addition of the section “Path of Thunder” clearly misrepresents the intention reflected in his last revision of the various versions of his poems. Nevertheless, one is bound to conclude that, all in all, the volume performs the valuable task of providing readers easy access to a judicious selection of the Nigerian author’s best verse. 3. Camara Laye, The African Child (London: Collins, 1955) and A Dream of Africa (London: Collins, 1970); Yambo Ouologuem, Bound to Violence (London: Heinemann, 1971); and Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1972). 4. Among the critics who relate Okigbo’s poetry to his life story, see especially Sunday Anozie, Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (London: Evans Brothers, 1972), but also Emmanuel Obiechina, “Christopher Okigbo: Poet of Destiny,” in Uzoma Esonwanne, ed. Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo (New York: G. K. Hall, 2000), pp. 195–229. 5. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950). 6. Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966). 7. Donatus Ibe Nwoga, West African Verse: An Anthology (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 172. 8. Vergil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, Penguin, 2006). 9. It is fair to claim that, within the African context, the root of the genre of magic realist writing as a mode of extravagant stories that stretch verifiability to the limit is traceable to Okigbo’s “Distances.” If Okigbo did not write extensively in the genre, this is quite in conformity with an observation made by Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, who points out in “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English,” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, ed. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), that “magic realism is often used sporadically in an author’s oeuvre, and sporadically even in those of his or her texts commonly regarded as ‘magic realist’” (249).

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10. For an outstanding discussion of the genesis and character of the contention between the Igbo and Yoruba, see Kole Omotoso’s diligent study Achebe or Soyinka: A Study in Contrasts (London: Hans Zell, 1996). 11. Okinba Launko, Minted Coins (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1987). All page references in the body of the essay are from this edition. 12. See Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths with Paths of Thunder (London: Heinemann, 1971); J. P. Clark, A Reed in the Tide (London: Longman, 1965); Gabriel Okara, The Fisherman’s Invocation (Benin: Ethiope Publishing Corporation, 1978); Wole Soyinka, Idanre and other Poems (London: Methuen, 1967); and M. J. C. Echeruo, Mortality (London: Longman, 1968). I refer in particular to Soyinka’s early verse of Idanre and other Poems. His poetry has of course developed in other directions over the years but the lyrical temper has remained a constant, as Charles Bodunde demonstrates in a recent essay, “Tributes, censures and transitions: Soyinka’s Mandela and other Poems,” Wasafiri, 14, 1991, pp. 2–6. 13. Chris Dunton notes in his book Make Man Talk True: Nigerian Drama in English since 1970 (London: Hans Zell, 1992, p. 67) how, in his early iconoclastic survey of contemporary Nigerian English language poetry, published in the now defunct news magazine Afriscope in 1974, Osofisan “dismisses the work of a whole number of poets, while invoking Okigbo as a poet he greatly admires” (p. 67). 14. See Carolyn Holdsworth, ed., The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials of W. B. Yeats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 56–57. 15. Laurens Van Der Post, Dark Eyes in Africa (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 16. 16. Okigbo well knew the value of publicity and his stunts were legendary. It is a well-documented fact, for example, that his acts of commanding the spotlight were filled with as much temperamentality as talent. A friend of his, the critic Sunday Anozie, remarks upon the poet’s personality in an incisive analysis in Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (London: Evans, 1972), that some of Okigbo’s eccentricities were no secret at all: “Everybody who knew Okigbo in the late 30s and early 40s when he was in the primary school agrees that he was restless, very active and intelligent, ready to take a pugnacious stand at the slightest provocation from his mates. Something of a truant, too, he preferred outdoor games to sitting in the classroom” (7). On his part, reporting on his acquaintance with the young Nigerian writers who got together during and immediately after his college days in Ibadan in his essay “African Literature IV: Ritual and Ceremony in Okigbo’s Poetry,” in Donatus Nwoga, ed., Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984, pp. 261–73), O. R. Dathorne speaks similarly of Okigbo’s “volatile temperament” (p. 261). 17. Chimalum Nwankwo, Feet of the Limping Dancers (Enugu: Abic Publishers, 1987); Toward the Aerial Zone (Lagos: Africa Spearpoint Publishers, 1988); Voices from Deep Water (Lagos: Malthouse Press, Ltd., 1997); The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems (San Francisco: African Heritage Press, 2002); and Of the Deepest Shadows (San Francisco: Africa Heritage Press, 2009).

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18. See Donatus Nwoga, “Foreword,” Chimalum Nwankwo, Feet of the Limping Dancers (Enugu: Abic Publishers, 1987), pp. v–vii. 19. See T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1975). 20. The two critics quoted are Isidore Okpewho and Ernest Emenyonu. 21. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in Nigel Smith, ed., Marvell: The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, United Kingdom: Pearson Education Ltd, 2003), pp. 81–84. 22. Jean Hagstrum, Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 23. Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (London: Heinemann, 1979) and Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed Books, 1987). 24. Omolara Leslie, “The Poetry of Christopher Okigbo: Its Evolution and Significance,” in Donatus Ibe Nwoga, ed. Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984), 288–99 (pp. 290–91). 25. Ibid, pp. 290–91. 26. Chinyere Nwahunanya, A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil War Literature (Owerri: Springfield Publishers, 1996). 27. Sunday Anozie, Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (1972), pp. 1–2.

