Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine

in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo Literature

Madhu Krishnan

University of Nottingham, UK
aexmk6@nottingham.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
This article examines the ways in which literary representations of the
sacred feminine have shifted and evolved in anglophone Nigerian-Igbo
literature. Beginning with an examination of the precolonial tradition of
Mami Wata, or mother water, goddess worship among Igbo communities,
this article traces the ways in which colonial imposition both fossilized
previously flexible 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 effacement of the sacred feminine from literary representation. This effacement,
however, has been redressed in recent years through a shift in engagement
that has allowed the anglophone Nigerian-Igbo writer to return to the
feminine as a means of voicing an alternative tradition, turning away from
the colonialist problematic of earlier works. This evolution in discursive
representations of gender and femininity is explored through readings of
Achebes Things Fall Apart, Nwapas Efuru, Emechetas The Joys of Motherhood,
and Abanis GraceLand.

his essay takes for its starting point a passing reference in Chris Abanis
2004 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 other
and a python draped around her neck, was still discernible. A crown hovered
over her black hair, and stars gleamed in the air around her blue body. Her face,

REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2012). 2012

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however, was scratched out. He wondered who had done that, and how they
could have endured the stench long enough to do it. (79)

Seemingly incongruous to its positioning among the fecal waste of an overused

toilet in Maroko, one of Lagoss largest and most notorious slums, the faded mural
that catches Elviss eye becomes a figure apart. For Elvis, unversed in the Igbo
tradition he lost with his mothers death and his removal from his ancestral home
in rural Igboland, the mural is unreadable; yet, for those literate in Igbo cosmology,
its identity is clear. She is Idemili, goddess of the rivers and creator of the world,
one of a pantheon of sea and river goddesses called Mami Wata, a general name
used for the hybridized river and sea goddesses popularized across Africa and the
African diaspora in the nineteenth century. Following from this occluded glance,
this essay considers Mami Wata, represented by Idemili, amongst others, as an
alternative paradigm for discourses of gender in the Nigerian novel. As above,
she remains hidden, barely discernible. Still, I argue, the use of the water goddess
as a discursive positioning of gender marks a reclamation and re-constitution of
precolonial social discourse, standing in sharp contrast to the colonially inflected
Judeo-Christian gender dichotomies presented in first- and second-generation
Nigerian literatures. This reconstitution of the discourse of gender, I suggest, is
emblematic of a shift in address from a literature that seeks recognition from an
imperialist West at the expense of a cultural flattening, to one that strives towards
emergent collectivities that exceed the Manichean divisions of colonialism. The
occluded feminine, as such, shifts in its valuations, moving from a literature
that seeks a direct engagement, or lack thereof, with the discourse of the divine
feminine to one in which it is submerged, becoming an alternative discourse that
escapes the confines of Manichean confrontation. Simultaneously, as seen in a
reading of Abanis GraceLand, this new presentation of discursive modes that defy
Western conventionalities necessitates a criticism sensitive to voices beyond the
center-periphery binary championed in the era of postcoloniality.

1. Idemili, Mami Wata and the Divine Feminine

Mami Wata, figured as a siren-like figure throughout West Africa and the diaspora
in the Americas, is imbued with ambivalence. Assimilated in various guises in the
diverse localities in which she is seen, Mami Wata is contradictory, both known
as a nineteenth-century invention and signifying, within the Igbo context of the
Nigerian writers considered in this paper, a pantheon of water goddesses, long
pre-dating colonial intervention as a name given to outsiders, known in Igbo as
Nne Mmiri. While the Mami Wata legend bears considerable variance across its
manifestations, marking the slippery discourses of postcolonial social identity
constructions, in the Nigerian context she has been described as more than of a
divinity. She also embodies and manifests important aspects of womanhood in
pre-colonial Igbo culture and society (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater
30), representing both the femme fatale, instrumentalizing masculine discourses
through her seduction of men and their subsequent devotion to her, and the
power of the mother-figure, totemic of fertility and the interior space occupied
by the feminine. Examinations of precolonial Igbo society have long recognized
the feminine as a site of ambiguity. As Ifi Amadiume argues, the notion of the

