Approaching Gender Equity Through Gender Dialogue in Ayọbami Adebayọ’S Stay with Me (2017) and Lọla Shonẹyin’S the Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’S Wives (2010)

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MYTH IS ITS OWN UNDOING: APPROACHING GENDER EQUITY THROUGH GENDER DIALOGUE IN AYỌBAMI ADEBAYỌ’S STAY WITH ME (2017) AND LỌLA SHONẸYIN’S THE SECRET LIVES OF BABA SẸGI’S WIVES (2010)

Michael Ọshindọrọ

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2020

Committee:

Khani Begum, Advisor

Michael Ọshindọrọ

ABSTRACT

Khani Begum, Advisor

The Western patented term ‘feminism’ adds another layer to the hegemony of white solipsism in a way that supplants other subjectivities in women’s struggles around the world.

However, the emergence of Third World feminisms initiated the necessary process of separating idea feminism from label feminism. The latter bears the insignias of Western feminist principles whereas the former denotes universal dialogic principles of amending strained relations between sexes in a bid to restore equity and balance along political, economic, and sociocultural lines. This thesis recenters idea-feminism in the context of the

Nigerian society with a primary focus on the Yorùbá people of Southwest Nigeria. Using

African cosmology and African oral literature as theoretical insights, I read Ayọbami

Adebayọ’s Stay With Me and Lọla Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives to understand the nature of myths and myth-making. A body of conventional, yet unwritten laws, myths sanction the modalities for discipline and punishment in the most subtle ways that hide the horror of the violence they perform. Stay With Me and The Secret Lives of Baba

Sẹgi’s Wives portray the precarious situations of the lives of the modern Nigerian/Yorùbá women in marriage as it relates to myths about children, barrenness, and fidelity, but the most significant import of these texts lies in the agency of the female protagonists. Although cultural expectations weigh heavily on both men and women, women carry additional burdens of oppression, tangential to what Angela Davis (1981) calls “the deformed equality of equal oppression” (Davis 8). Building on the notion of gender dialogue, this thesis interprets African feminism as a dialogic and expands on the vernacularism framework of

Womanism to theorize gender relations in Nigeria. This work contends that the most iv significant breakthrough in the women’s movement in Africa will not be where women merely fill the parliament or occupy the highest seat of power in the land; the biggest victory will be the redefinition of woman, female, girl. Whereas the task is enormous, and the processes involved in the achievement of this renaming will take time to complete, the plasticity of traditional wisdom in African oral literature renders mythic tools like stories, lores, sayings, songs, and proverbs protean and therefore adaptable. v

To Gbọtẹshọ

“When a person passes, they do not disappear as long as someone remembers them, their

name, their character…” (Barbara Christian 2007, 36).

To Morẹnikẹ

“For de suffer wey you suffer” (Nico Mbarga “Sweet Mother,” 1976). vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This would not have been a success without the help of God. I am also indebted to my thesis committee: Dr. Khani Begum, my advisor, and Dr. Kefa Otiso, my second reader.

Their insights and critiques are most valuable and highly appreciated. vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INITIAL REMARKS...... 1

The Premise ...... 1

The Place of “Gender” in African Feminist Discourse ...... 2

On my Identity as a Male Critic ...... 8

Chapter Distribution...... 9

CHAPTER 1: FINDING VOICES: IN SEARCH OF AN AFRICAN ESSENCE ...... 12

Introduction ...... 12

The Texts ...... 13

African and Western Feminisms: Drawing the Lines ...... 15

Feminism is African ...... 19

Sisterhood is Global ...... 24

African Cosmology as Theoretical Framework ...... 25

African Oral Literature as Theoretical Framework ...... 28

CHAPTER 2: RECLAIMING VOICES: VOCALITY AND GENDER DIALOGUE...... 31

Introduction ...... 31

Reclaiming Voices and Occupying Space ...... 35

Gender Equity: The Most Important Site of Restoration ...... 38

Weaving a Social Fabric ...... 41

CHAPTER 3: UNDOING MYTHIC LAWS IN ADEBAYO AYỌBAMI’S STAY

WITH ME (2017) ...... 46

Introduction: Annotating and Redacting “Sweet Mother”...... 46 viii

To Undo Myths, Make More Myths ...... 53

Undoing Myths I: The Oluronbi Story ...... 56

Undoing Myths II: The Ọlọmọ Lo Laye Saying ...... 58

A Rite of Protest...... 60

“Her Name is Ọlamide” ...... 65

Nursing Fathers: Revising the Roles of Men and Women ...... 71

CHAPTER 4: UNDOING MYTHIC LAWS IN LỌLA SHONẸYIN’S THE SECRET

LIVES OF BABA SẸGI’S WIVES (2010) ...... 74

Introduction ...... 74

“Her Right to an Armchair” ...... 77

Bàba-this/that: Reassessing Masculinity and Patriarchy in African Philosophy of

Culture...... 81

CONCLUSION ...... 88

WORKS CITED ...... 92 ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1 Cover of Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change ...... 43 1

INITIAL REMARKS

The Premise

African feminism must be conceptualized as a dialectic, a mode of renegotiating gender relations to bring about gender equity. This thesis recenters idea-feminism in the context of the Nigerian society with a primary focus on the Yorùbá people of Southwest

Nigeria. Using African cosmology and African oral literature as theoretical insights, I read

Ayọbami Adebayọ’s Stay With Me and Lọla Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s

Wives to understand the nature of myths and myth-making. Centering the idea means focusing on African ways of knowing in the reconceptualization of gender relations in Africa.

This step is necessary because there has been a long legacy of misrepresentation and mischaracterization of African belief systems and its cultures. Against the dismissive attitude of Western theorists to African ways of knowing, the practice of reading Africa on its own terms will displace Western gaze just as African thought patterns and worldviews will find the appropriate conceptual atmosphere where they can not only thrive but also be critically evaluated. In this connection, there is a duality inherent in African traditions, a double bind even: culture and tradition are a source of oppression and a source of liberation and healing.

Fully cognizant of this duality, African women writers have identified African oral traditions as viable spaces for advocating gender balance and are theorizing Africa’s gender problems on Africa’s own philosophical terms. These writers call out harmful traditional beliefs and through the mechanism of narrative theorization, appropriate traditional wisdom in remedying and reengineering inimical processes of socialization that have worked against the advancement of African women’s lives.

One of these processes derives from an epistemology that sanctions absolute violence against many African women. Here, violence transcends the act of physically administering punishment for witchcraft or murder of a husband, as many women have been subjected to in 2 many parts of Africa. If, as African philosopher John Mbiti (1969) suggests that within

African conceptualization of the world, children form a conduit for the transmission and preservation of life and cultural heritage, the materiality and metaphors of children presents an inroad into understanding what Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek (2008), calls symbolic violence in the African context. This type of violence is embodied in language and speech act, and it influences thought and behavior towards women. In essence, symbolic violence is the epistemological and ontological damage wrought by specific sayings, proverbs, beliefs, stories that have persisted for many generations. This set of mythic laws and principles appear at the core of what I call the ‘woman/gender problem.’

It is my contention that the most significant breakthrough in the women’s movement in Africa will not be where women merely fill the parliament or occupy the highest seat of power in the land. I submit that the biggest victory will be the redefinition of woman, female, girl. Indeed, the task is enormous, and the processes involved in the achievement of this renaming will take time to complete. But the plasticity of traditional wisdom in African oral literature renders mythic tools like stories, lores, sayings, songs, and proverbs protean and therefore adaptable. How two Nigerian women writers take on the challenge of rewriting mythic laws and adapting them for the empowerment and advancement of women’s lives is the primary focus of this work.

The Place of “Gender” in African Feminist Discourse

In “Is There a Feminist Method?” Sandra Harding thinks through different methods of doing feminist inquiry, with “method” being the techniques of evaluating what constitutes a substantive feminist research. Harding informs us that the best method will include a focus on women’s experiences. In this sense, the feminist researcher must account for how women, across group identities and as individuals, experience physical and/or systematic desubjectivization and denial of access to resources. Harding stresses that such a method 3 must acknowledge the possibility of ‘feminisms.’ That is, the researcher must recognize a multiplicity of consciousness to women's rights advocacy, one that is sensitive to the racial, class, or cultural, and gender realities of women across the broad spectrum of interlocking identities. Essentially, Harding is urging the researcher to be ‘woke’ to intersectionality.

Another distinctive feminist method relates to critically evaluating the feminist researcher on how up-front he or she places in full view their orientation, assumptions and beliefs on gender, race, class, and culture, and how these aspects of their own identity might influence their research: “introducing this ‘subjective’ element into the analysis in fact increases the objectivity of the research” (Harding 165). This second technique makes sense because the beliefs and behavior of the researcher add up to a body of empirical evidence and an expression of such sentiments also has a lot to do with the fulfilment of the ethical contract between the writer/researcher and the reader/audience.

The two techniques featured above are built upon the assumption of ‘gender’ as a fundamental category in the social order of a society. An account of the experiences of women and the researcher’s statement of their own politics should therefore be about addressing the multiple ‘hyphenations’ of women’s identity, a gender identity that colors their existential being e.g. women scientist, #Blackgirlscode, Asian-American feminist,

African-women-in-STEM. Thus, from the perspective of label feminism, a feminist researcher must first assume a gender category before they can account for women’s experiences with oppression, devaluation, and discrimination, and before they can put themselves into the research project.

Clearly, Harding’s methods and the problems they are contracted to solve are well correlated in cultures other than those in the West. But the assumption that we must first presume gender as the basic social organizing principle of every society, the fact that we must begin with gender in mind, is problematic. In many instances, the import of label feminism 4 has been to take gender as a given, both in the diachronic and synchronic explorations of the

‘woman question.’ Non-Western scholars and critics have criticized the Western feminist discourse for creating a homogenous notion of the oppression of women. Oyeronkẹ Oyěwùmí

(1997) and Nkiru Nzegwu (2006), in that order, reject gender as the organizing principle in

Yorùbá and Igbo cultures of Nigeria. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) maintains that in the view of Western feminists, the “average third-world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)” (Mohanty 65). It is in this precise sense of parsing African women, for example, into the definite categories of sexually constrained, domesticated, and victimized that I begin to examine women's social condition in novels by Nigerian women. It appears to me that the vast global outreach of label feminism has served to marginalize alternative approaches to social, political, and cultural relocation of women, e.g. Womanism.

Womanism is a perspective to social change and a set of methods of problem solving deep-rooted in Black women and other women of color’s daily life experiences. In her introduction to The Womanist Reader, Layli Phillips (2006) identifies four characterizing features of womanism. First, womanism is against all oppressions no matter the sex, race, color, or social class of whom is oppressed. The second identifying feature is that womanism is nonideological in the sense that it rejects formulaic and rigid ideological modes of conceptualizing belonging and solidarity, for ideology “relies on internal logical consistency and some degree of central control that seek the resolution of difference by means of homogenization” (Phillips xxv). The third attribute of the womanist approach lies in its communitarian outlook; womanism embraces the mass of humanity rather than aligns with one category. Simultaneously, it recognizes layers of affinity and conceives of community as

“a series of successive overlapping tiers” with Black women’s experiences as the point of 5 departure (Phillips xxv). The fourth feature relates to vernacularism, that is, the everyday needs and language of humanity—food, shelter, relationship and affection—as the launchpad for conceptual womanist thought.

I recognize the ideological differences between womanisms, as popularized by Alice

Walker, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyẹmi and Clenora Hudson-Weems, on the one hand, and

Black feminism, an offshoot of feminism, on the other hand. But my work draws from both frameworks to weave an African feminist outlook that centers the oppression of both men and women, with the full understanding that women suffer additional layers of oppression than men. I am borrowing from these Afro-centered perspectives because the fundamental premise of womanism and Black feminism derives from similar sources. For example, in their separate arguments for a truly Black/African essence in the advancement of gender equity, both womanism’s Clenora Hudson-Weems and Black feminism’s bell hooks take Sojourner

Truth’s 1852 everlasting line—Ain’t I A Woman?—as a philosophical point of reference in making a case for Black women’s emancipation (see Hudson-Weems 1989, hooks 2015).

Again, bell hooks (2015) defines a feminist in a similar way that Walker, Ogunyẹmi, and

Hudson-Weems would conceptualize a womanist: “To be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term,” hooks explains, “is to want for all people, female and male, liberation f rom sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression” (hooks 195). I draw on both womanist and Black feminist insights in my examination of African-based feminist ideology, especially on womanism’s vernacular framework to expand on critical human needs/concepts/objects in my theorization of gender relations in Nigeria.

It is the observation of this work that in spite of the relational principles of social organization which defined the indigenous peoples, societies, and cultures that constitute the

Nigerian space, prompting many scholars to challenge the idea that gender formed the basic component of social structure (e.g. Oyěwùmí (1997) with the Yorùbá society), the specter of 6 gender is visible in the socioeconomic and sociocultural life of the country today. This work holds the position that the “woman question/problem” (read: the material and conceptual hindrances militating against the advancement of women in contemporary Nigeria) is a necessary condition in the afterlife of colonialism and the enduring reign of religion-based imperialist evangelism in the country. And by virtue of being postcolonial and ‘religiously civilized,’ Nigeria has seen the seeds of gender and gendering germinate into serious social issues over many generations.

The precarious situations that women and girls face daily resulting from blatant and systemic devaluation has a lot to do with the social construction of sex and gender. Every year, international organizations publish qualitative and statistics-based reports that x-ray the living conditions of women and girls in Africa. Most of the time, the analyses and assessments have been nothing but gloomy. At the same time, the proffered solutions to gender imbalance on a global scale can only go so far to redress the core of the epistemological violences that predicate gender devaluation. Relevant organs of the United

Nations and the IMF annually suggest policies and devise programs aimed at narrowing the gender gap. But as with political and economic crises, the global-best-practices kinds of solutions often flunk the applicability test and fail to deliver quality results at national and local levels, partly because they originate from a Eurocentric perspective and therefore are mostly suitable to Western situations and realities. Feminism is one such “global best practices” that must be properly (re)adapted/(re)framed to deal with a Nigerian gender condition. Convinced that the label is bound to mischaracterize the epistemological foundations of the Yorùbá people and culture, this work is about relocating the idea in order to attempt a review of gender dialogue as has been initiated in novels by Nigerian women writers. 7

If and when Nigerian female writers do anything close to what Donna Haraway

(2011) identifies as "cyborg writing" in her seminal work “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” we must read these women’s works as something other than a writing "about the power to survive… on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other" [my emphasis] (Haraway 364). In the African situation, there is no seizing the tools in the sense that Haraway talks about gender coding/programming. For Haraway and many other Western thinkers, “physical bodies are always social bodies,” to use Oyěwùmí’s words (Oyěwùmí xii). Whereas the process of marking the world has come to be the preserve of men, in the traditional African/Yorùbá context, no one sex has the copyright on the tools of doing gender marking. For instance, in

African oral tradition, women were not merely performers of knowledge, they were also heavy producers of what constituted social, cultural, political, spiritual knowledge

(Nnaemeka 1994). In this connection, rather than a seizure or an appropriation, we must read

African women’s writings as a (re)activation of what is inherently theirs. African women writers activate their voices in the literal and homophonous senses of write-ing: write as making right a litany of distortions about women; write as the continuance of a rite of protestation; write as a legitimate claim to one’s right to vocality, which is not simply the ability to speak, but the quality of being heard and listened to. Like Haraway, I take lores, stories, sayings, and proverbs—Words—as a body of fundamental tools of cultural knowledge production. Wording laid the foundation of African being and to rectify the obvious imbalances in gender relations in Africa, the feminist/womanist/humanist researcher must prioritize oral tradition in their theorization. In this work I look at the most significant manifestation of wording: myth-making. 8

On my Identity as a Male Critic

Following Sandra Harding's charge, I would like to be up-front about my identity and privileges as a man writing about women-themed subjects and how my identities may have influenced my writing in this work. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1952) adapts a language that I think you the reader must use as you engage with this work. Citing Poulain de la Barre, de Beauvoir writes: “All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit” (de Beauvoir xxii). This sentiment is corroborated in “A Black Man’s Place in Black Feminism Criticism” where

Michael Awkward (2000) maintains that “a male can never possess or be able to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his relationship to feminist discourse and praxis”

(Awkward 91). I must state that I am not invested in gender to the effect that I should like to take on the label ‘feminist’ as much as I am fascinated by the culture of gender/gendering. I elected to write about women-themed topics not to speak for African, Nigerian, or Yorùbá women. In fact, I cannot, because they can and have always spoken for themselves. A woman is the bona fide representative of herself. Men can only speculate, and we have no doubts had a terrific scorecard of misrepresentation.

I decided to write about issues relating to Nigerian/Yorùbá women as a cultural critic and as a Yorùbá man. With my first-hand experience of these women’s strengths and constraints, the dynamics between their liberation and their oppression, I am speaking from the position of a cultural insider. I am cognizant of my male privilege and how my maleness makes me an unwitting accomplice, if not an active perpetrator, in the devaluation of women.

The passion to complete this work really stems from my inconvenience with how forgetful we can be of the sites of strength that lend themselves to us in the rectification of the sex/gender imbalances which manifest through underrepresentation of women in government, disproportionate investment in boy/girl-child education, and the social displacement of 9 women’s values/worth. Perhaps my male subjectivity has a strong influence on how I see the way out of the gender conundrum in the Yorùbá situation, I hope that by deferring to the

Yorùbá ways of knowing I have at least neutralized any self-serving opinions and depersonalized my sentiments in the light of an intersubjectivity that draws in both the

Nigerian/Yorùbá man/boy and woman/girl.

I honestly believe that I am writing for myself when I write about Yorùbá women because both our fates are inextricably linked. In the event that my mother/sisters/female relatives happen to look up to me by virtue of being a male (with a high probability of access to means of provision and social/cultural capital), the huge responsibility I carry may be seen as part of a total cultural package, but I also feel that what is right to think about is to not confuse sense of responsibility with a reinforcement of ‘the man as the absolute provider’ myth. One problem with such a narrative is that it blatantly overlooks women who are breadwinners in their own right. Another thing that such pattern reinvents is the legitimization of women's dependence on men for, say, financial/economic survival. For these reasons, the disproportionate distribution of power across the sex/gender spectrum calls for the necessary redistribution of resources along the same lines. A very significant point that nuances male privilege in the Nigerian situation, however, is that many men do not partake in what Michael Awkward calls “the prevailing social fiction” (Awkward 102).

Awkward uses these words in the context of Black men in America, but I find it especially useful and apt in my discussion of the men we encounter in the selected texts for this work. As you engage with this work, remain alert to signs of my male insensitivity.

Chapter Distribution

Chapter 1 is titled “Finding Voices: In Search of an African Essence.” Serving as an introduction to the work, the chapter explores the idea behind feminism as it is conceived by

Black/African women. Drawing the lines between African and Western feminisms, I submit 10 that agency; the capacity, condition, and state of acting or of exerting power, is second nature to African women, while also exposing the duplicity of Western feminism in a continued case of Western imperialism across the world. Emphasizing the need for an African placebo for an

African condition, I outline two main theoretical frameworks—African cosmology and

African Oral Literature—adopted in my reading of the selected Nigerian novels by women.