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frican literary history has conventionally been caught between advocates of a unanimous common African culture, born out of common descent and a shared colonial experience or language,1 and, more recently, a retreat into region and nation.2 But this study proposes a third way: of how authors have created a literary tradition by appropriating and rewriting each other’s narratives. Focusing not so much on the identical politics and ideologies shared by their authors or their cultural background but their negotiation of textual relationships, this study asks readers to approach African literature in a new key. African authors may be relatively late comers to the literary scene,3 but they are not alone in the making of emulation of each other’s works as their compositional pattern; as theorists of influence have long made known, intertextuality is a universally accepted practice. Poetry critic Helen Vendler, in a recent essay that one might not be incorrect to call of pre-eminent importance, “Stevens and Keats’ ‘To Autumn,’” understands the relationship of texts to other texts. Following in the steps of T. S. Eliot, she points out that a developing young writer’s uses of authority can take any variety of forms but influence is ubiquitous. “He may make certain implicit ‘meanings’ explicit; he may extrapolate certain possibilities to greater lengths; he may choose a detail, center on it, and turn it into an entire composition; he may alter the perspective from which the form is viewed; or he may view the phenomenon at a different moment in time.”4 As inspiration is like an osmotic process, whereby an apprentice writer can intuitively absorb what he or she reads without even noticing, the means by which a new text might spring into life are thus seemingly infinite. Instead of bowing to the voice of authority, to evolve his or her distinctive voice, the developing writer simply responds to it, and uses it in an act of creative negotiation. Thus, not only can the author under the tutelage of others 201

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combine several framing methodologies; the author can graft the appropriated corpus onto whichever genres he or she chooses. When it comes to the values of living aesthetic forms, the possibilities therefore seem endless. Now, the relevance of this legacy notion to African literature comes to the fore once it is recognized that all literary compositions draw from a communal literary system, as T. S. Eliot argued earlier in relation to European literature in his classic essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” when he stated that custom commands every writer to take his or her strategic place within heritage. Eliot, validating compellingly his argument that the really fine writers in the continent house within their writing the totality of the current of the mind of Europe encapsulated in the European literary estate, illustrates that the singularity of a rising text can rarely be asserted other than by inventively reshaping the defining qualities of pre-existing forms. In wrestling with the controlling power of accumulated cultural capital, a promising young writer may, concomitantly, choose the option of imitating of one established writer alone, as the single ideal that serves as the pattern of good writing, or follow an eclectic array of literary models. What will ultimately differentiate a new text from precursor texts will be how an aspiring young author redefines the registers of his or her model texts since to compose a work is to bring about an individual modification to tradition. Therefore, the evolution of a growing young writer’s tone or preferred aesthetic form almost always proceeds as he or she navigates several compositional stages beginning with scavenging, simulating, re-mixing, enacting, replicating, and transmuting of established forms; in short, impersonation and self-fashioning. In a nutshell, because each genuinely new artistic production is a driven variation of a master-text (or master-texts, as the case may be), the creation of a new work of art (be it a novel, musical composition, painting, sculpture, poem, short story, or play) inevitably involves a simultaneous process of appropriative activity—seduction and pulling away. For a new text to come into its own it must wrestle against those within the surviving order, staking out its claim to significance by insisting upon assimilating, modifying, extending, regenerating, and redrawing the shape and spirit of the inherited forms in surprising ways.5 Implicitly, then, authentic creativity or ingenuity is thus not necessarily about the use of untried material but, rather, consists of the ability to repackage existing stocks by infusing them with new life as a new vision reacts to the old at the strategic point of creative contact—as an unseasoned writer talks back, as it were, to the text he or she is interacting with. It is worth recalling, as Eliot asserts, that a significant new work thus goes through an alchemical process of transformation in which it is made

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to contend with (reject outright, confirm, regenerate, or combat) the predecessor texts thematically, ideologically, and stylistically. Creativity is a revitalizing act of realignment; so, to be of lasting value, a new text alters its precursor(s) in crucial ways: for, truly to establish its distinctive vocabulary, a newly created text both reflects and refracts the parent text through a relationship of affiliation and disaffiliation, attaching and detaching itself from the extant body of works; a neophyte text defines itself. So it can fully assert its particular, defining qualities, often a new text’s causes are better served by mounting a guerrilla-type insurgency against orthodoxies as it explodes its way into existence. Conclusively, he states, whatever the writer’s primary inspirational tool kit, to give itself any claim to uniqueness, the maturing writer’s work has therefore to break out of the purely routine realm. Eliot and Vendler are not alone. Several other Western critics, including Gilbert Highet, Alastair Fowler, W. J. Jackson Bate, Brian Vickers, and Heather Sellers, and, notably, their African counterparts Peter Nazareth and Wole Soyinka, have expressed congenial views unwaveringly placing emphasis on the determinant role of relationship to lineage in the creative venture. As in the learning of any trade generally, but particularly the building of individual original works of art, foundations that were laid in the past are among the predominant promptings that trigger the creative or critical imagination. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson recapitulating Pliny, W. Jackson Bate carries the discussion about the influence wielded by the works of forebears a step further, arguing that it may make itself felt in a negative or limiting rather than inspirational way but it is an omnipresent factor, memorably termed by him “the burden of the past.”6 Bate, of course, follows Gilbert Highet, who, writing with specific reference to the German revolutionary writers in his 1949 study The Classical Tradition, thought that while authors “read in order to write” as no “creative writer can work on his own experience alone” there is another matter worthy of consideration. He described, for example, how “very often a new book will stimulate an author more than the day-by-day events of his life,” proceeding to acknowledge that the great writers can sometimes be so intimidating as to be no help at all to the developing author, since “the stronger the stimulus, the harder it is to receive it without being numbed. Exposed to the full power of classical poetry, many promising young writers have either been silenced or become helpless imitators. The German writers of the revolutionary period admitted the power of Greek myth and poetry; but most of them were unable to assimilate it as easily and productively as the simpler influences of folk-song and medieval romance.”7

