In terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the poetics of writing back presents itself as an intertextual dialogue between postcolonial literatures, on the one hand, and the colonialist mentality, its literary manifestations and their influence, on the other. Chinua Achebe is considered a classic of writing back, especially with his novel . However, in the context of literary and social processes of transformation, this showpiece of writing back has become a pre-text of differently oriented intertextual dialogues which likewise increasingly come under the heading of writing back. In this essay, I will take as my point of departure and discuss not only the narrow understanding of writing back in its original orientation, but also two more recent manifestations of this intertextual dialogue in Nigerian literature. With an emphasis on novels by Flora Nwapa and Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, I wish to focus on the intertextual dialogue between Nigerian women's writing and both Igbo oral narratives and writings by male Nigerian authors.
An ecofeminist study of Flora Nwapa’s ‘Efuru’