Titled “Reclaiming Voices: Vocality and Gender Dialogue,” Chapter 2 raises important questions around voice, audibility and vocality. I refer to and complicate recent events in African collective memory in order to foreground the need to revisit the sites of women’s strength and the ultimate task of redefinition. I draw on the vernacular framework of Womanism to theorize cloth in its materiality and metaphors for a sustainable and productive gender dialogue. The chapter makes the case that the ‘woman question’ is that of definition, asking how do we define ‘woman’?; who gets to define ‘woman’?; and against what standards should ‘woman’ be defined? The chapter calls for a robust campaign of cultural education inspired by a transformative consciousness.

Chapter 3, “Undoing Mythic Laws in Ayọbami Adebayọ’s Stay With Me,” examines how the positive images of women as mothers, as givers of life, can and have been used against them. I explore Stay With Me to see how oral tradition, through verbal acts like stories, songs and other forms of folklore, have been used to distort the history and perception of women in Nigeria. I discuss how the novel complicates and subverts mythic legacies passed down from generations in the Yorùbá culture. I show how the novel pushes a feminism of both sexes and how it goes to the root of masculine and feminine oppression to attempt a rewrite of history, of culture, of the future. Adebayọ’s work dedicates ample thematic resources into a deeper exploration of the foundation of women’s oppression just as the author couches her advocacy in the light of scientific facts and evidence to speak to contemporary gender relations and conditions. I argue that the novel demonstrates how 11 intersubjectivity belies the binarity that has defined gender relations to the point of severing it.

Chapter 4, “Undoing Mythic Laws in Lola Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba

Sẹgi’s Wives,” follows up on Chapter 3. Leaning on the insights of feminist scholars like

Simone de Beauvoir and postcolonial writers like Frantz Fanon, I explore Shonẹyin’s use of storytelling as a subversive tool for counterbalancing skewed narratives about women’s reproductive ability both in its literal and figurative senses. I expand on the myth of male virility and fertility and how The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives throws new light on the trope of childlessness in novels by Nigerian women writers. In the final chapter, I conclude this work with a summary and a suggestion of areas of further research. 12

CHAPTER 1: FINDING VOICES: IN SEARCH OF AN AFRICAN ESSENCE

Introduction

The systems of power that sustain women’s oppression must be analyzed in order to find a lasting solution to issues of gender imbalance in Nigeria. The multiple forms of women’s oppression constitute the ‘woman question/problem,’ the precarious socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions that inhibit the advancement of women in society and negatively impact their wellbeing. This work investigates the conditions that make the woman/gender question so intractable within the Nigerian context at large and the Yorùbá society in particular. Within the conceptual paradigm of analyzing Africa on its own terms, this work assumes African philosophy of culture in the reconceptualization of gender relations. A perceptive observer may be quick to spot the tension inherent in the first part of the previous sentence. This conflict borders on the messy state of discoursing gender in contemporary

Africa.

The integrity of the expression analyzing Africa on its own terms appears to be tainted by the encumbrance of the phrase “African authenticity,” a shaky truth in the face of an abundantly modernized Africa. Yet, in its hybridized form, there are necessary contemplations. Are there vestiges of African ways of knowing that lend themselves to the

African feminist researcher as essentially useful ideological tools in the re-definition and reimagination of the ‘gender question’? Is it not a mark of deep insight for a person to look back to inspect the perimeter of the surface on which they had tripped, unlike the acutely naive who simply leaves the scene without looking back on why they fell, and are thus prone to repeat the fall? As Chinua Achebe puts it in his last memoir, There Was A Country (2012),

“... a man [or woman] who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body” (Achebe 1). What do we stand to gain by revisiting sites of cultural/traditional identification for the retrieval of the very items of political, 13 socioeconomic, spiritual empowerment peculiar to us? How does a review of the most quotidian aspect of Yorùbá identity help us reflect on who we are? How might self- knowledge facilitate the necessary distinctions between our African identity (e.g. autochthonous Yorùbá men and women) and modern identity (i.e. postcolonial/hybridized subjects)? I seek new light to these eternal questions in selected novels by Nigerian women writers spanning three generations.

The Texts

The primary text I will be reading in this work is Ayọbami Adebayọ’s debut Stay

With Me (2017). The story follows the life of Yejide and her husband, Akin. It details how both characters navigate life as a young couple in a tumultuous relationship which weighs heavily on Yejide. Stay With Me tells the tale of an unforgivable betrayal despite a total and blind trust guided by true and naive love. By using the dualism of points of view, Ayọbami

Adebayọ amplifies both male and female voices in the novel’s narratology, just as she acknowledges the intersubjectivity of the male and the female within a circle of cultural oppression, detailing how both characters struggle under the heavy weight of culture and tradition. I chose to analyze this novel not only for its relative novelty on the shelf, having been published in 2017 and set between the twilight of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty first century, but precisely because the novel describes a literary mode that uniquely creates a space for a different dialogic in women’s writings that center on feminist consciousness.

I have chosen to analyze Stay With Me along with two other novels: Flora Nwapa’s

Efuru (1966) and Lọla Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives (2010). Efuru deals with a woman’s long struggle with childlessness before she is able to conceive. The story details how the eponymous character struggles to keep a balance between the weight of custom and her own happiness. Split between failed marriages and the pressure to live up to 14 the standard of motherhood, Efuru reaches an epiphany at the end of the story where she wonders why there is so much fuss about motherhood and childbearing if in the mythology of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria, the goddess of fertility or Uhamiri, never experienced the

“joy of motherhood,” in other words, have a child of her own (Nwapa 281). With Efuru,

Nwapa deploys a deconstructive strategy to disrupt the notion of fertility as a mandatory requirement before a female can attain full status of womanhood. I see a parallel in Stay With

Me where, as in Efuru, there is a triumph over perceived barrenness and an active struggle with the demands of tradition.

The line of similarities between Efuru and Stay With Me is blurred by Shonẹyin’s The

Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives. Shonẹyin’s novel introduces a twist to the language of

Nigerian women’s writing in a tradition of literary counternarratives. A biting account of a polygamous family, The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives follows the life of the male protagonist, Baba Sẹgi, and that of his four wives. The inability of one of the women to bear children casts a shadow on the relative peace that has reigned in the family for many years.

The novel reaches a climax when it is revealed that in the midst of a plenitude of children lies a devastating secret: the husband is infertile. What these three novels demonstrate is that contrary to the fact that they are ready suspects of what Flora Nwapa calls “one of the numerous accidents of nature,” i.e. barrenness (Nwapa 207), women are fertile and very productive in a way that the same cannot be said of men, thus subverting the dominant narrative which situates childlessness in the female in many Nigerian societies.

The figurative reading of the relationship between the mother and the child provides an inroad into how I engage the narrative plots in Ayọbami Adebayọ’s Stay With Me and

Lọla Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives with a reference to Flora Nwapa’s

Efuru. I explore how African philosophy penetrates the plots of the novels to elicit a set of cultural codes—sayings, proverbs, tales—that have existed to regulate African ways of 15 knowing and doing. In their regulatory nature, these codes have inadvertently restricted the ability of the woman to fully integrate and attain a subjectivity that is totally liberating.

Scholars have opined that the significant role that African women play as mothers has turned out to be a double-edged sword; there is an enormous pressure on women to carry the reproductive burden of communal and racial self-perpetuation and nurturing. Those who cannot meet the reproductive expectations are considered “barren,” a term encumbered with derogatory baggage. While such narrative as this has dominated the social sphere, African women writers have assiduously worked to conscientize their societies through deconstructive plots that dismantle narratives that are generally harmful to the physical and cognitive wellness of women.1 Novels by Nigerian women writers reappropriate the traditionally ‘given’ to reinscribe strength and resignify resistance. The narrative twists in the plots are a potent instrument for the African feminist in his or her exploitation and re- appropriation of traditional narratives that are oppressive to women in the articulation of feminist advocacy. From a broader perspective, the search for an African essence in a global women’s movement remains important for the delineation of the peculiarity of African systems of thought and points of view and figuring out how it is different from other subjectivities, especially those of Western cultures.

African and Western Feminisms: Drawing the Lines

On the epistemological level, separating African ways of knowing from Western influenced ways of thinking continues to be of great importance in a world where non- mainstream cultures are constantly at risk of annihilation while mainstream cultures consolidate their global influence through the appropriation and racialization of those other cultures. This distinction is about self-definition. It is this precise idea of self-definition that

1 Changing economic realities and focus on career for social mobility have reduced the value placed on excessive childbearing and is a contributing factor to many women’s choice of not wanting children. 16 motivates this work. I take a less travelled path to remap the gender landscape. I focus on the intersubjectivity of both men and women under a precipitous weather of cultural entrapment.

I weave this work around novels by Nigerian women writers to demonstrate how, in spite of the asphyxiating cultural and national atmosphere, they continue to exercise their large capacity for the preservation of our humanity, a restoration of natural order, and to activate a trademark of inclusiveness. From the texture of their works, these women writers are committed to the task of re-naming themselves and restoring gender equity. The process of self-identification in African women’s writing has become a genre, a tradition even. Within a tradition of African feminism, female writers weave African language and sensitivity in the creation of an aesthetic that captures both the beautiful and the unattractive sides to women’s everyday reality in relation to their cultures and traditions in a dynamic African society.

My use of the term ‘African feminism’ carries a necessary contradiction because it will reveal the strife both between African and Western feminist ideals and within African ideals themselves. With regards to the latter, there are conceptual divisions that characterize the different camps of African feminists. Although it is safe to think that the term African feminism gives a voice to ‘Africans who do feminism,’ the fact is that it mutes Africans who do not want to be so labelled, not because they do not believe there is a gender problem and there is a need to fix it, but because they very well understand the power of language and its capacity to define someone as one thing and one thing only. They are cognizant of the powerful force of language and are acutely aware of language’s complicity in locking up the postcolonial subject in that peculiar sensation “of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” as W.E.B. Du Bois sagely puts it (Du Bois 8).

The juxtaposition of ‘African’ and ‘feminism’ in the phrase is quite symbolic in that it accurately reflects the indenture of Africa to Western systems of thought. The grammatical 17 structure of the phrase ‘African feminism’ indicates the subservience of the one to the other.

In this case, because ‘African’ functions to qualify ‘feminism’ we can assume that it is the one whose existence is hinged on the other. Indeed, using the metaphor of trade and commerce, Africa mainly relies on the West for economic survival, for instance. Along the same lines, Africa imports not only manufactured products but also manufactured ideas.

However, if we look at the grammatical structure the other way around, is it not the case that

‘feminism’ would remain vague without being qualified by ‘African’? By the same token, can we theorize that Africa has its own subjectivity and if we concentrate on the semantics of the phrase, the independence of African thought patterns and essence becomes more prominent, as in Africa’s feminism?

Anthonia Kalu (2001) argues in Women, Literature and Development in Africa that

“feminism and the African woman are the two most conflicting concepts in the study of women in the twentieth century” (Kalu xx). At least two different positions emerge from

Kalu’s statement. The first relates to a disconnect between African and Western paradigms and how the roots of that cognitive dissonance must be traceable to fundamental differences that suggest both their ontological and epistemological essences are inherently tangential, though their interests may converge on some levels and at some point. The second assumption follows from the first, namely the assumption of independence of thought of the

African woman as distinctly distinguishable from the proselytizing outlook of Western feminism; its global crusade of imaging and propagating a sisterhood bound together in a state of servitude and victimhood, an issue I explore in more detail below in a section I title

“Sisterhood is Global.” The African woman’s independence of thought provides her with a clear understanding of her unique situation which is largely a result of a distorted African tradition but also a consequence of historical events like Western imperialism and the phenomenon of globalization. In the introduction to Feminism, Sisterhood, and Other 18

Foreign Relations, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (2003) cites Filomina Steady Chioma who argues that Africa is the original home of feminist principles, leading Oyěwùmí to submit that

“African feminism is a tautology” (2). Again, in her seminal book, The Invention of Women:

Making An African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997) argues against what she considers to be an “epistemological shift occasioned by the imposition of

Western gender categories on Yoruba discourse,” positing that the fundamental category

‘woman’ was non-existent in Yorubaland before its prolonged contact with the West, and as a result the ‘woman question’ remains “an imported problem” (ix). Indeed, Nigeria’s current social climate contains conflicting social organizing principles: complementarity and seniority, the basic principles of social organization in traditional Yorùbá societies, for instance, now coexist with and have been overshadowed by patriarchal ethos.2 What

Oyěwùmí calls epistemological shift may explain what Gayatri Spivak (1993) identifies as

‘epistemic violence’ in her famous writing “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Anthonia Kalu’s postulation and Oyěwùmí’s submission represent a pushback on

Western feminism in a way that suggests that to embrace mainstream feminism is to deny the idea of African woman’s claim to freedom, constant and conscious effort toward self- actualization, and belief in equality, not as same with the other sex, but as an equally powerful agent in her own right. In Gender in African Women’s Writing, Juliana Makuchi

Nfah-Abbenyi (1997) references the Ghanian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, who once said

African women struggling both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of

the wider community is very much a part of our heritage. It is not new and

I really refuse to be told I am learning feminism from abroad... Africa has

produced a much more concrete tradition of strong women fighters than

2 There is an extensive discussion of power relations across sexes in traditional Yorùbá society in Chapter 4 under the subsection titled “Her Right to an Aimchair.” 19

most other societies. So when we say that we are refusing to be

overlooked we are only acting today as daughters and grand-daughters of

women who always refused to keep quiet. We haven’t learnt this from

anybody abroad. [emphasis original] (quoted in Nfah-Abbenyi 10).

In this passionate statement, Ama Ata Aidoo registers the fact that African women have long practised the idea that underlies what has come to be known as feminism before the moniker was patented in the West. Ama Ata Aidoo’s words are indicative of Africa’s resistance to ideological domination, but they also reflect the multiple ways that women writers have sought to rewrite a distorted history of African and black women around the world, bringing to mind Oyěwùmí’s disruptive claim that ‘African feminism’ is periphrastic.

Feminism is African

In a conversation between black feminist writer and critic Barbara Smith and white feminist and social political activist Gloria Steinem at the 2018 Makers Conference held in

Los Angeles, the black critic echoes a similar sentiment as Ama Ata Aidoo. The conversation cut across different issues from Black feminism within second wave feminism to reasons why black women have remained ‘hidden figures’ in the historiography of feminism.

GLORIA STEINEM: Yeah, so I just-- here’s my personal question to you.

How do you keep from going completely bonkers with rage when you turn on-

- when you go online and people are talking about white feminism? (“2018

Makers Conference” 52:17-52:30).

Gloria Steinem asks this question in order to disrupt the idea that feminism is essentially white. With a firm understanding of the critical role of black women in the women’s movement during the 1960s and prior, Steinem stresses a revisit of history, a history that

Barbara Smith evaluates as epistemologically flawed and systematically rigged to the point 20 that the average American is left half-educated about the giant strides of black women in the country especially in terms of their heroism in the frontier of women’s rights and freedom.

BARBARA SMITH: Well, as we know, people in the United States, they

probably got a C in history. Most people in the United States would have

gotten a C in history because history really is not taught very effectively in our

nation. That’s because there’s a lot that they wish to hide, particularly the

genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of my people, of African

people.

So the fact that we don’t know about the history and the participation of

women of color in the second wave of the women’s movement, that’s just like

one of 2,000 things that most people don’t know. As to how I do not go

bonkers, it’s because I’ve spent my entire life trying to counter that—those

omissions and that ignorance (“2018 Makers Conference,” 52:38-53:28).

Barbara Smith could not have summarized in more precise terms in response to a more pertinent question: If women of color, especially black women, are so crucial to the women’s movement, why have they remained invisible, hidden figures?

BARBARA SMITH: It can be difficult to place us [black women] accurately

in the history, in the chronology of feminism if what you’re looking for are

explicit statements of ‘I am a feminist’ (“2018 Makers Conference,” 54:20-

54:30).

The main brief from Smith’s response is that African ways of knowing and doing differ from

Western conceptualization of reality. In the West, it is common to think in terms of labels but for African women writers and thinkers, identity and ideologies are second nature.

Connecting Ama Ata Aidoo’s claim with Smith’s, what we find is that black and African women tend to put practice before labels. This then leads back to the idea of practical 21 understanding as opposed to theoretical idealism. To many women on the continent of Africa, the ideals that underlie women’s liberation—agency, ability to locate sites of oppression, access to subjective and objective reality, and the aura of resistance—are not foreign. Indeed, it is an ideal that is constantly practised and lived.

Barbara Smith rolls out a slew of black women in American history who embodied feminism, the idea, without recourse to feminism, the label. By virtue of their work, their fearlessness and determination of purpose in pursuing women’s freedom in terms of voting rights, abortion rights, and the right to education, these women are nonpareil. Some of these women include Fanie Lou Hamer, who from her own personal experience, having undergone what was called Mississippi Appendectomy, initiated the reproductive justice movement calling for an end to sterilization and who gallantly fought for her right to register to vote and single-handedly campaigned to unseat an illegitimate all-white delegation at the 1964

Democratic Convention. There is Anna Julia Cooper who wrote extensively advocating the right of women to higher education. Another hidden figure is Frances Beal who coined the term “Double Jeopardy” in late 1960s to describe how the interlocking systems of class, race, and sex contribute to women’s oppression.

The language that is now widely used within gender and cultural studies, replacing

Beal’s term, is “Intersectionality.” This new term was coined by another black woman,

Kimberle Crenshaw. In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist

Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Crenshaw

(1989) points our attention to

a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as

mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis [and how] this

tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in 22

antidiscrimination law and… also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist

politics (138).

The tendency of white feminists to separate race from gender had debilitating effects on the actualizations of their ‘sisters of color.’ In Ain’t I A Woman, American cultural critic bell hooks (2015), decries the effacement of the black woman within feminist discourse and the role of sexism and racism in the silencing of the tremendous contribution of black women to equal rights struggles in nineteenth century America. According to hooks, black women suffered a double tragedy: Sexism from men and racism from white women. hooks notes that many white female scholars who advocate for a feminist ideology fail to record, and when they do, often minimize the giant strides of black women’s rights advocates and their immeasurable input to the women’s movement.

Within their own community, black women did not use to have it any better. During the civil rights struggle, black women supported black liberation at the expense of women’s rights in the hope that when freedom was won for black people, the next step was to achieve women’s rights. This logic proved disastrous for black women’s cause as they were sidelined within the civil rights movement. Take for instance the pamphlet containing the order of events on the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at The

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. The details of the pamphlet are a literal representation of the positionality of black women during the civil rights era in

America. Certain features are noticeably striking in the order of events. One is the underrepresentation of black women in the organization of that demonstration. Anna Arnold

Hedgeman was the only woman on the Administrative Committee on The March on

Washington, the highest body in the organization of the event. Another is the role assigned to women as reflected in the order of events. The major highlights of the event were the

Remarks, but not a single woman gave a remark as part of the ten unifying organizations. 23

Women listed in the program mostly sang and while the likes of Rosa Parks were on seat, they were not slated to talk. That event demonstrates that visibility and ability to speak does not necessarily translate to audibility.