MADHU KRISHNAN 3

feminine sacred and the existence of what she terms matrifocality persisted
across the African continent, meaning that even the most virulently patriarchal
structure was not monolithically masculine, that is, consisting solely of male
symbols and masculine principles and values (Re-inventing 36). Barred from
property ownership and with political rights largely subordinated to those of men,
women nonetheless, through their control of the subsistence economy, trade, and
the domestic sphere, wielded considerable power (Amadiume, Male Daughters 27;
Uchendu 23), placing woman in the precarious position of both internal to and
excluded from the sociality. Indeed, it was women who, in 1929, were able to bring
about the dissolution of the colonial warrant chief system through their large-scale
non-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 of
leadership roles in their communities as male daughters or female husbands, even
heading their own clans (see Amadiume, Male Daughters; Ogunyemi 32), despite
claims to the contrary (Mba 27). Igbo culture has certainly never been codified
into a standard form, and throughout its various communities womens roles differed considerably, leading to a cultural context in which, as Amadiume explains,
traditional descriptors with their static notions of matriarchy and patriarchy
have overlooked the more complex social positioning of women (Male Daughters
189). Even in those societies that followed largely patriarchal systems of descent
and property ownership, relationships traced matrilineally were ritualized and
symbolized in cult objects in most Igbo societies (Amadiume, Male Daughters 177),
indicating the centrality of the feminine through the discourses of the maternal
figure. As Nkiri Iwechia Nzegwu reminds us, however, even these descriptors
of the consanguineal structure of precolonial Igbo society are not without their
own difficulties, mired, as they are, in conjugal discourses privileging the manwife nuclear dyad (60), which occlude the complex and seemingly contradictory
circulation of gendered identity in precolonial Igbo communities.
Perhaps most strikingly, womens roles presented a duality structured
around fertility and womens simultaneous existence as daughters and wives.
Daughters, as part of their patrilineal community, were valued for their eventual
worth 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 for
jurisdiction in the domestic sphere and social policing. Wives, though figured as
external to their marital community, gained access to the discourses of fertility,
enacting their influence through this position, their entry into the rites of sexuality
(Amadiume, Male Daughters 7374), and their position within the wives association (Nzegwu 39). More so than anything else, it was through her children that a
woman might gain influence within her marital community (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept 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 writing of Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa and also evident in the primacy of the
maternal-figure in GraceLand. Whether as daughter or as wife, women maintained
separate spheres of autonomy thatgenerated structures of challenging patriarchy
(Amadiume, Goddess 7), while providing a much-needed system of checks and balances to the male-dominated system of the okonko, or mens judiciary organization.

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Despite the focus on maternity for African women (see Ogunyemi), biological
sterility was itself not without contradictory readings. Women beyond childbearing years, for instance, functioned outside of societal control, fully enmeshed
within their matriarchal function through the absence of sexuality in their social
roles and the reverence inspired by their age (Uchendu 24), and indeed it was
older women who most vigorously defended their positions even upon colonial
imposition (Amadiume, Re-inventing 150). Women, perhaps most importantly,
could become mothers through the taking of wives and custodial arrangements,
separating the discourse of maternity from that of fertility (Nzegwu 175; Nwando
Achebe 121). This maternal ideology within Igbo society was underscored by the
worship of a range of water goddesses, Idemili amongst them. Manifesting as
an enchantingly beautiful mermaid protected by her totem, the python, Idemili
was believed by certain Igbo communities, particularly around the market town
of Onitsha, to be the mother of creation to whom offerings must be made to promote prosperity and health. Idemili, as Mami Wata, is a figure both admired and
feared, demanding and awesome (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater
33). Seen as a celestially beautiful woman, she is a temptress, leading men astray
and stealing their wealth and luck through her manipulation of sexuality; yet, as
the goddess, she is a protector, bestowing health and fertility upon those who
worship at her alter. As the mother of creation, Idemili and her worship point to a
deeply embedded sacrilization of the feminine within Igbo culture and tradition,
represent[ing] a universal theme of the supreme mother water goddess (JellBahlsen, Mami Wata 30); at the same time, and as Amadiume explains, Idemili
herself was an ambiguous figure, both all-powerful and yet somehow marginalized by the mythic creation of her husband to whom she must answer (Male
Daughters 109) and, in her contemporary imaginings, her need for male followers.
As this discussion implies, within the Igbo cultural context the water goddess has
long stood as totemic of the ideal feminine in all her ambivalence, marking one
way in which the ideals of femininity stand as representative of cultural histories.
With the imposition of colonial rule, however, the flexibility of womens roles
in Igbo society was replaced with the strictures of Victorian gender ideology, an
imposition that, as Chris Abani has noted, is today largely forgotten in discussions
around womens positioning (Aycock, Interview 6). Amadiume writes that the
new Western concepts introduced through colonial conquest carried strong sex
and class inequalities supported by rigid gender ideology and constructions; a
woman was always female regardless of her social achievements or status (Male
Daughters 119). Institutions such as female husbands and title-taking among
women were barred as practices and the worship of the water goddess discouraged,
while women found their traditional position within the subsistence economy
replaced by the imposition of a cash-based colonial system of trade (Amadiume,
Male Daughters 141). Due in part to the lack of womens organizations among European women and the binary-defying, seemingly incomprehensible flexibility of
gendered systems within Igbo sociality, Igbo women, as in other African societies,
were discouraged from participation in their traditional roles within the community, instead encouraged to maintain a focus on the domestic, particularly among
the upper classes (Amadiume, Goddess 7). Through their expansion in Igboland,
the British therefore legitimized a new sexual politics based on a very rigid gender
ideology which Igbo men were to manipulate effectively in their monopolization

