mami wata

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

1/19

Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine

in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo LiteratureMADHU KRISHNANUniversity of Nottingham, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which literary representations of thesacred feminine have shifted and evolved in anglophone Nigerian-Igboliterature. Beginning with an examination of the precolonial tradition ofMami Wata, or mother water, goddess worship among Igbo communities,this article traces the ways in which colonial imposition both fossilizedpreviously exible standards of gendered discourse and promoted largely

Judeo-Christian norms for gendered behavior as part of a total political,economic, and social process of domination, which resulted in an efface-ment of the sacred feminine from literary representation. This effacement,

however, has been redressed in recent years through a shift in engagementthat has allowed the anglophone Nigerian-Igbo writer to return to thefeminine as a means of voicing an alternative tradition, turning away fromthe colonialist problematic of earlier works. This evolution in discursiverepresentations of gender and femininity is explored through readings ofAchebes Things Fall Apart, Nwapas Efuru, Emechetas The Joys of Motherhood,and Abanis GraceLand.

This essay takes for its starting point a passing reference in Chris Abanis2004 novel GraceLand. In a passage buried midway through the narrative,Abanis protagonist, Elvis, sees the remnants of a faded mural on the side

of a public lavatory:

On one wall of the toilet, the landlord, in an attempt to clean things up years ago,had painted a mural. Faded now from years of grime and heat, the river scene,

with a mermaid holding a baby in one hand and a staff of power in the otherand a python draped around her neck, was still discernible. A crown hoveredover her black hair, and stars gleamed in the air around her blue body Her face,

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

2/19

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

3/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 3

feminine sacred and the existence of what she terms matrifocality persistedacross the African continent, meaning that even the most virulently patriarchalstructure was not monolithically masculine, that is, consisting solely of male

symbols and masculine principles and values (Re-inventing 36). Barred fromproperty ownership and with political rights largely subordinated to those of men,women nonetheless, through their control of the subsistence economy, trade, andthe domestic sphere, wielded considerable power (Amadiume,Male Daughters27;Uchendu 23), placing woman in the precarious position of both internal to andexcluded from the sociality. Indeed, it was women who, in 1929, were able to bringabout the dissolution of the colonial warrant chief system through their large-scalenon-cooperation in what is now called the Womens War (Mba 6897), and women,through the purchase of wives and title-taking, could attain a limited range ofleadership roles in their communities as male daughters or female husbands, evenheading their own clans (see Amadiume,Male Daughters; Ogunyemi 32), despiteclaims to the contrary (Mba 27). Igbo culture has certainly never been codiedinto a standard form, and throughout its various communities womens roles dif-fered considerably, leading to a cultural context in which, as Amadiume explains,traditional descriptors with their static notions of matriarchy and patriarchyhave overlooked the more complex social positioning of women (Male Daughters189). Even in those societies that followed largely patriarchal systems of descentand property ownership, relationships traced matrilineally were ritualized andsymbolized in cult objects in most Igbo societies (Amadiume,Male Daughters177),indicating the centrality of the feminine through the discourses of the maternalgure. As Nkiri Iwechia Nzegwu reminds us, however, even these descriptorsof the consanguineal structure of precolonial Igbo society are not without theirown difculties, mired, as they are, in conjugal discourses privileging the man-wife nuclear dyad (60), which occlude the complex and seemingly contradictorycirculation of gendered identity in precolonial Igbo communities.

Perhaps most strikingly, womens roles presented a duality structuredaround fertility and womens simultaneous existence as daughters and wives.Daughters, as part of their patrilineal community, were valued for their eventualworth in marriage through the bestowal of their bride price and for their centrality

as members of the umuada, or association of daughters of the clan responsible forjurisdiction in the domestic sphere and social policing. Wives, though gured asexternal to their marital community, gained access to the discourses of fertility,enacting their inuence through this position, their entry into the rites of sexuality(Amadiume,Male Daughters7374), and their position within the wives associa-tion (Nzegwu 39). More so than anything else, it was through her children that awoman might gain inuence within her marital community (Jell-Bahlsen, Con-cept of Mammywater 32, 36; Bastian 129). Within the context of Nigerian literature,the ability of female characters to give birth is seen as emblematic of womanhood,where sterility and lack of children become a marker of subhumanization, a trend

characterized in writing from Chinua Achebes foundational works to the writ-ing of Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa and also evident in the primacy of thematernal gure in GraceLand Whether as daughter or as wife women maintained

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

4/19

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

5/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 5

of power in the public spheres during the post-independence period (Amadiume,Male Daughters140), resulting in a system in which women were comparativelydelegitimized as social actors and marginalized both politically and economically

(Amadiume, Goddess22). The position of women within Igbo society thus shiftedwith colonial rule, taking on the qualities of deference in national affairs and sub-ordination to the more immediate discourses of nationalism and independence,removing the discourse of the divine feminine from public life.