In all of this, it is noteworthy that marginalization of black women is not a reserve of black men overseas and is definitely not restricted to the civil rights era. On the continent of

Africa, literary criticism in Nigeria continued as a male-dominated and male oriented enterprise since pre- to early post- independence. For a long time, female writers suffered long in silence as academics and critics. Late arrival of women to publishing and unequal access to formal and especially university education, which emanated in part from families’ preference for boys education over girls education, are obvious reasons for the prolonged inaudibility of Nigerian women writers and critics. But as Nfah-Abbenyi notes, these reasons are inadequate to explain the systematic sidelining of women in the scheme of African literary production at that time. The fact is that African women had been writing and publishing as long as there were many African male writers. For example, Flora Nwapa’s

Efuru was published in 1966 around the same time that many African male writers were just entering literary stardom. The real problem, however, is that on the one hand, the publishing industry was dominated by white males who did not deem it fit to publish as many black women writers; on the other hand, male writers and critics were better positioned to promote their works which romanticized and mythologized African women (Nfah-Abbenyi 3).

Leonard Senghor’s coinage, Mother Africa, has been read as an idealization of African women when he noted that the African woman did not need liberation because she has been liberated thousands of years prior (Kalu 5). For many, this position simply serves to reinforce the stereotype of women as mere objects for child rearing and passive agents in the affairs of their own lives. 24

Sisterhood is Global

African women are held within the crunching grip of a patriarchal ethos, but a more devastating site of oppression lies within. The other side of women’s marginalization often comes from fellow women within the movement. In her poem Sisterhood, Nigerian thinker

Nkiru Nzegwu identifies a different kind of patriarchy: Sisterarchy. white sister told me all women are one united in de face of chau’vism. … I looked up from my chore on the kitchen floor where, new found sister had ordered me to be on knees to scrub the floor clean for the pittance she paid: on knees to scrub the floor clean for sisterarchy

Nkiru Nzegwu (in Oyěwùmí 2003 vii-viii)

The emphasis here is on “Sisterarchy.” What Nzegwu’s poem reveals is that the feeling of distrust for Western feminism is mutually shared by both African and African American women writers and critics. Indeed, this poem, published in 1990, speaks ahead of itself.

Nzegwu (2003) writes in “O Africa! Gender Imperialism in Academia” of an incident that involved her Iranian-Canadian co-panelist and a progressive white woman at the 1992 C-

STIP conference in Toronto: “Five minutes before this session was to begin, Moghissi was mistaken for one of the serving staff by one of the ‘progressive’ white women at the conference” (103). In the same way Nzegwu writes about the hypocrisy of a global sisterhood, Barbara Smith remembers a moment she had with a white feminist. As members of the Combahee River Collective, an intellectual group of black lesbian feminists, she recalls how the collective grappled with marginalization within the feminist fold. 25

But we grapple as committed feminists in Boston in the 1970s with being

marginalized within the women’s movement. I’ll never forget that someone

who is still a dear friend who I had just met at that time saying as we were

riding along in the car, probably just a meeting or a demonstration. She said

“is that little group of yours still meeting?” And I was like, are you kidding

me? (“2018 Makers Conference” 1:01:35-1:01:58).

While these interesting moments featuring women of color and these ‘progressive’ white women can be argued in different ways, the fact remains that “unconscious gestures often reveal more about latent attitudes than carefully thought-out actions and intellectual theorizations” (Nzegwu 2003, 103). The overlapping interests between African and African

American women transcend the fact that as women they have been commonly oppressed and marginalized. Their call for a truly black and African solution to African gender problems bind them together in solidarity as women of color of African descent who must carve an emancipatory niche for themselves especially as their unique interests often go unprotected and their experiences unacknowledged under a universal alliance with Feminism. Whereas

African American women suffer the double tragedy of racism and sexism, and African women do not have to deal with racism, they both share a common heritage in an African essence which provides a glimmer of hope in the fight for their lives as human beings, as women.

African Cosmology as Theoretical Framework

Anthonia Kalu (2001) begins her book Women, Literature, and Development in Africa by stressing that, “although contemporary African literary criticism is a product of Africa’s contact with the West, evaluation and analyses relevant to the African experience must be derived from methods intrinsic to African artistic traditions” (Kalu 1). This is the same advocacy in “The Race for Theory” where Barbara Christian (2007) laments the obsession 26 with formal theorizations within African literary circles and contrasts Black feminist criticism with Western modes of theorizing, maintaining that people of color have always theorized, but have done so in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic, which she characterizes as authoritative and monologic based on “its emphasis on quoting its prophets… its preoccupation with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equation, its gross overgeneralization of culture” (Christian 42). For her, it is presumptuous to invent a theory of how critics ought to read literary works. Instead, she calls for a practical reading of contemporary literature and the works of past black female writers; black feminist critics must read the works of black women writers in different ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.

Characterizing how African women writers theorize, she writes

I am inclined to say that our theorizing is often in narrative forms, in stories

we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic

rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking (Christian 41).

Barbara Christian’s position here casts light on Ayọbami Adebayọ’s use of folktales as a crucial element in African oral literature in Stay With Me. Adebayọ herself follows the same path laid down by predecessors like Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emechetta and Lola Shonẹyin.

Referencing the works of black women writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker,

Christian describes African mode of theorizing in the form of a hieroglyph, “a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative,” stressing that the task of black feminist critics is to ‘illuminate and explain’ these hieroglyphs, an activity she totally separates from the ‘creating’ of hieroglyphs themselves (Christian 41). In other words, rather than inundate themselves in the creation of theory, critics’ reading and analysis of black literary works should involve demystifying the obscurity of latent messages in a text. 27

She further suggests that critics engage texts from a theoretical paradigm steeped in an

African essence.

In African Religions and Philosophy, John Mbiti (1969) states that within African cosmology, “the spiritual universe [forms] a unit with the physical, and these two intermingle and dovetail into each other so much that it is not easy, or necessary, at times to draw the distinction or separate them” (Mbiti 97). He writes of an African episteme that illustrates the fluidity in the relationship between the living and the dead. For the Af rican, death is not the end of life but an entry into the spirit world. In this way, both the living and the dead are in a constant communion. In traditional West African societies, the fear of death is not as serious as the fear of not being able to be remembered. Thus, within the African way of knowing, death is best when it becomes a transition rather than an effacement, an eternal disappearance. According to Barbara Christian, “when a person passes, they do not disappear as long as someone remembers them, their name, their character… Thus, continuity not only of genes but also of active remembering is critical to a West African’s sense of her or his own personal being, and beyond that, of the beingness of the group” (Christian 36). It is against this background that the African society prioritizes family as a social agent that carries the burden and responsibility of self-perpetuation. Survival and preservation of ancestral legacies tie perfectly with how well the living connect with those before them. The place of women remains particularly crucial to the fate of those Barbara Christian (2007: 38) identifies as the

“living dead,” who, here on earth, must attain a state of personal immortality in order to be remembered. To be remembered, a group, represented by women, must reincarnate itself. The seriousness of the continuity of the black race, therefore, becomes contingent upon the survival of the girl-child/woman who “in giving birth to children, [...] produce[s] those who are more likely to know and remember their ancestors” (Christian 38). African and Black women writers have been consistent in rehashing this epistemic essence. At the same time, 28 they have also been compulsively inclined in directing the society’s attention to the attendant diabolic effects of this way of knowing on the lives and wellbeing of women.

African Oral Literature as Theoretical Framework

In Africa, to challenge patriarchy, one must frantically take on indigenous cultures and traditions. De-subjectivization and othering of women often find legitimacy in culture and tradition. The most diabolic practices that contribute to the marginalization and oppression of women are situated in the cultures of the people. African feminists have made it their mandate to disrupt patriarchy in all its manifestations. However, while culture and tradition have provided a breeding ground for systemic subordination of the female gender and to a great extent have embodied that oppression themselves, it is paradoxical that the same culture and tradition constitutes power centers for women in the struggle for their reestablishment of meaning, subjectivity, and agency. Viewed as a site where the artist comes to self-recognition, where he or she gets a re-entry into language, tradition becomes a double bind—a source of oppression and a source of liberation. Recognizing this duality can help us understand that tradition does not invent itself nor does it have the capacity for gender or sexual prejudice in and of itself. Tradition, as it were, is manipulable because of its plasticity.

That is why African women writers have identified African institutions as viable spaces for advocating gender balance and are theorizing Africa’s gender problems on Africa’s own philosophical terms.

One such philosophical term is the use of orality in literary works. African women writers’ own experience with their cultures convince them of the efficacy of folk materials in

African oral literature so much so that these writers rely on them for philosophical backing in their writing. For example, in Stay With Me, Ayọbami Adebayọ employs traditional philosophical wisdom in her portrayal of the development of the two narrators in the story showing how they evolve and break from traditional stereotypes. Like many modern African 29 writers, Adebayọ consciously borrows techniques and ideas from the Yorùbá oral traditions to construct a literary work that deals essentially with modern life. Traditional wisdom must be reappropriated because the times are different, the paradigms and contents of folk materials need to reflect elements of contemporary reality, and the objective reality that those tales were used to prove have undergone significant change over these many generations.

Isidore Okpewho informs us that part of oral tradition is the beauty of the element of individual artistic skills. Explaining that oral artists bring in their idiosyncrasies into telling their stories in African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity, Okpewho

(1992) cites Ruth Finnegan who writing about the Limba people of Sierra Leone in West

Africa, reports that

The storytellers… are all individuals, individuals who perform on specific

individual occasions. There is no joint common “folk” authorship or set form

of performance dictated by blind tradition. The stories are, naturally,

composed and enacted within the limits of the social background of Limba life

and literary conventions; but each individual performer has his own

idiosyncrasies and unique fund of experience, interests and skills (in Okpewho

16) [emphasis original].

This decentralization of storytelling, the fact that there is no central authorship, that each storyteller brings into the verbal act their own unique experiences, helps us to understand artistic freedom. But as Finnegan puts it above, the oral artist expresses that leeway within

“the limits of social background” of their people (op. cit.). Because of the decentralization of voices, Okpewho remarks that within a community where more than two or more storytellers tell the same stories, we expect that one version of the tale will be different from another depending on the experience and mode of those who tell them. 30

This practice of presenting the same theme from a variety of perspectives

helps us a great deal in understanding the relationship between what may be

considered a ‘tradition’ (in the sense of a generally accepted body of

information) and the individual creative skill of narrators who undertake to

reshape that body of information to suit their own contexts (Okpewho 16).

Through Yejide and Akin, Ayọbami Adebayọ deploys folkloric materials to retell two popular stories among the Yorùbá people to push a feminist politics of reimagination of culture and tradition in this current generation. In The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives,

Lọla Shonẹyin tells a story of infidelity and betrayal from the perspective of her male protagonist and each of his four wives. Shonẹyin couches her feminist advocacy as it relates to rape, sexual education, and patriarchal domination in a rich and puzzle-like pattern narration. Through their works, women writers form a band of what Okonjo Ogunyẹmi

(1996) describes as the griotte, “entertainer, teacher, social critic, ideologue” (Ogunyẹmi 3).

The diegetic focus of Stay With Me and The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives borders on women's agency, the self-perpetuation of the living dead, and the intersubjectivity of the

African man and woman. Young adults in marriage can relate to Yejide and Akin in Stay

With Me, for example, because the story is mainly set around Nigeria’s transition from the twilight of military dictatorship in 1985 through the country’s entrance into democracy in

1999, and when the story ends in 2008. So can readers relate to the events in The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives because it is immediately set in the early 2000s with a flashback into the past. By situating the stories in time periods that border the new millennium, both novels become social realist commentaries on the lives of young Yorùbá and Nigerian men and women today. 31

CHAPTER 2: RECLAIMING VOICES: VOCALITY AND GENDER DIALOGUE

In the beginning was Africa/orality/the word and the word was women’s.

Obioma Nnaemeka (1994, 136)

Thus, the issues emerge as women’s stories, left untold or hitherto distastefully told by men, now set down in writing to counter the ephemeral nature of women’s traditional orature.

Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyẹmi (1996, 4)

Introduction

I begin this chapter with a tale of Mọremi Àjàṣọrò, a strong woman in Ilé If ẹ̀, the ancestral home of the Yorùbá people. This Mọremi story is important to understanding the sites of Yejide’s strength and rebellion in Ayọbami Adebayọ’s Stay With Me. There is a direct reference to Mọremi in the novel when Akin first meets Yejide in a movie theater at

Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University, Ilé Ifẹ̀. After eleven failed attempts, she finally allows him to enter her room in Mọremi Hall, a female hostel in the university. I read this allusion to

Mọremi in connection with the existing knowledge created by the interpretation of the

Mọremi story. As I see it, this story is an acknowledgement of female strength and agency and a simultaneous denial of the same.

In his article “Folklore and Yorùbá Drama: Ọbàtálá As A Case Study,” Joel Adedeji

(1972) recounts the story of Mọremi and her intervention in an insurrection of the marauding

Ìgbò who terrorize Ilé-Ifẹ̀ perennially.

Mọremi, a zealous and patriotic Ifẹ̀ market-woman, volunteered to save Ifẹ̀ by

secretly ascertaining who were the Ìgbò masquerades. She consulted Ifá (“the

Oracle”), who confirmed for her that the Ìgbò gangs were not spirits but

human beings. Ifá ordered her to sacrifice to the goddess of the Ẹ̀ sìnmìrin

Stream, which lay between Ifẹ̀ and the domain of the Ìgbò. She made a solemn 32

pledge to the goddess of the stream that should she succeed in finding out the

secret of the Ìgbò strategy, she would offer a supreme sacrifice.

During another Ìgbò raid, Mọremi allowed herself to be captured and

taken into servitude… When she captured the secret behind the Ìgbò

Masquerade, she stole out of captivity one night and escaped to Ifẹ̀.

The Ìgbò made a great chase after Mọremi and attacked Ifẹ̀ as usual

with their masked men. But Mọremi, carrying two burning brands, led an

army of Ifẹ̀ men with lighted torches, rushed among the astonished enemy, and

laid them low. The power of the Ìgbò was broken, the masks were burned to

ashes, and the “face” behind them scorched to death.

Mọremi then repaired to the Ẹ̀ sìnmìrin to offer the promised sacrifice

to the goddess of the stream. To her bewilderment, she learned the sacrificial

lamb was to be Ẹ̀ là, her only son. Having no alternative, she fulfilled her vow

with fortitude and forthrightness. The sacrificial rite was a very moving

occasion for the Ifẹ ̀ people. In spite of her great loss, Mọremi ordered that the

Ìgbò king and his followers be restored to ifẹ̀ to live like other inhabitants of

the place. Thus, Mọremi’s intervention and ransom affected the much needed

rapprochement between the followers of Ọbàtálá and Odùduwà. Her sacrifice

restored peace to the realm [emphasis mine] (Adedeji 326-327).

This story speaks of an enviable strength, a costly sacrifice, and an unprecedented conciliatory action. By restoring security and stability to a land marked by chaos, bringing an end to the menace of the faceless plundering Ìgbò marauders, and leading an army of men to battle in defence of the ancestral home of the Yorùbá peoples, Mọremi secures a space for herself as a powerful female figure in the Yorùbá pantheon. By surrendering herself into captivity and also sacrificing her only son to restore peace, she enacts the image of women 33 and mothers as self-sacrificing agents who give their all for a greater good. And by calling for a truce and harmonizing the warring factions, those loyal to Ọbàtálá and the followers of

Odùduwà, she evinces a conciliatory persona while registering women as unifying forces.

However, in this story, Mọremi can only be understood from her positionality as a woman and as a biological and social mother because her warrior instincts have been subsumed under the social gaze. Humanity is male, explains Simone de Beauvoir in The

Second Sex (1952). The powers exercised by women may be acknowledged in this universe of male humanity, but because ‘woman’ is always defined in relation to man, she becomes the “imperfect man, an incidental being” (de Beauvoir xvi). Whereas de Beauvoir’s (1952: xix) proclamation about women as having “no past, no history, no religion of their own” can be countered by the existence and giant strides of historical non-Western women like

Moremi, who lived to assert feminine strength and agency to which modern African women can tap from, de Beauvoir’s assertion can still be countenanced in the African situation within the context of the paucity of detailed accounts of the lives and times of these equally strong, capable, and omnipresent women. The disconnect lies in the fact that we do not have a version of history as it may have been written/told/recounted by these historical women themselves.

Like Mọremi, women have been of tremendous influence in the evolution of the

Yorùbá (and Nigerian) society, but the ways in which their stories have been told meant that their image gravitates exclusively towards that of motherhood. Mọremi’s mental acuity in trade and gallantry in battle appears to have been subsumed under the social construction of the ‘warrior mother.’ With the “two burning brands” that broke/burned/scorched the Ìgbò’s power/masks/faces, Mọremi is depicted as fierce in battle. But we are told that at the end of it all, she called for integration of the Ìgbò faction into Ilé Ifẹ̀ to live with equal rights. That this story wants us to think that Mọremi moved from being an aggressive and belligerent to an 34 absolute pacifist in one fell swoop raises questions about omission and distortion of details.

What could have been Mọremi’s kneejerk response when the spirit of the Ẹ̀ sìnmìrin river asked her to sacrifice her only child? It can be argued that she submitted to fate and was consoled by the fact that her child’s death brought peace to Yorùbá land. Whether this was the case or not, it is obvious that this story served the society more than it does Mọremi.

As Grace Eche Okereke (1998) writes, “The asphyxiation of female vocality in creative space starts from the oral tradition” (137). Many stories in oral tradition are drawn from the Ifá corpus, the body of scriptural texts that underlie Yorùbá religious beliefs. The corpus forms the base from which Yorùbá folklore derives. The ways in which we understand the wisdom and witticism found in oral tradition also seem to have been inspired by male experiences. According to T.M. Ilesanmi (1998), negative myths of women “are generally based on the chauvinism of men who pass negative moral and physical judgements on women” (Ilesanmi 38). For example, according to a Yorùbá proverb that has a solid backing in a verse of Ifá, a woman’s beauty is acknowledged, but that beauty cancels out if her character is perceived to be questionable: Bóbirin dára bí ò níwà, igi lásán ni, if a woman is beautiful but lacks good character/manners, she is just a carved wood (Ilesanmi 38).

Paradoxically, the epistemological basis of propriety, good character, and prosperity in the Ifá corpus is attributable to women. T.M. Ilesanmi (1998: 33-35) records that Iwa (read: good character), Ààbò (protection), Odù (read: support) were women with whom Ọ̀ rúnmìlà, the

Yorùbá god of divination, had some sort of relationship in ancient times.

What then makes negative stereotypes outlast the positive? While good character remains a must-have on the grounds of ethics, what remains curious is: Who sets the parameters of morality/good character, for what purpose, and in whose interests? In the story above, Mọremi’s political action emanated from a place of personal agency, but in the retelling of the story, that agency is granted only to a point. Having no alternative, she 35 fulfilled her vow with fortitude and forthrightness, writes Joel Adedeji. The tonality of this expression gives away an epistemological scheme: We are made to believe that this woman agreed to losing her only child without any hesitation. How do we explain other versions of similar stories where the women resisted? We are also told that all her choices are gone. That the death of her child is beyond fated; that it is a necessary sacrifice; that the sacrifice is the condition upon which total victory and unification can be permanent. In many ways, the sanctity of virtuous concepts like sacrifice, fortitude, and forthrightness has been tainted by a male monologic that overlooks the emotional trauma of the loss of the child. In the face of such male-constructed narrative, the sting of death loses its worth; children, the conduit of self-perpetuation, become disposable; and women/mothers, the givers of life, become no more than baby machines, with the emotions of a robot. In what follows, I explore the disposability of children and mechanization of women, a combinatorial force with grave mental destabilization for the woman.