MADHU KRISHNAN 5

of power in the public spheres during the post-independence period (Amadiume,

Male Daughters 140), resulting in a system in which women were comparatively
delegitimized as social actors and marginalized both politically and economically
(Amadiume, Goddess 22). The position of women within Igbo society thus shifted
with colonial rule, taking on the qualities of deference in national affairs and subordination to the more immediate discourses of nationalism and independence,
removing the discourse of the divine feminine from public life.
Of course, the figure of woman and the discourses of the feminine have long
had complicating interactions with the discourses of postcoloniality, which are not
unique to the Igbo context. Indeed, throughout Africa, because of the demands
of liberation and nationalist movements, womens interests on the continent have
been historically neglected in favor of the allegedly more pressing need for racial
liberation from the former colonizing powers, following a trend seen nearly uniformly across the postcolonial world. In a broader context, the role of women in
Africa, in the words of one critic, has often been defined by men rather than by
women (Ukadike 127). Through the effective splitting of gender from the wider
field of social relations, the notions of independence, resistance, and gendered
equality became discrete and alienating concepts. As numerous theorists have
written, under colonialism Africa, along with other colonial holdings in Asia and
the Caribbean, was seen in feminine terms. As part of the process of turning the
colonies into the Other of Europe, the colonial Other had to be seen as essentially
weak, irrational, and feminine to the strong masculine rationality of the metropolitan power. Florence Stratton, for example, has written that colonial writers
used their feminization of Africa and Africans [to contribute] to the justification
of the colonial presence in Africa (Gender 37), while Fanon has characterized
the black man, under white domination, as having lost his masculinity (see Black
Skin, White Masks). Geraldine Moane has further expressed the ways in which a
common pattern of regarding the colonized country and the colonized people as
feminine occurs. Discourses of femininity involving weakness and emotionality
were invoked to reinforce the inferiority of the colonized country and people (33).
As these comments suggest, colonialism led to a social perspective in which the
feminine was demonized and the masculine valorized, leading to the suppression
of discourses touched by femininity on the public stage. Operating in collusion
with colonialism, male judicial authority strove to efface the feminine from public
participation, 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 Nandy
has termed hypermasculization (711). As part of both of these movements, the
mother Africa trope was reconfigured as one that operates against the interests of women, excluding them, implicitly if not explicitly, from authorship and
citizenship through a construction of woman as both emblem of the nation and
keeper of its cultural purity (Stratton, Gender 40; Moane 50). This has occurred via
what Florence Stratton has termed the discourses of the pot of culture and the
sweep of history (Periodic 112), which she resolves as the tendency for writers
to, alternatively, assimilate women as analogous to traditional culture or mark
the feminine as indexical for the nation-state and its progress. In either situation,
women are first of all an object with exchange value (Chow 38), and at once
the custodians of national identity and culture and the wards of the nation-state,

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central to the preservation of the state and relegated to the margins of the body
politic (Sharpley-Whiting 58). In other terms, the feminine has been described
by one critic as finding itself positioned by nationalism in the guise of Woman
as victim and goddess simultaneously as this nationalism seeks to ideologically
compensate for its inability to produce its own history in response to its inner
sense of identity ... (Radhakrishnan 85). Even as it addresses itself to an ingroup of national subjects as authentic heritage, the language of an anticolonial
nationalism that must also seek its legitimacy as modernizing finds its modern
articulation hostage to exogenous Western discursive norms. The problem, then,
is a discursive pressure put on anticolonial nationalisma pressure to which it
succumbs whether it produces Woman as victim or goddessto reproduce as
rational and national the colonially imposed modern binary structurations in
which gender is normalized. In a schizophrenic response to the colonial conditionto be authentic and modern simultaneouslynationalist discourse
and practice ends up denying and effacing the heterogeneous nature of multiply
articulated subject positionings.
In literature, this schizophrenia is manifested in the impulse to represent
the heterogeneity of Igbo culture, one which, before colonial imposition, certainly
could not be seen as unified in any real sense (Harneit-Sievers 16), and the impulse
to write back to the effacing structures of colonial imposition that place the traditional under erasure. This, in turn, has led to a conundrum for the Nigerian
writer engaging with the discourses of gender, seen primarily through the critical
confusion that readings of gender in Nigerian literature have produced and the
evolution of the feminine and its traces within the body of that literature.

