West African Women in the Diaspora

Narratives of Other Spaces, Other Selves

Rose A. Sackeyfio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000474480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria africana

This book examines fictional works by women authors who have left their homes in West Africa and now live as members of the diaspora.

In recent years a compelling array of critically acclaimed fiction by women in the West African diaspora has shifted the direction of the African novel away from post-colonial themes of nationhood, decolonization and cultural authenticity, and towards explorations of the fluid and shifting constructions of identity in transnational spaces. Drawing on works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Taiye Selasie, this book interrogates the ways in which African diaspora women's fiction portrays the realities of otherness, hybridity and marginalized existence of female subjects beyond Africa's borders. Overall, the book demonstrates that life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey of expanded opportunities along with paradoxical realities of otherness.

Providing a vivid and composite portrait of African women's experiences in the diasporic landscape, this book will be of interest to researchers of migration and diaspora topics, and African, women's and world literature.

1Unbelonging, race, and journeys of the self in the diaspora fiction of Buchi Emecheta

DOI: 10.4324/9781003219323-2

Buchi Emecheta is an important forerunner in the emergence of Anglophone African women’s literature and her fiction has earned a memorable place in the annals of African literary history, feminist expression, and post-colonial writing. Emecheta is distinguished as the first African woman to write about the transformative nature of race and gender in the lives of migrant females across national borders of Africa and Europe. This chapter examines the ways in which Emecheta’s semi-autobiographical works explore transnational identities of African women in In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1975). These works are authentic accounts of the complexities and challenges that African women face within discordant Western environments.

Beginning in the twentieth century, global forces in Africa and abroad continue to influence contemporary migratory patterns of African people into cross-cultural spaces of the global north. The transformative nature of new landscapes of opportunity, education, and emerging diaspora identities is the subject of compelling fictional representations by African women authors of whom Emecheta is foundational within this genre. In addition to diaspora themes, Emecheta’s oeuvre represents a prolific outpouring of works about African females that are shaped by patriarchy, traditional customs and practices, and feminist/womanist expression. Moreover, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen are comparable to the array of contemporary diasporic narratives of leading third-generation African women writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013), Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street (2009), NoViolet Bulawayo’s, We Need New Names (2016), and Ghana Must Go (2013) by Taiye Selasie. Other recent fictional works by African women include Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping historical novel about Ghana and the diaspora, Homegoing (2016). Nana Oforiata Ayim’s The God Child (2019) and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016) are also notable worlds. Bernadine Evaristo was the winner of the 2020 Man Booker Prize for her brilliant short story collection, Girl, Woman Other (2020), which unfolds against the European and American diaspora. In 2020 Chika Unigwe published a collection of short fiction, Better Never than Late about the Nigerian diaspora in Belgium.

Collectively, this impressive body of works builds upon the literary tradition that began with Emecheta, because the authors engage the mixed bag of African diaspora experiences that (re)shape women’s identity. All of the works narrate fictional accounts of the difficulties that arise for women within hybridized spaces of Western nations and their place within global racial hierarchies. In these works, female characters are disaffected, challenged, and marginalized by racial difference along with shifting configurations of African women’s status in society. The women protagonists experience adversity and social and racial barriers as a form of initiation into otherness as diasporic subjects. Other important themes are sisterhood, relationship to Africa, and coming of age experiences that evokes Fanonian imagery of the divided self that emerges among displaced African subjects. As a literary godmother of African women’s fiction, Emecheta’s early works convey strong feminist elements that resonate in contemporary women’s writing through a matrix of female narratives that connect the past to the present. Further, African immigrant fiction is a dynamic and robust genre that has shifted the direction of African literature away from conventional post-colonial themes that examine issues of the colonial encounter and emerging nationhood to explore new realities of African life in the global age. Contemporary African women’s fiction is a richly textured body of works that are crafted in Western environments of contradiction and paradoxical outcomes for many immigrants.

The early 1970s marks the inception of Emecheta’s impressive literary corpus, culminating in more than 27 works such as fiction, autobiography, plays, children’s books, and young adult fiction. She is widely acknowledged as one of Africa’s most well-known writers and is renowned for feminist-inspired works. Emecheta has earned the distinction of being Africa’s most prolific female author, and she is known internationally as Africa’s foremost feminist. She migrated to London with her husband in 1962 and her major works that were published after In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen include The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), and Titch the Cat (1979). During the 1980s she published three children’s books: Nowhere to Play (1980), The Moonlight Bride (1981), and The Wrestling Match (1981). The 1980s continued to be her most productive period when she crafted Destination Biafra (1982), Double Yoke (1982), Naira Power (1982), Adah’s Story (1983), The Rape of Shavi (1983), Head Above Water (1984) and A Kind of Marriage (1987). Kehinde (1994) explores experiences of cultural hybridity against the background of Nigeria and London, similar to her early autobiographical works. Her last novel before her death in 2017 was The New Tribe (2000), which unfolds in London, and in this work a Nigerian boy searches for his identity as the adopted son of British parents. African women’s identity in Nigeria and abroad lie at the center of Emecheta’s enormous contribution to African writing, women’s fiction, and feminist-inspired works.