Reclaiming Voices and Occupying Space

“When women were silent,” writes Grace Eche Okereke (1998), “male writers orchestrated their myopic monologistic perceptions of women, burying them under such a heap of myths” (Okereke 139). In the process of countering anti-African rhetoric, African male writers and critics developed a powerful literary voice that normalized male vocality but one that created a masculine center from which everyone and everything is perceived and given form. The corollary of which is that the female’s voice became inaudible. Chinua

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) set out to recenter African voices in storytelling lest we continue to take the account of the hunter-colonialist as the only narrative. Achebe would be more direct in 1977 with his biting response to the “thoroughgoing racis[m]” of Joseph

Conrad in Heart of Darkness (“An Image of Africa,” 21). But as Michael Holquist notes, the

“law of placement” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism dictates that “everything is perceived 36 from a unique position in existence” and “the meaning of whatever is observed is shaped by the place from which it is perceived” (Holquist, 1990, 20). According to Nigerian critic,

Nkiru Nzegwu, Achebe’s novel popularized a model of traditional Igbo family that is structurally similar to that vilified by Western feminists; “The Okonkwo model is polygamous. [The novel] consists of an overbearing patriarch, subordinate wives, and numerous children” (Nzegwu 2006, 12). From the vantage point that many of the foremost

African literary texts were written, the male is synonymous with wisdom and decisiveness while the female is less assertive. Where the female is given voice, it is usually for the benefit of the male or the society (again, men) at large.

In Things Fall Apart, an empowering reference to the African woman can be located in the word Nneka, Mother is Supreme. Okonkwo, the protagonist, is banished from the village of Umuofia on the count of murdering a clansman. For a warrior like himself, it is humiliating to be expelled from his fatherland. However, the only place of refuge is his mother’s village of Mbanta. The protection that Okonkwo is able to receive from Mbanta validates the meaning of the word Nneka. Yet, it bears mentioning that this capacity of the mother to provide refuge to an embattled child can only be understood outside of the context of the personhood of that mother. While a mother does not have to be physically present to care for her child, the point here has a lot to do with the materiality of a woman’s personhood. There is a pattern in early postcolonial writings by men, as with the concept of

Nneka, to strip women of their physical presence when valorizing them. This is why Grace

Eche Okereke argues that women’s creativity in oral literary tradition “has been defined by the collective need of the people, not by [women’s] own personal, individual lives and experiences” (Okereke 138). It is along this line that male writers became the spokespersons for African male and female alike, a situation that has resulted in gross misrepresentation and generalization of women’s realities and experiences. 37

Crucial to the point I am making here is the concept of vocality. Vocality means more than ability to speak, it involves the quality of the articulation of one’s views in ways that transcends speech. It is the quality of being heard and listened to (see Okereke 1998, pp. 134-

135). Women simultaneously struggle and thrive in a marginal space coterminous with the dominant tropes of unquestioning conformity, intractable docility, and denied vocality. In many situations, they form a stream of combative voices who constitute formidable opposition to oppressive systems within and outside the margin. Their acts of transgression, of activating their vocality, of resisting the call to be silent, finds language in the Sene-

Gambian concept of Saani Baat or Voice Throwing popularized by the Gambian scholar Siga

Jajne (See Kọlawọle 1998, p. 4). Far from a call to battle, these disruptive voices open up a dialectical reexamination of African gender roles and relations in a ‘gender dialogue.’

The African woman writer occupies what Nigerian critic Obioma Nnaemeka (1994,

154) refers to as the “intellectual space.” Despite the glint of its qualification, this space puts the woman writer in a unique situation because as a female, she is constricted by her marginality and positionality to society/life. At the same time, the space is “an observation post” and the quality of the observation is determined by the vantage point of the observer

(Nnaemeka 154). Thus, the African woman writer doubles as marginalized on the one hand, and on the other, privileged, because she is able to present her story from a place of authority, experience, and genuine empathy, at the remotest. As Toni Morrison (2000) declares in

“Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” African/Black writers are caught in a triangle of experience: agent, witness, victim (Morrison 31). They are the subjects of their own narratives, witnesses to and participants in their own experience and in the experiences of those with whom they have come in contact.

Earlier on in the section I titled Initial Remarks, I read African women’s writings as a

(re)activation of what was originally theirs and I defined “write” both in its literal sense and 38 as it manifests in its homophonous forms: As making right a litany of distortions; as the continuance of a rite of transgression and protestation; as a legitimate claim to one’s right to vocality. The two texts I examine in this work commit to these multiple interpretations of write-ing. The authors attempt to right the wrongs wrought by a system that long favored and still favors androcentrism. The female characters in the novels continue a rite of aberration through their refusal of traditional roles of women. Like the brave women before them, these female characters claim their right to retell their story because in African oral tradition, no one sex has the copyright on the tools of social construction like proverbs, songs, stories. It is my contention that the most significant breakthrough in the women’s movement in Africa will not be where women merely fill the parliament or occupy the highest seat of power in the land. I submit that the biggest victory will be the redefinition of woman, female, girl.

Gender Equity: The Most Important Site of Restoration

The call for education and political empowerment may prove insufficient to proffer a lasting solution to the gender question in Africa/Nigeria. There is no question whatsoever about the immediate necessity of these attempts at restoring gender equity—investment in the education of women/girls and an increased gender inclusiveness in government. Intensified girl-child education will infuse female subjectivity into the social and national psyche, just as increased representation of women in governance and policy making will inevitably lead to a high probability of identifying necessary solutions that tackle the plethora of localized challenges facing women. But increased political appointment for women and an education that focuses on how 'girls can do what boys can do' and even better has a way of setting boys/men as the standard that girls/women should aspire to reach/beat. For one thing, we are reminded, going by Audre Lorde’s insight, that the master’s tool has not succeeded in dismantling the master’s house yet, even in Western societies. What then is the missing link between education/inclusion and the attainment of full gender equity? 39

It was unprecedented when the Prime Minister of Ethiopia decided in 2018 to implement a gender equality measure that split in half the gender composition of his cabinet.

By that singular act, Ethiopia became a role model not only for other African countries but also for Western nations. Alongside Ethiopia is another African country with an incredible scorecard of gender inclusiveness in government. With 61% of women in parliament and a

30% benchmark for women’s participation in politics, Rwanda has the largest number of women in parliament, more than in Europe or America.3 These figures, cited by Donno and

Kreft (2018), are corroborated by USAID/Rwanda in its Gender and Social Inclusion

Analysis Report of August 2019. We must ask, however, whether these decisions would essentially change the order in which the Ethiopian man, for example, cognitively and socioculturally parses/views the Ethiopian woman. Do men conceive of these new ministers as individuals first, and then female/woman public officers, or the other way around?

In an article for The Washington Post, researchers Daniela Donno and Anne-Kathrin

Kreft provide a nuanced understanding of women’s inclusion in government in Ethiopia.

Donno and Kreft describe the Ethiopian leader as a “modernizing autocrat” who recognizes that investment in gender reforms will galvanize women’s support for the ruling party, the

Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, at every level of government. Although women’s involvement in politics in the country is not limited to the national level, one way of apprehending this giant leap for women in Ethiopia, therefore, is that the decision to halve

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s cabinet along gender lines is more of a political than a sociocultural imperative. To this end, is it the case that with respect to the master’s house, de

Beauvoir (1952: xviii) is again right when she says “women have achieved only what men have been willing to grant; that women have taken nothing, they have only received.” In an

3 The Rwandan situation was precipitated by the long years of genocide that claimed the lives of thousands of men. To fill the power vacuum left by most of the men, women were elected to seats of power. 40 undated study titled “Linguistic Violence Against Women as Manifested in Sexist Amharic

Proverbs,” Endalew Assefa of Addis Ababa University, surveyed 166 Amharic proverbs about Ethiopian women. The thematic scope of the proverbs ranges from how untrustworthy, crafty, and vicious a woman can be, to her lack of decision making ability and how masculine hegemony is reinforced. What does it mean to be a woman in a political office and why should it matter?

We must expand our logic to other countries in Africa: Does increase in political empowerment elevate femininity to the status of full respect, as long as masculine remains the culturally preferred sex/gender? What should African women aspire to? To be like men or to become their own possible best? Are sustainable development projects of political empowerment enough to reconstruct cultural myths endemic to African ways of knowing?

Are legislations a total remedy? Formal education enables deep critical thinking, but what are the local affordances that can consolidate formal knowledge production? How might the first part of the title of Kareem Fahim’s opinion piece in The New York Times—”Slap to a Man’s

Pride…”—be instructive in reorienting a culture with an acquired taste for androcentrism?

The point I am trying to make here is that political empowerment is but one aspect of gender equity. Another and most fundamental site of restoration is the reconceptualization of woman/female/girl as a concrete human being, whose independent existence is required to complete the human whole; again, whose independent existence is required to dismantle the a priori assumption that ‘humanity is male.’ For the Yorùbá woman, oral tradition offers a broad outlet for such reconceptualization. The very site of African and Yorùbá women’s oppression, yet the plasticity of oral literature, its democratic outlook on authorship and authority, renders mythic tools like stories, lores, sayings, songs, and proverbs protean and adaptable. 41

Myth is its own undoing. To this end, a robust campaign of cultural education inspired by a transformative consciousness becomes imperative, especially one that alerts the female to what she has at her disposal in order to effect the change she wishes to see rather than a narrative that only highlights what she lacks. Coming to a fuller understanding of the wholeness of her personality in a cultural consciousness founded on communal bond, the

Nigerian/Yorùbá woman/girl will begin to see the Nigerian/Yorùbá man/boy as a relational self whose existence appears in complementary rather than in oppositional terms.

Weaving a Social Fabric

Women’s audibility and vocality must be articulated for their own advancement. Due to the necessary interactions between both sexes, in addition to that articulation, we must envision a space that draws men in for robust gender conversation. To theorize a renewed culture of gender relations in the Yorùbá society and Nigeria in general, we may turn to the illustrative power of things, using the vernacular framework of womanism. One such thing is cloth. I see cloth, both in its materiality and the processes involved in its production, as an illustrative item in the reconceptualization of gender relations. A piece of fabric that binds men and women together, cloth is a veritable site of rethinking gender dialogue. Clothes connote exterior value, yet, clothes have conceptual importance for imagining how men and women can improve upon their interrelationship within the Nigerian nation-space. As Elisha

Renne (1995) puts it in Cloth That Does Not Die, “things exhibit a certain dialectical quality in that they are invested with meaning but may themselves be integral to the reproduction of ideas that contribute to group unity in time and space (Renne 6). Clothes have deeper meanings and can be useful in how we think through gender identity and disidentity.

The cover of Marjorie K. McIntosh’s 2009 book Yorùbá Women, Work, And Social

Change is a full, iconic picture forming a solid background upon which the book title, author’s name, book blurb, and publication details are neatly engraved in blending colors. 42

This picture extends from the front cover through the spine all the way to the back cover. To see the fullness of the picture, one has to open the book, but in the totally opposite direction, in which case, we are opening/reading the book cover as against reading the pages of the book. I observe that this atypical manner of imagining and reading ‘otherwise’ positions us to see/think/imagine differently. This process of doing the awkwardly strange in order to achieve the pleasantly striking holds an important lesson for feminist discourse and gender dialogue. It also helps us apprehend the ‘woman question’ in a new light; to understand feminist advocacy in Nigeria as a dialogic rather than a heavyweight gender bout where one party is expected to come out victorious.

Our iconic picture is that of the “members of an ẹgbẹ́ of building cleaners, Faculty of

Arts, University of Ibadan, preparing to go to a wedding, June 2007.” The existence of an

ẹgbẹ́ , a sociocultural or socioeconomic association, is a powerful outlet for the Yorùbás’ love of sociability and their proclivity for grand celebration and sheer braggadocio. Because such psychosocial vibes require social expression, the Yorùbá often express their glee in extravagant adornment of fine costumes. What makes this photo very striking is that all the women in the picture adorn the same attire; a matching costume of the same color, style, and grandeur. Such uniformity in dress color and style makes a statement about their unity, solidarity, and belonging.

I draw a connection between the uniform expression of solidarity and identity among these female building-cleaners and Nigerian women intellectuals. Just as we can group the women in the photo based on their occupation, so can we categorize, on the basis of ideology,

Nigerian women writers who strive to put the national house in order by calling for gender equity through their writings. Each novel written by Nigerian women writers bears a genetic semblance to a rhizome of counternarratives. Each writer, From Flora Nwapa to Buchi 43

Emecheta to Lọla Shonẹyin, Chimamanda Adichie, and Ayọbami Adebayọ, cuts from the versatile fabric of Nigerian women's condition to make a befitting literary outfit.

Figure 1: Cover of Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Source: Indiana University Press. Used with permission. Despite this uniformity, however, individual taste in style and the variability in each person’s inclination to trendy fashion becomes a big factor in how the members wear their literary attire or aṣọ ẹbí. As Chikwenye Ogunyẹmi (1996) writes,

In spite of the general impression of sameness in the aṣọ ẹbí, there are always

distinctions in the total effect of each person’s outfit, creating individuality in

uniformity through choice accessories and poise of carriage (10).

It is from this perspective that I start to consider the multiple functions of cloth: The aṣọ ẹbí uniform reveals a general sense of solidarity while it simultaneously conceals the nuanced interpretations and apprehension of group identity. While they adorn matching dresses, the women in our iconic photo have different tastes in the kind of head tie they wear. Even in 44 situations where head ties match, the manner of tying them and the style into which individuals make their attire is not always exactly the same. With respect to the gender question, however, I consider this particularity of self-expression in at least two different dimensions: Among women writers and between men and women. The former can be explained in terms of the degree to which a writer/critic defines herself as a feminist; how she draws the line between accommodation for men within the Nigerian women’s movement, her views on the role of indigenous cultures, and whether or not they believe that the same cultures hold the answers to the woman question. With respect to the difference between men and women, the tensions that exist along gender lines can be explained, and indeed are reconcilable, through the materiality and metaphors of cloth.

We think of society in relation to cloth: society is a social fabric. In the production of cloth, which renowned anthropologist Annete Weiner (1989) identifies as “thread” for social relations in Cloth and Human Experience, individual efforts of women and men are essential

(Weiner 2). Researchers and scholars in the field of Yorùbá cloth production and use attest to the collaborative nature of cloth weaving in precolonial Yorùbá societies (Renne 1995,

Oshewolo 2018). Men and women were actively engaged in the production and aesthetics of woven cloth. The survival of the practice to the present day, at least in a few areas of the

Yorùbá nation, points to the possibilities of an effective and enduring collaboration between both sexes.

Scholarly and social discourse around gender can take the form of dialogic interaction, the kind that took place between these historical female and male weavers.

Writing on the production of cloth in Owé, a Yorùbá community that still practises traditional weaving, Oshewolo (2018) reports that in the precolonial and colonial days, men wove on horizontal looms while women wove on vertical looms. In addition, while the vertical looms were positioned indoors because it required little space, horizontal looms were constructed in 45 an open space given that the setup required enough room for the long warp (Oshewolo 114).

Beyond the oppositional nature of the setups, the positionality of each weaver in their respective looms represent how each one’s blind spot is revealed: The male cannot fully see what transpires indoors just as the female is partially oblivious to what is going on outdoors.

They must both cooperate to obtain a full view of what happens on either side. As Diedre

Badejọ (1995) remarks in African Feminism: Mythical and Social Power of Women of

African Descent,

African feminism cannot carry out its charge without the reestablishment of

African manhood to ensure its fulfilment. Conversely, African manhood cannot

progress without the reinstatement of the philosophical practices and tenets of

queen mothership, female rulership, and a healthy priestesshood. This is our

ethos, and restoring balance means just that (101).

The ‘gender dialogue’ advocated here can take place in the type of interconnected conceptual workspace where both male and female academics, artisans, market traders, and policy makers honor the trust invested in each other for a clear view of reality as was the case with the Yorùbá men and women weavers in history. Modern Yorùbá men and women must each be ethical and respectful enough to see things from each other’s perspectives because their collective survival depends on their cooperation. The complementarity that defined identity and socialized categories in the Yorùbá society point to a model of the politics of gender that must be vigorously pursued in our quest for reinstating gender equity. The call for women’s representation in governance and policy making, for example, should not be misconstrued for an overthrow of masculine power, but a redistribution of and improvement upon power and agency, as it were, in traditional/indigenous societies. 46

CHAPTER 3: UNDOING MYTHIC LAWS IN ADEBAYO AYỌBAMI’S STAY WITH ME

(2017)

Sweet Mother, I no go forget you For de suffer wey you suffer for me yeh [2x] … When I dey sick my mother go cry cry cry She go say instead wey I go die make she die She go beg God, God help me, God help me, my pikin o ... If I no sleep, my mother no go sleep If I no chop, my mother no go chop She no dey tire o Sweet mother… Prince Nico Mbarga, “Sweet Mother” (1976)

Introduction: Annotating and Redacting “Sweet Mother”

Prince Nico Mbarga’s classic “Sweet Mother” eulogizes an immortal and unforgettable mother. The song became a sensation immediately after its release in 1976 partly because it was sung in Pidgin English, a language accessible to everyone regardless of social class, and partly because its Highlife genre means the song is not exclusive to Nigeria or (the English-speaking region of) Cameroon, the two countries where Mbarga had mixed nationalities. The single hit sold over 13 million copies and according to the first part of the title of Sami Kent’s article in Narratively, “His Biggest Hit Sold More Copies Than Any of

The Beatles’.” Genre and language give the song a wider appeal in Anglophone West Africa, an appeal that has seen the song sampled and adapted by various musical artists in the

African subregion. By rereading social hieroglyphics like Nico Mbarga’s “Sweet Mother,” adapting the processes that Christina Sharpe (2016) calls “annotation” and “redaction”

(Sharpe 113), we can begin to understand the ways through which positive traits of motherhood may be propagating negative myths about women; specifically, how this admirable status of motherhood/Sweet Mother functions in the universe of Ayọbami

Adebayọ’s Stay With Me. 47

In Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake of Blackness and Being, annotation and redaction are used within the context of anti-Blackness. For my purpose, I adapt the idea behind both terms to discourse the asphyxiating conditions of the African woman. To annotate and redact is to revisit/re-see a (visual, written, aural) text by adding notes and/or striking out aspects that look disjointed in the light of substantive counter-evidences and counter-facts. By annotating and redacting the most powerful line in Nico Mbarga’s classic—de suffer wey you suffer (=the suffering that you endured)—we can identify the metafunctions of social beliefs as they operate similarly to what Slavoj Zizek describes as “symbolic violence” in Violence:

Six Sideways Reflections (2008). de suffer wey you suffer speaks directly to and praises a reproductively prolific woman who can persevere and bear the pain and hardship that accompanies being a mother. The lyrics thrive on their reverence of a mother who exudes great amounts of care, love and compassion for her child. In essence, the referent of this song becomes the prototype of ideal motherhood.