2. Achebe and First-generation Representations of

Gender
The ambivalence brought up by the confluence of the ambiguous and doubly articulated role of the feminine, colonial imposition and the assertion, in Africa, of a
right to an equal humanity might be best exemplified in the treatment of and reaction to the feminine in Chinua Achebes seminal Things Fall Apart. Certainly, much
has been written about this foundational novel of African literature, and much of
this established criticism deals, at least to some extent, with Achebes treatment of
women in his representation of traditional Igbo society. As a novel of such standing and one that has inspired such a vast body of critical response, to discuss
Achebes novel is neither an easy task nor one to be taken lightly. Regardless of
the difficulty inherent in approaching a novel so widely canonized, its treatment
of the sacred feminine is crucial to a broader understanding of the ambivalences
of 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 cultural
norms, a situation in which his texts, despite their status as works of fiction, have
gained sociological and anthropological currency (Nnaemeka 140). This fact,
along with the foundational status of Achebes work, is itself directly responsible
for current trends and approaches to African literatures, broadly, and Nigerian
literatures, specifically, including now-canonized perspectives on gender, class,
and race. Secondly, Achebes novel has stood as a site of often-vociferous debate
among scholars in African literatures, with critical viewpoints declaring Achebe

MADHU KRISHNAN 7

alternately as a classic misogynist who demonstrated a type of hyper-masculinization (Whittaker and Msiska 11; Jeyifo 183; Arndt 190), or, at the opposite end
of 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 a
closer examination both of the workings of the feminine in Achebes novel and in
its reception across literary criticism.
As alluded to above, Things Fall Apart is frequently taken at face value as an
accurate and authentic representation of Igbo society, evidenced in views that the
work is intended to fill gaps in historical reconstruction (Ogede ix) and demonstrates the validity of precolonial Igbo cultural codifications (Okechukwu 13). As
such, the portrayal of women in Achebes novel is seen as a sign of the barbarism
and patriarchal cruelty of Igbo civilizations. Certainly, witnessing Okonkwos
blatant disregard for the laws of Ani, the earth goddess, along with his violence
against his wives and children and continual denigration of the feminine as diametrically opposed to strong, masculine virtue, it is easy to see where critics find
in the novel a picture of a misogynist society in which women function as scarcely
more than slaves, marginalized and subjugated. Under this line of reasoning, even
the priestess Chielo, voice to the Oracle of the Hills, is regarded as an example
of the despotic and cruel character of women in a society that offers them no
regard, and the existence of a priest, rather than priestess, for central deity Ani
is viewed as another subjugation of feminine power to male authority (Cobham
176; Okpewho 26).
Yet, what these commentaries seem to neglect is the equally central role of
the maternal feminine within the Umoafia of Things Fall Apart. It is to his motherland that Okonkwo must return, banished from the patrilineage for his accidental murder of the son of Ezeudu. Indeed, precolonial Igbo society, while largely
patrilocal and patrilineal in its formation, held a special place for children of a
matrilineage, 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 nwanwa neglects to
include their ceremonial aspects, which, quite saliently, included a requirement
that male nwanwa seeking refuge in his motherland take on feminine responsibilities, including cooking on feast days (Jell-Bahlsen, Water Goddess 147). Along with
the function of the motherland as that where Okonkwo is able to reconstitute his
lost riches as his place of refuge, the notion of the divine female becomes crucial
to Achebes narrative at its climax. Immediately preceding the confrontation
with the missionaries and district commissioners in which, indeed, everything
for Okonkwo would fall apart, is the killing, by fanatical Christian Enoch, of the
python, totem of Idemili and her first child. It is particularly important here to note
that Idemili, in contrast to Ani, represents the dynamic and malleable aspects of
Igbo cosmology through the life-giving and life-taking capabilities of the sacred
feminine. Ani, the goddess foregrounded throughout Things Fall Apart, is instead
associated with the static and, ironically, the masculine through her implication
with the ancestors. Crucially, it is the slaying of the malleable force of Idemili that
inaugurates the chain of events that lead to Okonkwos demise. Yet, through his
repeated foregrounding of Ani, Achebe creates a notion of the feminine that is
mitigated by its masculine elements, one preferred by the British because they

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were more interested in the Earth than in water they could not control (JellBahlsen, Water Goddess 345). Still, by figuring the crucial moment of irreparable
violation 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 repeatedly demonstrates, the male and female were figured as halves of a whole, operating to temper and balance the other as interdependent discourses (Nzegwu 15).
Indeed, within political organization in precolonial Igbo societies, the masculine
okonko depicted by Achebe was tempered by the society of ekwe, or titled women
who, along with the powerful womens council, undertook responsibility for a
range of domestic affairs and personal grievances. Yet, in Things Fall Apart, the
umuada is noticeably absent, as are the society of wives, titled women, and any
interaction between co-wives. Despite these omissions and inaccuracies, it would
be unfair to view Achebe as historically ignorant or a misogynist seeking to efface
the traces of feminine power within his society. Instead, following the thoughtful
analysis of Rhonda Cobham, I would suggest that the transgression of the sacred
maternal and the effacement of the divine discourse of the feminine in Things Fall
Apart is a direct result of Achebes mode of address and intended audience. It is
by now well known that Achebes early writing was inspired by his devastating
encounter with the colonialist works of Conrad and Cary (Whittaker and Msiska
1620; Ogede 115), and Things Fall Apart has frequently been read as an African
reassertion of identity and humanity in the face of denigrating portrayals of the socalled Dark Continent. As such, Achebes intended audience, in this work, stands
largely as the colonialists who have dismissed Africa and Africans wholesale.
To reach this audience, then, two narrative effects come to the fore. As Cobham notes, critically, Achebe chooses representations of Igbo society that are most
easily digested by a Western audience and its preference for systems defined 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
ground which enables the figure of Okonkwo and his father and son to achieve
their representation prominence (Jeyifo 183) through a category error in which
women must become subordinated to the seemingly separate and more-pressing
concerns of nationalism. This, in turn, leads to erroneous categorizations of that
society as rigid or misogynist (Simola 148), putting the feminine under erasure in
a manner analogous to Mami Watas own appropriation and dissemination by the
discourses of postcoloniality. Yet, as outlined above, the effaced feminine remains
in traces, seen most strongly through Idemili and her ultimate driving of the
narratives final 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 reception
of the discourses of the feminine in Nigerian Igbo writing is not, of course, an
issue relegated only to men, and the work of critically acclaimed female authors,
particularly Achebes contemporary, Flora Nwapa, and second-generation Buchi
Emecheta, arguably the most famous female African author to date, demonstrate