Of course, the gure of woman and the discourses of the feminine have longhad complicating interactions with the discourses of postcoloniality, which are notunique to the Igbo context. Indeed, throughout Africa, because of the demandsof liberation and nationalist movements, womens interests on the continent have

been historically neglected in favor of the allegedly more pressing need for racialliberation from the former colonizing powers, following a trend seen nearly uni-formly across the postcolonial world. In a broader context, the role of women inAfrica, in the words of one critic, has often been dened by men rather than bywomen (Ukadike 127). Through the effective splitting of gender from the widereld of social relations, the notions of independence, resistance, and genderedequality became discrete and alienating concepts. As numerous theorists havewritten, under colonialism Africa, along with other colonial holdings in Asia andthe Caribbean, was seen in feminine terms. As part of the process of turning thecolonies into the Other of Europe, the colonial Other had to be seen as essentiallyweak, irrational, and feminine to the strong masculine rationality of the metro-politan power. Florence Stratton, for example, has written that colonial writersused their feminization of Africa and Africans [to contribute] to the justicationof the colonial presence in Africa (Gender 37), while Fanon has characterizedthe black man, under white domination, as having lost his masculinity (see BlackSkin, White Masks). Geraldine Moane has further expressed the ways in which acommon pattern of regarding the colonized country and the colonized people asfeminine occurs. Discourses of femininity involving weakness and emotionalitywere invoked to reinforce the inferiority of the colonized country and people (33).As these comments suggest, colonialism led to a social perspective in which thefeminine was demonized and the masculine valorized, leading to the suppression

of discourses touched by femininity on the public stage. Operating in collusionwith colonialism, male judicial authority strove to efface the feminine from publicparticipation, heightening the impact of cultural imposition (Nzegwu 23).

Nationalist movements thus sought to re-masculinize their global image,reorienting themselves as equally strong along with Europe through what Nandyhas termed hypermasculization (711). As part of both of these movements, themother Africa trope was recongured as one that operates against the inter -ests of women, excluding them, implicitly if not explicitly, from authorship andcitizenship through a construction of woman as both emblem of the nation andkeeper of its cultural purity (Stratton, Gender40; Moane 50). This has occurred via

what Florence Stratton has termed the discourses of the pot of culture and thesweep of history (Periodic 112), which she resolves as the tendency for writersto alternatively assimilate women as analogous to traditional culture or mark

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

6/19

6 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1

central to the preservation of the state and relegated to the margins of the bodypolitic (Sharpley-Whiting 58). In other terms, the feminine has been describedby one critic as nding itself positioned by nationalism in the guise of Woman

as victim and goddess simultaneously as this nationalism seeks to ideologicallycompensate for its inability to produce its own history in response to its innersense of identity . . . (Radhakrishnan 85). Even as it addresses itself to an in-group of national subjects as authentic heritage, the language of an anticolonialnationalism that must also seek its legitimacy as modernizing nds its modernarticulation hostage to exogenous Western discursive norms. The problem, then,is a discursive pressure put on anticolonial nationalisma pressure to which itsuccumbs whether it produces Woman as victim or goddessto reproduce asrational and national the colonially imposed modern binary structurations inwhich gender is normalized. In a schizophrenic response to the colonial condi-tionto be authentic and modern simultaneouslynationalist discourseand practice ends up denying and effacing the heterogeneous nature of multiplyarticulated subject positionings.

In literature, this schizophrenia is manifested in the impulse to representthe heterogeneity of Igbo culture, one which, before colonial imposition, certainlycould not be seen as unied in any real sense (Harneit-Sievers 16), and the impulseto write back to the effacing structures of colonial imposition that place the tra-ditional under erasure. This, in turn, has led to a conundrum for the Nigerianwriter engaging with the discourses of gender, seen primarily through the criticalconfusion that readings of gender in Nigerian literature have produced and theevolution of the feminine and its traces within the body of that literature.

2. ACHEBE AND FIRST-GENERATION REPRESENTATIONS OFGENDER

The ambivalence brought up by the conuence of the ambiguous and doubly artic-ulated role of the feminine, colonial imposition and the assertion, in Africa, of aright to an equal humanity might be best exemplied in the treatment of and reac-tion to the feminine in Chinua Achebes seminal Things Fall Apart. Certainly, much

has been written about this foundational novel of African literature, and much ofthis established criticism deals, at least to some extent, with Achebes treatment ofwomen in his representation of traditional Igbo society. As a novel of such stand-ing and one that has inspired such a vast body of critical response, to discussAchebes novel is neither an easy task nor one to be taken lightly. Regardless ofthe difculty inherent in approaching a novel so widely canonized, its treatmentof the sacred feminine is crucial to a broader understanding of the ambivalencesof gendered discourses for two reasons. First, as the father of African literature,Achebe, along with his novels, has been taken as the purveyor of Igbo culturalnorms, a situation in which his texts, despite their status as works of ction, have

gained sociological and anthropological currency (Nnaemeka 140). This fact,along with the foundational status of Achebes work, is itself directly responsiblefor current trends and approaches to African literatures broadly and Nigerian

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

7/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 7

alternately as a classic misogynist who demonstrated a type of hyper-masculin-ization (Whittaker and Msiska 11; Jeyifo 183; Arndt 190), or, at the opposite endof the spectrum, as particularly sensitive to and aware of womens role in Igbo

society and the danger implicit to forgetting them (Edame Egar 69; Ogunyemi 18).These seemingly contradictory positions may be made comprehensible through acloser examination both of the workings of the feminine in Achebes novel and inits reception across literary criticism.