It bears mentioning that according to this song, and given its cultural connotations, it is not the fact that a woman can activate her fertility that makes her a “Sweet Mother.” What wins a woman this coveted title instead is her ability as well as her iterative capacity to starve just so her child can eat; to lose sleep in order to pet her sleepless child; to acquire and display all the symptoms of illness even though she is not sick. In more ways than one, lyrics like this work to epistemologically legislate what motherhood is and what it is not. Through such songs, mythic cultural beliefs become laws that surreptitiously regulate the minds of mothers and would-be mothers alike.

The processes of annotation and redaction may not have the power to erase the visible markings/writings that constitute the orthography of anti-women sentiments, but the new understandings we gain from “imaging” and “imagining” the text otherwise—two important ways that Christina Sharpe theorizes annotation and redaction—definitely has the power to 48 effect the change we wish to see (Sharpe 114). A powerful tool of ideological indoctrination, music has a way of inculcating social, political, and cultural mores in the most unconscious fashion. Because of the popularity of “Sweet Mother,” the song, it is easy to use the beliefs it perpetuates as justification for othering. For instance, a woman who cannot conceive is soon pathologized as barren and is ineligible to be a Sweet Mother even though this “barren” woman very much qualifies for the status in other equally significant ways, e.g. being a social mother. Since motherhood is framed as the ultimate goal of women, the thought of it becomes a regulatory force of gender surveillance which can either come from society or be self-imposed after many years of interiorizing the Sweet Mother ideals. For the female protagonist in Stay With Me, de suffer would begin even before she becomes a mother.

The female protagonist, Yejide, grows up with the idealized image of woman as mother and tries in every way to become a Sweet Mother. Motherhood is desirable, but the mythification of this noble status has turned into a curse for her. The situations in Yejide’s marriage require a staunch display of physical and emotional strength, forbearance, and self- sacrifice. Without recourse to a woman’s personal dreams and desires, the status of the Sweet

Mother is only attained when a woman proves her fecundity. I read the act of proving as a double process: First prove that you are not barren (i.e. conceive and give birth to a child), then show proof that you can mother because in the traditional sense of the word, mothering is simply about long-suffering. Yejide learns from Mọọmi, her mother-in-law, that “a good mother’s life is hard…” (Adebayo 10). This declarative directly echoes Nico Mbarga’s song.

Like the song, Mọọmi’s words function to culturally institutionalize the myth of suffering as a necessary ingredient for motherhood. According to Mary Modupe Kọlawọle, “Myths recommend, prescribe or validate the society’s norms, values, code of conduct, social roles, gender socialisation and a society’s sense of identity and collective acceptance” (Kọlawọle

7). Mọọmi’s emphasis on suffering and hardship reifies motherhood and defers it at the same 49 time. Through such cultural instructions and gender socialization, Yejide internalizes some serious beliefs that would have grave implications for her physical and mental well-being: that she must give birth to her own child; that her career is not enough; that motherhood completes a woman.

The novel is set in Iléṣà and Ilé Ifẹ̀, two coterminous Southwestern cities in Nigeria with some actions taking place in Jos, a volatile city in North Central Nigeria. The story starts in the present, the year 2008, with Yejide expressing her resolve to travel to Iléṣà from Jos to attend the funeral of her father-in-law. Unbeknownst to her, this trip holds the resolution to a turbulent experience in her marriage. According to her, the road that leads to Iléṣà is

“shrouded in a darkness transitioning into dawn” (Adebayọ 3). The novel also ends in the present in Ileṣa where she finds out that Rotimi, her third daughter, who she thought had died after abandoning her with her husband, is still alive. The details of Yejide’s tumultuous journey in her marriage to Akin and her reasons for abandoning her child are laid out in between these opening and closing accounts. The reader is taken back to 1985 in Ileṣa when

Yejide’s in-laws visited in the company of “a yellow woman with a blood-red mouth who grinned like a new bride” (Adebayọ 9). Funmilayọ or simply Funmi will become Akin’s second wife. Funmi is the result of a huge family pressure on Akin to have a child of his own because according to cultural calculations, one is not complete without a child.

It must be acknowledged here that in African societies, children are a core part of social security in old age. The absence of official support systems in many African countries adds to the imperatives of childbearing. However, the focus here is not so much on the value of children but how premium on children feeds a cultural ideology that promotes the symbolic violence of othering against women who cannot bear children: it does not matter whether Yejide has been a good wife, or a beautiful woman with good character, if she cannot give her husband a child, the logical thing to do will be to get someone who can. 50

Under this logic, we are often blinded to the role of the man in the inability of the woman to conceive as it is the case with Akin in Stay With Me.

In this connection, some scholars have argued that motherhood is the primary reason for the domestication and othering of females. While this assertion is a statement of fact, it has nonetheless been countered by other writers who call for a contextualization of that fact

(Oyěwùmí 1997, Nzegwu 2006, Nfah-Abbenyi 1997). Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi (1997) is sceptical of the position that sexuality and motherhood form a huge constraint for African women and have stood in their way in the push toward self-actualization. These sceptical scholars nuance the feminist position that childbirth is restrictive and that being a mother often impacts a woman’s professional career and general wellbeing. Because of the importance of children, women are only viewed through the lens of motherhood and heterosexuality, what Nfah-Abbenyi defines as “forced mothers” and “sexual slaves” in that order (Nfah-Abbenyi 24). But as Oyěwùmí (1997) notes, the Yorùbá social structure makes it possible for a woman with children to pursue trade and economic fulfilment. At the same time, cultural expectations have been draining for many women. They function like mythic ordinances that have dictated the lives of women like Yejide.

Mary Modupe Kọlawọle (1998) conceives of myth as “non-rational prevalent traditional sets of beliefs, thoughts and practices which guide a society’s interpersonal and collective values, mores, moral codes and social norms” (3). “Mythification” is a powerful mode of institutionalising gender inequity and validating many forms of harmful practices against women. To borrow from Wenying Xu (2006), myths are “appetizing, saturating,

…vicious” (165). It is important to stress that myths are not restricted to a past lost in mystical powers and superstitions. Instead, myths are constantly being mined; they are

“configurations that still pattern men and women’s reactions to situations,” becoming the law and constituting the biopolitics of discipline and socio-cultural training (Kọ́láwọlé 3). 51

Kọlawọle tells us that when derogatory mythic interpretations of women become internalized over a long enough period of time, certain negative self-perceptions develop which are then taken for granted and perceived as natural and African. Cultural productions like legends, folklore, sayings and proverbs create marginalizing spaces that are perceived as culturally sacred and indubitable but are inimical to the lives and prosperity of women in a way that enhances their suffering. This explains why a young woman like Yejide acquiesces to a system of marriage she never supported nor believed in. As an educated woman, how come

Yejide is able to be swayed into accepting polygamy? Why does she accept unquestioningly many of the traditional beliefs that are injurious to her wellbeing?

Myths impact differently on African women across social class but they are most profound on the middle-class woman “because the middle-class woman is caught between two worlds, the stress caused by her assertion of her individuality and the demands by communal cultural acquiescence often assume a more profound proportion” (Kọlawọle 9-10).

Yejide suffers from and thrives in this liminal space of reconciling customary and traditional givens and the imperatives of modernity. Yejide’s mother comes from the nomadic Fulani tribe in Nigeria and gets pregnant by Yejide’s father and decides to stay with him instead of continuing her pastoral journey. In childbirth, she passes away leaving Yejide in the care of her stepmothers. Yejide grows up with these women who refer to her mother as a woman of

“unknown lineage” and “a whore” (Adebayọ 64, 157). On some level, such derisive reference to lineage comes from a chronic ethnocentric bias and bigotry. The uncanny way these

Yorùbá women derogate Yejide’s mother is a commentary on the horror of ethnicity in

Nigeria. This scornful and hostile disposition would transfer to Yejide. But Yejide makes important life decisions as resistance: “I decided that minute" after one of her stepmothers tells her she will end up like her mother, "that I would go to university, that I would stay a virgin until I get married and have the blood-stained white cloth sent as proof to my father on 52 my wedding night” (Adebayọ 157). It is in this position of proving her stepmothers wrong that we might find an answer to why a modern and educated woman like Yejide succumbs to cultural myths about marriage and childbearing that turn out to be harmful to her wellbeing.

Because of her experience with her stepmothers, Yejide rejects polygamous marriage.

“I don’t do polygamy,” she tells Akin before their marriage (Adebayọ 20). Although she shows great strength in setting life goals for herself and achieving them, Yejide remains powerless under the weight of customary beliefs about marriage and children. It therefore becomes obvious that women are constantly trapped in a web of interlocking systems of oppression. With the intensity of the pressure coming from her husband’s family, Yejide has to conceive. According to Mọọmi, Yejide’s mother-in-law, “women manufacture children and if you can’t, you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman” (Adebayo 40). By all cultural calculus and arithmetic, and as a woman in her prime, Yejide must act fast to remedy her infertility.

I did not think of Akin and how he would have said I was going mad. I did

not think of Mọọmi, who would have reminded me that my feet were

shaky in her son’s house without a child. I did not even think of Funmi,

who might be pregnant already. I looked down at the bundle in my arms

and saw the little face of my child smelled the fresh scent of baby powder

and believed (Adebayo 45).

Initially opposed to polygamy, Yejide has come to embrace what she denounces in pursuit of the Sweet Mother ideal. In the excerpt above, Yejide is recounting her experience at the

Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles where she has gone to make prayers that will heal her of her perceived infertility. The bundle in her arms is a live goat which she must carry on her back as if it were a real child. She does this without thinking about what her husband, mother-in-law, or rival might think of her. The desperation in her voice and her resoluteness 53 to find a solution to her problem show how Yejide has interiorized society’s definition of womanhood/motherhood. Elsewhere, she says, “I simply had to get pregnant, as soon as possible, and before Funmi did” (Adebayo 38). By making this kind of statement, we see her total submission to polygamy, but more than that, we can see the reason for her desperation.

Yejide once narrates how Iya Tunde, her stepmother, had displaced Iya Martha, another stepmother, because Iya Tunde got pregnant first (Adebayo 63). In her mind, Funmi is a perfect replica of Iya Tunde.

While these instances form the motivating factors for her visit to the Mountain of

Jaw-Dropping Miracles, giving what we know of her life story, Yejide gives in to polygamy primarily for her own happiness. Her mother has no name in the story and Yejide does not mention her name since her mother died while giving birth to her. No family of her own to look out for her, Yejide wants a child she can call her own and that is all that matters to her.

After the spiritual exercise on the miracle Mountain, Prophet Josiah assures her: “Go. Even if no man comes near you this month, you will be pregnant” (Adebayo 45). Not long after this prophetic declaration, Yejide begins to notice changes in her body. Nausea and missed periods become signs of answered prayers and her bulging stomach is a physical manifestation of a long-awaited miracle. Yejide’s pregnancy will turn out to be fake. We know this because the ultra-scan disproves any pregnancy and also because the pregnancy has lasted for more than eleven months. What she carries is a fake pregnancy condition called

Pseudocyesis. The anxiety that follows the news that there is no baby ruins Yejide’s mental health to the point of psychological depression.

To Undo Myths, Make More Myths

Myths are protean and should be deliberately re-directed towards the enhancement of women’s role. –Mary Modupẹ Kọlawọle (1998, 26) When Akin is informed of Yejide pregnancy, he accuses her of infidelity: “Have you been having sex… with another man?” and goes on to say, “We both know you can’t be 54 pregnant” (Adebayo 50). Although their sex life has been appalling, Yejide has been waiting for this ‘miracle’ for a long time, what Akin calls “immaculate conception” (Adebayo 50). “I was a woman at last,” Yejide gleefully thinks to herself and considers all the troubles and discomfort she has been through as “rites of passage into motherhood” (Adebayo 51). Akin’s accusation of Yejide as adulterous logically follows from the general mythic perceptions of women in the Yorùbá society.

These mythic perceptions are products of human imagination not essentially an intrinsic aspect of nature. T.M. Ilesanmi (1998) notes that myths are “created to explain not only the natural order of reality but also the cultural practices of man in order to justify and legitimate it” (31). While Ilesanmi uses the word “man” in the generic sense, the fact is that in many cases, Ilesanmi’s words are true of the biological male. Conscious and unconscious biases of men against women have facilitated the toxification of both positive and negative myths of women at several stages of social evolution. In the Yorùbá context, women are easy targets of accusations like extra-marital affairs, deceit, and debauchery.

The irony of myths in this cultural setting is that both men and women are caught in its vicious web. Akin’s accusation comes from a place of frustration, partly from his belief that Yejide is unfaithful to him, partly and more importantly, because of his own knowledge of his sexual dysfunction. In the same scene of this accusation, Yejide narrates how Akin became so violent, a disposition she has never seen before.

He picked up a saucer from the table and held it aloft. In one frightening

moment I could see him breaking the delicate china on my head. He threw it

across the room, then he pulled the tablecloth off the dining table. Plates,

mugs, saucers and vacuum flasks crashed to the floor. My husband was not a

violent man, and the man who lifted a dining chair and hit it against the dining

table until the chair broke was someone I did not know (Adebayo 51). 55

I argue that this instantly violent man may not be protesting his wife’s infidelity outright, this outburst of aggression comes right from the fact that his ego has been bruised and even shattered. Not able to bring himself to terms with his inability to get his wife pregnant, the toxicity of his masculinity and manhood is then unleashed. Like Yejide, Akin is crushed under the weight of traditional mechanisms of social conformity. Unlike Yejide who later overcomes pseudocyesis to prove her fecundity on three different occasions with the birth of her three children: Ọlamide, Sẹsan, and Rotimi, Akin is permanently castrated.

Ayọbami Adebayo’s creation of a sexually dysfunctional husband serves to rewrite

(to make right) the imbalance in the social narrative that takes masculinity as tantamount to sexual virility. Adebayo uses characterization to subvert the narrative in an interesting way.

On the one hand, Akin’s impotence and Yejide’s fertility give the lie to the notion that if there is a delay in conception in a marriage, it must have something to do with the woman and not the man. On the other hand, Adebayo adapts the Yorùbá saying Ọlọ́mọ Ló Layé (One who has children owns the world) to deconstruct the belief that one (man or woman) must have a child to be fulfilled in life. But how does the novel do the work of subversion?

Stay With Me does the work of subversion when in the narrations of both characters, it capitalizes on oral literature to dispel harmful positive and negative myths funnelled through sayings, songs, stories, and through the media. It retells Yorùbá folktales that carry stereotypical consequences for women as well as for men. Akin narrates the epic fable of

Ìjàpá-Yánníbo story while Yejide creates her own version of a famous tale, the Oluronbi story, two childhood folktales that most Yorùbá people of Nigeria are familiar with. The latter is based on an imaginary female trader called Oluronbi while the former recounts the story of the animal character Ìjàpá (Tortoise) and Yánníbo, his wife. With Yejide, Ayọbami

Adebayọ questions the myths perpetrated in Yorùbá folk tradition of women as unfaithful and 56 deceitful. Stay With Me and its lead female character transgress the boundary of conformity through the act of shifting the cultural narrative with this reappropriated story.

Undoing Myths I: The Oluronbi Story

The act of retelling and recreating received tales is transgressive only because one version of African folktales have subsisted for many generations. The only version of the

Oluronbi story that the Yorùbá people tell is one about Oluronbi, a woman trader, who approached the spirit of the Iroko tree, believed to have the power for doubling sales and securing wealth. The woman pledged her daughter to the Iroko tree if it could help her make good sales than other traders in the market. While she recorded tremendous sales as requested of the tree, the woman did not fulfil her own side of the bargain. At the heart of this story is the theme of unfulfilled promise and a sneaky and deceptive woman. In Stay With Me, Yejide does not believe that a woman would trade her child for profit. She decides to create her own version of the story.

The process of subverting the general understanding of the story cannot be more deconstructive. Besides the process of subversion, the idea behind this retelling is not strange to African storytelling. Indeed, it is not uncommon for griots and storytellers to give different versions of the same story. Isidore Okpewho (1992) informs us that African storytelling thrives on the individual artistic skills of storytellers and that oral artists bring in their idiosyncrasies in telling their stories. “This practice of presenting the same theme from a variety of perspectives,” Okpewho notes, “helps us a great deal in understanding the relationship between what may be considered a ‘tradition’ (in the sense of a generally accepted body of information) and the individual creative skill of narrators who undertake to reshape that body of information to suit their own contexts” (Okpewho 16). In other words, in a social context where more than one version of a story exists, we expect that one version of the tale will be different from another depending on the experience, mood and motivation of 57 those who tell them. Ayọbami Adebayo’s choice of retelling the Oluronbi tale and the gender politics the novel evinces, tend towards a relocation of African feminism in oral literature that must be reappropriated. These traditional stories and sayings must be reappropriated because the events and situations upon which they were predicated are different today. The very fact that the Oluronbi story has taken on a single interpretive dimension, one that portrays

Oluronbi as crooked, calls for a revision of the narrative. According to Yejide, “the reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones that others will remember” (Adebayo

119). While in Yejide’s own version of the story, Oluronbi eventually loses her daughter,

Aponbiepo, to the Iroko tree, we are left with a nuanced interpretation of the story.

Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone

who can explain who we were to the world when we are gone. If there really

was once an Oluronbi, I do not think she had any children after she lost

Aponbiepo. I think the version of her story that survived her would have been

kinder to her if she’d left behind someone who could shape the way she would

be remembered. I told Ọlamide several stories, expecting that one day she too

would tell the world my story (Adebayo 119).

Yejide reappropriates and tells the Oluronbi story to her first child, Ọlamide. The circumstances around the birth of Ọlamide necessitate this retelling. Given the circumstances surrounding her own birth and the cruelty of her stepmothers coupled with her loneliness in the world, Yejide’s perceived barrenness and her pseudocyesis take a huge psychological toll on her mental wellbeing. Desperate for the Sweet Mother status and with overwhelming deficit of sexual satisfaction, Yejide gives in to the suggestive lures of Dọtun, Akin’s brother.

Ọlamide is the result of her experience with Dọtun. Yejide retells the Oluronbi story to recenter her reasons for sleeping with Dọtun and having all of her three children with him. 58

Although it is difficult to believe that Yejide is unaware of Akin’s impotence, the novel overwrites the reader’s incredulity by making Yejide virtuous and sexually naive until marriage. Later on in the story, Yejide shows naiveite in sex literacy when other women would discuss their femininity and sexual experiences. Aunty Sadiat and Iya Bolu, two women visiting Yejide’s hair salon, enter a lewd chit chat about sexual intercourse which they compare to the act of pounding yams. Iya Bolu marvels at how the “the pestle” (an imagery of a man’s sexual organ and the intensity of pounding) does not kill “the mortar”

(the woman or the woman’s organ) (Adebayọ 145). When the women locate the dignity of the pestle in its hardness and mock the existence of a soft pestle that cannot pound, Yejide becomes “uncomfortable.” At this point, a series of questions wells up in Yejide’s mind as she thinks about the last time she and Akin made love. On account of propriety, she could not ask her questions. At this time in the story, Yejide has lost Ọlamide to sickle cell anaemia and has given birth to her second child, Sẹsan.

