New Silences & the Reign of the Phallus in New Nigerian Writing [An Essay] by Oko Owoicho

A major turn in the radical and protest movement of African literature is the emergence of women writers in the 70s and 80s. Although, before this period, women authors like Efua Sutherland (1962) Flora Nwapa (1966), and Bessie Head (1968) had already published their first books. While the vision of the early male writers was an attempt to decolonise the African continent, the role and historical relevance of women—an almost absent minority among African writers then—was barely considered or given any relevance in the literature produced. Florence Stratton argued that Achebe’s women, up until Anthills of the Savannah, were down on one knee before their male folks. Similarly, critics noted that Soyinka’s Jewel (The Lion and the Jewel, 1962) was at best an “object” meant to be won by the Lion (Baroka) or by the contesting, conflicted Lakunle. Most women writers see their near-absence in male literature as an attempt to invalidate their contribution to African pre-colonial history (Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, 1999) and male authors’ “[neglect] to point out the positive side of womanhood” (Flora Nwapa, 1998), hence they decided to tell their own story.
Besides writing literature that centres female protagonists, the 70s and 80s also saw African women critics. Their evolvement beyond the creative genres and the need for critical attention to their works is best captured by Ama Ata Aidoo when she notes that “it is especially pathetic to keep on writing without having any consistent, active, critical intelligence that is interested in you as an artist (or creator)” (158). Her argument at the 1986 Stockholm Conference in South Africa was that “any critical attention is better than none at all. Therefore it is also obvious that one factor that has definitely damaged the career of so many women writers is the absence of attention from the critical world” (162).
Aidoo’s argument raises concerns about the questions of canonisation. Critical attention is the core channel of canonisation, hence with male authors being evaluated, a “male literary tradition” becomes the defining aesthetic ruptures of any generation. As Florence Stratton says in Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender: “In characterizing African literature, critics have ignored gender as a social and analytic category. Such characterizations operate to exclude women’s literary expression as part of African literature. Hence what they define is the male literary tradition” (1).
However, this concern was checked with the emergence of critical attention by the women writers. They moved beyond just critical appraisal of their writings to theoretical formulations. Buchi Emecheta’s “Feminism with Small ‘f’” and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s “Stiwanism: Feminism in an African Context” are evidence of such critical endeavours. While notable male African critics were caught within the Marxist orthodoxy of their age, the women scholars were already moving towards a concrete universal ethos.
The need to defend the Alter-Native[1] and Marxist ideology and women writers writing their way out of male dominance in literary discourse caused both men and women of the second generation to produce a number of critics—Abiola Irele being one of the major voices of that era. Even the creative writers among them produced numbers of critical works. The third generation witnessed few prominent critics, both male and female, compared to their predecessors. This dearth of critics is more visible with women. However, the contribution of Toyin Adewale-Gabriel to the criticism of that age cannot be repudiated. Besides anthologizing women writers, she also lends voice to, what is in my view, the continued conversation on the Being of womanhood. In an interview in Brittle Paper, she notes that “As a young woman in Nigerian literary circles [of the third generation] in the mid-nineties, I was struck by the absence of women voices, after the wave of Mabel Segun and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie whom we had studied in school”. That she meets the absence of women voices shows the continued silence that reigns in the critical space of women writers.

The Fourth Generation and the New Silence
Different essays trended recently on contemporary Nigerian literature. The arguments have been on trope, the Americanisation of Nigerian poetry, and the periodisation of the new poets with the aesthetics that distinguish them from the third generation. What is most obvious in the critical exchange is the near-total absence of female poets, writers or critics and their contribution to new Nigerian literature.
In essence, is the new Nigerian literature a phallocentric activity with no female writers contributing to the aesthetic ruptures seizing the literary scene? This eloquent silence on the appraisal of contemporary Nigerian female writers shows the continuous “being down on one knee” of Nigerian women writers. But who can we blame for this sort of absence: the male critics who have failed to write on female writers, or female writers who haven’t taken on the pose of their predecessors in asserting their contribution to culture and society against the phallocentric attitude of the Nigerian cultural scene?
In 2009, while the poets I refer to as the Boundary Poets of the fourth generation were entering into the scene, asserting their cultural energy and views, Jumoke Verissimo was already popular with the publication of I Am Memory. This means she is one of the earliest poets to have ushered the poetics and politics of the fourth generation into view. What is even more distinguishing, if we use Verissimo as the pathfinder of the female poets of the fourth generation, is that her revolutionary zeal and poetics, steeped in national consciousness, trounced the dangling uncertainties of male poets. While Dami Ajayi, Su’eddie Vershima Agema, Servio Gbadamosi, and Femi Morgan, among others, were caught within the uncertainties of the age that ushered them in, Verissimo toed the lines of the critical literary tradition of art as a prompt for change.
I Am Memory, in my view, transcends the discourse of grief and protest against military dictatorship in the writings of the third generation. It explores the issues of coloniality of being—an idea that shows the continuous reproduction of racial classification to justify violence such as slavery, killing, and destruction of the African knowledge system—hereby discoursing decoloniality, a sentiment foregrounding what is found in the poetry of Tchicaya U’Tamsi, Syl Cheney Coker, and Kofi Awonoor (sadly, all male poets here again). The collection goes deeper into history and raises a politico-historical consciousness that informs the ache of a rising generation.
Before I delve into the main thematic thrill of the book, it is necessary to state that where Verissimo’s generation meets her is within the context of bodily desires. Iduma notes of Ajayi’s Daybreak and Other Poems that “I get the feeling that Dami Ajayi wants to understand the currency of sexuality – what is exchanged in lovemaking and what is not and what cannot be exchanged. …he is interested in the opening of bodies to reveal souls struggling with banality, ordinariness, fading beauty, and the end” (7). Hence, Verissimo’s collection opens with “Sequence (Of desire)”. The poem, which takes a full section in the collection, rings from “the currency of sexuality” and what it means when bodies open themselves to each other, allowing the soul and beingness of the personas travel through each other:

Ajani.

The beads on my waist,
the heat of my passion,
the pleasure of my ache,

the memory of a
burn
ing groin.

The beads of waiting,
the beads of wanting
the beads are weighty,

I wait.
My waist pines for your searing,
It is burdened by despised beads
Which lightens in your admiration.

In your touch
my singed waist comes alive
my beads become my flesh. (3)

The object and desire of sex avails itself through every line in the poem. The unnamed persona confesses to the “want” and desire for her lover’s body. But is there a political angle to Verissimo’s “Sequence”? While the object of desire and expression is always expected to be carried out by men, initiate the sex, and begin the conversation, the persona here does it differently. The tone stands to defeat the age-long belief that a woman’s desire must be hidden so that she would not be termed loose. So, in Verissimo’s palm, love and sex become a political testament to the new woman who refuses the docility of desire as a must command by the phallus.
The second section of the book, “Association,” takes on a metanarrative of the plight, history, and consciousness of the African colonial experience. The poem makes a pragmatic statement: “Times have not changed/ pain has: it has grown bolder” (18). The growing pain the poet writes about is the ache of history—the history of slavery. Using the motif of the middle passage, she states that:

I am memory;
of souls who voyaged
into seas of persecution,
seeking liberation in bloodied ties.

I am memory;
of passages
leading home to discontent,
of passages,
of dry bones that failed to rise
when the bitterness scourged their strength.

I am the middle passage;
reflections of the Atlantic… (19)

Verissimo represents one of the most critical voices of the boundary poets, and I believe that no classification of this new generation begins on the right path without a reference to her allegiance to the radical and revolutionary aesthetics that inhabit the core of African literature.
Besides the revolutionary character shown in I Am Memory, the aesthetic feature of contemporary female Nigerian poets that can be classed within the New School Nigerian Poets is also worthy of note. One such poet is Funmi Gaji, whose chapbook The Script of Bruises (Konya Shamsrumi, 2020) delights in the beauty of language. While her work takes on crucial topics like the despairs of being a woman in a space that haunts its own, her language strives for poetic precision. No matter the depth of her topic, her words sashay in the notion that lyricism is the first business of poetry.

The first poem “The Blood Collectors” opens: “Sorrow sits on you like/a second skin” (1). This sort of sibilant alliteration is not the shrill and obvious pandering of alliteration by amateurs. The words sit in their proper order and invite the reader to the subject of sorrow. Such is the genius of Gaji.[2]
I do not set out to historicize contemporary female poets. I only want to draw attention to the new silence which is a historical repetition of what I consider a male valence at canonisation. Digging into Verissimo is to show, briefly, the rich and powerful poetics of contemporary female poets in Nigeria, one with one of the strongest revolutionary gazes. Gaji shows the aesthetics, for critics who favour language. What this calls for is female participation in literary criticism. While I don’t advocate for gender separation in literary analysis, we cannot deny that our society still has more men pursuing criticism than female writers. There is a need for the deliberate participation of contemporary Nigerian female writers in the criticism of their writing.

NOTES

[1] Alter-Native generation is a term popularised by Funsho Aiyejina to refer to the second generation of Nigerian writers like Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, and Tanure Ojaide as representative poets of that era which comes after the Okigbo-Soyinka-Clark generation of Modernist Nationalist.

[2] I chose Verissimo and Gaji in this essay to represent the time span of the fourth generation writing—the boundary poets and the new school—to show the dearth of critical engagement on new Nigerian female writing. There are several women writers that I believe their writings need to be engaged. As a way of shattering the silence, the 30 Nigerian female poets curated by Pamilerin Jacob is a place to begin, although thirty is a small figure compared to the large number of contemporary female writers.

Oko Owoicho, Africanist poet, performer, and scholar is the Director of the Abuja and Benue Poetry Troupes. He is a passionate rising literary voice.