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Consequently, the weight of existing works—whether bringing nourishment or impoverishment—is so omnipresent in the production of new works, it cannot be overlooked; it is thus unreasonable to hanker futilely and desperately after an absoluteness of un-indebtedness. Alastair Fowler affirms this position when stating “very few if any of our ideas and words can be called our own. We came into the world without them, and have unconsciously taken them over from forgotten sources: parents, teachers, role models, books, and the Internet. Dante was partly aware of this: ‘Speech is what we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses.’”8 And Heather Sellers clinches the argument about the inescapable clutch of effects bequeathed by awareness of others’ works in this way: “When you imitate, you aren’t copying or stealing. You are performing a training exercise, one that has a long and respected tradition in the arts. You of course always acknowledge the imitation. It’s against the law to take someone else’s words or ideas and pass them off as your own, and it’s embarrassing to pretend your work is original when clearly it is not,”9 adding: You are imitating whenever you write, unconsciously. All writers are influenced by the works they have read, what they watch, what they know about literature. Stories you learned as a child are stuck in your head. Phrases and rhythms of works you read last semester lodge in your writing mind, and come out in your work. This is a good thing! Successful writers enjoy embedding subtle references to other pieces of literature in their works. We pass on, translate, adore, and keep alive the writers who influence us, consciously and unconsciously. We’re all imitating to some extent, every time we sit down to write. The more widely you read, the more texture your own writing has—artist as melting pot. If you slavishly read only one or two writers, your work may suffer from a poverty of influence. (41)

Sellers reasons that it does not really matter how literary affect is absorbed— whether it is taken in on purpose or un-deliberatively. Leverage may occur in ways large or small, manifesting itself subliminally or not so subtly, but it always plays an important, even if cloaked, role in composition; its clutches are seldom entirely avoidable. A person is not necessarily stealing when imitating someone responsibly; guided copying is often a justifiably great means of coming up with the most original ideas, and is not tantamount to a lack of innovation. Looking Inward should have demonstrated how and why although, without fail, influence constantly gives rise to a special creative moment when an established text (or texts) and new ideas come together in in-

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novative ways, however, it is easy to understand the reason many writers carefully and scrupulously keep their sources hidden. We have seen that writers hardly ever want to lift the veil on their compositional strategies; few of them want to give away their tricks to their competitors. Authors such as Achebe and Bessie Head, in fact, either show complete disavowal of influence or attempt to keep literary borrowing wrapped within the secrecy of their individual lives; these writers want the matter of obligation shrouded or concealed in the works themselves. If debt is negotiated in notoriously unexpected ways, taking all forms and shapes, idiosyncratic, private, and unpredictable, they seem to ask: Why seek to put it all out in the open? Influence attribution, source study, and even plagiarism charges, may intrigue and engross researchers; but none of these things is among the creative authors’ most palatable subjects. It is pretty apparent that these authors’ repudiation of things taken on loan demonstrates just how explosive the matter of relations between writers is. Literary alliance is a slippery subject to pin down because, as our discussion of Armah’s relationship to Achebe all too clearly demonstrates, many writers work hard to cover their tracks. They try to keep out of their readers’ sight key compositional methods or building blocks; pirated material is the part the most likely to be suppressed. For this reason, throughout history, the tracing of the outlines of the renewal brought about by creative continuity has remained an intriguing subject. But, as anyone could expect of a subject as touchy and demanding as literary debt, scholars have rarely come at it through more than broad brush strokes. In light of the labor, sentiments, and subterranean activities implicated in it—how easily emotions can run high over this matter—it is not surprising that drawing the fine lines is not always an achievable goal in the practice of tracking literary padding; there are bound to be various untraceable elements. It is within the context of this protean difficulty involved in the business of delineating literary affinity the work of veteran East African literary scholar Peter Nazareth draws its singular appeal, especially the diligence with which he has unpacked the complex impacts brought to bear on Ayi Kwei Armah by Alex La Guma.10 From a thorough and intricate discussion of the conventional properties of fiction, such as “story, plot, theme, character, structure, rhythm, metaphor, and, most of all, words” (154), Nazareth reaches the relatively novel conclusion that even a work as seemingly innovative as Armah’s iconoclastic novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1967) is really a substantial re-writing of another African classic—La Guma’s novella A Walk in the Night (1962). A Walk in the Night and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born both take the journey motif as their orga-

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nizing principle of structure, Nazareth argues. A Walk in the Night opens in the dark of night with “a trackless tram . . . a trolley bus . . . a vehicle that does not know where it is going,” from which an “angry young man jumps out, unheeding of the shouts and curses of the traffic,” while events in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born start off with a decrepit bus “when it is dark, but this time it is the darkness of dawn” (154). Nazareth next traces the unusually close resemblance in the uses of scavenging creatures as controlling images (the cockroach in La Guma’s A Walk in the Night and the Chichidodo bird in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born) as well as characters and their surroundings, with the main focus on how both protagonists are placed in locations with unthinking bodies—populations that hardly seem to “spend time thinking” although “it has been estimated that around 50,000 thoughts flash through” an average person’s head each day (155). In the hostile environments in which they find themselves, Nazareth argues, Mike (in La Guma’s A Walk in the Night) and the man, and, to a lesser extent, his teacher (in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born) are the only thinking beings who express the belief that “it is imperative to find out what one has been placed on this earth to do, and one can only acquire this awareness through thinking” (155). Forced into roles not of their own will, each deals thoughtfully with existential questions about the deeper meaning of life: La Guma has Mike face the question of “what it means to be a man” and “Armah extends La Guma’s notion that a word has a deeper meaning than what we assume” (157). There is a central distinguishing trait, however: though both characters aspire to attain the vision of the ideal, the man in Armah’s novel strives to reach it through political struggle—as opposed to Mike’s utopian dream to will it into existence in La Guma’s text. But, serving as a common source of revitalizing energy in both texts, is music: “La Guma is drawing on the resources of the blues not only because they deal with hurtful situations but also because they transform one’s response to situations. Armah takes the music further into Africa; and unlike Mike, the man pays attention” (162). The favorite choice of traveling guide, we have seen, for anyone in need of the company of someone who knows his way around influence study in the field of African literature, largely based on the force of his independent thinking which sweeps and engages the reader with his superb command of the subject, understandably, would be likely to be Wole Soyinka, of course; indeed, any study of intertextual influence in African literature must inevitably reckon with his absorbing book Myth, Literature, and the African World, a sublime piece of literary criticism in which the Nigerian Nobel Laureate provides ample evidence of how the great or near-