As alluded to above, Things Fall Apartis frequently taken at face value as anaccurate and authentic representation of Igbo society, evidenced in views that thework is intended to ll gaps in historical reconstruction (Ogede ix) and demon-strates the validity of precolonial Igbo cultural codications (Okechukwu 13). Assuch, the portrayal of women in Achebes novel is seen as a sign of the barbarismand patriarchal cruelty of Igbo civilizations. Certainly, witnessing Okonkwos

blatant disregard for the laws of Ani, the earth goddess, along with his violenceagainst his wives and children and continual denigration of the feminine as dia-metrically opposed to strong, masculine virtue, it is easy to see where critics ndin the novel a picture of a misogynist society in which women function as scarcelymore than slaves, marginalized and subjugated. Under this line of reasoning, eventhe priestess Chielo, voice to the Oracle of the Hills, is regarded as an exampleof the despotic and cruel character of women in a society that offers them noregard, and the existence of a priest, rather than priestess, for central deity Aniis viewed as another subjugation of feminine power to male authority (Cobham176; Okpewho 26).

Yet, what these commentaries seem to neglect is the equally central role ofthe maternal feminine within the Umoaa of Things Fall Apart. It is to his mother-land that Okonkwo must return, banished from the patrilineage for his acciden-tal murder of the son of Ezeudu. Indeed, precolonial Igbo society, while largelypatrilocal and patrilineal in its formation, held a special place for children of amatrilineage, called nwanwa, who, while members of their fatherland, or umunna,retained special rights and responsibilities towards their motherland. Interestingly,however, Achebes novelization of Okonkwos return to the nwanwaneglects toinclude their ceremonial aspects, which, quite saliently, included a requirement

that male nwanwaseeking refuge in his motherland take on feminine responsibili-ties, including cooking on feast days (Jell-Bahlsen, Water Goddess147). Along withthe function of the motherland as that where Okonkwo is able to reconstitute hislost riches as his place of refuge, the notion of the divine female becomes crucialto Achebes narrative at its climax. Immediately preceding the confrontationwith the missionaries and district commissioners in which, indeed, everythingfor Okonkwo would fall apart, is the killing, by fanatical Christian Enoch, of thepython, totem of Idemili and her rst child. It is particularly important here to notethat Idemili, in contrast to Ani, represents the dynamic and malleable aspects ofIgbo cosmology through the life-giving and life-taking capabilities of the sacred

feminine. Ani, the goddess foregrounded throughout Things Fall Apart, is insteadassociated with the static and, ironically, the masculine through her implicationwith the ancestors Crucially it is the slaying of the malleable force of Idemili that

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

8/19


were more interested in the Earth than in water they could not control (Jell-Bahlsen, Water Goddess345). Still, by guring the crucial moment of irreparableviolation of the community as a crime against Idemili, the secret and sacred tongue

of the maternal divine reasserts itself in the novel.In precolonial Igbo tradition, the notion of an entirely masculinized or

entirely feminized society stands as alien. Instead, as Sabine Jell-Bahlsen repeat-edly demonstrates, the male and female were gured as halves of a whole, operat-ing to temper and balance the other as interdependent discourses (Nzegwu 15).Indeed, within political organization in precolonial Igbo societies, the masculineokonkodepicted by Achebe was tempered by the society of ekwe, or titled womenwho, along with the powerful womens council, undertook responsibility for arange of domestic affairs and personal grievances. Yet, in Things Fall Apart, theumuada is noticeably absent, as are the society of wives, titled women, and anyinteraction between co-wives. Despite these omissions and inaccuracies, it wouldbe unfair to view Achebe as historically ignorant or a misogynist seeking to effacethe traces of feminine power within his society. Instead, following the thoughtfulanalysis of Rhonda Cobham, I would suggest that the transgression of the sacredmaternal and the effacement of the divine discourse of the feminine in Things FallApartis a direct result of Achebes mode of address and intended audience. It isby now well known that Achebes early writing was inspired by his devastatingencounter with the colonialist works of Conrad and Cary (Whittaker and Msiska1620; Ogede 115), and Things Fall Aparthas frequently been read as an Africanreassertion of identity and humanity in the face of denigrating portrayals of the so-called Dark Continent. As such, Achebes intended audience, in this work, standslargely as the colonialists who have dismissed Africa and Africans wholesale.

To reach this audience, then, two narrative effects come to the fore. As Cob-ham notes, critically, Achebe chooses representations of Igbo society that are mosteasily digested by a Western audience and its preference for systems dened in

binaries. Compounding this effect, Achebe, like his fellows in the nationalist era,subsumes the question of gendered oppression such that women recede into the

groundwhich enables the fgureof Okonkwo and his father and son to achievetheir representation prominence (Jeyifo 183) through a category error in which

women must become subordinated to the seemingly separate and more-pressingconcerns of nationalism. This, in turn, leads to erroneous categorizations of thatsociety as rigid or misogynist (Simola 148), putting the feminine under erasure ina manner analogous to Mami Watas own appropriation and dissemination by thediscourses of postcoloniality. Yet, as outlined above, the effaced feminine remainsin traces, seen most strongly through Idemili and her ultimate driving of thenarratives nal trajectory through what has been called the studied ontological

balance between male and female principles underlying the novel (Okpewho 26).

3. WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FEMINIST DOUBLE BIND

The problem of address and its implication in the representation and receptionof the discourses of the feminine in Nigerian Igbo writing is not of course an

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

9/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 9

a similar conundrum when addressing the divine feminine. This becomes vis-ible particularly in these writers works as well as the often contradictory criti-cal responses both women, as writers, evoke. In the works of Flora Nwapa, for

example, Idemili, called by one of her many alternate, locality-specic names,Ogbuide, proves central to her characters trajectories. At the same time, Nwapasrepresentation of the water goddess and her cult remains highly selective, servingmore as a deconstruction that favors certain aspects of the divine mother than afaithful representation of her status in traditional Igbo society. In Efuru, a nar-rative in which the eponymous heroine remains tied to movements dened bymen (Nnaemeka 144), for instance, the water goddess is depicted as a relativelyobscure force, despite the fact that, as Jell-Bahlsen demonstrates, her worship was

the major reference point for communities under her inuence. Indeed, Nwapasnovel works through a series of manipulations of traditional water goddess wor-ship, including the depiction of her cult as entirely female, forcibly celibate and

barren, suppressing the feminine in order to create a narrative that directly writesback to older portrayals of women in Nigerian literature. As is now well known,Flora Nwapas career as a writer began in response to her male peers of the rstgeneration of Nigerian literature where, like her fellow women writers, Nwapa

showed close afnities with [her] male counterparts (Nnaemeka 140), and her ini-tial foray into writing was both supported and legitimized by Achebes approval(Umeh 7). As such, despite claims that womens writing was intended to reclaimthe tradition of female history and stories (Jeyifo 190) and intended primarilyfor women who mostly bear burdens (Ogunyemi 4), Nwapas work may be readas a response to the masculinized discourses of her peers whose erasure of thefeminine, in the name of nationalism, she sought to redress through a partial rep-resentation of tradition in which the feminine would be erased of its contradictions,instead celebrated as equally worthy of individuation and progression as the male.At the same time, this erasure and reconguration of the feminine has led to acritical practice that, unable to make coherent its conicting discourses and modesof address, seems incapable of coming to terms with Nwapas work, alternativelycondemning and celebrating her (see Chineze Chukukere 11820). With Nwapa,then, the water goddess is instrumentalized as a signier of independence sepa-

rate from male inuence through this redeployment that nonetheless confoundsher originary primacy in Igbo cultural tradition.While Nwapa is undoubtedly the mother of Nigerian literature, second-

generation writer Buchi Emecheta remains the best-known Nigerian womanwriter and, indeed, among the best-known African writers of either gender. LikeNwapa, from whom she took a great deal of inspiration, Emecheta presents aconfounded view of the divine maternal, most strikingly in her fth novel, criti -cally deemed a culminating achievement in the literary career of Buchi Emecheta(Chineze Chukukere 185), The Joys of Motherhood. The novel explicitly grappleswith the degradation of the Nigerian woman through the dual forces of patriar-

chal oppression and colonial imposition in what has been seen as a Manicheansystem of subjugation (Jita Allan 104) seemingly conating two distinct discourses,that of the pre colonial traditionalist and that of the imperial colonizer The Joys

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

10/19


inviting sympathy for its heroine from Western feminist readers (Fishburn 106;Allen 10416; Chineze Chukukere 165). At the same time, however, historical inac-curacies have been noted (Cobham 176; Arndt 286), most strikingly through Nnu

Egos failure, in a narrative set as contemporary with the Womens War of 1929 ,to engage with the traditional forms of female agency and solidarity available toher (Nnaemeka 150; Arndt 286; Ezeigbo 17). Following this line of argumentation,then, Nnu Egos predicament could be seen equally as caused by her own denialof her dual role as wife to Nnaife, but daughter to Agbadi, instead atteningherself into a single-dimensioned and essentialized notion of femininity wherecolonialism has thoroughly effaced any positives from tradition (Stratton, Grave152; Arndt 35859).

While traces of the divine feminine and feminine agency remain, notablythrough Ona and Azukas abilities to leverage their roles as male daughter andcenter of subsistence economy, respectively, as well as the importance of NnuEgos chi, or destiny-bestowing personal deity, a riverine follower of the watergoddess, The Joys of Motherhood, like Achebes novel before it, betrays a confusionin its form of address, leading to the erasure of the divine feminine. Like Achebe,Emecheta, too, seems to be writing to a split audience, both Western, through herengagement of forms of femininity recognizable to and sympathetic for a Euro-American feminist audience, and male, through her sense of writing back to thegure of woman as represented in male-authored Nigerian texts. As such, the textfalls prey to the temptation to limit the roles it ascribes to women in traditionalsociety to those invented by Achebe (Cobham 178). At the same time, again, aswith Achebe, Mami Wata again proves her uidity through the traces she leaveson the text. Despite this, however, the trope of the water goddess and precolonialfeminine agency has been largely neglected in critical readings of the text, whichinstead respond to the foregrounded voice of the novel that encourages an erasureunder the imposition of colonial rule and its attendant discourses.

