História das Áfricas e Literatura: as mulheres igbos na escrita literária de Flora Nwapa

Por meio do diálogo teórico com intelectuais das Áfricas e de uma episteme que, oriunda de reflexões dos campos de estudos pós colonial e decolonial, permite emancipar os sujeitos da pesquisa enquanto produtores de conhecimento acerca de si mesmos e da realidade que os cerca, apresento neste trabalho resultados da pesquisa na qual propus construir interpretações acerca da vivência de mulheres igbos evidenciadas na escrita literária de Flora Nwapa, nigeriana e autora da obra Efuru. Dentro da perspectiva de articulação entre História das Áfricas e Literatura apresento possibilidades de utilização das literaturas africanas pós-coloniais na construção de conhecimentos sobre mulheres igbos e os processos históricos ocorridos na Nigéria da primeira metade do século XX, a partir de uma perspectiva africana.

Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature

By invoking Flora Nwapa, this monograph draws attention to Nigerian women writers in world literature, with an emphasis on femininity and spirituality. Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) was the first internationally published novel in English by a female African writer. With the establishment of Tana Press in 1977, Flora Nwapa also became the first female publisher in Africa. Although Flora Nwapa has been recognized as the ‘mother of modern African literature’, she is not sufficiently acknowledged in world literary canons or world literature studies, which is something this monograph aspires to redress, with the help of earlier studies, especially Nigerian scholarship. Drawing on the Efuru@50 celebration in Nigeria in 2016, this book explores the revival of Flora Nwapa’s fame as the pioneer of African women’s literature. Using an ethnographic rather than biographical approach, it captures Flora Nwapa’s literary practice in the context of the Nigerian literary scene and its interlinkages with world literature. The ethnographic portrayal of Flora Nwapa is complemented with an exposé of a select number of contemporary Nigerian women writers, based on interviews during fieldwork in Nigeria. The book uses concepts like creolized aesthetics and womanist worldmaking to advance scholarly understandings of world literature, which is conceived here as a pluriverse of aesthetic worlds. Exploring experimental ethnographic writing, the book combines the genres of creative non-fiction, descriptive ethnography and scholarly analysis, in an effort to make the text more accessible to academic as well as non-academic readers. Through travel notes the experience of fieldwork is shared in a candid manner. Detailed ethnography from the Efuru@50 literary festival is presented to show the expansion of Flora Nwapa’s fame. In-depth analyses of Flora Nwapa’s literary works and the cultural context of her literary practice cover a wide range of themes, from feminine storytelling and children’s literature, to publishing and digitalization. The theoretical discussion draws on anthropological, literary and African womanist theory to contextualize and explore the central themes of femininity and spirituality in world literature. Inspired by the social change perspective of African womanism and critical decolonial theory, the book makes a contribution to current efforts to explore a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world of many worlds. Paying close attention to gender complementarity and sacred engagements in Flora Nwapa’s literary worldmaking, it shows how world literature can help us create other possible worlds of human, spiritual and environmental coexistence.

Forces and Flaws in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu

Considering her unique position as the premier African woman to publish a novel in English, given, also, her relatively artistic delineation of the African woman’s experience at a time when there is a dearth of female voice on that topic; when works of the male authors generally denigrate women, Flora Nwapa receives a commendable level of attention from critics all over the world. While most of the critics appreciate her for drawing attention to the strength and challenges of the African woman, others fault her for the absence of literary dexterity in her narrative. But for some critics’ romance with Uhamiri, not enough attention, relatively, has been given to the intrinsic and extrinsic forces surrounding Nwapa as a writer and how she manages these forces in plot development. Thus, this paper addresses this concern through the analysis of her foremost works, Efuru andIdu. Certain oversights are, also, noted some of which result from her deliberate or unconscious attempt to handle the forces that influence her. This is to draw attention to a writer’s conscious or unconscious struggle with forces, natural or supernatural, and, also, point to certain flaws, in Nwapa’s narrative, for the advancement of scholarship. The choice of Nwapa and her first two novels derives from the need to approach a relatively new topic from the beginning. Key Words: Forces, flaws, tradition, love, muse, influence.

The utilization of literary techniques in Flora Nwapa’s Never Again and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

This research investigates the utilization of literary techniques in two Nigerian historical fictions: Never Again by Flora Nwapa and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. Nwapa and Adichie are two creative writers belonging to two different generations of Nigerian writers. While the former is of the first, the latter is of the third generation. In their two different novels in focus, it is observed that they deployed diverse literary techniques in variegated fashions to achieve the same goal – creating fictional works that deal with the sensitive issues of the Nigerian Civil War. Using new historicism (NH) as its theoretical anchor, this study uses historical-analytic and literary methods to posit that no two creative writers apply literary techniques in an identical manner even when their subject matter is the same. Rather, the deployment of literary tools is usually a function of talent, training, idiosyncrasies, orientation and propensities of a particular author. It is, of course, the patterns of such deployments that create and confer identity and uniqueness to various writers across the globe, such that when a section of the work of a known author is read, his or her name comes to mind. Using New Historicism as a critical searchlight, this paper evaluates compares and contrasts the utilization of literary techniques in the two novels aforementioned. Both writers have utilized literary elements in various ways to foreground and portray the cancerous issues of corruption, ethnicity, nepotism and avarice – the issues that led to the unfortunate and devastating Civil War, and till today continues to limit the progress of Nigeria. Keywords: Literary techniques, NH, Never Again, Nigerian Civil War, Half of a Yellow Sun

Gender Issues in Alcohol Consumption: A Study of Equiano’s Travels, Nwapa’s Efuru and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

This paper appraises gender issues in alcohol consumption in Africa, in terms of processing and control using Oladuah Equiano’s autobiography- Equiano’s Travels, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. These three literary texts are thoughtfully chosen for the study, in view of the fact that Equiano pioneered African literature, and advanced by Flora Nwapa and Chinua Achebe in their debut, Efuru and Things Fall Apart, published in 1966 and 1958, respectively. In Equiano’s Travels, published in 1789, Equiano capture and document the Igbo lifestyle in its nativity. Scholars have attempted to look at the works of these literary titans from several perspectives and themes but, to the best of the knowledge of these researchers, they have not enquired into the Igbo lifestyle in alcohol consumption and given it the desired academic attention as amply presented in the literary works of these literary paragons and pathfinders, as the present study intends to do. While Achebe looks at the traditional humane living of Igbo society in the hinterland in its pre-colonial period, Nwapa discusses the lifestyle and folkways of Igbo Lake people of Oguta. Nwapa presents a segment of this Igbo society, which grants women access to alcoholic drink in the public, in sharp contrast to the rest of Igbo society that restricts women from drinking the same liqueur. Likely, the ample liberty and tremendous respect accorded to the female folk in Oguta Igbo subculture may be responsible for this, coupled with the fact that the river deity of the Lake, Uhamiri goddess, may have provided further evidence to the improved status accorded to women. Thus, Nwapa in the pages of her literary works, especially in Efuru and One Is Enough, brings to our doorstep the lifestyle and folkways of Ogbuide Lake people of Oguta, which enable women to enjoy this unrestricted liberty of self-expression and audacious access to alcoholic drinks at the profane gaze of men, as it was. Equiano, through his travails and escapades of slavery, shows the changing trends in alcohol drinking and culture especially the differences in female drinking cultures based on geography and climate. Today, the ethos of Igbo society has changed remarkably. The paper seeks to investigate these details using Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Nwapa’s Efuru as well as Equiano’s Travels, our texts of focus. The inquiry is essentially literary or library research.