MADHU KRISHNAN 9

a similar conundrum when addressing the divine feminine. This becomes visible particularly in these writers works as well as the often contradictory critical responses both women, as writers, evoke. In the works of Flora Nwapa, for
example, Idemili, called by one of her many alternate, locality-specific names,
Ogbuide, proves central to her characters trajectories. At the same time, Nwapas
representation of the water goddess and her cult remains highly selective, serving
more as a deconstruction that favors certain aspects of the divine mother than a
faithful representation of her status in traditional Igbo society. In Efuru, a narrative in which the eponymous heroine remains tied to movements defined by
men (Nnaemeka 144), for instance, the water goddess is depicted as a relatively
obscure force, despite the fact that, as Jell-Bahlsen demonstrates, her worship was
the major reference point for communities under her influence. Indeed, Nwapas
novel works through a series of manipulations of traditional water goddess worship, including the depiction of her cult as entirely female, forcibly celibate and
barren, suppressing the feminine in order to create a narrative that directly writes
back 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 first
generation of Nigerian literature where, like her fellow women writers, Nwapa
showed close affinities with [her] male counterparts (Nnaemeka 140), and her initial foray into writing was both supported and legitimized by Achebes approval
(Umeh 7). As such, despite claims that womens writing was intended to reclaim
the tradition of female history and stories (Jeyifo 190) and intended primarily
for women who mostly bear burdens (Ogunyemi 4), Nwapas work may be read
as a response to the masculinized discourses of her peers whose erasure of the
feminine, in the name of nationalism, she sought to redress through a partial representation 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 reconfiguration of the feminine has led to a
critical practice that, unable to make coherent its conflicting discourses and modes
of address, seems incapable of coming to terms with Nwapas work, alternatively
condemning and celebrating her (see Chineze Chukukere 11820). With Nwapa,
then, the water goddess is instrumentalized as a signifier of independence separate from male influence through this redeployment that nonetheless confounds
her originary primacy in Igbo cultural tradition.
While Nwapa is undoubtedly the mother of Nigerian literature, secondgeneration writer Buchi Emecheta remains the best-known Nigerian woman
writer and, indeed, among the best-known African writers of either gender. Like
Nwapa, from whom she took a great deal of inspiration, Emecheta presents a
confounded view of the divine maternal, most strikingly in her fifth novel, critically deemed a culminating achievement in the literary career of Buchi Emecheta
(Chineze Chukukere 185), The Joys of Motherhood. The novel explicitly grapples
with the degradation of the Nigerian woman through the dual forces of patriarchal oppression and colonial imposition in what has been seen as a Manichean
system of subjugation (Jita Allan 104) seemingly conflating two distinct discourses,
that of the pre-colonial traditionalist and that of the imperial colonizer. The Joys
of Motherhood has been described as an eviscerating portrayal of the sexism of
Nigerian society, where tradition suppresses the material and social progression of its protagonist, Nnu Ego (Nnaemeka 150; Ogunyemi 261; Chukwuma 2),

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inviting sympathy for its heroine from Western feminist readers (Fishburn 106;
Allen 10416; Chineze Chukukere 165). At the same time, however, historical inaccuracies 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 to
her (Nnaemeka 150; Arndt 286; Ezeigbo 17). Following this line of argumentation,
then, Nnu Egos predicament could be seen equally as caused by her own denial
of her dual role as wife to Nnaife, but daughter to Agbadi, instead flattening
herself into a single-dimensioned and essentialized notion of femininity where
colonialism has thoroughly effaced any positives from tradition (Stratton, Grave
152; Arndt 35859).
While traces of the divine feminine and feminine agency remain, notably
through Ona and Azukas abilities to leverage their roles as male daughter and
center of subsistence economy, respectively, as well as the importance of Nnu
Egos chi, or destiny-bestowing personal deity, a riverine follower of the water
goddess, The Joys of Motherhood, like Achebes novel before it, betrays a confusion
in 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 her
engagement of forms of femininity recognizable to and sympathetic for a EuroAmerican feminist audience, and male, through her sense of writing back to the
figure of woman as represented in male-authored Nigerian texts. As such, the text
falls prey to the temptation to limit the roles it ascribes to women in traditional
society to those invented by Achebe (Cobham 178). At the same time, again, as
with Achebe, Mami Wata again proves her fluidity through the traces she leaves
on the text. Despite this, however, the trope of the water goddess and precolonial
feminine agency has been largely neglected in critical readings of the text, which
instead respond to the foregrounded voice of the novel that encourages an erasure
under the imposition of colonial rule and its attendant discourses.