4. GRACELANDAND A RETURN TO THE VERNACULAR

All three authors, Achebe, Nwapa and Emecheta, demonstrate that, through their

reconstitution of address, the powerful discourse of the feminine available in tra-ditional Igbo society and represented by Idemili is instead forced under erasure,replaced with an incomplete notion of the feminine that takes its inspiration fromcolonialist binary norms of gendered relations. By speaking to their oppressors,rather than to tradition, all three novelists create narratives that present essential-ized pictures of the feminine, despite the lasting traces of Idemili remnant in allthree texts. On the surface, GraceLandtoo appears to fall prey to the masculinizedambiguities surrounding feminine discourses in Nigerian literature, seeminglysubordinating its female characters to the ultimate narrative trajectory of its maleprotagonist, while engaging in a dichotomizing view of femininity that transforms

women into mere signiers of sexuality. Yet, GraceLand presents an alternativemethod of feminine depiction to the cases I have traced above, more clearly resist-ing the appropriative readings of critical inquiry and demonstrating how a shift in

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

11/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 11

may reasonably be viewed as a work where conformity to gender roles weavesthroughout the novel as a force destructive to both men and women, denyingwomen access to full personhood and robbing men of the ability to express tender-

ness and love for each other (Aycock, Becoming 13), read closely, and with anattention to the seemingly silenced voices running throughout, the text reveals itselfas a trickster, to use Henry Louis Gates Jr.s term (45), transforming the feminineinto a secret tongue that permeates the work as a whole, buttressing its developmentand ultimately driving its outcome. Like the water goddess who, controlling entryand exit into and from this world (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater 31),impels the trajectories of earthly life, the hidden feminine in GraceLandimpels itsnarrative trajectory, and, similarly like the water goddess, elusive and slippery asthe liquid element itself (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater 32), throughoutGraceLand, woman appears not as a singular gure but in many guises rangingfrom the hypersexualization of Elviss cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing tothe maternal gures of Oye, his grandmother, and Beatrice, his mother, represent-ing in narrative a dually written ambivalence towards woman taken from thistradition. Women appear as both the maternal producer of life and the sexualizedfemale, but this very duality is continually transgressed through contrapuntalacts of resistance. Seemingly effaced, the feminine instead functions in the guiseof masquerade, turning the text in on itself and mocking its limits as a return to avernacular tradition that puts the feminine at the fore, lifting it from its historicaleffacement. The importance of the feminine occurs in three motifs that both driveand motivate Abanis text, demonstrating the ways in which, as an alternative codethat dees assimilation into the dominant code of the novel, the water-goddesstrope may provide an alternative reading of gender. In GraceLand, this is maintainedthrough Elviss fascination with drag play and makeup, the gure of his mothersjournal and his memories of his mother and grandmother, Oye, who, as Novak haspoint out, represent the alternative tradition of womens histories in the text (47).These histories serve as the governing logic of the text that dees easy uncodingand therefore resists the closure and appropriation seen in the critical assimilationof Achebes and Emechetas works above.

Early in the pages of GraceLand, the narrative describes Elvis, alone in his

room, as he puts on his mask of makeup, recounting his meticulous process ofapplying foundation, mascara and lipstick as part of his costume as an Elvis Pres-ley impersonator (Abani 7778). Elviss transformation, through a play of drag, intoElvis Presley, a white man who, himself, enacted a feminized drag performance ofblack culture, has been critically described as his attempt to inhabit an alternativepersonality, his means of escaping the stiing connes of tradition and his searchfor a more uid working of gender and race through his assimilation within thesymbol of white America (Adk; Dunton; Dawson). Yet, it soon becomes clear,the trappings of femininity and whiteness represent not so much a desire for analternate identity as a desire for an idealized authentic identity rooted in the

foreclosed past which haunts Elvis. Drag and play in makeup transform fromacts of racialized and gendered transgression into acts of recuperation, attemptsat re opening the past through the performativity of the present In GraceLand

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

12/19


Beatrice laughed and set the plastic disk on the record player. The needlescratched the edge a few times as though undecided, then launched into thethroaty call of Elvis Presley. Beatrice grabbed Elvis and began to dance with

him. Her illness made her movements slow, although it wasnt hard to see theywere once uid and smooth. (42)

The narrative makes it apparent that Elvis Presley and the whiteness that repre-sents him function as metonyms for Elviss childhood under his mothers protec-tive gaze, linking his play to a striving towards the effaced feminine. It is shewho introduces Elvis to this music, the joy of dancing and indeed who bequeathshim his namesake. As a child unable to understand the cancer that is killing her,Elvis thus constructs a conception of self that encloses himself, his mother, andElvis Presley in a homogeneous relationship of holistic identication, turning the

American star into a signier of Beatrice and all her loss represents in Elviss younglife. For Elvis, the progression from his mothers laughter to the scratching of theneedle to the throaty call of Elvis Presley operate together as the totality withinwhich he identies his idealized youth.