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great texts of African literature present endless points of entry into writing for others. Pointing specifically to the canonical African handling of labor in fiction, Soyinka shows how the example of Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bit of Wood taught others such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’ in Petals of Blood and Ayi Kwei Armah in The Healers to use sketches of the laboring working-class people’s struggles and victories as a viable approach to historical fiction. The longer one looks at Ousmane’s classic, Soyinka declares, the clearer it becomes that it has turned out to be a work with an uncommonly enduring, haunting power—one whose literary specters hover all over works by writers who go on to utilize the design of the parent text as an effective organizing literary principle of plot construction. As a text in the forefront of the movement for literary recurrence, Soyinka declares God’s Bits of Wood to be nothing short of epochal in its inspirational effects.11 As the preceding discussion will have illuminated why, anyone embarking on a study of influence in African literature can generally enlist the support of Soyinka and Nazareth. Just as is common with writers elsewhere, in addition to taking their sense of form, technique, temper, themes, and attitudes from each other, the paired African writers such as Chimalum Nwankwo, Okinba Launko, and Christopher Okigbo; Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Bessie Head; and Cyprian Ekwensi and Flora Nwapa also share identical elements either of style relating to vocabulary, sound patterns, or other linguistic permutations, as the case may be. 12 Crafted in sharp, subtle, and finely nuanced prose styles that court attention with rare and compelling combinations of scholarly erudition and analytical force, lucidity, and succinctness, the arguments pioneered by Soyinka (and expanded upon by Nazareth) display the art of a superb close reader of documents with a refined manner of presenting intricate interpretations of texts; with his lively and witty style that is truly riveting into the bargain Soyinka’s ideas have striking implications for the exploration of influence in African literature because of how he keeps a steady eye on the lines in which debt almost always shows up in creative writing—showing that not only do students and scholars of influence in African literature no longer have to negotiate every single hurdle, every faltering step, which the pioneering critic undertook when the field of influence studies was still groping for a direction. Students and scholars of the burden of the past in African literature now have surer footpaths to traverse, brighter lamps to light their way, and better tools to make them stronger researchers. Contrary to the prevailing popular stereotype that African writers do tend to ignore each other, evidence adduced to prove the network of connections among the texts examined in Looking Inward refutes resoundingly

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any attempts to negate the claim that author dialogues in Africa transcend frontiers, cutting across different parts of the spectrum. At cross purposes to any impression that only African women writers read each other’s works, for example, it is clear from our sampled texts that male and women writers do read each other’s works and many of them have proven to be consummate practitioners of imitation. We see how and why African writers— testing the artificial boundaries of colonization, tongue, gender, ethnicity, political ideology, and of Western public opinion—have long been holding literary dialogues, in addition to maintaining other forms of cultural contact. The concept of local filiations may, at first, appear inapplicable to African literature. But the opposite is true. Indeed, when one sets aside conventional biases and undefended conclusions, and dispassionately examines the evidence, it really should be obvious that mutual collaboration is inevitable, for even the rudimentary demands of schooling, for instance, so make many African writers required reading all over the continent it is very unlikely any of them could successfully overlook the others’ works. Were they so inclined, in fact, tangible evidence exists to demonstrate few are the African writers who can look away from each other’s works; therefore, the claim that African authors’ mutual indifference is more striking when they do not share the same colonizer is really nothing more than a cliché.13 Given the genealogy of African literary criticism, not just the presumed formal relation between the imaginative literatures of Africa and Western literature but how the influential concepts utilized in the explication of African writing are often borrowed wholesale from methods of interpretation developed in Anglo-American and French critical theories and methodologies, it is not a stretch to say that to continue to stress the issue of rivalry of African authors, despite evidence to the contrary, is therefore, in a way, to make every effort not to make the most of what we do know: the demonstrable aesthetic and thematic links between their works. With all of the staggering details of the nature of African creative writings increasingly being thrust into the limelight, never before have the windows for viewing anew the ordering of creative impulses in contemporary African literature been unlocked quite like they are now; there could hardly be a moment more auspicious than now to take stock of the literary links in African letters. This is truly a time of an unprecedented explosion of knowledge—archival, aesthetic, sociological, and political—about the African creative imagination. African literary study has built up such an impressive momentum that, whether just entering the field or an established expert, we can now stand back and reflect upon the monumental research output.

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If the current state of African literary scholarship offers any single crucial insight, it is therefore that, in order for a more compendious understanding of the field to emerge, intertextuality must take a more central stage rather than the passing nod which it currently enjoys. The contours of the field have been expanding and need to continue doing so; more concentrated energies should be expended in expanding the field even further to include the inspirations of forebears immediate and distant. Since all the evidence is increasingly suggesting the contrary, to continue stressing how African writers fight only serves a purpose of evasion. Constructing a reliable knowledge base on Africa is going to be anything but simple. Specifically, any new research initiative on Africa wishing to point the way to a new understanding will encompass new attitudes, beliefs, and feelings without which it is impossible to come to real knowledge of the particulars of how literary works are made there. What is needed is clearly a stubborn pursuit of appropriate conceptual frameworks of analysis. For example, the figure of the imitative African writer, dependent upon Western sources for creative inspiration, is all-pervading in conceptions of African literature; but missing in the discourse is the highly potent force of influence of an indigenous African origin. Tapping into this source of creativity will require stimulation of a mindset that is ready to deal with a very powerful impediment to research on intertextual relations in African literature: the issue of the apparent crisis of confidence which makes many African writers eager to conceal their real sources of inspiration. No writer has a direct hand in what posterity does with his or her ouvre; therefore, every writer blessed with a lasting literary reputation which can be measured by the number of talents who have chosen to work with his or her identifiable ideas and forms as well as standard devices of storytelling deserves every ounce of recognition received.