Undoing Myths II: The Ọlọmọ Lo Laye Saying

Just as Ayọbami Adebayo uses the traditional tool of tale-telling to deconstruct the general perception of women in Yorùbá society through Yejide, she affords Akin the opportunity to give his own account and tells the Ìjàpá-Yánníbo story. In the story, Ìjàpá

(Tortoise) and Yánníbo are a doting couple but do not have any issues. Ìjàpá crosses seven mountains and seven rivals to get to a traditional healer to find a solution to Yannibo’s childlessness. This healer concocts a ritual meal only to be eaten by Yánníbo as this ritualistic delicacy has the potency of effecting pregnancy on whoever eats it. It begs stressing that

Adebayo’s choice of that story and the character of Ìjàpá or Tortoise is symbolic because in

Yorùbá land and indeed in West Africa, the animal is a trickster and embodies social vices of dishonesty and betrayal. In this way, Adebayọ directly compares Akin and Yejide to these animal characters; specifically, she compares Akin to Ìjápá, a human-animal comparison not 59 uncommon in African oral literature because the line between human and animal characters in tales is often blurred; animals embody human characteristics and exercise human agency

(Okpewho 1992). Focusing on this Akin-Ìjàpá persona, the biggest betrayal and dishonesty comes when we find out that Akin indeed connives with his brother Dọtun to get his wife pregnant. “The master plan was to have four children,” says Akin, “two boys, two girls. Once every other year, Dotun was supposed to spend a weekend with us, get my wife pregnant, and go back to Lagos.” (Adebayọ 192). As with the Tortoise, Akin’s scheme blows up when

Dọtun opens up to Yejide about the master plan later on in the story with belief that Yejide is privy to the plan since this is what Akin tells him at the outset. Akin lacks the moral propriety to open up to his wife about his sexual condition.

By letting Akin tell the Ìjàpá-Yánníbo story to Rotimi, their surviving daughter, in the same way that Yejide tells the Oluronbi story to Ọlamide , their first daughter, the novel puts

Akin in a position equidistant to the affective connection that the reader might have with

Yejide, at least to a certain degree. Reinforcing the notion of intersubjectivity of both genders, Adebayọ allows Akin to retell a story that he was told as a child, just as Yejide recreates a childhood story that formed and still shapes her subjectivity. According to Akin,

Mọọmi, his mother, used to tell the Ìjàpá-Yánníbo by starting with the mythic saying: Ọlọ́mọ

Ló Layé (One who has children owns the world). Akin grows up with this saying and happens to be playing out a social script handed down to him through the cultural process of myth- making; he is not man enough if he does not have a child of his own. Having realized the dangers that surrounds the pressure of this received myth/knowledge/law, Akin reflects on his current disposition to the Ọlọ́mọ Ló Layé saying:

I never began the story with Mọọmi’s Ọlọ́mọ Ló Layé saying. I’d believed her

once, I’d accepted like the tortoise and his wife that there was no way to be in

the world without an offspring. I had thought that having children who called 60

me Baba would change the very shape of my world, would cleanse me, even

wipe away the memory of pushing Funmi down the stairs. And though I told

Rotimi the story many times, I no longer believed that having a child was

equal to owning the world (Adebayọ 212).

Akin is not immune to the crushing influence of cultural myths, but like Yejide, Akin reaches his own epiphany. Also referenced in the above statement is Akin admitting to killing

Funmilayọ his second wife, a scenario that remains unexplored further in the novel but an incident that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Out of desperation to have a child, and because the cultural logic demands it, Akin betrays his wife’s trust. From the musing above, we can see his reason for doing the most unthinkable such as asking his brother to have sex with his wife and not saying the most unheard of, namely the fact that an “African man” is impotent. The reader who might have judged Akin harshly can begin to reevaluate their feelings towards him. Thinking back at the scene where Akin breaks out in anger throwing the saucer and dining table at the news of his wife’s (fake) pregnancy, we confront the underlying motive when Akin remarks, “Anger is easier than shame” (Adebayọ 212).

Adebayọ furthers this mood of empathy in the novel when the reader finds out that Akin is seeing a specialist in Lagos University Teaching Hospital and when Yejide comments on

Akin’s condition: “Even after I moved out of our bedroom and stopped talking to him, I was sure that I knew who he really was and I believed that man was still there beneath all the deception and pretence” (Adebayọ 230). In the face of a brutal betrayal, however, empathy fails to hold the marriage center: Yejide abandons Rotimi with Akin to take care of and travels to Jos to live independently focusing on her hairstyling business.

A Rite of Protest

When Yejide abandons Rotimi with Akin, she turns against the social construction of the Sweet Mother who must necessarily endure “de suffer” that Nico Mbarga beautifully 61 describes. An atrocious move, Yejide leaves her child to die, an action that ranks her very low on the mothering/motherhood index. In spite of this bad cultural review, I read Yejide’s decision as a powerful rejection of the homoglosia of patriarchal understanding of motherhood. Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta, who openly rejects Western feminism while upholding feminist ideals, once said, “I have no sympathy for a woman who deserts her children, neither do I have sympathy for a woman who insists on staying in a marriage with a brute of a man simply to be respectable” (quoted in Nnaemeka, 1994, 147). Yejide checks both boxes that Emecheta highlights in the sentence above; the first half of the utterance decries a transgression that the other half simultaneously calls for. This duality characterizes women’s life in the margins, a space that operates as a non-space because of its asphyxiating demands; it deprives you of oxygen and provides you with the impulse to speak at the same time. An African proverb (of Cameroonian origin) reads: ‘Women have no mouth.’

According to Okereke (1998), this saying summarizes the myth of silence as the identity of the female gender. Expected to remain in her husband’s house and care for her sick child,

Yejide’s personal views and opinions on Akin’s betrayal and exploitative moves remains unacknowledged. By leaving a manipulative marriage, however, Yéjídé reclaims control and agency and becomes a reincarnation of strong female characters who follow their inner voices and display unmatched temerity in novels by Nigerian women.

In Efuru (1966), Flora Nwapa creates the eponymous character who, like Yejide, struggles with childlessness in marriage and has to embrace polygamy. A strong, beautiful, and economically independent woman, Efuru breaks with tradition to move in with Adizua, despite the fact that “the man had no money for the dowry” (Nwapa 1) and “is [a] nobody

[and] his family is unknown” (Nwapa 3). Efuru will express her non-conformity with tradition in other ways. After she has moved in with him, Adizua disappears and never returns, although they have a daughter, Ogonim. Efuru’s mother-in-law tells her of how the 62 same had happened to her with Adizua’s father who absconded for six years only to return with a terminal disease, and since his demise, she has chosen not to remarry. Efuru thinks to herself: “perhaps self-imposed suffering appeals to her. It does not appeal to me. I know I am capable of suffering for greater things. But to suffer for a truant husband, an irresponsible husband like Adizua is to debase suffering” (Nwapa 73). Efuru’s introspection reveals strong will and self-worth. In Stay With Me, Yejide reaches this level of strength and maturity and in many ways, she mirrors the self-assuredness of Efuru. The latter does not know her mother and only learns about her from her father. She is the only child of her mother. The first two years of her marriage to Adizua does not produce a child. As with Yejide’s Akin, people expected Adizua to take another wife. To these people, “two men do not live together. To them, Efuru was a man since she could not reproduce” (Nwapa 23). This statement anticipates Yejide’s mother-in-law’s assertion: “Women manufacture children and if you can't, you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman” (Adébáyọ ̀ 40). This parallelism of narratives and almost verbatim dialogue show how contemporary texts, like Stay With Me, continue a rite of protest initiated by (real and imagined) historical women. While the reenactment of the diegesis of a classic like Efuru (1966) prefigures the endurance of the social problems highlighted, Nwapa’s characterization of her female protagonist remains a cause for criticism in the literature, as Obioma Nnaemeka notes.

Being an African woman is perhaps not antithetical to being liberated as some

female/feminist critics have implied, but Nwapa has great difficulty in creating

a protagonist who is attached to tradition but can also be strong, independent,

and free-spirited. Efuru unconditionally accepts traditional practices such as

circumcision and polygamy, traditional beliefs (especially the linkage often

made between womanhood and motherhood), and traditional attitudes towards

wifehood and infertility (Nnaemeka, 1994, 144) 63

Nnaemeka is referring to Efuru’s ambivalence towards tradition; she initially tells Adizua not to worry about the dowry, but she would later remind Adizua about the dowry because a part of her still wants to fulfil that aspect of the marriage tradition. The “great difficulty” of ambivalence, contradictions, and ambiguities in the works of African women writers like

Flora Nwapa survives into contemporary texts. In Stay With Me, while Yejide attains the level of strong will and self-worth/self-knowledge as Efuru, she shows an attachment to the tradition she appears to have broken away from.

When Baba Lọla and Iya Martha, Yejide’s in-laws introduce Fúnmi as Akin’s second wife, Yejide is furious to know that Akin is privy to the plan all along and it takes Akin’s reflex to stop Yejide’s hand from landing on his face. But while her in-laws demand remorse and apology, Yejide challenges what she believes and knows to be culturally appropriate in such a situation.

I knew I was supposed to kneel down, bow my head like a schoolgirl being

punished and say I was sorry for insulting my husband and his mother in one

breath. They would have accepted my excuses—I could have said it was the

devil, the weather, or that my new braids were too tight, made my headache

and forced me to disrespect my husband in front of them. My whole body was

clenched like an arthritic hand and I just could not force it to make shapes that

it did not want to make. So for the first time, I ignored an in-law’s displeasure

and stood up when I was expected to kneel. I felt taller as I rose to my full

height (Adébáyọ̀ 13).

Yejide rises to her full height, stands up when she is expected to kneel, and for the first time, ignores the sensibility of culture and tradition. On the one hand, this action is an activation of her notoriety for fierceness and badass demeanor. In High School, she was called “Yejide

Terror” because she always won all the fights after school: “I lost a few buttons, broke a 64 tooth, got a bloody nose many times, but I never lost. I never got one single grain of sand in my mouth” (Adébáyọ̀ 30). On the other hand, her action shows a symbolic break from what she knows to be culturally correct.

Like Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, Yejide rejects tradition as much as she reaffirms it. At the death of Sẹsan, when Mọọmi asks permission to incise “just a few marks on his body” and in lowered voice, “a little whipping,” Yejide refuses twice: “Mọọmi, I said no, there is no need;” importuned again, she blots out, ”I said no. Can’t you hear me?” (Adébáyọ̀ 177). The marks from the incision and whipping, it is believed, will serve as proof that the next baby is an abiku, or a spirit child, if the newborn carries the marks. In the same scene where she rejects the offer to make the incisions, Yejide goes on to say “Yes” to Mọọmi’s repeated request for permission. This is after Yejide has admitted that she knows the tradition and has

“never believed in Abiku at all” (Adébáyọ̀ 177).

In this way, modern female characters, even educated ones like Yejide, still find it hard to entirely break from tradition. Okonjo Ogunyẹmi writes, “African novels written by women, as counternarratives, fascinate with their inherent contradictions as they reveal strength and weakness, beauty and ugliness, ambiguity and clarity, in unfolding the politics of oppression” (Ogunyẹmi 4). I would argue that the ambivalence, contradictions, and ambiguities are a necessary characteristic of strong female characters like Yejide. These characteristics only reveal the complexity of human existence as agents with crisscrossing interests. Yejide wants a child of her own having lost her mother; she wants to heal from the psychological trauma of losing two children and the possibility of the third; she wants to be free from stifling cultural/traditional ordinances. At the heart of these encumbrances lies mythic perceptions that have congealed into law. But in the most paradoxical fashion, the answers she seeks lie on the other side of the coin of these mythic perceptions. Tradition, through the epistemological machinery of oral literature, has been used to subjugate women 65 and keep them in the margins away from a center controlled by and oriented towards phallogocentrism. However, as many scholars have opined, tradition, through the same epistemological tools, can be reappropriated to effect a corrective. Caught between these webs of plasticity of traditional/cultural identities and attachments, the female is expected to exhibit these contradictions and ambiguities.

“Her Name is Ọlamide”

Stay With Me struggles to see death as mere loss. When she is being consoled by mourners on the death of her first child Ọlamide, Yejide reasons: “They were sorry that I had lost a child, not that she had died” (Adébáyọ̀ 126). For her, true empathy would mean the acknowledgement of the fact that there has been an occurrence of death rather than a loss. For what is lost is left to chances of recoverability but death indicates an everlasting dispossession. While the mourners can get over the loss, the bereaved is left with the excruciating realization that a part of them has died. In all of this, it is important to note that

Yejide’s grief comes from a place of loneliness in the world and the perpetual fear that she might never get a child of her own. (This reason provides a broader context for her continued affairs with Dọtun. See the section titled “Undoing Myth I: The Oluronbi Story” above).

Yejide’s expression of her anguish over the death of Ọlamide demonstrates an aberrant way of processing traditional beliefs and ways of knowing. It “squeezed [Yejide] inside that no one wailed or screamed” because

If [her] Ọlamide had grown older, if she had married and had children before

dying, if it was [Yejide] or Akin who had died, the mourners would have been

wailing openly, not biting their lips and shaking their heads and asking

[Yejide] to forget because there would soon be another child (Adébáyọ̀ 126).

Yejide is asking a pertinent question: Does the transience of life nullify the endurance of mourning? By envisioning the futurity of Ọlamide’s life, Yejide acknowledges how the 66

Yoruba culture understands the distribution of time and occupation of space. But she protests the mourners’ reckless manner of telling her to ‘move on,’ and how easily disposable the baby she struggles to have has suddenly become. She questions tradition’s short memory: it was tradition that required motherhood of her; it was tradition that asked her to suffer and do everything necessary to conceive. Now that that child is gone, “it is as though, because

[Ọlamide] had spent so little time in the world, it did not really matter that she was gone—she did not really matter” (Adébáyọ̀ 126-127). In this connection, Stay With Me highlights the oft-overlooked linkage between the disposability of children and the psychological ramifications for the mother.

As a review of tradition, the novel opens a dialogue around the trauma of loss and how existing coping mechanisms may be insensitive to the psychological wellness of the mother who has just lost a child. Yejide is inundated in despair and the insensitivity of people to her pain exacerbates her situation. When Akin tells her he is sorry about “the baby’s” death, Yejide screams, “Her name is Ọlamide” (Adébáyọ̀ 129) to register Ọlamide’s forever presence even in death. Only that this presence will manifest in a spectral form. Not long after Ọlamide passed, Yejide is pregnant with Sẹsan. But at this auspicious moment, she is still haunted by the past: “Walls of pain closed in one me from every side; I tried to push, but the walls were concrete and steel. I was mere flesh and miserable bones” (Adébáyọ̀ 128).

Having been considered barren, enduring the stigmatization of infertility for four years, giving birth to a child becomes more than a vindication, the baby becomes a source of joy and fulfilment. But to see that child pass away means an abrupt truncation of what Buchi

Emecheta calls the Joys of Motherhood. While society can help the bereaved mother find solace in the fact that she could still make more babies, in instances of women within reproductive age, that consolation blocks off the possibility of true empathy just as it trivializes the bond between that mother and the deceased child. 67

In the event of the death of an infant, the traditionally correct attitude as well as the psychological process of coping with such loss is to attribute the death to mystical causation.

For the Yorùbá people, a mystical explanation is that the baby is an àbíkú—a spirit child destined to die in infancy only to reincarnate in a newborn. The àbíkú is a sickly child whose demand for constant attention and (medical) care makes him/her tender but also inevitably self-centered, thus he/she is simultaneously loved and scorned by the parents. Renowned

Nigerian poet, J.P. Clark, addresses the àbíkú directly in his poem of the same title. J.P. Clark addresses the àbíkú in a tone of familiarity; the spirit child is notorious for a lack of commitment to life and a divided attention between the physical world and the spirit realm.

The spirit child is also recognizable from the scarification left on his/her body the last time they were on earth. J.P. Clark urges this itinerant being who ‘comes and goes’ at will to behold the weariness of the mother and have a rethink about its erratic transitions because having “many more mouths” to feed (read: children) “gladdens the heart.”

Coming and going these several seasons, ... But step in and stay For good. We know the knife scars Serrating down your back and front Like beak of the sword-fish, And both your ears, notched As a bondsman to this house, Are all relics of your first comings, Then step in, step in and stay For her body is tired, Tired, her milk going sour Where many more mouths gladden the heart. J.P. Clark Abiku (1963, 100)

In Stay With Me, Mọọmi considers Ọlamide an àbíkú. So is Sẹsan because he too dies in infancy. Otherworldly, the spirit child is dispassionate about life on earth; he/she has to decide to stay or be convinced to stay through efforts that come at a great cost to the parents.

The ritual of scarifying the àbíkú at death is then attenuated by the casual belief that the child 68 is mysterious and vicious. This belief underwrites the cruelty of flogging the remains of

Sẹsan before the body is interred at an undisclosed location to the parents, especially the mother.

The reason for preventing the mother from seeing the body or having knowledge of where and how it is buried has a basis in traditional Yorùbá epistemic order of social organization. In Yorùbá cosmology, life events are ordered in chronological sequence with every organism expected to observe every phase of the cycle of life. Death constitutes a node in that rotation. People are expected to leave in the same order in which they came into the world. Since parents and elders came first, they are supposed to exit first, and the young, much later. Because of the curse of mortality, younger people outlive older ones, but it will count as a terrible tragedy if things happen the other way around. If, as African philosopher

John Mbiti (1969) suggests that within African conceptualization of the world, children form a conduit for the transmission and preservation of life and cultural heritage, then to lose a child to death is tantamount to discontinuation of life, a tragedy so grave that no parent should ever witness because the dead body in itself is a devastating catastrophe personified.

Thus, the idea of keeping the remains of a baby out of sight of the parents is to prevent the exacerbation of what is already a traumatic experience.

However, this mystical coping mechanism is undercut by verifiable medical evidences. Stay With Me juxtaposes Yorùbá traditional beliefs with modernist outlooks on traditional concepts like abiku to reveal a cultural misplacement of facts. Medical tests show that neither Ọlamide nor Sẹsan is a spirit child: they both suffer from Sickle Cell Disease.

Ayọbami Adebayọ deploys medical science to belie the àbíkú myth. In a different connection, that Yejide's children have Sickle Cell Anemia is perplexing because the genetic pairing of Akin and Yejide could not have produced Ọlamide, Sẹsan, or Rotimi, who carry the sickle cell gene. Blood tests prove that Akin and Yejide have compatible blood 69 genotypes: Akin is of the AA genotype while Yejide carries the AS genotype. Their genetic combination should not have resulted in children with the SS genotype. But this genetic anomaly is not perplexing for Akin or Yejide because of Dọtun, Akin’s brother, and his role in the marriage. Apparently, Dọ̀tun is a carrier of the sickle cell gene as much as Yejide and the series of intercourse between them produces a situation of sickle cell inheritance.