At this young age, then, Elvis is interpellated into a social stratum in whichthe inclusion he seeks is associated with the feminine sphere of his mothers pres-ence, linking the past to the present and complicating the discursive circulation ofgender and race in his drag play. Later in his narrative, Elvis expressly ruminateson his desire for comfort through the mask of the feminine, watching his aunt puton makeup: He was amazed not just at how much makeup made her aware of

herself, but by how much he wanted to wear that mask. [. . .] He envied her abilityto prepare a face for the world. To change it any time she liked. Be different peoplejust by a gentle hint of shadow here, a dash of color there (Abani 173). For Elvis,the trappings of femininity become the signiers of a holistic communal inclusionwhere, under the literal mask of makeup, he may return to the unity of self that heonly experienced when with his mother. This link is further developed as dancingand make-up, in the wake of his mothers death, become for Elvis the metonymicmethod through which to surpass his grief; as an attainable pursuit, drag andperformance replace the unattainable goal of being reunited with the mother whohe admits to forgetting (Abani 104). This search is echoed in Elviss obsession with

his mothers journal, described in the narrative as a talisman of sorts, part of hisdaily attire as that which he keeps close in an effort to make sense both of his ownexistence and of his mothers life. Beatrices journal serves as a site of mysticationfor Elvis. As the sole inheritance he holds from his deceased mother, the book andits incomprehensible collection of recipes never used and herbal cures taken fromhis grandmother stands as the opaque code which Elvis seeks to understand inorder to nd meaning in her life and, by extension, his own. Novak writes that

the journal offers a record of the past very different from that which focuses onthe large-scale events of public life, serving, within the narrative, as a signierof the traumatic loss of womens traditional culture in Nigeria and of the way inwhich that story remains isolated from the narrative of neocolonial trauma thatis Elviss story (47), tacitly positioning the book along with the other suppressed

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

13/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 13

strands of neocolonial trauma and the traumatic loss of womens traditionalculture are not able to remain discrete; instead, through Elviss dual implicationin both, where the lost feminine is what both drives and confounds him, they

become intertwined aspects of a story told in multiple voices and contradictorycodes. Expanding from these comments, the journal may be seen in a broaderlight as exhibiting not just the suppressed world of the traditional feminine, butan entire foreclosed past towards which Elvis strives, indicative of the precolonialtradition as a whole. The suppressed voice of the feminine and the tradition itexpresses reassert themselves through their very resistance to an easy decod-ing, becoming the wedge that prevents an easy narrative closure; instead, theeffaced feminine forces the narrative upon itself, as it seeks to decode that whichis decodable and speak in tongues not its own, as Elvis himself soon discovers(Abani 46). Finding that the book fails to connect him with his mothers spirit,Elvis, by the narratives end, can admit that he never learned anything at all fromthe journal, musing that [i]t had never revealed his mother to him. Never helpedhim understand her, or his life, or why anything had happened the way it had.What was the point? Nothing is ever resolved, he thought. It just changes (Abani320). The journals open-ended signiers remain beyond him, their rhetorical playexceeding his comprehension, foreclosed in the same ambivalent space as his ownexistence in a fragmented Nigerian society. Rather than serving as the silencedfeminine narrative described by Novak, then, the journal in its silence embodiesthe trickster; the signication of Beatrices journal shifts, this time becoming a typeof narrative mockery that refuses entry and comprehension, instead forcing anacknowledgement of its irreducible difference on a liminal cultural boundary andthe continual frustration of any attempts to view the text as a passive repositoryof meanings swallowed by a dominant masculinity.

The characters of Beatrice and Oye, Elviss beloved grandmother, materializewhat Abani hints in his narrative when Elvis catches an askew glimpse of a muralof Idemili through their maternal power as matrons. Novak has argued that thefeminine voice is cast aside in GraceLand, citing both Beatrices and Oyes deathsas evidence (47), echoing Abanis own comments that [w]omen are the terrainover which masculinity is charted (Aycock, Interview 9); yet both Beatrice and

Oye remain imbued in the narrative through the lasting inuence of the maternalgure on Elvis and its implication with his striving towards selfhood.Through thevery primacy of Oye and Beatrice in Elviss self-construction and the potency oftheir quasi-magical protection over him, the lost discourse of the feminine ndsits reassertion in the narrative as an alternative code that eludes domination andappropriation within the text. The gure of woman, represented by the mothergure, remains within the text, as its driving force, yet out of its reach and trans-gressing its limits. It should be noted that it is precisely this alternative discourseof matriarchy that prompts Elviss ultimate trajectory in the novel, motivating hismovements and remaining with him, through his mothers possessions, even at

his nal moment of ight. The gure of woman is thus less suppressed within thenarrative than spoken in terms outside of its dominant idiom; while it appearserased it is instead simply apart beyond the control of the masculinist rituals