NOTES 1. See, for example, studies by Janheinz Jahn, Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1961); Ezekiel Mphalele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), and Charles Larson, The Emergence of African fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). 2. See, for instance, Richard Bjornson, The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) and Roger Kurtz, Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel (Trenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 1998.

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3. This claim still holds up even when consideration is given to the work of the one author considered by many the first African man of letters, the transplanted African Ouloudah Equiano, author of The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, two volumes (London, 1789). 4. Helen Vendler, “Stevens and Keats’ ‘To Autumn,’” in Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois, ed. Close Reading (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 157. 5. T. S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Frank Kermode, ED. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 37–44. 6. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 7. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 376. 8. Alastair Fowler, How to Write (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 101. For an opposing purist theory of literary production, see George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), for instance, which strives to establish a distinction between invention and creation and tags as “inventors” those who seize upon present material, and as “creators” those who make something out of nothing, a hair-splitting exercise. 9. Heather Sellers, The Practice of Creative Writing (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), p. 41. 10. 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 Press, 2002), pp. 153–66. By contrast, see a pioneering essay, “Plagiarism and Authentic Creativity in West Africa” (Research in African Literatures 6.1 [1975]: 32–39) by Nigerian literary critic Donatus Ibe Nwoga. 11. For details, see Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 12. Compare Brian Vicker’s richly informative study, offering a synthesis of the stages through which authorship studies of Elizabethan drama over the last century have passed. In that study, Vickers breaks down the stages as follows: “The first involved the identification of passages in anonymous or co-authored plays that closely echoed known work by one or more dramatists. This method considers longer verbal collocations, not single words or short phrases, and works best when it can show parallels of thought and attitude, in addition to verbal parallels. The second stage was the realization that different writers have different preferences within frequently recurring linguistic features: the use of contractions (’em, ’ee, ’tis), choice of alternative spellings (while or whiles), variant verb forms (has or hath, does or doth), or favourite exclamations (pish, phew). These usages could be located in a text, and systematically investigated, sometimes revealing clear differences. Variations in verse form could also be identified and tabulated. The third stage grew out of this, locating linguistic features—such as ‘function words’ (to, of, the), or

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the words beginning and/or ending sentences or speeches—and submitting them to detailed statistical analysis. All three approaches are independently valid, but the most satisfying results are obtained when their results support each other” (Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 244). 13. With respect to African women’s writing from different geopolitical and linguistic regions of the continent Anglophone Cameroonian feminist scholar Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi came up against similar prejudices; to move ahead with her project Gender in African Women’s Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), she had, in her own words, defiantly “to refuse to maintain a dichotomy or promote the splintering of African literature into linguistic camps reinforcing the false notion that these literatures are inherently different, for a number of reasons” (p. x).

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INDEX

Achebe, Chinua, xii, xiv, xv, 2, 7–9, 13, 36, 49, 62, 69–75, 79, 91, 95, 97–98, 102, 111, 113–23, 125, 127 129, 131–33, 135–37, 139, 141–46, 195, 198–99, 205, 207, 213–20 Arrow of God, 72, 79, 95, 115, 118, 213 A Man of the People, xv, 49, 69–122; affinity with the European colonial African novel, 73–77; Ananta in, 74, 80, 82; Chief Nanga (character) in, 74, 76–84, 87, 89–91, 93–94, 113, 119, 120n16; corruption and nepotism in, 82; as foundational text of African postcolonial political disillusionment, 71–73; humor, moral indeterminacy and satire in, 92–95; the limousine (long car) symbol in, 90–94; Odili Samalu (character and self-absorbed narrator) and ambiguity of representation in, 75–94; role of first person narrative in, 95; social snobbery in, 79–80

Morning Yet on Creation Day, 9n1, 115n1, 121n16, 213 No Longer at Ease, xv, 8, 115, 123–36; aesthetically characterized and differentiated from its predecessor Things Fall Apart, 134–35; commonalities with Eliot’s The Waste Land, 136; disappointed romantic love in, 125–32; osu caste and class hierarchy in, 124, 126–31; as pioneering text on ethnic intolerance theme, 136 Things Fall Apart, 36, 72, 79–80, 95, 102, 115, 118, 124, 132, 134–36, 21 Acholonu, Catherine, 9n1, 213 adaptation, xi, 2, 6, 11n8, 26–31, 62–64. See also appropriation and remodeling; allusion; imitation; influence; inspiration; parody Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 13n23, 213 aesthetic strategies, ix, x, xiii, 10, 36–37, 41–47, 56, 65–81, 90–115, 124–30, 137–43, 145–57, 179, 181–86, 191–97. See also adaptation; allusion; appropriation and

