The Task of Allegorical Interpretation: African Women's Domestic Tales as Political Narratives

In the last two decades, African literary criticism has broadened its focus on male authors to acknowledge writings by African women, through such landmark studies as Irène Assiba d'Almeida's Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994), Odile Cazenave's Femmes rebelles: Naissance d'un nouveau roman africain au féminin (1996), Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi's Gender in African Women's Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference (1997), and Ken Harrow's Less than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing (2002).¹ With the exception of Nfah-Abbenyi's study, which brings together women writers from Anglophone and Francophone Africa, studies of the African female literary tradition have generally held themselves to the Anglophone-Francophone divide. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988, by Susan Z. Andrade, performs a rare crossing of the linguistic divide in African literary criticism by examining the novels of writers from Algeria (Assia Djebar), Nigeria (Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa), Senegal (Mariama Bâ, Ousmane Sembène, Aminata Sow Fall), Somalia (Nuruddin Farah), and Zimbabwe (Tsitsi Dangarembga). Even more unique, in light of the tacit exclusion of North African literatures from the category of African literatures, is Andrade's inclusion of Algerian writer Assia Djebar.

While I have situated The Nation Writ Small in the context of landmark studies of African women's writings, the scope of the book is beyond African feminine writing. Andrade analyzes the African male and female literary traditions side by side with an aim to document and unravel gendered reading practices in African literary criticism. Andrade thereby makes an innovative contribution to the critical literature on African women writers. The book takes issue with an entrenched tradition of (mis)reading African women's writings that is not attuned to the political import of these literary texts and has subsequently contributed to the ghettoization of African women writers and their marginalization from the political-narrative-driven canon of African literatures. Juxtaposing male novels acclaimed as political narratives with female novels perceived as apolitical because of their focus on domesticity, Andrade offers new readings and ways of reading African women's literatures that revise the apolitical reading entrenched by some of the landmark studies of African women's writings mentioned above.

At the core of The Nation Writ Small is the following question: "At a time when novels written by men were understood to be deeply involved in the project of anticolonial nationalism, why were novels written by women understood to be apolitical?" (6). Andrade persuasively argues that the cultural nationalist genealogies of African literary criticism are at fault. African women's texts, much more so than men's texts, lay their narrative groundings in the domestic sphere and the space of the home. The failure of critics to read this narrative grounding allegorically, due to patriarchal reading practices that are informed by the nationalist confirmation of a separate domestic sphere, has rendered African women illegible as political contributors. Andrade states, broadly, that while texts by African male writers foreground their allegorical character, texts by African women writers require the reader to excavate their (usually disguised) allegories. Women's texts, Andrade claims, demand more labor from their readers.

The introduction does an excellent job of outlining the field of African literary criticism and the ways it was shaped by cultural nationalism and the gender politics of cultural nationalism. Andrade offers insightful readings of two key yet often overlooked texts in African literary criticism, Florence Stratton's Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) and Olakunle George's Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003).² The two texts have never been put in conversation before, and in conducting this exercise, Andrade is able to articulate an interpretive framework that attends to the gendered politics of representation in African literatures and literary criticism while paving the way for her robust engagement...