Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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Feminist Consciousness and Nigerian Theatre

by

Osita C. Ezenwanebe

University of Lagos, Nigeria

 

1. Introduction                     

Nigerian theatre is alive to the social realities of its time: a theatre where socio-political and cultural issues are evaluated and possibly judged in other to bring about a better society. The playwrights are therefore vanguards of society, keeping watchful eyes and attentive ears to the happenings in the society. One however wonders if such watchful eyes and attentive ears have been extended to the yearnings and aspirations of the female gender in our society. Many Nigerian playwrights (especially men) create powerful female characters that play the significant roles of social reformers; yet little or no attention is given to the plight of these women in a society they labour to reform. It is this state of affairs, which the researcher sees as a theatrical conspiracy of silence against the plight of women in contemporary Nigeria, that informs the writing of this paper.

 

2. Realism and Feminist Consciousness in Nigeria

Virtually every Nigerian playwright is committed to the social and moral issues of the time. It could be seen as a form of inhumanity, a crime against the Nigerian people, if a Nigerian playwright writing for Nigerian audiences today chooses to merely play to the gallery in the face of the numerous injustices in society. The new generation of Nigerian playwrights (the direct political playwrights after Wole Soyinka) believes that the   level of injustices, corruption and other forms of social decadence in contemporary Nigeria defiles the art of speaking with tongue- in-cheek on the stage but rather demands an urgent and more direct representation for an immediate social transformation. In his own words, Femi Osofisan, one of the founding members of alternative theatre in Nigeria, is convinced that:” If we warned ourselves often and painfully enough with reality, with the reality around us, if we refuse to bandage our sensitive spots away from the hurt of truth, then we can attain a new and positive awareness” (in Awodiya 1993: 18). Nigerian theatre is therefore deeply committed to issues of immediate social relevance – from the issues of cultural contamination and degradation to those of moral and social decadence including the inhuman oppression of one class by another.  It is believed that a realistic dramatisation of these socio-political and cultural issues, that is, a direct, matter- of fact evaluation on the stage, would bring them to the consciousness of the audience  who would then do something to sanitise the society. In this case it is assumed that consciousness has adaptive value necessary for survival as propounded by the experiential psychologist, William James.

    Nigerians have an intense female consciousness. In his book Psychology (1997), Dodge Fernald defined consciousness as “Awareness of one’s own existence and surroundings at any given moment” (Fernald 1997: 160), It is our awareness at any given moment. Man’s normal consciousness is an expanded one which helps him to search not only for food and shelter but also to seek for information with which to know his world and understand it. (p. 187). Every Nigerian is aware of the uniqueness of his gender. Nigerian women are ordinarily appreciated for their special roles as daughter, wife and mother. There is also the reality of a social construct known as “femininity”, a purported female essence applied to all biological women. The social construct of a female essence is based on patriarchy, the notion that man is on top of and superior to woman in all things, placing women at a secondary, marginalised position as the otherness of men. Every Nigerian is aware of the social construct, which defines social relationships since it is inscribed in, persevered and transmitted by culture.

    Nigerian women accepted their marginalised position in society when they were not aware of any other alternative. They have no access to power and wealth and are excluded in decision making, especially in state matters. The different modules of female consciousness still obtainable in contemporary Nigeria are testifying among other things to the reality of women’s oppression. These include the numerous associations of women as daughters, wives and mothers; the tendency to mass together in uniform at every public occasion and to resort to collective action to make their voice heard. Akachi Ezeigbo’s novel, The Last of Strong Ones, like many other Nigerian fiction documents the heroic role of the representatives of such women associations, the “Oluada”(women born into a clan) and the “Alutara” (women married into a clan) who joined forces with men to resist colonial invasion. The Aba (a popular city in South-East Nigeria) Women’s Riot of 1929, the Egba Market Women Uprising in the 1940s under Mrs. Ransome-Kuti which forced the Egba king into exile, and many others are historical facts of women’s collective action. Nigerian literatures are riddled with instances of women collective action as a political weapon to resist the encroachment on the few marginalised spaces available for them in the male-dominated society. In her play  The Reign of Wazobia Tess Onwueme dramatises the rare, unique “Nude March” where women( especially elderly ones) embark on a nude procession to resist  intense oppression. Since Nigeria women have neither voice nor authority as individuals, they resort to bonding in order to make an impact in public/political matters.

