HFCN #09: Reading Historical Novels from Around the World II

This is the second of a series of newsletters as I revisit my notes from a pandemic project of reading historical novels from around the world with Book #6. #SlowReading

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Introduction

Last month, I began reviewing some pandemic journal notes and started a newsletter series to share a reading project from that time. The goal at the time was to read one historical novel from each country. If you missed it, here is the first installment, which also describes some of the project’s parameters and the first five countries that I read from.

Having started rather ambitiously with a list of five, I have realized that it is too much work to write something meaningful when I try to cover more than one novel in a single edition. So, moving forward, I’m focusing on one book per country, which will make for a more extended series overall.

Before we get to the next work, a reminder: this project was about filling some of my own reading gaps, so the selections are not based on any qualitative or objective criteria. In most cases, I had avoided books I had read before the project. But, as you will see in future installments, I included some rereadings for specific reasons.

And, if you are just getting to this series, I suggested three ways you could engage with the project on your own in the first installment.

Nigeria is the sixth-most populous country in the world. I have read works by writers like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from this country before, so my goal was to select a historical novel I had not yet read. I chose the first novel in English by a Nigerian woman writer. As we will see, it was groundbreaking for a few other reasons, too.

6. Nigeria: Efuru by Flora Nwapa (1966)

My introduction to Nigerian literature began with the legendary writer Chinua Achebe and his novel Things Fall Apart. In many ways, it set a high benchmark for the novelists who followed him. This is partly because the book business likes to hold the first groundbreaking writer up as a benchmark against which all the following are measured. Yes, there are commercial reasons—it is easier to market and sell the works of emerging writers if they can be situated alongside the well-received works of established writers. However, this shortchanges both the original and the newer writer. The former likely had to work that much harder to get their work noticed, while the latter has probably worked hard to create something uniquely their own. [Note: Such comparisons also happen in academia for pedagogical reasons. We will get to that related topic another time.]

That said, let me mention Achebe again, but for two different reasons. First, for him, historical fiction is also about “rewriting history through fiction” because so much of the precolonial history of a colonized nation is appropriated or dismissed by the colonizers (see Conversations with Chinua Achebe.) Note that Achebe was not talking about counter-narratives, which we will get to with another work in this series. To a large extent, Nwapa was also doing something similar with this first novel. Second, Nwapa sent the unpublished manuscript of this novel to Achebe, and he encouraged her, even pointing her to a British publisher. Both of these facts reveal important aspects of the conditions of the production of this novel.

Nwapa is possibly even more of a trailblazer than Achebe because she was the first Nigerian woman novelist published in English. She was also an educator and a literary and social activist—in 1970, she founded a feminist press in Nigeria and was directly involved in the country’s reconstruction efforts after the Biafran war.

The story is about Efuru, a woman from the Igbo tribe in colonial 1940s Nigeria, and explores the complexities of womanhood, culture, and societal expectations in rural Igbo society. People somewhat unfamiliar with Nigerian culture might discuss how Nwapa challenged the norms of her time by portraying a childless woman navigating marriage, motherhood, polygamy, and societal pressures with resilience, autonomy, and independence. It is fair to say that Efuru’s choices and search for personal fulfillment on her own terms allow us to reflect on broader issues like the tension between tradition and modernity, colonial influences, ingrained beliefs about gender roles, and the status of women in African society at that time. However, Nwapa was critiquing, more than anything else, the gender conventions depicted in the works of her contemporary colonial male African writers. Efuru presents a colonial Nigerian woman beyond the usual roles of wife, mother, or femme fatale. Efuru is, in addition to being a wife and a mother, also a businesswoman, a farmer, a priestess, and more.

Since the 1960s, much has been written and discussed about this novel and Nwapa herself. For our purposes here, let’s focus on three elements contributing to this historical work’s timeless relevance.

1940s Nigeria as a Mirror to 1960s Nigeria

The novel is set during the 1940s when British colonial powers controlled all of Nigeria. This meant that they controlled trade, too. For example, Nwapa mentions how the British had banned homemade gin (see a quote below referring to contraband gin.) We also see how Efuru’s second husband, who attended a Christian school, has an anglicized name like “Gilbert.” Despite these facts, Efuru is not your typical anti-colonialist novel. Aside from some of the characters complaining about “white men” and their inconvenient laws, the novel is not concerned with examining colonialism in great detail. Nwapa’s focus is on evolving Igbo life and traditions and how they affected women’s place in society.

Here is an example of how Nwapa foregrounds Igbo culture rather than colonialist oppression. This is a scene where the newly married Efuru is visited by the men of her family, who want to take her back because her first husband has not coughed up the dowry (more on this below.)