Here lies a manifestation of the “double jeopardy” of womanhood/motherhood: While the genomic mismatch between Yejide and Dọtun ends in the death of the first two children produced from their sexual exchanges, only Yejide suffers the after-effect of this extra- medical romance. Dọtun is ensconced in Australia after the birth of Yejide’s third child and regularly writes from there. Even though Akin is proven to be impotent, the effect of his condition is more visible on Yejide than Akin himself because while everyone looks at

Yejide for a baby, Akin simply ‘passes’ for fertile. With her AS genotype, Yejide blames herself for transferring Sickle Cell Disease to her children. In the hospital with Sẹsan, Yejide reflects to herself: “I had made him sick. I had passed on my sickle-cell gene to him; my body had created the fault in his… It is only fair that I should share in what I had caused”

(Adébáyọ̀ 172). This tendency to self-indict has more devastating effect on the psyche of a bereaved mother than any direct accusation from outside.

Michiko Kakutani, American critic and winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for

Criticism, eulogizes Stay With Me as a novel that explores “the pull between tradition and modernity” and “newer imperatives of self-definitions and identity,” but she flaws the novel on the account that “it’s hard for the reader to believe that Yejide, however naive she might be, would not have immediately grasped the first of Akin’s lies” (Kakutani “Portrait of a

Nigerian Marriage”). At the same time, Kakutani excuses this flaw by pointing to the incredible way that Ayọbami Adébáyọ̀ orchestrates the emotional chain reaction set off by the deceptions. In addition to Kakutani’s perceptive evaluation, the setting of the story also 70 lends some credence to Yejide’s naiveté. Set mostly in the years between 1985 and 1990s, a pre-internet dispensation in Nigeria, the novel presents Yejide’s limited knowledge of reproductive and sexual health with some degree of credibility. With the enormous amount of information available in the new dispensation, individuals can turn to the internet to find answers to any questions about their health and relationships. By presenting the serial deaths of Yejide’s first two children, the reader is invited to go out of the text to educate themselves on the true cause of the disease; to seek medical explanations for sickle cell anemia. Given its life-long impact on the carrier of the abnormal hemoglobin genes—Hemoglobin SC, SD, SE,

Sβ0, Sβ+ thalassemia, and SS—the inquisitive reader will find out that early testing becomes crucial to a patient’s survival (American Sickle Cell Association). That the disease is asymptomatic in the first 1-2 months of life but between 3-6 months, dactylitis and splenic problems begin to emerge, and that the first six months hold serious dangers for the baby

(Serjeant 2013). In their study, Chakravorty and Dick include pre-marital and pre-conceptual cases in “antenatal” haemoglobin screening methods. This echoes the call for blood group testing before two people agree to tie the knot. All this makes Stay With Me a didactic, a principle characteristic of Nigerian novels by women.

Ayọbami Adébáyọ̀ creates Yejide from a relatable experience. As she discloses in a

BBC interview, the author is a carrier of the sickle-cell gene herself and she has vowed that the genotype question will be the first set of issues to be addressed whenever she meets a potential life partner (Murray 2017, 15:39-27:23). This tendency to put themselves into their art remains a characteristic of Nigerian women writers. Even in novels where the character does not reflect any direct reference to the author, the fact that the story addresses women- themed issues means that the author is implicated because no matter how they write, African women’s writing is a form of autobiography, what Modupe Kọlawọle (1998) describes as the 71

“fictionalization of selfhood” in her article “Reversing Gender Myths and Images in Buchi

Emecheta’s Novels” (Kọlawọle 159).

Nursing Fathers: Revising the Roles of Men and Women

In her absence, Akin assumes the role of the mother; waking up in the middle of the night at times and every day at 5am to tend to the baby girl. With this image of Akin as a

‘mothering’ father, and beyond the trope of abandonment, the novel is opening a debate about shared responsibility in parenthood. Along this line of thought, Stay With Me makes a feminist statement about the roles of men and women in the care and socialization of children: men should be more involved in parenting as a means of helping working mothers, and also in a bid to deconstruct the underlying belief that childrearing is the duty of wives.

This issue is important because it lies at the heart of the scepticism of many African men to the feminist cause.

Complicating the exclusivity of the ideas of ‘black male feminism’ and of ‘raising feminist consciousness for black men and boys’ on the one hand, and ‘the need to center the concerns of Black women and girls’ on the other hand, Jared Sexton (2018) asks in Black

Men, Black Feminism: Is there not a way to talk about topological figures of difference without boundary? (Sexton 5). Sexton asks this question as a criticism of the Black feminist claim that Black women and girls suffer extra layers of oppression they share with Black men and boys, tangential to what Angela Davis (1981) calls “the deformed equality of equal oppression” (Davis 8). Sexton believes that there is an unremarked and unavoidable tension between the male camp and female camp in the movement for Black emancipation in

America. Instead of the bifurcation of the Black political project, Sexton argues for “a vision of racial justice that centers the concerns of all Black lives” (4). While Sexton’s argument targets African Americans, it is very useful to my conceptualization of gender relations in

Africa, and particularly in Nigeria. I agree with Sexton on the idea of centering all lives 72 because I believe that African males and females are subjects of cultural, colonial, and racial oppression. But I differ from Sexton in that while we can conceive of Black/African precarity as a tragedy for both men/boys and women/girls, what Frances Beal calls Double Jeopardy and Kimberle Crenshaw’s idea of Intersectionality are a reality and any attempt to see both genders as suffering from one and the same plight might be oblivious to the additional burdens that women carry. I still find Sexton’s question very intriguing: Is there not a way to talk about topological figures of difference without boundaries? A good place to start is to consider how Okonjo Ogunyẹmi relates Anne Adams’s apt analogy of women’s clothes to women’s novels.

… the lappa, the most important item in the African woman’s wardrobe. The

simple two or three yards of fabric is versatile: it can be used as a dress, a

blanket, a pillow, a curtain or screen, a mattress or mat, a sheet, a bed cover, a

tablecloth, an umbrella, headgear, a baby carrier, a sling, a wall decoration, or

an aju to cushion and protect the head from the load it carries. Its

commonplaceness ensures its position as a symbol of African womanhood.

Women use it often, men use it also, during the day and invariably at night to

cover themselves. Women’s novels, like the lappa, are intended primarily for

women who mostly bear burdens, yet they are indispensable for communal use

(Ogunyẹmi 1996, 4).

Arguing for a transactional conception of gender in African Feminism: Mythical and Social

Power of Women of African Descent, Diedre Badejọ (1998) submits that: “African feminism cannot carry out its charge without the reestablishment of African manhood to ensure its fulfilment. Conversely, African manhood cannot progress without the reinstatement of the philosophical practices and tenets of queen mothership, female rulership, and a healthy priestesshood. This is our ethos, and restoring balance means just that” (101). Badejọ’s 73 submission provides a valuable lens through which we might begin to engage Sexton’s perceptive question. It also provides a conceptual framework for reading the writings of

African women writers.

In this connection, when Stay With Me gives voice to both Akin and Yejide to narrate their stories in separate chapters of the book, the topological deformations, twists, and bends in gender relations begins to even out. With a dual first-person narrative point of view, the novel presents a subjective account of both the female and the male in a way that presents no villain in the midst of betrayals and broken promises. The documentary style of narration forms a dialogic of genders relations and it is Adebayo’s way of bringing together and placing in conversation with each other both sides of the gender debate, a move that we do not often see reflected in feminist discourses. 74

CHAPTER 4: UNDOING MYTHIC LAWS IN LỌLA SHONẸYIN’S THE SECRET LIVES

OF BABA SẸGI’S WIVES (2010)

The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, [s]he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Simone de Beauvoir (1952, xviii)

Introduction

If female infertility and childlessness are recurring motifs in novels by Nigerian women, then male sexual dysfunction and reproductive challenges form a diegetic counterbalance. Building on the Hegelian notion of the Subject and the Other in The Second

Sex (1952), Simone de Beauvoir theorizes ‘woman’ in a way that I find extremely useful coming into the next text under analysis in this work. The presupposition that ‘humanity is male’ validates the notion of man as the One, the Self, the Subject to whom woman is the

Object, the Other. To the Subject, this Other stands in his way, weighs him down, and impedes his joys. In this chapter, I explore the dynamics of this Subject/Other duality as it plays out in Lola Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Bàba Sẹgi’s Wives. I argue that this thought process of locating deficiency and affliction in the Other makes it difficult to look inwards for a serious factcheck. I also contend that no condition is more pernicious than when the Other defines/accepts herself as the Other.

The Secret Lives of Bàba Sẹgi’s Wives opens with a distraught Bàba Sẹgi or Ishọla

Alao, sick to his gut, deeply unsettled by the childlessness of Bọlanle, his latest wife of two years. He decides to seek the valuable advice of his most trusted and enlightened friend,

Teacher, who suggests seeking an expert’s opinion. Although uneducated, Bàba Sẹgi’s wealth affords him the luxury of catering to the needs of all his dependents. His household presents the image of a patriarchal situation with the husband/father at the center and every other member of the family depending on him for survival; Bàba Sẹgi sits at the top of the 75 family structure and becomes a domineering figure under whom the wives fall and are further ranked. Focusing on the family structure of Okonkwo’s household in Achebe’s Things Fall

Apart, we see a mirror image of the Okonkwo model in The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s

Wives. In the Alao household, Bàba Sẹgi has a strong hold on his house while his sit-at-home wives jostle for his attention as well as his approval. Taken in by the skewed social structure that installed and validated androcentrism, Bàba Sẹgi’s wives identify with the phallic authority of their husband. In a bid to ‘male identify,’ they fight and begrudge each other.

The hierarchy that patriarchy institutionalizes only makes sense within a philosophy of culture that is based on what Nkiru Nzegwu calls the “mono-sex” system (2006, 216).

Notably, the mono-sex paradigm favors the biological male’s perspective; the female is evaluated from his point of view and based on his positionality to the world. Bàba Sẹgi flagrantly flaunts his masculinity and sexual agility and his opinion forms the fulcrum from which the world of his family members revolves. A polygamist, Bàba Sẹgi marries four wives and boasts of seven children from his first three wives. From his male perspective,

Bọlanle is a ‘rotten guava,’ his way of describing her as barren: “When you buy guavas in the marketplace, you cannot open every single one to check for rottenness. And where you find rottenness, you do not always throw away the guava. You bite around the rot and hope that it will quench your craving” (Shonẹyin 38). Interestingly, this disparaging analogy contains the paradoxical notion of tolerance. Bàba Sẹgi’s ability to tolerate Bọlanle and her “barrenness” is not unassociated with the fact that within the mono-sex system, the one species that poses the greatest threat to the authority of the male is not the female; it is another male. Based on his masculinity, the woman is not a match and therefore does not constitute a viable competition for the male's manhood. de Beauvoir points out that

For the male it is always another male who is the fellow being, the other who

is also the same, with whom reciprocal relations are established. The duality 76

that appears within societies under one form or another opposes a group of

men to a group of men; women constitute a part of the property which each of

these groups possesses and which is a medium of exchange between them (de

Beauvoir 70).

The existence of ‘woman’ in the zone of non-existence/non-Being makes it possible for her to be erased from the man’s sensibility as it relates to opposition and the inducement of paranoia. To this end, man is man’s other and woman is the absolute Other. The former, occurring within the immediate range of reference, is the consequential other. The latter, locked away in the zone of non-Being, is simply inessential. When Baba Sẹgi rues marrying a

‘rotten guava,’ the cognitive range of his regret is limited by how society will perceive him.

He would have been less of a man in the eyes of the other men who crowd Teacher’s shack:

“[Baba Sẹgi] didn’t quite know how he would tell the men that all his pounding had proved futile” since only two years ago, “he boasted of his conquest: how Bọlanle was tight as a bottleneck, how he pounded her until she was cross-eyed” (Shonẹyin 4). The seven children that he boasts of notwithstanding, Baba Sẹgi still feels the need to prove his manhood. This unrelenting urge to self-approve provides a new perspective to Frantz Fanon’s (1967) submission in Black Skin White Mask where he argues that the black man is “comparison” in that “he is preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal” (Fanon 211). Fanon makes this statement to explain the fact that in the minds of black men, there is a constant strife to self-assert and score personality scores along the lines of ’who is less intelligent, blacker, and less respectable than the other?’ For Fanon, this enterprise of comparison is against an Other that is not the white man: “[the black man] does not compare himself with the white man qua father, leader, God; he compares himself with his fellow against the pattern of the white man” (Fanon 215). Transposed into the Yoruba cultural context, Fanon’s words apply to both the double Other: The consequential male Other and the inessential 77 female Other. Of the two agents of alterity, the opinion of the consequential male Other has a greater impact on the man’s ego. As put forward by de Beauvoir, women constitute the pawns of power exchange between the two others that are the same—a man and another man—but the male is dreadful of the female insofar as her behavior and social assets pose a threat to his masculinist megalomania. The woman’s social asset registers her in the man’s remote consciousness; it affords her a voice and social maneuverability. Within the mono-sex system, however, speech does not always transcend to audibility and vocality.

“Her Right to an Armchair”

Bọlanle’s education poses a threat to the rest of the women (and Bàba Sẹgi) who are not educated. In an inner circus gossip among the first three wives, Ìya Fẹmi bears out her mind: “I do not want her [i.e. Bọlanle] in this house” (Shonẹyin 49). Ìya Sẹgi, the first wife and by that same virtue, the mother-of-the-house, douses the brewing tension with her cryptic statements. She maintains that this is not a world that Bọlanle knows and that when Bọlanle does not find what she hopes to get, she will be forced to leave the house for the rest of the wives.

Let me ask you this: what does our husband value more than what fills his mouth?

Ìya Fẹmi’s eyes widened. ‘Children!’

‘Ah! Wisdom at last,’ Ìya Sẹgi said. ‘When Bọlanle fails to give him a child, Bàba

Sẹgi will throw her out! We know she will not give him children so we should watch

from a distance (Shonẹyin 50).

This exchange reveals as much as it conceals. It is clear that these women believe that

Bọlanle will not be able to give Bàba Sẹgi any children. What is unclear, however, is whether the inability to make babies lies with Bọlanle or with Bàba Sẹgi. Notably, all first three wives have children of their own. Besides, the women regularly attest to Bàba Sẹgi’s alphamale- ness, as does Ìya Tọ́pẹ. One morning after Bọlanle, looking so burned out, emerges from her 78 bedroom to greet the rest of the women in the kitchen, Ìya Tọ́pẹ remarks: “After a night with

Bàba Sẹgi, the stomach is beaten into the chest by that baton that dangles between his legs”

(Shonẹyin 50). With such statements, the author conspires with her characters to lead the reader to think that the infertility problem may perhaps be with Bọlanle. By emphasizing and reiterating Bàba Sẹgi’s sexual virility, the author reinforces the archetypical/stereotypical

African man sexuality. Given this imagery of an ideal African man whose maleness and sexuality speaks for itself, readers are positioned to ask questions as to why after two years

Bọlanle has not conceived. With a focus on Bọlanle, readers are bound to ask certain questions, but they are also bound to exclude alternative sides to the story.

Being the last wife means Bọlanle gets her husband’s intimate attention the most, and in principle, she is his favorite. The most disgruntled among Bàba Sẹgi’s wives over the entrance of a new wife is Ìya Fẹmi, the third wife. In the same way that Yejide perceives

Fúnmi in Stay With Me, Ìya Fẹmi believes that Bọlanle has come to dispossess her of the special privileges she is due. But Bàba Sẹgi does not seem to be cut out for favoritism; he establishes an egalitarian system in his family and he distributes himself equally in his sexual duties. Bọ́lánlá’s new position does not win her more nights with Bàba Sẹgi than any of the other wives: “She gets her sex ration on Tuesdays, and sometimes she gets an extra day. No less, no more than any of my other wives,” Bàba Sẹgi tells Teacher (Shonẹyin 37). This extra day is usually a Sunday when Bàba Sẹgi makes up for missed rations for any of his wives who, for example, may be on her period on the day of the week she was supposed to get her share. Nkiru Nzegwu notes in Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of

Culture that the mono-sex system is built on subjugation of rather than equality for women.

Thus, the idea of egalitarianism in Bàba Sẹgi’s house only reveals the subordinate status of all four women in relation to their husband who has the power to withdraw sex altogether as a punitive measure of control over his wives. 79

Although he is unbiased in his sexual duties, Bàba Sẹgi’s emphasis on children leads him to rank each wife on the basis of how she can prove her fecundity. The first three wives,

Ìya Sẹgi, Ìya Tọ́pẹ, and Ìya Fẹmi, in that order, have proven their womanliness. For that reason, they have each earned their rights to a whole armchair in the sitting room; only

Bọlanle “hadn’t earned her right to an armchair” (Shonẹyin 11). This armchair comes to mean more than the material object; it encodes the precise ideas of a conducive space to heal and an enduring comfort. An essential item in a house, the presence of a chair and the condition of that chair either add to or take away from the quality of the coziness of the occupier. Also, Shonẹyin’s reference to a chair is reminiscent of how the Yorùbá understand wifehood and marriage: ìjòkó, or chair, signifies an enduring conduciveness in time and space for a woman in wedlock. Children, prosperity, and peace of mind combine to form the armrest for a woman’s ìjòkó. With an armrest, the armchair provides an extra layer of comfort, affording the seater enough room to recline and sprawl.

A victim of rape and a survivor of an unsafe abortion, Bọlanle needs her own armchair to calm her embattled mind which plays host to a “war between who [she] used to be and who [she’d] become” (Shonẹyin 16). Sexually violated at the age of fifteen, Bọlanle lives with the trauma of her rape into her adult life. The rape incident and her romance with

Sẹgun, her landlord’s teenage son, leads to a pregnancy. Bọlanle maintains a remarkable academic record in secondary school. Often compared to her sister, Lara, who is less driven,

Bọlanle lives her teenage life trying to be a “perfect daughter” for her mother, who is idealistic about life, marriage, and motherhood (Shonẹyin 150). Bọlanle’s virginity defines her fragile dignity, but at the event of her rape, her sense of self-worth vanishes. Severely broken, and having lost a grip on her life purpose, Bọlanle embraces polygamy as a form of escapism from her “ruined, damaged, and destroyed” self (Shonẹyin 149-150). Like Yejide in

Stay With Me, polygamy is a tough choice for an educated woman like Bọlanle. While these 80 women accept polygamy, some others, mostly for fear of dispossession, dread it.

Chimamanda Adichie’s Beatrice or Mama in Purple Hibiscus (2003) dreads polygamy. But in the process of preventing marital dispossession by another woman, Beatrice endures a regime of abuse that almost cost the lives of her two children. On her own part, Bọlanle gets into a polygamous marriage to get away from her mother’s insensitivity and constant pressure to get married and have a job.

So, yes. I chose this home. Not for the monthly allowance, not for the lace

skirt suits, and not for the coral bracelets. Those things mean nothing to me. I

chose this family to regain my life, to heal in anonymity (Shonẹyin 16).

Considering the compounding psychological stress from her childlessness, the hostility of her rivals, and the imperative of gaining back a lost self and life purpose, Bọlanle could use some easement in her life and in Bàba Sẹgi’s house. During one of the family times when everyone gathers to watch TV, Ìya Tọ́pẹ makes room for Bọlanle to sit with her in her own armchair.