   The question is “Are Nigerian women feminist conscious?” Most Nigerian women are not feminist conscious despite their intense female consciousness. As Irene  Salami rightly pointed out in her paper on “Female  Consciousness and Collective Action”, “Women’s collective actions are not based predominantly on the desire to create  a different destiny for women, but are often a protest against the impossibility of being a woman in accustomed ways” (Oni 2005: 423). They provide evidences of female consciousness and oppression than of feminist consciousness.  According to Steady, “The more removed a group is from access to dominant model or articulation the greater the likelihood for female collective action” (Steady 1993: 90). Feminist consciousness is the awareness of the social and cultural oppression of women and their consequent struggle for liberation.  Feminism is the political label for both the awareness of women’s marginalised, secondary position as forms of socio-cultural oppression, and the quest for freedom. The history of feminism is the history of women’s resistance and opposition to patriarchy.  It is an ideology in art and life that resists “patriarchy” and challenges “the female essence”. Feminism as an organized, political struggle started in the West and spread to other parts of the world. Kate Millet (1970) in her book Sexual Politics insists that patriarchy “consists the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power” (pp. 25; 118).  Patriarchal oppression consists therefore in the obnoxious concept of a “female essence” by which certain social standards of femininity are imposed on all biological women to make it seem as if the oppressive conditions are natural.  “Women”, Eva Figes rightly said, “have been largely Man-made” (1986:15). Worse still, language, that which validates existing reality by assigning a name to it, seems to legitimate the existing order by the presence of the binary oppositions like male/female; man/woman, strong/weak, and so on.  Feminists locate the root of women oppression in culture, traditional practices and social conventions.

    Many Nigerian women are yet to accept the fact that they are being oppressed. Many have not heard of feminism; many who have heard do not even understand it. Yet no one can deny the practice in Nigeria where a widow is made to drink the water used in washing the corpse of her husband just for her to prove her innocence (concerning the man’s death) to the world.  What about the horrible discriminating practice where male circumcision is for beauty aimed at making the male sex organ more active for coitus while that of woman is aimed at quenching her libido and depriving her of sexual enjoyment, thereby reducing her to something to be enjoyed. It is also a fact that our society is “patrilineal”, and that forces the society to hold the male child in higher esteem than the female counterpart, and this is often displayed in extravagant words and deeds, not to mention the act of wife battering which is taken as the normal way of “controlling” one’s wife. These and other instances testify to the fact that Nigerian society cannot exonerate itself from the oppression of women.  The task of Nigerian feminist is to make Nigerian women realise that these degrading practices are forms of women oppression which feminism sets out to eradicate.

   In Nigeria, Feminism is accepted with a pinch of salt. It is confronted with serious bias, misrepresented and misinterpreted often deliberately by men who feel threatened with the way it is practiced in the West.  Being  conscious of African environment, Nigerian feminists introduced a liberal form  tagged “Womanism” in Alice Walker’s sense of  “Being committed to survival and wholeness of entire peoples, male and female, being not in any way separatist or adversarial to men” (Walker 1983, p. xi). They therefore emphasise women empowerment which according to one of its founding member, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie in her forward to the first edition of her book Recreating Ourselves, means “Social recognition and dignity… Space to speak, act and live with joy and responsibility…” (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994). They opt for critical transformations of major areas of women’s oppression in Nigeria: the traditional family, economic dependence, educational backwardness and absence in politics.  

