Uhamiri Or a Feminist Approach to African Literature: an Analysis of Selected Texts By Women in Oral and Written Literature.

Abstract

This dissertation reads and re-visions a number of African writers--Chinua Achebe, Okot p'Bitek, Cyprian Ekwensi, Sembene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong'o Ama Ata Aidoo, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba--in a study of the Woman Question in African literature. A genealogy of the Question is first traced and developed in traditional women's songs. The tracing of a historical connection between old and new articulations, be they by female praise-singer or modern novelist, occupies a fundamental place in this dissertation. My selection of text and artist has been so structured as to cover a variety of thematic developments and creative confrontations. By thus conjoining, say, MaShezi's "Grappler with the bull that others are afraid of" and Mariama Ba's novel So Long A Letter, we arrive at a sense of the desire for a kind of empowering that this dissertation defines in terms of Presence and Plenitude. These two pivotal terms are developed in the polyvalent context within which I interpret Uhamiri, the lady of the lake in Flora Nwapa's Efuru. Uhamiri involves us in and also transcends the common formulations of culture and gender. The more usual theses of Traditional/Woman, anti-theses of Modernity/Man, and syntheses of Afro-Saxonism, Assimile/ and rogyny are translated by and in Uhamiri into a fourth stage, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, in the idealization of diversity. I have therefore oriented this study's feminism toward Uhamiri, and she dominates my reading of reality and potential for this and other work yet to be done on the Woman Question in African cultures. She is there at the bottom of the blue lake, beautiful of body, with her long hair; she has no children but is called mother by men and worshipped in a cult of women. She is, it seems to me, an especially effective meeting point for the dialogic possibilities at work in the Woman Question. It is significant that in her search for Presence and Plenitude, Nwapa's female protagonist dreams a dream that is as appropriate as it is complex: "She dreamt of the woman of the lake, her beauty, her long hair and her riches. She had lived for ages at the bottom of the lake. She was as old as the lake itself. She was happy, she was wealthy. She was beautiful. She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never experienced the joy of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her?"