The only one of the wives who identifies with Bọlanle, Ìya Tọ́pẹ’s action is symbolic. By budging, the little room created for Bọlanle to sit turns into acceptance in the face of hostility.

In an atmosphere filled with toxicity, Ìya Tọ́pẹ creates the much-needed room for Bọlanle to detox, to breathe. Considering the mutual relationship that Bọlanle and Ìyá Tọ́pẹ share in the story, one can assume that this ‘armchair moment’ lasts more than this one time, because even though Bàba Sẹgi breaks his own rule with respect to the armchair, Bọlanle’s comfort would have been short lived.

The privilege that only a new bride enjoys, Bàba Sẹgi personally goes into the storeroom to dust and wipe an armchair that becomes Bọlanle’s. But a great misfortune of being in a polygamous marriage is the impermanence of the fortune of one of the rivals.

Upset by the fact that Bàba Sẹgi breaks his own rules in order to please his new wife, with the exception of Ìya Tọ́pẹ, the other wives are consumed by great envy. Ìya Sẹgi exploits her 81 husband’s discontent with the fact that Bọlanle has not conceived: “Comfort made the female form complacent,” she tells Bàba Sẹgi (Shonẹyin 54). Bọlanle’s armchair, a symbolism of her chance for “comfort,” soon disappears because by the next day, Bàba Sẹgi, taken in by Ìyá

Sẹgi’s words, returns Bọlanle’s armchair to the storeroom.

Bàba-this/that: Reassessing Masculinity and Patriarchy in African Philosophy of

Culture

The Secret Lives of Bàba Sẹgi’s Wives depicts mythic representations and how myths are entwined in the quotidian human experience. Each of Bàba Sẹgi’s wives has a story to tell about how they end up with him, but I focus on Ìya Sẹgi because her case truly presents an example of how myths work to simultaneously strengthen and entrap women. A product of her past, Ìya Sẹgi recounts her formative years living with her mother in a two-bedroom space in the village before her marriage to Bàba Sẹgi. In her own narration, Ìya Sẹgi recalls her mother saying: “Men are nothing. They are fools. The penis between their legs is all they are useful for. And even then, if not that women needed their seed for children, it would be better to sit on a finger of green plantain” (Shonẹyin 97). Ìya Sẹgi’s mother is speaking from her own experience; her husband, Ìya Sẹgi’s father, had absconded with another woman when Ìya Sẹgi was in the womb. His story explains the image of the “absent father” that

Okonjo Ogunyẹmi (1996, 145) writes about. In a broader sense, the absent father may not have died like Ìya Sẹgi’s father; this kind of father is defined by his failure to meet fatherly responsibilities; his abscondment and shirking of duties. He typically comes back later in life to claim paternity, especially when the child has recorded considerable success.

Ìya Sẹgi’s mother makes the above remark along with another empowering statement about female independence. “Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man’s promises,” Ìya

Sẹgi recalls her mother’s words (Shonẹyin 97). I interpret this statement as admonition on female independence of thought and of being. These words will lay the groundwork for Ìya 82

Sẹgi’s understanding of economic empowerment just as they unleash her entrepreneurial instinct. From her fufu business in the village, eighteen-year-old Ìya Sẹgi was able to generate enough income on which she could afford to live independently of her mother. In Bàba Sẹgi’s house, she now owns eight cement stores in the city of Ìbàdàn and “[her] wealth swells by the day” (Shonẹyin 104). This investment remains unknown to her husband and the remaining wives.

In spite of her financial liberation, Ìya Sẹgi’s upbringing imbibed in her a feeling of subordination and inferiority in the sense that she is incomplete in herself and exists as an appendage of her husband. Her marriage to Bàba Sẹgi was arranged between her own mother and that of Bàba Sẹgi who agree to marry their children off to each other, because by the two older women’s estimation, Ìya Sẹgi has entered “the age of shame” at twenty-three and desperately needs a man to complete her (Shonẹyin 99). Although she still manages to retain her business acumen, the mythical knowledges from her early life subsume her acuity in the shadows of her husband. No scene explains this subjugation better than one evening when a young Ìya Sẹgi rummages her room which bears telltales of having been ransacked. She is searching for her savings which she always stashes under her mattress. To Ìya Sẹgi’s dismay, her mother has taken the money and given it all to her future husband, Bàba Sẹgi. Her mother’s argument is that Ìya Sẹgi has allowed money to become her husband. The worry that this mother expresses is very real because many accomplished young women find it hard to marry because some men find a lady’s success intimidating, lest she ‘becomes the husband.’

By giving her daughter’s life savings to a man she wants her to marry, Ìya Sẹgi’s mother further propagates the belief in female submissiveness to male authority. Given that she has previously counseled her daughter on the importance of self-reliance and warned against men’s deception, pressuring her daughter to get married shows a disconnection 83 between what she preaches and what she practices, a situation that cannot be divorced from the entrapments of the cultural ideology on marriage. Although she is wary of men and unfaithfulness in marriage, she forces her daughter to go into marriage mainly because of children: “The world has no place for spinsters. It spits them out,” Ìya Sẹgi’s mother cautions, and goes on to say, “it is every woman’s life purpose to bear children. Do you want to become a ghost in the world of the living? That is not how I want to leave you in this world”

(Shonẹyin 101). Again, from this statement, we see the imperative of children in the narratives that are passed down from generation to generation. In addition to children, Ìya

Sẹgi’s mother wishes companionship for her daughter; she fears her daughter might end up lonely like herself: “I do not want her to die alone like me” (Shonẹyin 99). From this mother’s point of view, we see the double bind: Men can be mischievous and marriage, turbulent; yet children are good to have, but babies must be made within wedlock. Still, received wisdoms are elastic and are open to adaptation. Ìya Sẹgi masters the art of using men for her own purpose—procreation and companionship—and when she could not get children within wedlock, she might as well find them outside of it.

Explaining why she gives all the money to Baba Sẹgi, then Ishọla Alao, Ìya Sẹgi’s mother states: “He will need it to look after you” (Shonẹyin 101). It happens that most of the money goes into executing the wedding ceremony and some more ends up in the groom’s pocket, given that Ishọla does not have enough money at the time to throw a grand wedding.

But the import of the assertion by Iya Sẹgi’s mother points to the ridiculous idea that a wife does not have the cognitive capacity to take care of herself; that in marriage, she lacks what it takes to manage her own affairs financially and otherwise; that her wealth is automatically transferable to her husband, as was the case with the doctrine of coverture in Western societies. In every way, these implicatures systematically solidify male superiority and propagate female inferiority. The problem with the myth of male authority is that it 84 empowers the man to wield absolute power over the woman, such that any exercise of agency from the woman presumably exists under the auspice and/or magnanimity of the husband.

Submissiveness opens to different interpretations and can be negotiated in a way that proprietal authority cannot. In a social structure that operates on relationality, submission can very much substitute for respect, which of course will proceed bi-directionally. But absolute authority in marriage has come to be the preserve of the male. I contend that in the Yorùbá conception of marriage, the attribution of ‘absolute authority’ to the man is an aberration. The

Yorùbá saying, ọkọ ni olórí aya—the husband is the head of the wife—has come to be used to imply the lordship of the husband over the wife. To subscribe to the lordship of the man to the effect that he owns the woman is to acquiesce to women’s subservience under male authority. It is my submission that the premises that produced this logical conclusion are partly derivative of exogenous forces and partly pure androcentric distortions. For one, the word olórí as used in the saying above actually replaces another phrase: olówó orí—the payer/owner of the bridewealth. Long construed as bride price, the bridewealth is a token of appreciation that a groom offers to the bride’s family and especially the bride’s mother. In the past, if paid in cash, a payment process that was often spaced out in convenient instalments, a part of the bridewealth ends up with the bride as a start-up capital for her business venture.

Dowry was also rendered both in the presentation of gifts and the provision of physical labor to the woman’s relatives (McIntosh 2009, 86). Since payment was spaced out, a husband may not claim full entitlement to a woman if he had not completed the instalments; he ran the risk of termination of the marriage at any time. Notably, payment in cash, kind, or labor does not confer any authority of ownership in the same sense that the man henceforth controls the affairs of the bride’s life. Up to the modern time, a woman continues to be a member of her parents’ lineage and makes her own contributions to the family from her new home. And some women are wealthy enough to repay dowry. In all, the closest a man can get to 85 authority in the home is ‘leadership.’ He does not have absolute authority, nor does he become lord-over-all; he has to share his leadership role with his wife who oversees, say, the family’s expenditure, among other vital responsibilities. In many ways, authority is contingent upon the quality of one’s leadership.

This is why the decision of Ìya Sẹgi’s mother to hand out all that Ìya Sẹgi has worked for to a prospective husband is quite antithetical to Yorùbá philosophy of culture as it relates to marriage. Our understanding of how marital relationships work within Yorùbá system of thought also challenges a gendered assumption of hierarchy which places men at the top relative to women at the bottom. The same presumption of male authority and superiority in this case Bàba Sẹgi’s proprietal authority in the story, legitimizes inferiority and incompleteness of women. Different from the act of receiving money in exchange for human merchandise, giving out a daughter to a man along with the fortunes of that daughter amounts to devaluation of her personhood. It is also symbolic of servitude and subservience. Quite incongruous to how marriage is conceived in Yorùbá land, such devaluation of women presents a perfect example of what Nkiru Nzegwu (2006) describes as “fictive traditions and ideologies” (21). Fictive because the reality that such practices portray lack fundamental basis in the epistemological and ontological configuration of the Yorùbá philosophy of thought. Systematically ratified by the long bromance with Eurocentrism, which primes the asymmetrical mode of sex valuation, the preferential treatment of men coupled with the assumption of their leadership mettle in every area, including the home, led to the othering of women out of political, economic, and social relevance. Over the years, these views and practices became “Yorùbá tradition.”

Unlike the mono-sex system which assumes the homogenization of power in marriage and suggests that intelligence is a gendered endowment, the dual-sex system within which the

Yorùbá culture operates, promotes decentralization of authority in the same fashion that it 86 distributes ‘sites’ of influence in marriage (Nzegwu 2006, Oyěwùmí 1997). The dual-sex system acknowledges sex differences, but unlike the mono-sex paradigm, “it does not define those differences within a paradigm of domination and subordination” (Nzegwu 2006, 220).

A fundamental premise of the mono-sex system is that it is based upon the physical body.

This system focuses our attention on the man’s and woman’s body, highlighting the possession/lack of certain body parts, forming the basis of biological determinism. The dimophic conception of power relations in the dual-sex system recognizes these differences.

However, this ungendered dual-sex dynamic situates biological and social prestige and relevance in both sexes, rather than in the one, namely the male. In traditional Yorùbá society, it is not the case that “physical bodies are always social bodies” (Oyěwùmí xii)

[emphasis original].

Primarily constructed around the imperative of procreation and self-perpetuation, the institution of marriage in Yorùbá land affords measured privileges to both husband and wife.

Failure to acknowledge the value of the other sex spells doom for the marriage: Bàba Sẹgi’s intimidating presence, his massive physical form, agility, and his claim of ‘lordship’ over his four wives, does not translate to a full grasp of what happens right within his household. His wives make him believe that he has all the powers when in fact they know more than he does and control the affairs of the home behind his back. The fact is that they are simply using his wealth to secure their own futures and that of their children.

“A man whose house is full of birth,” Bàba Sẹgi remarks “will never want for mirth”

(Shonẹyin 201). The irony is that not one of the seven children—Ìya Sẹgi gives birth to two children, Ìya Tọ́pẹ three, and Ìya Fẹmi two—are biologically fathered by Bàba Sẹgi.

Shonẹyin’s novel punctures the bloated ego that accompanies being called Bàba-this or

Bàba-that. We are made to understand that the suffixal Bàba- (read: father of) can be utterly titular. Whereas he is referred to as Bàba Sẹgi in the story, the fact remains that that title is 87 merely nominal. Although Baba Sẹgi qualifies for paternity, being the only father-figure that the children know, in a society where the boundaries between biological and public fatherhood is clearly marked, the term “Bàba Sẹgi” is emptied of its masculine and fertile implicatures.

The twist is this: While biological paternity can be dissociated from its linguistic anchorage on Bàba-this or Bàba-that, biological maternity cannot be so detached because it is the woman who houses the baby in her womb and nurtures it from its embryonic stage until it becomes a fully formed neonate, and beyond. That Bàba Sẹgi in The Secret Lives Bàba Sẹgi’s

Wives and Akin in Stay With Me have a biological condition that prevents them from impregnating their wives shows that men are sometimes responsible for childlessness in marriage. The case of both men also demonstrates that women and men are equally crushed under the weight of cultural expectations. This cultural weight often manifests in an interesting fashion that is reminiscent of Fanon's notion of “comparison.” When ‘woman’ gets a proper redefinition to the extent that ‘woman’ is conceptualized as the whole half of the human puzzle, and the presupposition that ‘humanity is male’ undergoes a critical cultural reevaluation, then men and women can enter into similar fields of a comparison that follows from total complementarity. 88

CONCLUSION

So far, I have attempted a survey of the ‘woman question/problem’ as it relates to the cultural conditions that put a strain on motherhood in the Nigerian situation and the Yorùbá society in particular. I argue that the manner in which feminism is adapted and (re)framed within the African context will determine the extent to which it is successful as a movement.

I maintain that African feminism must be conceptualized as a dialectic, a mode of renegotiating gender relations to bring about gender equity. I have also attempted to show that the ‘woman question/problem’ is not exclusively women’s. In many ways, the problem is best apprehended as a wo/man palava, as Chikwenye Ogunyẹmi conceptualizes it in her book

Africa Wo/man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women (1996). The conditions that necessitate delay in women’s reproductive ability often have their origins in the literal and metaphoric value of the fertility of men. These strictly biological indices have figurative implications. From Ayọbami Adebayo’s Stay With Me and Lola Shonẹyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Sẹgi’s Wives, it is clear that male virility and fertility are a part of what Michael

Awkward identifies as “prevailing social fiction” (Awkward 102). The conditions of the male characters in both novels exemplify the extent to which social privilege is sometimes constitutive of oppression for the subject so privileged. By all estimations, Akin and Baba

Sẹgi are less affected by the consequences of their wives’ childlessness even though they are directly responsible for the situation.

So, what are the larger implications of this work for a Yorùbá society of the future?

Another way of framing this question is to ask: what lessons must we take away from the lives and experiences of Yejide and Bọlanle? In this connection, the counternarratives provided in the texts I analyze in this work set a tone for a dialogic interaction, but the issues that are raised revisit difficult topics that call for a reorientation of the mind and a redefinition of social and ethical priorities. To begin to give answers to the questions above, it is 89 imperative to reassess our relationship with two significant notions that are central to the

Yorùbá ways of apprehending the world: death and children. Both operate in fascinating ways: the dead are not entirely dead if there is someone to remember them (Mbiti 1969). The need for continuity makes children desirable. In the Yorùbá society, and indeed other African societies, children are social security for the parents. But not every woman is able to make babies, a situation that is very much true with men. This factual knowledge should guide our evaluation of childless marriages going forward.

The other lesson relates to our attitude to death and mourning. When Yejide laments the insensitivity of the mourners to her everlasting pain—they were sorry she lost a child, not for the fact that the child had died—she is asking us to rethink language of consolation.

Indeed, we are called to reevaluate language and the violence that language performs. Up to the moment of the conception of Yejide’s first child, we witness the work of language: the stigma that accompanies being characterized as “barren” is powerfully indelible in a society that values children. Having borne the emotional scars of this social reproach for many years, giving birth to a child means more than justification, it is a total healing. To then lose that child, as Yejide does on two occasions, leaves the mother in total devastation. Stay With Me becomes a didacticism in that sense: intending couples would be investing in lasting happiness if they are medically well informed of not only their partner’s fertility but also their genetic compatibility if the priority of that marriage is childbearing. But the biggest lesson will not be with medicine and science; the real didactic resides in reassessing an epistemology that sanctions absolute violence.

Violence here does not mean the act of physically administering punishment for witchcraft or murder of a husband, as many women have been subjected to. That kind of violence is what the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, writing in Violence: Six Sideways

Reflections (2008), calls subjective or visible violence. Zizek identifies a different kind: 90 symbolic violence. This is the “violence embodied in language and its forms” as it manifests in incitement and habitual speech forms in ways that impose “certain universe of meaning”

(Zizek 1, 2). The Yorùbá thought process considers a child who dies in infancy an abiku, the spirit child that is born to die. While it makes sense to want to attribute death to fate and articulate consolation in the language of the inevitabilities and the vicissitudes of life, there is a symbolic violence in the way we expect women to grieve. Like the mourners to Yejide, we say to a mother who has just lost a child to death: move on. It is more so very easy for us to say this after convincing ourselves that the child is evil and mysterious.

In the larger context, if reference to the mythical abiku as a coping mechanism in

Yorùbá cosmology is now particularly contentious in the light of scientific evidence, how do we let women (and men) grieve and mourn the death of a child in infancy? How might we alter languages that desensitize our minds of the ability to truly empathize with a grieving mother? It is my opinion that for our language to change, the wellspring of our thought pattern must be revamped: we must value every child as a true gift regardless of their health status. Shunning ableism and seeing the best in every child is the beginning of this transformation. A larger support system is needed; the government has the responsibility to make life comfortable for children with any form of disability, but the place and duty of the individual cannot be filled by the government either. How much we value, support, and care for children with sickle cell anaemia, cerebral palsy, impacted vision, or impacted hearing goes a long way to making life easy for them. And within the context of this work, how much we connect with these children will put us in a position to truly empathize with the parent, especially the mother, during grief.

This work has so far focused on married women and therein lies one of its limitations.

Ironically, the female protagonist in the texts I read present examples of areas that require further research: Yejide and Bọlanle move from married women to single women. My 91 research defers to future study for a thorough analysis of the position of single women in

Yorùbá and Nigerian society today. At the end of each story, both Yejide and Bọlanle leave their respective marriages for good, but the journey ahead does not promise a blissful nirvana.

Whether or not they will be socially accepted or respected as complete women that they have each become remains to be seen, for as Grace Eche Okereke (1998) informs us,

There is yet no clearly defined respectable space for the single woman in this

culture. And so, the life of the single woman remains a monologue of

unrespectability anchored on patriarchally-defined tenets of morality that do

not apply to the bachelor (Okereke 147-148).

In the Yorùbá society to which Yejide and Bọlanle belong, when a woman leaves a marriage, no amount of the reasons that she tries to provide as an explanation f or her exit tends to be enough. In fact, the idea of walking out of a marriage is generally unthinkable. If by society’s standards, a female is required to have a child and maintain a functional marriage to complete her womanhood, it appears that the womenfolk will remain in an abyss of incompleteness and insufficiency. Along these lines of thought lies a critical need for more investigation: how are modern Nigerian/Yorùbá women challenging or embracing existing narratives around marriage and childlessness in marriage? Research into social respectability of single women/mothers may show how the cultural landscape is shifting to accommodate or reject cultural dissidents, as it were. It may also reveal the psychology of women who refuse to be defined by marriage/childbearing and what cultural ideologies drive their resolve. 92

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