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

14/19


It is of course possible to see in GraceLanda female gure that is entirely dif-ferent through the portrayal of sexualized violence and the seeming expendabilityof sexualized female characters, most directly through Elviss relationships with

his cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing. These women have been described asthe collateral damage necessary for Elviss narrative progress; yet, at the same time,they function in a manner akin to the maternal gure, destabilizing the narra-tives codes and ultimately motivating Elviss own journey. Throughout GraceLand,indeed, Elviss memories of Efua are nearly equal to those of his mother, and it isthrough these ashes that Elvis nally comes to acknowledge the very constructedquality of the impossible past which impels him. Recalling his witness to Efuasrape by her own father, the man who would later rape him, becomes, for Elvis, theimpetus to break with the truncated signiers of authenticity and essentializedidentities. Echoing this formative experience, Elviss inability to stop his fellowcaretaker, Okons, extortion of sex from Blessing returns Elvis to the feelings ofimpotence and shame that his inability to act have evidenced throughout his life.Like Efua, whose plaintive gaze at Elvis during her rape marks the lack at the coreof his being, Blessing looks towards Elvis conveys shame and pity, complicat-ing a simplistic reading of this scene as one that capitulates back to the traditionaluse of sex work as a means for advancement in Nigerian literature. Through hersense of pity, Blessing somehow objecties Elvis, returning him to the liminalthrough his inability to adapt to the rigid standards of his society. Certainly, itwould not be without reason to interpret these womens sexual exploitation andthe violence against them as an objectication of women at the service of Elvissgrowing being-in-the-world. Simultaneously, however, it is precisely these memo-ries and incidents that move Elvis throughout the narrative and destabilize hisstatic notions of self, community, and memory, suggesting that, running in paral-lel to the violation of the fertile woman is an altered and truncated agency thateffects its boundaries on Elvis. It is this partially written agency that enforces thefragmentation that drives him on his quest for a self-in-community and leadingto his ultimate ight to America. Elviss knowledge of what these young womenknow and have seen highlights the lack of totalizing identications from thisforeclosed space of femininity, an impotence that haunts Elvis to his nal ight to

America and exposes the very constructedness of memory, community and self.This unresolved feminine disallows a tidy ending to Elviss story; instead, his, too,is a story to be displaced, unnished and unheard in its totality.

5. CONCLUSIONS

The gure of woman and the discourse of femininity, as traced throughout thisessay, demonstrate that, speaking in a code inassimilable to dominant, Manicheancurrents, the feminine confounds an easy or direct reading of any of these authorswork. Tradition, displaced and re-congured through its interaction with the

competing discourses of colonial imposition, masculinity, and nationalism, isinstead transgured, shifted, and continually (re)appropriated. At the same time,through the manipulation of address and a desired community identication the

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

15/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 15

Abanis novel demonstrates the fecundity of an unashamed return to the vernacu-lar and a re-presentation of tradition that exceeds the strictures of postcoloniality.Mami Wata has been described as a site of instability, inhabiting a space both prior

to the colonial encounter, as a repository of cultural signiers, and one inextricablyaltered by the imposition of outside forces (Gore and Nevadomsky 62). Rife withirreducible differences that were nonetheless partially effaced by transculturalcirculation and external appropriations, the water goddess thus serves as anallegory for the shifts in representation in the Nigerian novel, as writers movefrom seeking to legitimize their cultural identications to an outside audiencehistorically dismissive, to a sense of reclamation of tradition that strives, instead,towards emergent and heterogeneous collectivities that surpass the binaries ofmale/female, Africa/Europe, and colonizer/colonized, representing both the mul-tiply articulated and often conictual discourses of the feminine and the space ofliminality in which novel identications are enacted. Missy L. Bastian has writtenthat in the 1980s, the tradition of Mami Wata and the water goddesses becameparticular prevalent among the Igbo-speaking populations of southern Nigeria:

In the grip of powerful feelings of alterity and thinking that their lives are out ofcontrol, Igbo-speaking people turn to the foundations of their social experienceto socialize and connect with these others. Kinship is familiar as both a comfortand a discomfortand, as such, offers a discursive space where ambiguousrelations can be played out and made gures for creative play. Perhaps whatcan help draw together such disparate worlds as those of spirit and humanity

can help explain and knit up, for the Igbo, some of their fractured experience(s)of modernity as well. (131)

It is of little surprise, then, that in GraceLand, a novel set during this very time oftumultuous change and following the tortured transition of its protagonist froman idealistic child to a disillusioned adolescent, the hidden discourse of the watergoddess should prove so crucial to the narratives underpinnings in a way thatthe circumstances of colonial imposition and cultural imperialism disallowedearlier works. While functioning within the landscape of Nigerian literature andits historical lineage as a body of work, the water goddess is re-appropriated as a

means of insisting on the heterogeneity and dynamism of precolonial traditionsthat, though irrevocably altered by the passage of time and the imposition of colo-nial cultural context, remains retrievable and itself fertile. The feminine emergesout from erasure as a tongue spoken in a distinct code uncontainable within thedominant discourse of the Nigerian novel, and instead reclaims its centrality as amarker of the ambivalence which marks the postcolonial Nigerian condition, and,through this re-emergence, the tradition within Nigerian literature itself reassertsitself as a discourse both irreducible to and liberated from outside imposition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Woodson Institute forAfrican-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and Universitas

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

16/19


WORKS CITED

Abani, Chris. GraceLand. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print.Achebe, Nwando. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority inNorthern Igboland 19001960. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005. Print.

Adk, Adlk. Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination. GlobalSouth2.2 (2008): 1030. Print.

