Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"How Sisters Should Behave to Sisters": Women's Culture and Igbo Society in Flora Nwapa's Efuru

1999; African Journals OnLine; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2071-7474

Patrick Colm Hogan,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

Since its publication in 1966, Efuru has been recognized as an important statement about Igbo society from woman's point of view.1 Unlike works by, for example, Achebe or Amadi, it is not only written by woman, but directly treats the experiences, practices, and concerns of women their daily lives, their relation to men, and so on. In other words, it takes up precisely the same sorts of concerns that were becoming central to feminist thinking in the West, but it does so in relation to African, rather than European culture. Unfortunately, despite its obvious relevance to global issues of women's solidarity, struggle, etc., the novel has generated relatively little detailed interpretation, especially interpretation which attends to the particularity of the text and to the culture from which the text emerges and to which it constantly refers. Moreover, what criticism there has been is often vitiated by one of three problems. First of all, great deal of criticism seems to have been guided by Maryse Conde's early, highly critical view of the main character, the novel as whole, and the crucial final paragraph of the novel. Specifically, Conde sees the book as presenting a disturbing picture of narrow-mindedness, superstition, malevolence, and greed and fear in traditional Africa (136). Moreover, she sees the conclusion of the book as reducing women to their position as childbearers (134, 136). Some critics have accepted parts of Conde's interpretation (e.g. Andrade [104] largely agrees with Conde on the concluding paragraph). Some have come to similar interpretive conclusions, but with greater sympathy for both Nwapa and her main character (e.g. Scheub, who sees tradition in the novel as empty and spirit-destroying [679]). Others have almost entirely rejected Conde's view rightly, as I shall