Feminist Knowledge | Identities, Culture & Religion

African Women Poets and their Assassins
by Molara Ogundipe

Molara Ogundipe (formerly Molara Ogundipe-Leslie) is a poet, writer, scholar and critic. She is a university professor of English, Africana, cultural and gender studies.

This essay is based on an interview published in Irene Assiba D'Almeida, ed. Palabres Volume Special, Femmes Africaine en Peosie, 2001.

Poetry, in my view, is not words on a page or even an imagined utterance only, even though it is also this. Poetry is first and foremost an actual utterance from your soul, something that you say or think to yourself (in any order) before you decide to set it down on paper or screen. Poetry therefore starts as a private act and ends as a public one, for a poet needs an audience even when the audience is only yourself. Producing poetry is a private and public act. Notwithstanding that a shy and diffident poet writes and hides her work in a closet, so to speak, her act of writing is already public. If the work were never discovered, the work would still be public at the moment that she made that soul utterance. In the moment that the utterance is made, the poet others herself. The act of utterance is itself a social act between the poet and a listener or hearer. The human being is not only a creature that lives in society or a polis (Aristotle) or makes tools (Marx), she is also a creature that talks to herself (and to others).

Why do we bother to write? To hallow a moment, a feeling, a mood or an observation, and to set it down for remembrance, permanence or posterity through our pleasure in words. Why do we think that what we think, feel, see or say is of that importance? Due to some self-assurance (some would say arrogance, and definitely so in some of us), perhaps from some anxiety, but often from much humility before existence and the reality of living, we make poetry. Many of us write out of a reverence for life and the perceptions it offers. Writing poetry can come from a reverence for life and the many luminous (and dreary!) parts that we encounter.

Writing also comes from the desire to testify and to immortalize something not always clearly conceived. As I said in one of my poems, perhaps in our various secreted ways, we seek immortality ("Lunchtime and Questions to the Creative Self) in Sew the Old Days (1985). I say "secreted" to mean "put away in hidden places in our hearts, minds and sites of creativity." Through these secreted acts, we betray an ambition for immortality that we may not have told ourselves and of which we may not be aware. Artists get immortality. Whether some actually seek it is a moot point. As human beings many people seek immortality through their children; others through their actions like political work or poetry. Still others, the really lustful ones who lust after life, seek immortality through all the foregoing all at once. Poets lust after life and this lusting, for me, is an admirable and magnificent hunger and thirst. I hope that the poet produces great things from the satiation of that hunger and that thirst.

I think of my readers or audience as people who might be interested in what I am talking about in any one poem and what I have to say generally. I also assume as audience all who can read me in English or seek access to my work through translations or conversations with those who speak English who might help them with the meanings of my poems. Furthermore I think of those who may come to know about the poems through conversations and hearsay. I also think of friends or family who, from knowing me, will share my memories and emotions, in addition to being just simply curious about my doings and wishing to give me love and support.

Hardly do I ever think primarily of Yorubas (my ethnic group) or Nigerians first, contrary to the myth that having an ethnic identity consigns one's soul or consciousness to an area where you think ideologically about being Yoruba all time or are inscribed and circumscribed in a monochrome world. It is in fact hard to articulate what being a "nativist" means. I am only trying here to put that assumption in words. It is difficult to understand and articulate the conception of the African who claims her indigenous identity as a "tribalist and "nativist", because only the purveyors of the concept and the term fully know what it means. The Yoruba world, like many ethnic worlds in Africa, has always been moving, polychrome and multifaceted in cultural identity. The fact that I would define myself as a Yoruba woman and a modern twenty-first century one for that matter, does not mean that I situate myself historically and contemporaneously outside the global world of cultures.

I once heard a Booker Award runner-up say in London something to the effect that writers write for their age group. That for me was a fearful thought if we consider that members of one's age group are not only small in number, but are also diminishing by joining the ancestors! The thought of writing for one's age group and peers only could be a great deterrent to writing. I can see how as writers we are empowered and gratified by the pleasures that readers who know our world and experiences find in our works. I do hope, however, that our audiences stretch chronologically beyond our age group in all ways.

Being a woman always constitutes a problem for many whether it is in Africa or elsewhere. It does, particularly now when there is a backlash against feminism and a swearing off of positions already gained through feminist struggles. Now we have the quiet silencing of women through the promotion of pre-feminist positions and the self-silencing of women themselves in the United States and Europe in particular. Feminists did not react in large numbers to the Monica Lewinsky event. This is a time when Ally McBeal can be touted as a feminist figure in a TV drama that trivializes her life as a professional woman who is a Harvard trained lawyer as it reduces her to absurdity.