    Education is indispensable in developing self consciousness. The backwardness of African women has been identified as the major obstacle to feminist consciousness. Their backwardness, Ogundipe-Leslie correctly asserts, “Is a product of colonization and neo-colonization, comprising poverty, ignorance and the lack of a scientific attitude to experience and nature” (Ogundipe-Lesli 1994: 35).  It is believed that such critical transformations will bring about a just society where men and women will co-exist in equal dignity and love.

   The question being asked in this paper is how the Nigerian theatre, in its avowed commitment to social realism and reconstruction, has responded to feminist consciousness?  The question is evaluated through a critical examination of the different approaches of some Nigerian playwrights to feminist issues.  The paper offers a feminist analysis of some selected African plays relevant to the study.  The Nigerian theatre is aware of the feminist struggle.  It has responded to it in various ways, but the proposition in this paper is that Nigerian playwrights (especially the men) have not given feminism a fair representation on stage.  It is these responses to feminist issues that are the concern of this paper.

 

3. Feminist Aesthetics of Nigerian Theatre

    Prominent among the various approaches adopted by Nigerian playwrights in their representation of Feminism is Ola Rotimi’s farcical cum comical approach in his play Our Husband has Gone Mad Again (1977). In the early part of the play before the emergence of Lisa, Ola Rotimi presents a group of dumb, docile women who are rendered inactive not by an express command of the gods as in The Gods are not to Blame, but by a long period of subjugation under patriarchal culture that has made their oppressed state to look like a natural way of life.  This group of women can be illustrated with Ola Rotimi’s play Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (1977) before the intervention of Liza in the play.  The man of the family, Rahman Lejoka – Brown, is the god of his own household.  His orders are as potent and as final as those of the gods.  The ex-military-man-turned-politician prides himself as being more prudent than his father because he (Lekoja-Brown) acquires as many women as he can “handle” unlike his father who had a hundred and fifteen of them.  In fact, he “handles’ them as perfect as he does his other possessions.  His is a traditional African family that is anchored in the culture of his people and the exigencies of the time.  His marriage to the two wives at home is a testimony to his prudence.  He acquires Mama Rashida, “a well-mannered, quiet, well-bred African pigeon” (p.9), from his late elder brother.  “Mama Rashida was the oldest of my late brother’s wives”, he explains to his friend Okonkwo, “My elder brother … died in a train accident… my father … had married her off to me!” (p.9).   In addition to the “well bred pigeon”, he marries Sikira to meet the demands of his political ambition.  Being in need of women’s vote and realising that Sikira is the daughter of the president of the Nigerian Union of Market Women, Lejoka-Brown acquires her for electoral victory.  He has planned to settle her with money and send her away after the election.

   Though they live together under the same roof as husband and wives, the man is far removed from his wives emotionally and otherwise, and this is evident in his relationship with them.  His communication with the wives are mostly in the form of commands and orders to which they unreservedly respond “Yes, my Lord”.  The women have neither voice nor choice; neither ambition nor power and are completely dependent on their husband.  Lejoka-Brown is their mouthpiece.  The house is “peaceful” because patriarchy – that obnoxious belief that man must be-on-top of woman (whatever that phrase means) -- is maintained.  The women are complacent about their subservient position.  For them, it is a natural state.  They do not agitate for another state because they are unaware of an alternative way of life for wives within a traditional family. It has to take someone from outside with a different way of life to rouse the women from their slumber, and Liza is the one.

   Liza, a Kenyan lady, a medical doctor and the only one who Lejoka-Brown has married for love, is a different woman.  Before she enters Lejoka-Brown’s family, Lejoka-Brown is thoroughly agitated, feeling completely insecure.  He confesses this to his friend Okonkwo when he said that,

                 Here I am, running up and down, renting a flat, getting restless, going

                crazy! Just because; .. I mean, I whose grandfather had a hundred and

                fifteen wives, … one hundred plus ten plus five breathing wives 

                all at once under his very roof! But here I am, with only two little

                crickets, expecting one more – just one more canary, and I can’t just

                pick her up by the arm and say to her: ‘woman I forgot to tell you; …

                Here-meet your other  ehm … sisters-in-marriage! (p.28).