221

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Index

remodeling; imitation; influence; inspiration; parody; realism and verisimilitude; satire African novel, relation to colonialism, 100 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 122n30, 122n33, 213 allusion, xiii, 5, 59, 163, 188 Amadi, Elechi, 7, 73, 118n9, 192, 213 Amadiume, Ifi, 192, 200n23, 213 Anozie, Sunday, 9n1, 197, 198n4, 199n16, 200n27, 213 anxiety of influence in African literature, 1–6, 69–71 appropriation and remodeling of Achebe by Armah, 92, 97–99, 101–14 of Achebe by Head, 8, 123, 137–42 of Ekwensi by Nwapa, xii, xiv, 7–8, 15, 24–27, 29–36, 44–46, 49–65 of Faulkner by Armah, 9 of Okigbo by Launko, xii, xv, 7, 169–81 of Okigbo by Nwankwo, xii, xv, 7, 153, 181–86, 191–97 Armah, Ayi Kwei, xii, xiv, xv, 6–8, 9n1, 13n25, 68n28, 69–71, 97–99, 102, 104, 106–7, 111–12, 115, 115n2, 116n2, 116nn3–4, 117, 120n16, 121n16, 122nn28–33, 123, 142, 144n2, 151, 198n3, 205–7, 213, 215, 218 as one of the better African authors, 115 attacks on, 69–70 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, xiv, xvin2, 8, 9, 68n28, 69–73, 96–111, 113–15, 116n3, 117n4, 120n16, 122n30, 122nn31–33, 205–6, 210n10, 213, 215, 218;

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Estella Koomson (character), 104–6, 110; Joe Koomson (character) in, 68n28, 91–93, 103–5, 110, 113; the man (protagonist) in, 101, 112, 114; Oyo (character), 101, 112, 114; rage at corruption in, 100–14; remodeling of Achebe’s narrative of urban decline and political disillusionment in, 98–103, 105–14; revisiting of the trope of the long car and driving pioneered by Achebe, 103–7 Why Are We So Blest?, 123, 144n2, 151, 198n3, 213 See also appropriation and remodeling Asante, S. K. B., 122n32, 214 Asien, Samuel Omo, 99, 122 n29, 214 Auerbach, Eric, 3, 11n9, 214 Awoonor, Kofi, xvn1, xvin2, 122n30, 214, 217 Bate, W. Jackson, 203, 210n6, 214 Beard, Linda Susan, 144n15, 214 Behn, Aphra, 41, 67n23, 214 Bernheimer, Charles, 4, 12n12, 214 Bjornson, Richard, 209n2, 214 Black, Fodaski Martha, 4, 12n15, 214 Bloom, Harold, xvn1, 1, 10n3, 10n4, 11n4, 214 Bodunde, Charles, 199n12, 214 Booth, James, 119n14, 214 Bornstein, George, 4, 12n13, 214 Brooks, Peter, 41, 67n25, 214 carnival/carnivalesque, 79, 80, 185 Carroll, David, 88, 120, 132–35, 144nn4–7, 214 Cary, Joyce, 61, 75, 87, 118n11, 214

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Index Casanova, Pascale, 10n3, 214 Cavell, Stanley, 52, 68n30, 214 Chinweizu (and Onwuchekwa Jemie), 8, 13n26, 214 Clark, J. P., 9n1, 169, 173, 199n12, 214, 217 collaboration between African authors, ix–xv, 5–8, Colm Hogan, Patrick, 12n15, 214 Colmer, Rosemary, 87, 94, 118n13, 120n16, 121nn20–21, 214 conflict between African authors, 69–71 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 9n1, 12n11, 61, 75–76, 87, 118n11, 214, 220 Conton, William, 141, 144n18, 214 Corkery, Daniel, 118n10, 214 Daston, Lorraine, 97, 121n25, 215 Dathorne, O. R., 98, 122n27, 199n16, 215 Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne, 198n9, 215 dialogue, ix, xi, xiii, xv, 1, 8n1, 12n13, 13n23, 27, 65n1, 131, 208 as narrative device, 37, 52, 108, 112–13 Drame, Kandiouri, 9n2, 215 Dubois, Andrew, 210n4, 219 Dunton, Chris, 199n13, 215 Durix, Carol, 140, 144n14, 215 Eagleton, Terry, 10n4, 11n4, 215 Echeruo, M. J. C., 120n16, 145, 169, 199n12, 215 Eliot, T. S., 9n1, 144n8, 198n5, 200n5, 210, 215, 220 Elliot, Robert C., 46, 68n27, 215 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 183, 201–3 The Waste Land, 136, 153 Ekwensi, Cyprian, xii, 15–31, 33, 36, 39, 42

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criticism of and assumptions about the superiority of canonical European authors, 2, 11n8 Jagua Nana, xiv, 8, 15–24, 27–29, 36–43, 46–49, 56–61, 63, 65, 66n2; childlessness and marriage plot in, 43–44; the conventional male image of the woman prostitute, 15–23; divorce in, indirect narration in, 59–60; documentary narrative on prostitution and the urban underclass in, 39–40; patriarchy and female subjugation in, 32, 56–58; pornography in, 16–20; portrait of the woman prostitute as complicit in her status as plaything of men in, 41–42, 46–47; rhetorical faux pas in, 46–49; streamof-consciousness technique in, 42–43, 58–61; and the Ur-text, 18 as pioneering Igbo male author, xiv, 7 See also appropriation and remodeling Emecheta, Buchi, 192, 200n23, 215 Emenyonu, Ernest N., 2, 11n8, 18, 41, 66n3, 66nn5–21, 200n20, 215 Encyclopedia of African Literature, 12n22 Equiano, Ouloudah, 210n2, 215 Falola, Toyin, xvin2, 210n10, 218 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 50–51, 68n29, 140, 144n13, 215 Folarin, Margaret, 9n1, 215 Forster, E. M., 75–76, 118n11, 215 Fowler, Alastair, 203–4, 210n8, 215 Fraser, Robert, 9n1, 215