Meanwhile, Efuru brought out a bottle of home-made gin – a very good one that had been in a kerosene tin for nearly six months. ‘I am sure you will like this gin. Nwabuzo had it buried in the ground last year when there was rumor that policemen were sent to search her house. When the policemen left, finding nothing, Nwabuzo was still afraid and left it in the ground. A week later, she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital, where she remained for six months. She came back only a week ago. So the gin is a very good one.’

It is likely that Nwapa, writing the book in the 1960s right after Nigeria gained its freedom from the British, wanted to avoid including the terrible civil war underway at the time. That would have diluted her desired focus on cultural issues related to gender and society, so she chose the near-historical colonial past as her setting instead. What made the novel’s 1940s setting similar to the 1960s setting of its writing is that both were at the cusp of significant sociocultural transformation for Igbo culture and Nigerian society. This also allowed Nwapa to experiment with an unconventional female protagonist, which was unusual in her time’s male-dominated Nigerian literary landscape.

Idiomatic Prose That Embraces Cultural Complexities

Nwapa’s prose might sound somewhat quaint to our contemporary sensibilities. However, its most singular feature is how her English weaves in complex elements of Igbo culture, mythology, idiom, and social practices without over-explaining or sanitizing any of them.

Here is one example. There is a custom where Igbo people traded parable-like anecdotes instead of making abstract or ideological statements. However, this custom had already begun to fade in modern times. For example, a woman goes to collect some money owed to her by another woman. After much argument and drama, the first receives her five shillings from the second and offers this in parting.

‘Thank you very much, Ajanupu. A man asked his friend to cut up some meat for him. When the friend finished, he asked whether it was properly cut, the man told him that if he called him again to do the same job he would know whether he did it well or not.’ Ajanupu had banged her door by the time the woman finished this tedious proverb.

Granted that 1940s linguistic and idiomatic conventions were not so different from those of the 1960s. So, Nwapa likely did not have to work too hard to make her near-historical dialogue and idiom sound realistic. Some of us are writing about people who lived centuries ago. Who can say what our characters sounded like in everyday life when all we have are the odd literary or historical texts as archival records of their times? That said, Nwapa’s craft shows us the many ways that language can and should be wielded as a critical and purposeful tool in worldbuilding, historical or otherwise.

A related aside: Coming from a culture where the bride’s family pays the wedding dowry, I found it interesting that in Igbo culture, this burden falls on the groom and his family. Nwapa explores, with careful nuance and balance, how this dowry responsibility affects the bride, who is essentially being bought with it in the marriage transaction.

Flora Nwapa: a Forerunner of Modern African Literature

I mentioned some of the conditions of this novel’s production. Let’s consider some facts about its reception.

One of the things that upset Nwapa was that Heinemann, her British publisher, did not package and publish a novel by a “minority” writer from a third-world country in the same way as they did for their other writers. This is also one of the main reasons she established her own press in Nigeria about ten years later. Note: Nigeria was also dealing with a civil war when this novel was published, which certainly did not help matters.

Then, there was also pushback from her own male-dominated literary community because she went against the grain in portraying Efuru as a self-sufficient, intelligent, complicated Nigerian woman. This mindset did change over time, as we can see from Achebe’s own portrayal of women in Things Fall Apart versus his later novels like Anthills of the Savannah.

Today, many scholarly essays also exist about the spiritual and environmental worldmaking of Nwapa’s novels. These have their fair share of controversy because predetermined ideologies and agendas still drive the portrayal and interpretation of her works. Nevertheless, they all agree that she was innovative in how she enfolded these aspects into her storytelling.

I imagine that it would make Nwapa raise her eyebrows to be referred to as the “mother of modern Nigerian literature,” given that her novels are conflicted about motherhood as a dominant goal for women. Still, future generations of African women writers owe her a considerable debt for not just opening particular closed doors but blasting them to pieces so that they can never be closed again. Fun fact: Buchi Emecheta, who came after Nwapa, wrote a book titled The Joys of Motherhood, which is relatively more well-known. Note this closing paragraph of Nwapa’s Efuru:

Efuru slept soundly that night. 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?

Nwapa revisited some of her themes from Efuru in subsequent novels, such as Idu and The Lake Goddess, her last book.

Over to You

Nigeria has given us a considerable number of well-known writers since Nwapa. There are even writers in the Igbo language itself. And there’s even a Nobel laureate: Wole Soyinka. Since my pandemic project, I have added the following to my favorites: Teju Cole’s nonfiction, Helen Oyeyemi’s surreal works, Ben Okri’s animist realism, and Chinelo Okparanta’s historical fiction. What is it about this country that produces more than the usual share of brilliant literature?

If you have read this novel or intend to do so, please let me know your thoughts below. And I look forward to sharing the next historical novel from the eighth country in the series with you all very soon.

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