The fact emanating from this passage is that Lejoka-Brown is restless because he knows that Liza, the American-trained medical doctor, is a different woman from the “two little crickets” of wives in his family.  At least she is not “a cricket” but “a canary”. Lejoka-Brown’s question “Liza take eye see Mama Rashida?” (p.30) to his servant Polycarp who runs to the airport to tell Lejoka that Lisa his wife who he is waiting for is already at his home confirms it. Why is Lejoka-Brown, the god of Lejoka-Brown family, agitated about Liza’s return?  It is undeniably because Liza unlike the other wives is empowered by formal education.  She is trained as a medical personal with a Kenyan scholarship.  Liza is therefore intelligent, powerful, independent and assertive. She knows what to say and how to achieve her aim. She is a totally different woman from Mama Rashida and Sikira. She is a symbol of an empowered, modern African (Nigeria) woman.

    Even before getting the telegram informing him about Liza’s return, Lejoka-Brown has started making albeit bad and unnecessary adjustments to impress and accommodate her. He knows therefore that the high-handed, suppressive method he is using with the order two wives cannot be applied to the new woman.  He starts to adjust both himself and his traditional family to accommodate her.  “A man must measure up” (p. 29), he told his friend in the fit of his adjustment.  One of the important moves he makes in order to “measure up” is to dabble into politics in order to acquire some titles and positions that will enhance his social status so that his headship in his family is not tampered with.  Lejoka-Brown’s attitude is a good example of patriarchal attitude – that which makes men believe that they must be on top of women in all things, especially in their relationship with their wife.  This is believed to be a sure way of retaining one’s supremacy and authority at home.  And feminism is against patriarchal attitude because of the unnecessary tension and strains it puts on the family as is seen in Lejoka-Brown’s family. It is the patriarchal attitude that for a man to be a man and for him to be on-top, he must “measure-up” with or out measure his wife that makes Lejoka-Brown to meddle in politics, marry Sikira and do many other things so as to measure up or “out measure” Liza with her degree in medicine.  When his aspirant political position fails to draw from Liza the kind of attention he has hoped for, he becomes impatient. “After all, let’s face it,” he said, “I got into all this mess in order to make her feel proud” (p.28).

    Liza’s presence in Lejoka-Brown’s house exposes the enslavement of the other women.  She has refused to be “doomed to becoming one of the three sacrificial slaves” in the “nauseating, clay-walled, gas-chamber” of a house, all in the name of a wife.  Instead of keeping distance from the ‘slaves’ as Lejoka-Brown has planned, Liza mingles with them and tries to empower them in the best ways she could in the spirit of sisterhood.  For instance, she helps Sikira (who she has thought to be a house girl and not a wife) to develop poise; teaches Polycarp, Lejoka-Brown’s servant, the skill of cage making and also shows Mama Rashida how to boost her petty trading to yield her higher profit.  The fact that the women hold tenaciously to what they have learnt and have also started making use of them at once confirms the fact that they were in the subjugated position because they lack the knowledge of and the power to agitate for an alternative.  In the end the traditional family breaks up because the husband fails to make necessary adjustments to accommodate the new women.  Instead he uses violence and intimidation to force a new woman into an obnoxious old traditional family.  His determination to resist change is seen when he addresses Liza:

              Wife, it is too much indulgence that makes the she-goat

             grow a long beard like her husband, the she goat … Now,

             I’m no longer going to lie down forever… while you wipe

             your feet on all the moral standards I have set in this house!( p.   )

He believes it is his sole right to set the standards and principles that dictate moral and social conducts: It is for the women’s own to follow without question.