As a literary icon, Buchi Emecheta has been honored with distinguished literary prizes and for Second Class Citizen she was awarded the Daughter of Mark Twain award in 1975. She received the Jock Campbell award for Slave Girl in 1978 and Best Third World Writer between 1976 and 1979. Most notably, she won the Best Black Writer in Britain award in 1980 for The Joys of Motherhood, which is perhaps her crowning achievement in fiction. This novel is widely acknowledged as her most well-known work, has been translated into French and German, and is widely taught.

Buchi Emecheta is the first in a generation of African female writers to highlight the intersection of race, class, and gender in the lives of African women immigrants. Based upon her own life, female characters are at the center of In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen and, as Nigerian émigrés in London, they experience the harsh realities of alienation, marginalization and the challenge to survive. Emecheta’s life and works foreground women’s resilience, agency, and pursuit of education while battling adversity, and her success is a testimony of Emecheta’s vision of female empowerment. Her literary works express the need for social transformation as women face enormous barriers in life, such as patriarchal oppression, single parenthood, and fewer opportunities for success on the margins of society.

In a well-known interview with Marie Umeh, Emecheta describes herself as a feminist with a small ‘f’. According to Umeh:

Emecheta’s literary achievement therefore marks a turning point in Nigerian literary history. For the first time, one observes a conscious effort by a female writer to speak out against the subjugation of Igbo women in the quest for social change.

(1998: 149)

Written from a female perspective, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen vividly convey women’s subjectivity within the diaspora landscape of London. Adah, the central character, struggles against poverty and marginalization to survive as a single mother of five children. Second Class Citizen was written after In the Ditch as an examination of the collusion of gender and class dynamics in Nigeria among the Igbo community, and later during her life in London. Emecheta says of her autobiographical work, Head Above Water (1986):

I had to write the book, there was no doubt. I had to reply to those critics who felt that women did not live as I had described in In the Ditch and who felt that any woman with a little education should be able to make a living, even though she had a number of children to bring up alone. Writing Second Class Citizen, I thought, would give a good background to In the Ditch.

(qtd in Sougou 2002: 41)

These sentiments support the ways in which Emecheta’s works upholds the commitment of the female writer articulated by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie in Recreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (1994). More than any other female writer, Emecheta epitomizes her call to African women to tell the woman’s story from a woman’s perspective (57). Further, Sougou affirms that for Emecheta, “exile spurred her creativity … and she broaches the issue of migration in her two debut novels, and shows through her characters what it means to be an African and a woman in Britain” (2010: 14). These observations illustrate the synergism of life and art and, through her writing, Emecheta chronicles the gendered realities of African women’s singularity.

Moreover, Marie Umeh notes that Second Class Citizen describes artistically “how Igbo traditional culture exploits women through a system of assigned and devalued roles that emphasize sexual asymmetry” (1998: 150). Noted for vivid realism, Emecheta unfolds the multilayered forms of subjugation that suppresses the achievements of women in Igbo society. In contrast, Chioma Opara’s response is sharply critical of Emecheta’s realism and asserts that “Surely, no other West African female writer has written an autobiographical novel as intimate as Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen. Making the private public in this compelling novel, the author defies traditional norms which frown upon women laying bare their intimate experiences” (2004: 135). Despite such criticism, Emecheta’s autobiographical works repositions the female voice in the act of writing back to patriarchy, as well as to interrogate the social, economic, and political forces that hinder female empowerment in society. By inserting herself into history, Emecheta employs writing to reconfigure the African woman’s identity in ways that articulate her selfhood as an expression of feminist consciousness.

Carol Boyce Davies sheds light on the power of women’s autobiography to expand women’s consciousness and to un-silence women from the margins of society. In her article, “Private Selves and Public Spaces: Autobiography and the African Woman Writer”, Davies provides a theoretical framework to interpret African women’s autobiographical narratives. She formulates three structural modes or levels of narrative self-representation:

1. The self described as synonymous with political struggle
2. The self represented in dialogue with family and/or social cultural history
3. The self identified in resistance to patriarchal/racial order (1991: 278).

These levels represent the modalities of female consciousness in relation to the African woman’s world. The Nigerian diaspora space of England infuses the elements of resistance as Emecheta tells her story. In The Ditch and Second Class Citizen vividly illustrate the ways in which patriarchy, British racism, and class oppression are posed as jointly detrimental to the existence of an African woman in England. But while Igbo scholars have accepted her critique of racism and class oppression, the revealing of unsavory details of female experience under patriarchy has been called “selfish” betrayal (Davies 2013: 287).

Such criticism of Emecheta’s honesty and courage highlights the cultural sanctions and conventions of the twentieth century that silenced or muted women’s voices within ‘traditional’ Igbo society. Written in the 1970s, Emecheta’s works unfold gender inequality with stark and compelling realism in ways that that posed a challenge to the status quo for women within the conservative climate of the period. In narrating her experiences, Emecheta’s pioneering works paved the way for other African women writers and theorists to evolve feminist awareness as a catalyst for social transformation. Nevertheless, Second Class Citizen has attained iconoclastic status as a feminist work that is widely acclaimed in the literary world.

In Second Cla...