4. GraceLand and 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 traditional Igbo society and represented by Idemili is instead forced under erasure,
replaced with an incomplete notion of the feminine that takes its inspiration from
colonialist binary norms of gendered relations. By speaking to their oppressors,
rather than to tradition, all three novelists create narratives that present essentialized pictures of the feminine, despite the lasting traces of Idemili remnant in all
three texts. On the surface, GraceLand too appears to fall prey to the masculinized
ambiguities surrounding feminine discourses in Nigerian literature, seemingly
subordinating its female characters to the ultimate narrative trajectory of its male
protagonist, while engaging in a dichotomizing view of femininity that transforms
women into mere signifiers of sexuality. Yet, GraceLand presents an alternative
method of feminine depiction to the cases I have traced above, more clearly resisting the appropriative readings of critical inquiry and demonstrating how a shift in
the locus of address may enable a return to a tradition kept under erasure through
a direct confrontation with it. While at its most basic narrative level, GraceLand

MADHU KRISHNAN 11

may reasonably be viewed as a work where conformity to gender roles weaves

throughout the novel as a force destructive to both men and women, denying
women access to full personhood and robbing men of the ability to express tenderness and love for each other (Aycock, Becoming 13), read closely, and with an
attention to the seemingly silenced voices running throughout, the text reveals itself
as a trickster, to use Henry Louis Gates Jr.s term (45), transforming the feminine
into a secret tongue that permeates the work as a whole, buttressing its development
and ultimately driving its outcome. Like the water goddess who, controlling entry
and exit into and from this world (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater 31),
impels the trajectories of earthly life, the hidden feminine in GraceLand impels its
narrative trajectory, and, similarly like the water goddess, elusive and slippery as
the liquid element itself (Jell-Bahlsen, Concept of Mammywater 32), throughout
GraceLand, woman appears not as a singular figure but in many guises ranging
from the hypersexualization of Elviss cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing to
the maternal figures of Oye, his grandmother, and Beatrice, his mother, representing in narrative a dually written ambivalence towards woman taken from this
tradition. Women appear as both the maternal producer of life and the sexualized
female, but this very duality is continually transgressed through contrapuntal
acts of resistance. Seemingly effaced, the feminine instead functions in the guise
of masquerade, turning the text in on itself and mocking its limits as a return to a
vernacular tradition that puts the feminine at the fore, lifting it from its historical
effacement. The importance of the feminine occurs in three motifs that both drive
and motivate Abanis text, demonstrating the ways in which, as an alternative code
that defies assimilation into the dominant code of the novel, the water-goddess
trope may provide an alternative reading of gender. In GraceLand, this is maintained
through Elviss fascination with drag play and makeup, the figure of his mothers
journal and his memories of his mother and grandmother, Oye, who, as Novak has
point out, represent the alternative tradition of womens histories in the text (47).
These histories serve as the governing logic of the text that defies easy uncoding
and therefore resists the closure and appropriation seen in the critical assimilation
of 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 of
applying foundation, mascara and lipstick as part of his costume as an Elvis Presley impersonator (Abani 7778). Elviss transformation, through a play of drag, into
Elvis Presley, a white man who, himself, enacted a feminized drag performance of
black culture, has been critically described as his attempt to inhabit an alternative
personality, his means of escaping the stifling confines of tradition and his search
for a more fluid working of gender and race through his assimilation within the
symbol of white America (Adk; Dunton; Dawson). Yet, it soon becomes clear,
the trappings of femininity and whiteness represent not so much a desire for an
alternate identity as a desire for an idealized authentic identity rooted in the
foreclosed past which haunts Elvis. Drag and play in makeup transform from
acts of racialized and gendered transgression into acts of recuperation, attempts
at re-opening the past through the performativity of the present. In GraceLand,
Elviss drag as Presley is transformed through its implication in his search for his
dead mother, Beatrices, memory, introduced early in the narrative in a flashback:

12 Research in African Liter atures

Volume 43 Number 1

Beatrice laughed and set the plastic disk on the record player. The needle
scratched the edge a few times as though undecided, then launched into the
throaty 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 they
were once fluid and smooth. (42)

