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Research in African Literatures 33.2 (2002) 81-99



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Genre and Authority in Some Popular Nigerian Women's Novels

Lee Erwin


I should start by telling you about the father.

—Buchi Emecheta, Naira Power

This essay is an experiment in disarticulating the term romance from the category of Nigerian women's popular fiction, with which it has become linked in recent criticism. This is neither to deny the importance of romance elements in many such novels, nor to devalue the romance as a form through which women might imaginatively negotiate aspects of their domestic and social positions. Rather my intention is to alter the terms of analysis to account for textual features elided in "reading the romance," and to suggest that the primary burden of the novels is not the sexualized gender relations that dominate Western reading practices, but a broader negotiation of gendered social formations in which what is conventionally defined as romance constitutes only one of several strands. Rather than positing the romance as the term of analysis and identifying examples of "textual deviancy and cultural syncretism," as Jane Bryce and Kari Darko put it, I suggest that the novels' generic syncretism enacts an insistent concern with authority, both within the texts themselves as well as in the cultural arena of their production.

My primary focus is on novels by Helen Ovbiagele, Buchi Emecheta, Yemi Sikuade, and Rosina Umelo written in the early to mid-1980s for Macmillan's Pacesetter series, as well as novels by Zaynab Alkali and Ifeoma Okoye for Longman. These by-now-familiar series, representing multinational publishers' efforts to capitalize not only on the growing readership for accessible fiction in English cultivated by the Onitsha and other market literatures (as Virginia Coulon argues) but also to the growing educational market for young adult reading materials, present special problems of genre as a result. The novels' colorful covers, the brevity and accessibility of their texts, the prominence of women writers among their authors, and the treatment of subjects such as adultery and illegitimacy may have led to a too hasty assimilation of these novels to the more familiar generic model of the popular romance, which had already gained a foothold in West Africa. Their target readership at the secondary-school level, on the other hand, which is both "off the radar" of conventional literary criticism and in part supported by educational funding, may have let them serve, as Helen Chukwuma suggests, as a site of experimentation (141). While the novels' marketing as secondary-school ESL readers places them in an ambiguous sociocultural position—neither an elite literature that might be read and taught as part of university curricula, both in Nigeria and abroad, nor an unambiguously popular literature, produced locally with local resources (see, e.g., Newell, "Brink" 64; Barber 4)—these novels may nonetheless be read as in some ways recasting the "us versus [End Page 81] them" binary Karin Barber identifies as structuring the African popular in all its forms, and as making complex, often conflicted attempts to assimilate traditional sources of authority with the new forms thrown up by modernization. The admittedly problematic term "popular" is retained here for these novels, then, for its reference both to those immediately urgent issues and to the range of conventionally popular genres deployed in negotiating them.

While many of these concerns are plainly limited neither to Nigeria nor to a narrow span of years (and Macmillan and other multinational publishers continue to publish such texts throughout Africa), a focus on Nigerian novels published during the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s offers a particularly rich body of texts, both literary and critical, for analyzing how such novels, though commissioned by multinational publishers, may engage in local debates surrounding constructions of gender, authority, and social mobility. The early predominance of Nigerian authors in an ostensibly pan-African series 1 was only one aspect of a much larger upsurge in Nigerian print culture during the period—triggered by the post-Civil War oil boom and the accelerated urbanization, new educational institutions, and changes in...

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