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Index

Gakwandi, Arthur, 9n1, 122n30, 216 Galison, Peter, 97, 121n25, 215 gender and narrative 63–65 Goodwin, Ken, 9n1, 216 Greene, Graham, 133, 216 Greene, Thomas M., 12n21, 61, 216 Hagstrum, Jean, 189, 200n22, 216 Harlow, Barbara, xvin2, 210n10, 218 Harrow, Kenneth, xvin2, 216 Hawkes, Terence, 7, 13n24, 216 Head, Bessie, xii, xiv, xv, 7, 8, 123, 216 Maru, 123, 137–43, 216; Dikeledi (character) in, 138– 39; idealization of romantic love as access to equality or social leveling of ethnic status in, 139–41; ironic structure and the influence on of Achebe, 137–38, 142–43; Margaret (character) in, 137–41; Marsawa identity and disavowal of ethnic bigotry in, 137–41; Moleka (character) in, Prince Maru (character) in, 137–40 Heron, George, xvn1, 216 Heyne, Eric, 97, 121n24, 216 Highet, Gilbert, 203, 210n7, 216 Holdsworth, Carolyn, 192n14, 216 Idoma, a laid-back people in Nigeria’s Benue state who seem to be perpetually engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the aggressive and more politically domineering Tiv neighbors, 12n22, 13n22 Igbo, xii, 7, 13n23, 30–33, 53, 123, 127–30, 160–61, 169, 192–93, 199 bonds-women’s predicament of, 127–30

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culture/ethnic ways of, 73, 75, 79–80, 95, 118nn10–12, 129, 135, 159–61, 185, 192–93 difference from and conflict with neighbors, 30, 123, 199n10 folklore themes, 53 religious and Christian idioms, 155, 157 roots of Achebe’s fiction, xv speech acts, 73, 124, 155, 157, 161, 183–84 writer, xiv, 154 Igwe, Dimbga, 115n2, 213 Ike, Chukwuemeka, 123, 142, 144n2, 216 imitation, 2, 5–6, 11n8, 44, 157, 179, 204, 208 influence/intertextuality, x–xiii, xvn1, 1–2, 9nn1–2, 10nn2–8, 12n18, 13nn23–25, 27, 31, 36, 41, 66n3, 70–71, 91, 103, 114, 116n4, 132, 137–38, 145, 163, 168–69, 181–85, 193, 195, 197, 201, 203–9 function of the local or indigenous or non-immigrant genre, 4–8 See also adaptation; allusion; appropriation; collaboration; imitation; inspiration; parody inspiration, xi, xii, 1–2, 4, 9nn1–2, 10n4, 143, 147–48, 181–82, 93, 201, 203, 207, 209 Irele, Abiola, xi, xvin1, xvinn3–4, 116, 216 Jahn, Janheinz, 116n4, 121n22, 209n1, 216, 218 Jeyifo, Biodun, 120n16, 216 Jones, Eldred, xvn1, 216 Julien, Eileen, xvn1, 9n2, 11n8, 216 Kernan, Alvin, 46, 67n27, 216 King, Bruce, 120n16, 144n5, 215, 219

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Index Kipling, Rudyard, 75–76, 118n11, 216 Knight, Charles A., 46, 68n27, 217 Kurtz, Roger, 209n2, 217 Larson, Charles, xvin5, 144n5, 209n1, 217 Launko, Okinba (Femi Osofisan), xii, xv, 7, 145, 169–81, 199n11, 207, 217 and evocative lyricism, 169–70 expansion of Okigbo’s theme of political disenchantment and the history of military dictatorships in Africa in, 169–71 Minted Coins, 145, 169–81 and linguistic borrowings from Okigbo, 169, 171–73, 177–81 the nation as a woman in, 171–75 redramatization of Okigbo’s landscape imagery in, 181–82 See also appropriation and remodeling Laye, Camara, xvin6, 2, 151, 198n3, 217 Lazarus, Neil, 122n33, 217 Lentricchia, Frank, 210n4, 219 Leslie, Omolara, 195, 200n24, 217 Levine, George Levine, 97, 122n26, 217 Lindfors, Bernth, xvin2, 2, 9n1, 11n5, 116n4, 121nn22–23, 144n8, 210n10, 217, 218, 220 Longenbach, James, 12n13, 217 Maduakor, Obi, 9n1, 217 Madubuike, Ihechukwu, 8, 13n26, 214 Maja-Pearce, Adewale, 18, 66n4, 217 Makonnen, Ras, 111–12, 122n32, 214 Marvell, Andrew, 188, 200n21, 217 “To His Coy Mistress,” 188 Mazo Karras, Ruth, 23–24, 66n7, 67n24, 217

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Mbembe, Achille, 121n18, 217 Mckeon, Michael, 3–4, 11n10, 12n16, 217 McLaren, Joseph, xvin2, 217 Moore, Gerald, xvn1, 91, 121n17, 217 Mphalele, Ezekiel, 209n1, 217 Murphy, David, 12n18, 217 Nazareth, Peter, xvin2, 203, 205–7, 210n10, 218 Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana Makuchi, 211n13, 218 Ngara, Emmanuel, 9n1, 218 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, xvn1, 6, 9, 62, 72, 118n6, 178, 207, 215, 218, 219 Nnolim, Charles, 9n1, 13n23, 98, 122n28, 218 Nussbaum, Felicity, 46, 67n27, 126, 144n3, 218 Nwahunanya, Chinyere, 196, 200n26, 218 Nwankwo, Chimalum, xii, xv, 7, 145, 153 Feet of the Limping Dancers, 182, 218 identical life-forming experiences shared with Okigbo, 181–82 Of the Deepest Shadows, 199n17, 218 summary of general debt to Okigbo, 82–84; 197, 199n17, 200n18, 207, 218 Toward the Aerial Zone, 183, 218 Voices from Deep Water, 183 The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems, 184–94; aesthetic experimentation in, 190–95; contemporary disorder and the alienation effects, 188–90; echoes of Okigbo’s pet themes, language games and metaphor in, 184–86, 188–91, 193–94; on the