The narrative makes it apparent that Elvis Presley and the whiteness that represents him function as metonyms for Elviss childhood under his mothers protective gaze, linking his play to a striving towards the effaced feminine. It is she
who introduces Elvis to this music, the joy of dancing and indeed who bequeaths
him 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, and
Elvis Presley in a homogeneous relationship of holistic identification, turning the
American star into a signifier of Beatrice and all her loss represents in Elviss young
life. For Elvis, the progression from his mothers laughter to the scratching of the
needle to the throaty call of Elvis Presley operate together as the totality within
which he identifies his idealized youth.
At this young age, then, Elvis is interpellated into a social stratum in which
the inclusion he seeks is associated with the feminine sphere of his mothers presence, linking the past to the present and complicating the discursive circulation of
gender and race in his drag play. Later in his narrative, Elvis expressly ruminates
on his desire for comfort through the mask of the feminine, watching his aunt put
on 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 ability
to prepare a face for the world. To change it any time she liked. Be different people
just by a gentle hint of shadow here, a dash of color there (Abani 173). For Elvis,
the trappings of femininity become the signifiers of a holistic communal inclusion
where, under the literal mask of makeup, he may return to the unity of self that he
only experienced when with his mother. This link is further developed as dancing
and make-up, in the wake of his mothers death, become for Elvis the metonymic
method through which to surpass his grief; as an attainable pursuit, drag and
performance replace the unattainable goal of being reunited with the mother who
he 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 his
daily attire as that which he keeps close in an effort to make sense both of his own
existence and of his mothers life. Beatrices journal serves as a site of mystification
for Elvis. As the sole inheritance he holds from his deceased mother, the book and
its incomprehensible collection of recipes never used and herbal cures taken from
his grandmother stands as the opaque code which Elvis seeks to understand in
order to find 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 on
the large-scale events of public life, serving, within the narrative, as a signifier
of the traumatic loss of womens traditional culture in Nigeria and of the way in
which that story remains isolated from the narrative of neocolonial trauma that
is Elviss story (47), tacitly positioning the book along with the other suppressed
signifiers of the lost feminine. Yet, the journal and its indecipherable language,
signifying the last remnant of Elviss past, embed themselves within his story
through his very attachment to the book and the memories it conjures. The two

MADHU KRISHNAN 13

strands of neocolonial trauma and the traumatic loss of womens traditional

culture are not able to remain discrete; instead, through Elviss dual implication
in both, where the lost feminine is what both drives and confounds him, they
become intertwined aspects of a story told in multiple voices and contradictory
codes. Expanding from these comments, the journal may be seen in a broader
light as exhibiting not just the suppressed world of the traditional feminine, but
an entire foreclosed past towards which Elvis strives, indicative of the precolonial
tradition as a whole. The suppressed voice of the feminine and the tradition it
expresses reassert themselves through their very resistance to an easy decoding, becoming the wedge that prevents an easy narrative closure; instead, the
effaced feminine forces the narrative upon itself, as it seeks to decode that which
is 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 from
the journal, musing that [i]t had never revealed his mother to him. Never helped
him 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 (Abani
320). The journals open-ended signifiers remain beyond him, their rhetorical play
exceeding his comprehension, foreclosed in the same ambivalent space as his own
existence in a fragmented Nigerian society. Rather than serving as the silenced
feminine narrative described by Novak, then, the journal in its silence embodies
the trickster; the signification of Beatrices journal shifts, this time becoming a type
of narrative mockery that refuses entry and comprehension, instead forcing an
acknowledgement of its irreducible difference on a liminal cultural boundary and
the continual frustration of any attempts to view the text as a passive repository
of meanings swallowed by a dominant masculinity.
The characters of Beatrice and Oye, Elviss beloved grandmother, materialize
what Abani hints in his narrative when Elvis catches an askew glimpse of a mural
of Idemili through their maternal power as matrons. Novak has argued that the
feminine voice is cast aside in GraceLand, citing both Beatrices and Oyes deaths
as evidence (47), echoing Abanis own comments that [w]omen are the terrain
over which masculinity is charted (Aycock, Interview 9); yet both Beatrice and
Oye remain imbued in the narrative through the lasting influence of the maternal
figure on Elvis and its implication with his striving towards selfhood. Through the
very primacy of Oye and Beatrice in Elviss self-construction and the potency of
their quasi-magical protection over him, the lost discourse of the feminine finds
its reassertion in the narrative as an alternative code that eludes domination and
appropriation within the text. The figure of woman, represented by the mother
figure, remains within the text, as its driving force, yet out of its reach and transgressing its limits. It should be noted that it is precisely this alternative discourse
of matriarchy that prompts Elviss ultimate trajectory in the novel, motivating his
movements and remaining with him, through his mothers possessions, even at
his final moment of flight. The figure of woman is thus less suppressed within the
narrative than spoken in terms outside of its dominant idiom; while it appears
erased, it is, instead, simply apart, beyond the control of the masculinist rituals
of Elviss Lagos life and functioning beyond the strictures of a developmentalist
ideology.