    The comic-farcical method of Ola Rotimi’s Our Husbands frustrates the feminist reading of the play.  It is clear that the playwright’s aim is to make fun of all feminist ideals.  In his subtle way, he like some other Nigerian playwrights upholds patriarchy in the name of preserving cultural tradition.  In using the comic-farcical approach to feminism, he trivialises its ideals.  He achieves the ridiculing of feminist ideals by misrepresentation.  He makes the ideals too confusingly ambiguous as to be objectionable.  The technique of using an American trained woman Liza to teach the ideals of freedom to African women in African society is wholly unacceptable to African feminists or “womanists”.  Liza can only but teach the western women’s conception of emancipation which is ultimately the dissolution of the traditional family in other to establish a new one based on equality.  For many African feminists, the traditional family is too central to our African communal way of life to be risked for anything.  Rather it favours a reformation of the traditional family to accommodate the changes of the modern era in establishing a just society based on gender equity. Also the method of tactically de-emphasizing the good aspects of Liza’s ideology and deliberately emphasising its wrong application by the women is aimed at portraying the feminist ideals as irrelevant and bad.  For example, the playwright represents Sikira as a thoughtless woman whose brain is too weak to accommodate certain truths. Immediately she regains her poise through Liza’s lesson, her head becomes so swollen that she feels the family can no longer accommodate her. Instead of seeking a reformation of the old traditional family as Mama Rashida has done, she walks out to pursue her political ambition. Representations like that explained above seem to support the objectionable view that women’s involvement in public life is injurious to the family. Yet Nigerian society is producing many Lizas.

    Nigerian theatre has represented many female characters that tried to extricate themselves from the oppressive effects of cultural tradition on their own personal aspiration.  Ona, an undergraduate student and the protagonist of Tess Onwueme’s The Broken Calabash, Ogwoma, the protagonist of Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods, Ebiere, the protagonist of J.P. Clark’s Song of a Goat, and others are examples of women who challenge the supremacy of certain cultural norms and practices over and above the personal aspirations and freedom of the individual.  Unfortunately, all the female characters mentioned above fail in their one-man (or one-woman) conquest.  In this way of crushing the women, the quintessence of culture and its intolerance of the women’s aspiration are maintained. There was little or no consideration of their predicaments. The theatres fail to give their views a fair representation.

   Representations of feminist ideals on the stage are fraught with ambiguities. In Sofola’s The Wedlock of the Gods, for example, cultural beliefs and traditional practices that oppress women are exposed to the audience only for them to witness their complete submersion in the supremacy of cultural tradition. In the play, Ogwoma, the female protagonist, is forced to marry her late husband’s brother against her preference for her lover. She goes through many widowhood rites like creping her hair, including that of the pubic, arm pit as well as eye lashes. These and the compulsory three months consignment to the ashes by the fire place, all in the name of mourning her late husband, are represented as secondary issues. The inhumanity of the above cultural practices is made less poignant by the playwright’s excessive focus on the so called cultural violation:  Ogwoma sleeping with her lover during the period of mourning. In fact the dramatic action centers on the senselessness of Ogwoma’s action and how she pays the price, which is “a swelling of the body with water leaking from everywhere” (Sofola 1972: 19).  Sofola deliberately sidetracks the gruesome reality of women oppression in the play as if they are not worthy subjects for drama. Maybe the playwrights are trying to be patriotic to the culture they labour to prove dignified to the world.  One would have thought that thirty-two years after Sofola’s play feminist issues would have occupied a centre stage in Nigerian theatre.

   The Reign of Wazobia, a play by Tess Onwueme, is one of the few plays where women’s resistance to cultural oppression is allowed to succeed on the stage.  In many other plays, their struggle is crushed and their quest for freedom, misrepresented as a violation of culture, is not allowed to see the light of the day.  Ona’s determination to free herself from the oppressive custom of “Idegbe” and the “caste system” is subsumed under the strength of African culture.  The voices of Ebiere in J.P. Clark’s Song of a Goat, Liza’s in Our Husband has Gone Mad Again, Titi’s in J. P Clark’s The Masquerade, Yetunde’s and Ogwoma’s in Zulu Sofola’s Song of a Median, and The Wedlock of the Gods respectively and several others are represented as voices of evil and of cultural aberration.  They are represented only to be crushed as a warning to others.