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language of nature, landscape and the exploration of inner being, 185–86; the influence of Andrew Marvell on, 188; memory and historical reconstruction in, 186–88, 192–93; penchant for Okigboan neologisms and punch-lines, 181–83 See also appropriation and remodeling Nwapa, Flora, xii, xiv, 8, 15 and dialogue with Achebe, 7 and dialogue with Ekwensi, xiv, 7 One Is Enough, xiv, 8, 15, 24–27, 29–36, 44–45, 49–56, 61–65; abandoned woman as temptress taking out her anger on men, 50–54; Amaka (protagonist) and oppositional reconstruction of Ekwensi’s image of prostitution and its root causes, 24–27; marriage as entrapment for women in, 29–36; McLaid (the Catholic priest facing allegations of violating his sworn sexual conduct code), 53–55; stream-of-consciousness technique in, 58–61; the wicked mother-in-law syndrome in, 32–36, 64; the woman prostitute as violated individual resolved to bounce back, 44–45; and women exploiting other women plot, 25–26, 33 See also appropriation and remodeling Nwoga, Donatus Ibe, xvin6, 155, 182– 83, 198n7, 199n16, 200nn18–24, 210n10, 215, 217, 218 Nzekwu, Onuora, 7, 73, 118, 218

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Obiechina, Emmanuel, 66n17, 96, 116n4, 117–19, 121n22, 198n4, 218 Obumselu, Ben, 122n33, 218 Ogungbesan, Kolawole, 120n16, 215 Okafor, Dubem, 145–46, 198n1, 213 Okara, Gabriel, 169, 199n12, 218 Okigbo, Christopher, xii, xv, xvin6, 7, 9n1 Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, 145–68; and the Bible, 164–68; colonialism and its devastating cultural, economic, spiritual, and psychological effects in, 151– 56; the distinctive Okigboan style in, 145–57, 179, 181–83, 186; Igbo idiom in, 157, 159–61; magical realism in, 165–67; modulation of traditional Igbo ritual, 147–50, 168, 173; postcolonial political disillusionment in, 159–66; on the processes of artistic growth, 156–59; relation to English poetic tradition, 153; and Roman poetry, 162–63; themes in, 147; as a source for punning, 168; word order and word choice in, 148–49; Yoruba sources in, 160, 169 testimony of contemporaries regarding the charming and exuberant personality of, 195–97, 199n16 Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Chikwenye, 11n8, 31, 41, 55, 66n15, 67nn22– 26, 68n31, 215, 218 Okpewho, Isidore, 123, 142, 144n2, 200n20, 219 Olaogun, Modupe, 141, 144n15, 219 Omotoso, Kole, 9n2, 13n23, 199n10, 219 originality, xvii, 2–6, 131, 197

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Index Ouologuem, Yambo, xvin6, 5–6, 12n20, 122n31, 151, 198n3, 219 Ousmane Sembene, 6, 12n18, 72, 178, 207, 217, 219 God’s Bits of Wood, 6, 72, 118n6, 207, 219 Palmer, Eustace, 9n1, 18, 27, 40, 66nn3–14, 94, 12n19, 219 pan-Africanism, xvin2, 12n18 parody, xiii, 7, 13, 24, 80, 92, 168 p’Bitek, Okot, xvn1, 116n4, 153, 198n6, 216, 219 Peters, Jonathan, 9n2, 219 plagiarism, xii, xvin6, 5, 10n3, 205, 210n10, 218, 219 Povey, John, 144n5, 219 Radway, Janice, 143, 144n19, 219 Randall, Marilyn, 10n3, 219 Ravenscroft, Arthur, 139, 144n12, 216, 219 Rawson, Claude, 46, 68n27, 219 realism and verisimilitude, xv, 52, 60–62, 95–96, 98–105 revenge or vengeance, 46–52 Reynolds, Mary, 4, 12n14, 219 Richards, Sandra, 13n23, 219 romans à clef, 151 Rushdie, Salman, 56, 68n32, 219 satire, 13n23, 67n27 in Nwapa’s response to Ekwensi, 24–25, 44–46, 55–56 variations in function of, in A Man of the People, 89–95; and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 71, 80–81, 92–114 Sellers, Heather, 16, 203–4, 210n9, 219 scavenging, xii, 161, 202, 206 Sicherman, Carol, xvn1, 219 signifying, xiii, 1, 3–5, 12n18, 23–24, 26, 28, 33, 35, 40–41, 44, 55, 59–61, 75–76, 79–80, 84, 86–87,

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89, 93, 103–8, 110, 134–35, 141– 43, 149, 159, 163–64, 173–74, 179, 184, 193, 209 Soyinka, Wole, xvn1, xvin2, 2, 5–6, 9nn1–2, 12n19, 13n23, 113, 116– 17, 119, 169, 195, 199nn10–12, 203, 206–7, 210n11, 213–14, 219 Steiner, George, 4, 12n17, 210n8, 219 Stratton, Florence, 65n1, 219 Umeh, Marie, 67n26, 219 urban setting in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 98–103 in A Man of the People, 84–88, 96–97 See also realism Van Der Post, Laurens, 179, 199n15, 219 Vendler, Helen, 201, 203, 210n4, 219 Vergil, The Aeneid, 162, 198n8, 220 Vicker, Brian, 203, 210n12, 220 Vogel, Susan M., 118n12, 220 West, Russell, 4, 12n11, 220 White, Louise, 67n24, 220 Wilentz, Gay, 24, 66n12, 220 Wilson, Roderick, 135–36, 144nn8– 11, 220 women’s prostitution, the causes explored in Africa, 15–22, 24–27, 30–36, 41–43, 46–47, 58–62, 67n24 ijala, 161 incantation, 161 in Medieval Europe, 23–24 writer, 169 Yoruba, xii, xv, 13n23, 123, 160, 169, 172–73, 181, 199n10 Zabus, Chantal, 118n8, 220 Zeleza, Paul, 8, 13n27, 220

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ode Ogede is professor of English at North Carolina Central University, in Durham, North Carolina. He has lectured and published widely on African oral and written literatures.

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