As a woman, one needs to be taken seriously as a result of which one's perceptions and productions as a person, artist, and social critic are taken seriously, not rendered second place to whatever male artists have to say. An example is when editors and publishers might consult or invite a male poet first before they invite or even remember a female one. Our African colleagues are still producing their phallocentric anthologies and bibliographies, though there has been a big improvement since the seventies and eighties. There is a greater effort to include women as artists and acknowledge their productions. Some male critics actually work on women's writing, a few in the pragmatic or opportunistic move to get in on the industry around women's writing and gender issues. Some of such critics still give only a nodding acknowledgement to women. Such colleagues could have, for instance, a two-page entry on women in a book of three hundred pages or discuss all African women together in a few paragraphs of a whole book. Sometimes the critique of women's writing not only betrays inadequate research and analysis; the data on the writers' lives and texts are often just wrong, including basics such as the date of publication of the women's texts. While we congratulate our colleagues for having moved a little forward in their reactions and handling of women's production, they need to do more work to show constantly that they are aware that the world is double-gendered. One way to show this is to think of women and their productions when you think of men, not only when you do work on marginal people. Our colleagues need to demonstrate the insight and recognition of a double-gendered cosmos in and out of the world of arts, letters, and thinking in general. To reiterate, women need to be consulted and included on their own behalf in all our visions and productions.

The malaise of the mono-gendering vision of society produces the unfortunate situation where women writers may be more excluded from grants, awards, invitations to readings, workshops, writers' colonies etc. Women poets may have greater difficulty having an interest taken in their work by publishers since poetry does not sell well anyway. For this reason, we thank publishers like Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press, who have created a series on women's poetry. Due to the discriminations against women poets, women may also have to do more politicking and manoeuvring to get attention as well as to get past critics and reviewers. I have told the tale of a male editor in Nigeria who accepted my manuscript and published first the manuscript of a male writer that I had brought to him in the joy of having had my own manuscript accepted. I had received rave reviews on my manuscript from companies owned by native speakers of English, so it was not a question of my poetry being inferior.

Speaking of reviewers, there are those I would call the assassins, the secret killers, of African women poets. They hide behind the anonymity of being undisclosed reviewers of texts for publishing houses to write damning pieces from personal dislike, revenge or hatred, gender or ethnic warfare, and other reasons. They hate your guts, so they destroy your work behind your back. They rob the poet of the chance of being published by assassinating her through her work. Some such reviews are so virulent that the publishers, mystified, shocked and regretful, apologetically send you copies of the hate-filled writings. With some research you will find that some of these poisonous pens are "friends" who work with you on some projects, or laugh and chat with you at literary conferences, and follow you around at such gatherings for pickings of your ideas.

One of the situations facing women in Nigeria is that there has been a male take-over of the institutions of feminisms and women's liberation by men who do not know or care about issues and the discourses around them. The take-over came into being in the years of military dictatorship. In those years, State feminisms emerged that were quite patriarchal in their perspectives and objectives as they were corrupt and exploitative of women in the lower income groups. Moreover, today there is a bourgeosification of the women's movement, the flowering of NGOs as industry and survival mechanisms, a national weariness following the impact of the IMF, the rapacity of soldiers, and the entry of AIDS into the society. Gender violence seems to have increased and become more public from the data assembled by some concerned NGOs. Nonetheless women continue to be socially active and activist while they are being publicly and privately responsible and caretaking.

The most serious problem facing Africa today for me is the grave threat of the recolonization of the continent through multinationals, foreign faith groups, and landing grounds or gateways such as South Africa. Furthermore in Nigeria there exist a book famine, the lack of readers of poetry, and the soul weariness emanating from the harsh conditions of existence there. Yet Nigeria is also characterised by the vigorous publication of newspapers, magazines, and religious tracts alongside the book famine and the difficulties of publishing. Nigeria enjoys the ongoing publishing of poetry and a massive production of poetry through other media such as electronic texts, traditional verbal arts, and theatre. I am convinced that we shall defeat the historical silence around women's talents in the modern nation state. I also have great hope in "the beauty, intelligence and energy" of Nigerians and her women writers noted astutely by President Bill Clinton, with regard to Africans in general, on his trip to the continent. I am sure that in the realm of poetry and under the most distressing conditions in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, "a terrible beauty," in a positive sense, will continue to flourish.