Allen, Tuzyline Jita. Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995. Print.

Amadiume, I. Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women, Culture,Power and Democracy. London: Zed, 2000. Print.

. Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. London: Zed, 1997. Print.

.Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London:

Zed, 1987. Print.Arndt, Susan. African Womens Literature: Orature and Intertextuality. Bayreuth: Bayreuth

African Studies, 1998. Print.

Aycock, Amanda. Becoming Black and Elvis: Transnational and Performative Identityin the Novels of Chris Abani. Safundi10.1 (2009): 1125. Print.

. An Interview with Chris Abani. Safundi10.1 (2009): 110. Print.

Bastian, Misty L. Married in the Water Spirit Kin and Other Afictions of Modernityin Southeastern Nigeria.Journal of Religion in Africa27.2 (1997): 11634. Print.

Chineze Chukukere, Gloria. Gender Voices and Choices: Redefning Women in Contempo-rary African Fiction. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1995. Print.

Chow, Rey. The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, andthe Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives.Ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. London: Routledge, 1999. 3456. Print.

Chukwuma, Helen. Positivism and the Female Crisis: The Novels of Buchi Emecheta.Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective. Ed. Henrietta C. Otokunefor andObiageli C. Nwodo. Lagos: Malthouse, 1989. 218. Print.

Cobham, Rhonda. Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things FallApart. Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, Ed. Isidore Okpewho. NewYork: Oxford UP, 2003. 16580. Print.

Dawson, Ashley. Surplus City: Structural Adjustment, Self-Fashioning, and Urban

Insurrection in Chris Abanis Graceland. Interventions11.1 (2009): 1634. Print.Dunton, Chris. Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words. Research in African

Literatures39.2 (2008): 6878. Print.

Edame Egar, Emmanuel. The Rhetorical Implications of Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart.Lanham: UP of America, 2000. Print.

Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. London: Heinemann, 1979. Print.

Ezeigbo, Theodora Akachi. Tradition and the African Female Writer: The Exampleof Buchi Emecheta. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Ed. Marie Umeh.Trenton: Africa World P, 1996. 525. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2008.Print.

Fishburn, Katherine. Reading Buchi Emecheta: Cross-Cultural Conversations. Westport:

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

17/19

MADHU KRISHNAN 17

Gore, Charles, and Joseph Nevadomsky. Practice and Agency in Mammy WataWorship in Southern Nigeria. African Arts30.2 (1997): 6069. Print.

Harneit-Sievers, Axel. Construction of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State

in the Twentieth Century. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2006. Print.Jell-Bahlsen, Sabine. The Concept of Mammywater in Flora Nwapas Novels. Research

in African Literatures26.2 (1995): 3041. Print.

, The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake. Trenton: AfricaWorld P, 2008. Print.

Jeyifo, Biodun. Okonkwo and his Mother: Things Fall Apartand Issues of Gender inthe Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse. Chinua Achebes Things FallApart: A Casebook. Ed. Isidore Okpewho. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 181200.Print.

Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Womens Political Activity in Southern

Nigeria, 19901965). Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1982. Print.Moane, Geraldine. Gender and Colonialism. Basingstoke: MacMillan. 1999. Print.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi:Oxford UP, 1983. Print.

Nnaemeka, Obioma. From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the(Re)Inscription of Womanhood. Research in African Literatures25.4 (1994): 13757.Print.

Novak, Amy. Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two NigerianTrauma Novels. Studies in the Novel40.1/2 (2008): 3151. Print.

Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966. Print.

Nzegwu, Nkiri Iwechia. Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture.Albany: State U of New York P, 2006. Print.

Ogede, Ode. Achebe and the Politics of Representation. Trenton: Africa World P, 2001. Print.

Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. Africa Wo/man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women.Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Okechukwu, Chinwe Christiana. Achebe the Orator: The Part of Persuasion in ChinuaAchebes Novels. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. Print.

Okpewho, Isidore. Introduction. Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. Ed.Isidore Okpewho. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 353. Print.

Radhakrishnan, R. Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity. Nationalismsand Sexualities. Ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and PatriciaYaeger. New York: Routledge, 1992. 7795. Print.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Rowmanand Littleeld, 1998. Print.

Simola, Raisa. World Views in Chinua Achebes Works. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995. Print.

Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London:Routledge, 2004. Print.

. Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Mens Writing.Research in African Literatures21.1 (1990): 11126. Print.

. The Shallow Grave: Archetypes of Female Experience in African Fiction.Research in African Literature19.2 (1988): 14369. Print.

Uchendu Egodi Women and Conict in the Nigerian Civil War Trenton: Africa World P

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

18/19


Ukadike, N. Frank. Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the BlackDiaspora. Redirecting the Gaze. Ed. Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe. Albany: State U ofNew York P, 1999. 12748. Print.

Umeh, Marie. Introduction: Historicizing Flora Nwapa. Emerging Perspectives on FloraNwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Marie Umeh. Trenton: Africa World P,1998. 124. Print.

Whittaker, David, and Mpalive-Hangson Msiska. Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart.London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

8/10/2019 Mami Wata

19/19

Reproducedwithpermissionof thecopyrightowner. Further reproductionprohibitedwithoutpermission.

mami wata

Documents