The Role of Literature in Raising Women’s Consciousness Towards Transformation in Nigeria

-Grace Eche Okereke

Consciousness is awareness; to be conscious then is to attain a state of awareness. And since “the locus of consciousness (is) the psyche” (Clark and Holquist 228), then consciousness raising is the process of re-educating, re-structuring the psyche to put it into a state of awareness. Transformation connotes change in all spheres of life –the cultural, social, economic, educational, political. The literature of the people is the imaginative record of their micro-and macro-history; it imaginatively plots the trajectory of their individual and collective transforming experiences in time and space. Also, “Literature not only draws from life, but seeks to direct the society through each writer’s vision (Okereke 162). Therefore, literature and life share an osmotic relationship as each informs the other. Thus, literature is a major instrument of consciousness raising in any age towards the issue at stake in the collective existence of a people.

The colonial experience engendered literary works that raised the consciousness of different African peoples towards the struggle for political independence. In Nigeria, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are examples. Neo-colonialism and imperialism, capitalism with its corollary classism generated Marxist Literature whose revolutionary consciousness has informed the resistance of the working class against the exploitation of the bourgeoisie. In Nigeria, Festus Iyayi’s Violence and The Contract are examples of Marxist literature.

In all these societal battles which have also been staged in the literary arena, men and women have been lumped together with race and class as the major ideological boundaries demarcating the oppressor from the oppressed, the powerful from the powerless, the victimizer from the victimized. But the 80’s and 90’s have witnessed an increased gender consciousness in the various power dichotomies in Africa. Ironically, gender inequality that informs the politics of existence in society is as old as the universe, yet it has been voiced only recently, especially in Africa. The voicing has been achieved because of the increased gender consciousness that has swept across all areas of life in Africa, consequent upon the multiple nobilities now open to women.

Gender consciousness in Nigeria has engendered a literary sub-culture that highlights and renders visible the female perspective hitherto subsumed under the male perspective. This has in turn “opened women’s eyes” as well as raised society’s consciousness towards the position of the genders in society’s structures, thus reopening the question and reassessment many things that were hitherto taken for granted.

It was taken fro granted that the male is at the forefront in all sphere in society. This has reflected in literature where the male occupied centre stage in literary creativity and criticism as writers, characters, and critics. The female, regarded naturally as the “second sex” occupied the back stage, the margins in all these spaces after the males. Sometimes, she is completely absent. Even when the woman is the point of focus in creativity and criticism, she still occupies the back stage with the male steering the ship of Nigeria (and African) literature. Thus, the male has been the producer of literary meaning and the female has been more of a passive consumer of this male-constructed meaning. Chikwenye O. Ogunyemi laments this “Phallic” literary tradition in “Women and Nigerian Literature” (60-67). Women writers and critics lament it in In their own Voices: African Women Writers Talk (James, 153pp).

But with the dispersal of feminism, the seed of female consciousness, across the world, including Africa, women have achieved a new and constructive awareness that subversively questions the back stage position of their gender. Their questioning has led to a new socio-literary production constructed with the language of revolt reappraising the worth of the woman and her rightful position alongside man in all societal power structure. As Catharine MacKinnon asserts: “as Marxist method is dialectical materialism, feminist method is consciousness raising: the collective critical reconstruction of the meaning of women’s social experience as a woman lives through it” (543). Thus consciousness raising is central in feminist aesthetics. Nigerian women writers and critics are currently engaged in a corrective aesthetics that places gender under literary microscope to examine and analyse all hidden “micro-organisms” and their functioning systems in power discourse, to better educate the Nigerian woman (and man) on her role in transformation.

Hitherto, male writers assigned the multiple spaces in transformation to the men, while the women, even when highly educated, served to rest and revitalized the tired men for greater performance and achievements. The edging out of the female from power discourses and the sites of production of meaning in Nigeria is obvious in the dichotomization of male and female roles in male authored novels. Examples of these are Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and A Man of the People that either absent women or place her on the margins of political discourse in both colonial politics and local politics.

There are also the novels of Elechi Amadi –The Concubine, The Great Pond, and The Slave - that edge the woman out of cultural politics and its multiple dimensions of production of ritual meaning, by making her a victim of male conquest. There are also the novels of Cyprian Ekwensi –Jagua Nana’s Daughter, Iska, and The People of the City –that edge the woman out of the high urban culture by making her “a biological aperture” (Anais Nin qtd. In Ogundipe-Leslie 5)at the service of ambitious, achieving men. However, this role of servitude assigned to the female in male-authored works to an extent reflects her marginal position in transformational processes in the Nigerian society, especially during the periods of the writing of these novels.

But the Nigerian women writer, serving as a collective eye, the collective consciousness of the gender, looked again and saw that she as an individual was endowed with resources that could help transform her society. And if she possessed them then other members of her gender also possessed these resources. The woman writer then proceeded to employ her brain and her pen to tell of women’s worth, to throw into sharp relief woman’s potentials and capabilities geared towards raising the consciousness of her gender for the transformation of her society, Nigeria.

And so Nigerian women writers –Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Zulu Sofola, Ifeoma Okoye, Zaynab Alkali to name a few, took a closer look at women in their respective contexts and redefined them within transformational processes.

These women writers often launch their creative careers by constructing female consciousness within domestic space because it is here that her being (existence), her “I AM” is most questioned and often deconstructed. When the female has succeeded in establishing herself as a subject in the domestic hearth, she often succeeds in carving a place for herself in the larger transformational structures. But when she has failed and allowed her “being” to be deconstructed, by patriarchal values, she often died a multiple death culminating in the final physical exist, which is most times ironically librating although escapist. This is the case with Idu in Nwapa’s Idu, Akunna and Nnu Ego in Emecheta’s The bride Price and the Joys of Motherhood respectively. Thus, raising women’s consciousness to deal with the micro-realities of daily living in patriarchal marriage with an often antagonistic husband and hostile in-laws, is often the preparing ground for self-application and relevance in the macro-realities of sexual politics in transformational structures…..

From the foregoing, it is obvious that gender is to feminism what class is to Marxism –the superstructure of consciousness on which the struggle for libration is constructed. Literature, especially the novel, has played and still playing a major role in construction of this new consciousness. Literature has achieved this by making both women and men aware that the female is endowed with great resources that could be tapped and harnessed for the successful transformation of Nigeria, thereby making it a better place for male and female harmonious co-existence.

Culled from NDỤǸỌDE; Calabar Journal of the Humanities Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000

bookagewise ©2016