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Callaloo cal.1 (2001) 287-300



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It's A Woman's War
Engendering Conflict In Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra

Ann Marie Adams


Why resurrect it all now. From the past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion.

--Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

The Nigerian Civil War has been analyzed and contextualized from numerous historical perspectives. African (Nigerian and non-Nigerian alike) as well as Western scholars have attempted to assess the effects of this brutal struggle. Whether it is C. Odumegwu Ojukwu himself laying out his plea to the world in Biafra or liberal scholars such as Auberon Waugh and Suzanne Cronjé highlighting the hidden and not so hidden role of Britain in the "internal" conflict, the war has been written and rewritten from sundry ideological perspectives. Yet it is also clear that this phenomenon is not the sole prerogative of political scientists, historians or military warfare experts; numerous authors have creatively reenacted the war, often minutely chronicling the various offenses and battles. As Chidi Amuta, perhaps the foremost critic of Nigerian Civil War literature, notes,

[a]lthough the war ended more than a decade ago, one of its most enduring and significant legacies is the numerous literary works it has generated and inspired. Apart from works based directly on the war situation such as Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn, Okechukwa Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun, Wole Soyinka's Madmen and Specialists and A Shuttle in the Crypt, recent works such as Festus Iyayi's Violence and Femi Osofisan's Once Upon Four Robbers testify to a still lingering "war consciousness." The civil war constitutes the most important theme in Nigerian literature (in English) in the 1970s. ("Nigerian" 83)

Craig W. McLuckie, in his study, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an Imagined Community, implicitly agrees with Amuta and even goes so far as to claim that this literature can be read as an attempt to construct a truly national community after the partisan conflict of the disastrous war. The Anglophone nature of these works, McLuckie contends, is indicative of their national nature, for to "write in an indigenous language (Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa, for example) would be to limit one's Nigerian audience, while also implicitly advancing a tribal rather than a nationalist consciousness" (6). 1 [End Page 287]

Despite the abundance of criticism on the war and the "national" literature it inspired, very rarely has the role of women, or women authors, been discussed in this critical discourse. As Abioseh M. Porter notes in "They Were There, Too: Women and the Civil War(s) in Destination Biafra," it is ironic "that some of the most celebrated attempts to discuss works dealing with the Nigeria-Biafra civil war--one of the predominant themes of modern African literature--have either ignored or underestimated the literary efforts of female writers" (313). If gender is discussed in a literary context, it tends to be in relationship to the female characters found in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories or Cyprian Ekwenski's Survive the Peace, seemingly despite the fact that the most celebrated woman writer in Nigeria, Flora Nwapa, has written extensively on the war (in Never Again, One is Enough and Women are Different). Even the popularity and wide Western readership of Nigeria's most famous (or perhaps infamous) female writer, Buchi Emecheta, has not allowed for the growth of much critical "gendered" discourse. Save a few general overviews on women and the war experience (Jane Bryce's "Conflict and Contradiction in Women's Writing on the Nigerian Civil War" and Marie Umeh's "The Poetics of Thwarted Sensitivity"), Emecheta's work on the war, Destination Biafra, seems to be largely ignored--even by feminist critics. 2 This "oversight" is an unfortunate lacuna because Destination...

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