Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page i John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jobs Stories of women Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page ii John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page iii John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jo Stories of women Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation ELLEKE BOEHMER Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page iv John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job Copyright © Elleke Boehmer 2005 The right of Elleke Boehmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6878 9 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 6878 2 First published 2005 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10987654321 Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page v John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jobs For Ben Phipson Vijay Keshav Rosa Marshall Todd Thomas and Sam In memory Mia Fabienne Nuttall-Mbembe 23–30 March 2004 Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page vi John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page vii John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jo Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons: theorising the en-gendered nation 22 2 ‘The master’s dance to the master’s voice’: revolutionary nationalism and women’s representation in Ngugi wa Thiong’o 42 3 Of goddesses and stories: gender and a new politics in Achebe 54 4 The hero’s story: the male leader’s autobiography and the syntax of postcolonial nationalism 66 5 Stories of women and mothers: gender and nationalism in the early fiction of Flora Nwapa 88 6 Daughters of the house: the adolescent girl and the nation 106 7 Transfiguring: colonial body into postcolonial narrative 127 8 The nation as metaphor: Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera 140 9 East is east: where postcolonialism is neo-orientalist – the cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy 158 10 Tropes of yearning and dissent: the inflection of desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga 172 Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page viii John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's J viii Contents 11 Beside the west: postcolonial women writers in a transnational frame 187 12 Conclusion: defining the nation differently 207 Select bibliography 223 Index 235 Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page ix John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job Acknowledgements I first wish to acknowledge with much gratitude the support of the A.H.R.B. Research Leave Scheme which gave me the time to complete the final part of the research towards, and a substantial part of the writing of, this book. I am grateful to the Department of English and Media at the Nottingham Trent University for research leave support. I should like to thank my col- leagues in the department, especially Alison Donnell, Patrick Williams, Tim Youngs and Nahem Yousaf of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, as well as Roberta Davari-Zanjani for her kind encouragement. Many thanks to Susan Andrade, John Barnard, Shirley Chew, Lyn Innes, Hermione Lee, Susheila Nasta, Judie Newman, Benita Parry, Angela Smith, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Robert Young for support and inspiration, given in different contexts and capacities. I owe gratitude to Pal Ahluwalia, Rehana Ahmed, Derek Attridge, Bridget Bennett, Tim Brennan, Amit Chaudhuri, Rinka Chaudhuri, Laura Chrisman, Leela Gandhi, Philip Gehrens, Lucy Graham, Gareth Griffiths, Claudia Gualtieri, Liz Gunner, Lisa Hill, Graham Huggan, Neil Lazarus, Satish Keshav, Nazreena Markar, Gail Marshall, Achille Mbembe, Anne McClintock, John McLeod, Jo McDonagh, Jon Mee, David Mehnert, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Catherine Morley, Stuart Murray, Steph Newell, Sarah Nuttall, Rob Nixon, Ken Parker, Ranka Primorac, Terence Ranger, Helen Richman, Michael Roberts, Meg Samuelson, Kay Schaffer, Jon Stallworthy, Keya Tanguly, Alex Tickell, Helen Tiffin, Paula Teo, Wes Williams, Clair Wills, Naomi Wolf, and the other fellow writers, friends and scholars with whom I’ve been privileged to share ideas on gender and the nation – and other topics besides! – over the past several years. Inexpressible thanks are owed to my family, Thomas, Sam and, above all, Steven, long-suffering endurer of late-night ‘table-tapping’ on the upper floor. The journal articles and essays in books on which a group of the chapters here are based have been substantially revised, elaborated and, in certain cases, Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER PRELIMS 3/22/05 2:54 PM Page x John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jobs x Acknowledgements updated; however, I wish to express my thanks to the editors and publishers of the following: ‘Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons: representations of nationalism and women’, From Commonwealth to Postcolonial, edited by Anna Rutherford. London: Dangaroo, 1992, pp. 229–47. ‘Revolutionary nationalism and the representation of women in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26:1 (1991), 188–97. ‘Ofgoddesses and stories: gender and a new politics in Achebe’, Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991, pp. 104–12. ‘Stories of women and mothers’, in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing, edited by Susheila Nasta. London: The Women’s Press, 1991, pp. 3–23. ‘Daughters of the house: the adolescent girl and the postcolonial nation’, Small Worlds: Transcultural Visions of Childhood, edited by Rocio G. Davis and Rosalia Baena. Pamplona: University of Navarre Press, 2001, pp. 59–70. ‘Transfiguring: colonial body into narrative’, Novel, 26:3 (Spring 1993), 268–77. ‘The nation as metaphor in post-colonial literature: Ben Okri and Chenjerai Hove’, English Studies in Transition, edited by Robert Clark and Piero Boitani. London. Routledge, 1993, pp. 320–31. ‘East is east and south is south: feminism and postcolonialism in Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy’, Women: A Cultural Review, 11:1/2 (2000), 61–70. ‘Without the west: Indian and African women writers in the 1990s’, African Studies, 58:2 (1999), 157–70. Reprinted in English Studies in Africa, 43:2 (2000). ‘Tropes of yearning: the troping of desire in contemporary Zimbabwean women’s writing’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38:2 (2003), 135–48. Elleke Boehmer - 9781526125965 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 03:23:25PM via free access BOEHMER Makeup 3/22/05 2:55 PM Page 1 John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Jobs: Introduction Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longings to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity. (Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason)1 Say No, Black Woman Say No, When they give you a back seat In the liberation wagon Yes Black Woman A Big No. (Gcina Mhlope, ‘Say no’)2 Girl at war The beginning of this study of gender, nation and postcolonial narrative lies, appropriately, in story – a story about a ‘girl’, a girl at war. The ‘girl’, Gladys, is the at first nameless young woman whom the narrator of Chinua Achebe’s 1960s short story ‘Girls at war’ encounters at three repre- sentative moments during the years of the Biafra War.3 Achebe has long been intrigued by the power granted women in myth (take Ani, Idemili), but what is at issue in the present story is not so much mythical presence as the ‘girl’ Gladys’s nationally signifying condition. She is in effect on three different occa- sions and under three different guises a sign of the at-first-emergent and then declining nationalist times. With ‘Girls at war’ Achebe expresses something of the exhaustion and disil- lusionment that was the aftermath of the 1967–70 Biafra conflict in Nigeria.