Mothering across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations, and: Writing Across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta (review)

According to both Angelita Reyes and Omar Sougou and much of feminist and postcolonial theory, there is little difference between mothering across cultures and writing across cultures; to write is to "mother" and to teach language and to bridge boundaries. Reyes's touching and lovely argument is for a "global consciousness" of "unity within diversity of the human family [. . .] to reverberate until humanity gives birth to new ways of being with each other in the world" (3). Sougou contends that Buchi Emecheta seeks a similar peace, "a transformational current of international feminism [. . .] which challenges patriarchal tradition and enhances the notion of the family, [. . .] egalitarian partnership between male and female; acknowledging the struggle against imperialism, neocolonialism, racism, and exploitation" (25).

Reyes explores, often in lyrical terms, the works and the identities of such authors as Toni Morrison (and the history of Margaret Garner, the original Sethe of Beloved), Jean Rhys (who shares Reyes's own nationality), Mariama Bâ (of yet another culture), and, finally, Reyes's mother as storyteller. All these writers and tellers are members of a vast group that includes many critical theorists from numerous cultures. Reyes states that women of all cultures possess an almost mystical power of communication, "one of the gifts that women claim as technicians of the unseen" (180). Reyes's mother reaches across death to share in this study to express ideas "about the diversity of the mother-women in New World cultures and in the context of a transitional modern African society" (176). All mothers, fictional and otherwise according to Reyes, tell the "tongue-language" (191) and pass culture from one generation to the next.

As poetic as this all may seem, Reyes is a scholar as well, and her literary and historical research qualifies her as an excellent postcolonial critic. Her assessments of Morrison's texts, particularly Beloved, are insightful and sensitive, covering historical material that few previous scholars have understood as well as she. Few critics are able either to cite such Jamaican traditions as the flying mothers and surrogate mothers, the maroonage, representing "the enabling motif of death, rebirth, and transformation" (78). Every reader of Wide Sargasso Sea loves Christophine, who "possesses the mother-woman's ancestral 'grit and toil' that enables survival" (900). According to Reyes, Christophine, with her mixed heritage, reflects the spirit world of obeah and marronage, which allows both Antoinette and herself to triumph finally in the burning of the colonial English mansion.

Flying women also represent a motif in Morrison's works, and the relationship with language and magic and power is clear and exciting as it is in Rhys's novel. Morrison, however, is relatively free of the burden of identity politics; she knows who she is, and so does each of her characters. Both Reyes and Rhys, however, suffer in some ways from what Reyes quotes Rhys as calling "this color thing" (91). Reyes talks repeatedly of the "olden kinship" (189), but at times, in her crosscultural text, it is sometimes a problem to recognize who or what this exactly means.

Even for writers from Africa, like Buchi Emecheta, identity is a concern. Sougou describes Emecheta as a "cross-cultural figure" who was born in Nigeria, lives in London, and who "draws on African materials and experience," but who also has been named "one of the best Young British Writers" (1). Sougou himself is a "cross-cultural" writer. He is a graduate of the University of Dakar and has taught in both Scotland and the United States. He concentrates on placing Emechata firmly in the context of contemporary feminist and Postcolonial critical theory. The bibliography for...