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Volume 43 Number 1

It is of course possible to see in GraceLand a female figure that is entirely different through the portrayal of sexualized violence and the seeming expendability
of sexualized female characters, most directly through Elviss relationships with
his cousin Efua and the beggar girl Blessing. These women have been described as
the collateral damage necessary for Elviss narrative progress; yet, at the same time,
they function in a manner akin to the maternal figure, destabilizing the narratives codes and ultimately motivating Elviss own journey. Throughout GraceLand,
indeed, Elviss memories of Efua are nearly equal to those of his mother, and it is
through these flashes that Elvis finally comes to acknowledge the very constructed
quality of the impossible past which impels him. Recalling his witness to Efuas
rape by her own father, the man who would later rape him, becomes, for Elvis, the
impetus to break with the truncated signifiers of authenticity and essentialized
identities. Echoing this formative experience, Elviss inability to stop his fellow
caretaker, Okons, extortion of sex from Blessing returns Elvis to the feelings of
impotence 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 core
of his being, Blessing looks towards Elvis conveys shame and pity, complicating a simplistic reading of this scene as one that capitulates back to the traditional
use of sex work as a means for advancement in Nigerian literature. Through her
sense of pity, Blessing somehow objectifies Elvis, returning him to the liminal
through his inability to adapt to the rigid standards of his society. Certainly, it
would not be without reason to interpret these womens sexual exploitation and
the violence against them as an objectification of women at the service of Elviss
growing being-in-the-world. Simultaneously, however, it is precisely these memories and incidents that move Elvis throughout the narrative and destabilize his
static notions of self, community, and memory, suggesting that, running in parallel to the violation of the fertile woman is an altered and truncated agency that
effects its boundaries on Elvis. It is this partially written agency that enforces the
fragmentation that drives him on his quest for a self-in-community and leading
to his ultimate flight to America. Elviss knowledge of what these young women
know and have seen highlights the lack of totalizing identifications from this
foreclosed space of femininity, an impotence that haunts Elvis to his final flight 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, unfinished and unheard in its totality.

5. Conclusions
The figure of woman and the discourse of femininity, as traced throughout this
essay, demonstrate that, speaking in a code inassimilable to dominant, Manichean
currents, the feminine confounds an easy or direct reading of any of these authors
work. Tradition, displaced and re-configured through its interaction with the
competing discourses of colonial imposition, masculinity, and nationalism, is
instead transfigured, shifted, and continually (re)appropriated. At the same time,
through the manipulation of address and a desired community identification, the
feminine, along with the tradition it signifies, has become a site of misconception.
It is through this very ambivalence, however, forced under erasure in the work
of Achebe, and responded to in its same tongue by Nwapa and Emecheta, that

MADHU KRISHNAN 15

Abanis novel demonstrates the fecundity of an unashamed return to the vernacular 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 signifiers, and one inextricably
altered by the imposition of outside forces (Gore and Nevadomsky 62). Rife with
irreducible differences that were nonetheless partially effaced by transcultural
circulation and external appropriations, the water goddess thus serves as an
allegory for the shifts in representation in the Nigerian novel, as writers move
from seeking to legitimize their cultural identifications to an outside audience
historically dismissive, to a sense of reclamation of tradition that strives, instead,
towards emergent and heterogeneous collectivities that surpass the binaries of
male/female, Africa/Europe, and colonizer/colonized, representing both the multiply articulated and often conflictual discourses of the feminine and the space of
liminality in which novel identifications are enacted. Missy L. Bastian has written
that in the 1980s, the tradition of Mami Wata and the water goddesses became
particular prevalent among the Igbo-speaking populations of southern Nigeria:
In the grip of powerful feelings of alterity and thinking that their lives are out of
control, Igbo-speaking people turn to the foundations of their social experience
to socialize and connect with these others. Kinship is familiar as both a comfort
and a discomfortand, as such, offers a discursive space where ambiguous
relations can be played out and made figures for creative play. Perhaps what
can 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 of
tumultuous change and following the tortured transition of its protagonist from
an idealistic child to a disillusioned adolescent, the hidden discourse of the water
goddess should prove so crucial to the narratives underpinnings in a way that
the circumstances of colonial imposition and cultural imperialism disallowed
earlier works. While functioning within the landscape of Nigerian literature and
its 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 traditions
that, though irrevocably altered by the passage of time and the imposition of colonial cultural context, remains retrievable and itself fertile. The feminine emerges
out from erasure as a tongue spoken in a distinct code uncontainable within the
dominant discourse of the Nigerian novel, and instead reclaims its centrality as a
marker of the ambivalence which marks the postcolonial Nigerian condition, and,
through this re-emergence, the tradition within Nigerian literature itself reasserts
itself as a discourse both irreducible to and liberated from outside imposition.
Acknowledgment

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Woodson Institute for
African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and Universitas
21 for providing the support that funded the research for this paper.

16 Research in African Liter atures

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