    The women’s victory -cry “We have taken over the stage! Women have taken over the stage” in Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia (Onwueme 1992:35), re-echoed by Lejoka-Brown in Our Husbands (1977:70), is equally not within the framework of “womanism”.  So also is Mrs. Ife’s rejection of feminism in Bode Osayin’s Woman when she objects that Ogbeni, a male character in the play, should help her out in the kitchen: “Kitchen is a woman’s world”, she said, “Forget about women emancipation, which I do not share.  As battle ground is for men, so is kitchen for women” (p.112).  The issue at stake is not who goes to the kitchen, but that the one who goes to the kitchen is no less a human being than the one who goes to the battlefield.  After all, who says the kitchen is less important than the battlefield.  Whoever says so should go to the battlefield with an empty stomach.  To feel that to be in the kitchen is less dignified than to be in the battlefield is a patriarchal attitude, and it is this attitude, which informs other oppressive actions against women that both feminism and womanism strive to abolish.  The examples given above are grave misconceptions of feminism as African women conceive of it.  The future of the African family, I believe, lies not in wishing away the feminist ideals but in using its good aspects to reform the traditional family. Theatre is one of the viable tools for creating the awareness for such reform. To make a mockery of Nigerian women’s groan for freedom from cultural oppression as if it is irrelevant is to deceive the Nigerian public.  If theatre will continue in its role of education and reformation, it must give the issue of feminism the attention it deserves.

    The confused comical approach to feminist issues as seen in Our Husbands represents the view of many Nigerian men who feel that the issue of women’s emancipation is not worthy of serious attention on the stage.  Playwrights like Wole Soyinka and others neglect the feminist ideals to extinction by representing women as willing slaves of the culture that feminism kicks against. Bode Osayin sympathises with what some women go through as mothers.  In his play Woman, Osayin gives a graphic picture of the bitter experiences of motherhood where Mrs. Ife has to cope with her sick son alone.  But while Osayin sympathises with women, he does not believe in the political or organised struggle for their emancipation.  He feels that a writer should not concern himself with feminism. In an interview with Duro Oni, Osayin idealizes the issue of feminism when he said that, “In a just society, there should be no need for feminism” (Oni 2003: 84).  But the fact remains that ours is an unjust society.  After all, in a just world, they will be no need for pan-Africanism, Negritude, Marxism and the like. 

 

4. Conclusion.

Why is the woman’s case different?   Why should the injustice against women not awaken the creative genius of many men and women in Nigeria?  The triviality and artificiality of Noel Coward and other romantic playwrights in the 18th and early 19th Century England roused the genius of George Bernard Shaw, the father of modern British drama. Despite the ruins in Britain after the World Wars, the playwrights were thrilling the complacency of the over-fed Dandes with the little acts of the Working-class pupils splitting their infinitives. In response to the lies being propagated on the stage, Shaw wrote Plays Unpleasant where he confronts the English people with the reality of the ugly side of their society. Prominent among the plays is Mrs. Warren’s Profession that indicts society against women prostitution. Similarly in 18th Century Europe, the people’s attitude of hanging on outworn and out molded morals and social conventions awakened the angry pen of Henrik Ibsen, the father of realism. In two of his plays A Doll’s House and Ghosts he calls for a reformation in the relationship between man and wife by portraying on the stage a truthful account of the lives of men and women of his time.  He deals as a matter of urgency with the issue of a false conception of women, which suppresses and oppresses them.

   If the crusade of Nigerian theatre against injustice must be seen as unbiased and truly realistic, it must go by the words of Marshal in Femi Osofisan’s Moroundadun, “Let all prisons fall!” (p. 77), and this must include those that enslave our women.  The battle against injustice on the stage must be total.  I believe that some Nigerian men are progressives.  

 

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