The Politics of (M)Othering

Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature

Obioma Nnaemeka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134774371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This collection is a study of African literature framed by the central, and multi-faceted, idea of 'mother' - motherland, mothertongue, motherwit, motherhood, mothering - looking at the paradoxical location of (m)other as both central and marginal. Whilst the volume stands as a sustained feminist analysis, it engages feminist theory itself by showing how issues in feminism are, in African literature, recast in different and complex ways.

1
Mother’s talk

Trinh T.Minh-ha

When memory goes a-gathering firewood, it brings back the sticks that strike its fancy.

Birago Diop

“The most stupid of all animals that fly, walk and swim, that live beneath the ground, in water, or in the air, are undoubtedly crocodiles, which crawl on land and walk at the bottom of the water… And this, for no other reason than that they have the best memories in the world.” This is how Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop begins the tale of Mother Crocodile.¹ This is how he recounts a narrative of his elders, which he ascribes to another teller—the griot (storyteller, singer, and genealogist) Amadou Koumba. And, to complicate matters further, this is also what Amadou Koumba said he remembered from another teller yet, for “that is not my opinion, said Amadou Koumba. That is what Golo the monkey says. And although everyone agrees that Golo is the most coarsely spoken of all the creatures, since he is their griot, he sometimes manages to make the most sensible remarks, so some say; or at least to make us believe he has made them, according to others.”

Stupidity and memory. Talking brought three male-identified voices together while deferring their unity. The story presents itself as a piece of gossip that circulates from teller to teller. The man who narrates (Diop) implicitly warns the reader that he is quoting Amadou Koumba who actually got it from Golo-the-He-Monkey. Right at the outset, the question is raised as to the real source of such a gossip: if the reader can’t really tell whether Golo makes “sensible remarks” or whether he simply takes the lead in making people believe that he is the one to have made them, then whose opinion is it exactly? As the tale progresses, storytelling becomes increasingly reflexive and the reader is further led to ask: Who among the tellers is the real monkey? Whose stupidity is it finally? Here lies the power of indirection in which the tale weavers excel. Through the spell of words the latter must both resonate the comments passed on and fullfill the function of the tale, which is not merely to deliver a message, but rather to invite talk around it.

The postponed subject of the tale, the loved-hated figure that elicits mockery from the male tellers but is talked about only with much caution, is here the most persevering storyteller of all: Mother Crocodile Diassigue. A tale’s resonance lies in its ability to proceed by indirection and by sharp digressions. Nobody understood this better than Diassigue who educated her children with his/stories of men—“not of Crocodiles, for crocodiles have no his/stories.” Mother always remembers. And what she remembers, she never forgets to weave with what her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother remembered. Diassigue, the mother of crocodiles, was thus reputed for her very good memory. “And much as he deplored this, in his heart of hearts Golo had to admit it,” wrote Diop. As for her being stupid, “it was difficult to tell whether Golo’s statement was intended to be praise or blame.” The saddest part of the whole business, however, was that Diassigue’s own children, the little crocodiles, began to share the monkeys’ opinion of their mother and to think that Golo spoke the truth. “They thought that perhaps their mother really did sometimes talk a lot of nonsense.” So goes the tale, which proceeds to tell us how Diassigue, the all-absorbing spectator, remembered best because she spent her time, from her lair in the mud or under the sunny banks of the river, watching the movements of life, lending a patient ear to the chatter of women and of other living creatures, and thus collecting all the news and noises of her talkative environment.

• —Here is a story!
• —A story it is.
• —It has happened.
• —It has already been told.

When Mother gathered her children around her and told them what she and her foremothers had seen, they yawned and yawned. For while they dreamt of great crocodile exploits, all they could hear were stories of black men and white men. Having witnessed “empires born and kingdoms die,” the mothers were only eager to recount the times when the river turned red with corpses after the coming and going of men. And what they remembered of places, events, and passers-by was, in fact, no more and no less relevant to the crocodiles than the history of men, of wars, of massacres of men by other men. One day, it was said, alerted three times by the disturbing messages of the crows, Diassigue hurriedly collected her children to urge them to leave their home, for “the Emir of Tzara has declared war on the Wolofs.” To her youngest son’s question, “What difference does it make to us crocodiles if the Wolofs of Wolo fight against the Moors of Tzara?” she then replied, “My child, the dry grass can set fire to the green grass. Let us go.” But the little ones would not follow their mother. To shorten Diop’s tale, at the end of seven days of terrible fighting, the Moors lost and the Wolofs won, taking with them the heir to the Moorish kingdom who bore a wound in his right side. All the priests and medicine-men were summoned to care for the young captive prince, but to no avail. Finally, there came to the court an old, old woman who prescribed the effective remedy, which was: “to apply, three times a day, to the sore place, the fresh brain of a young crocodile.”

“The tale is of all countries,” wrote literary critic Mohamadou Kane.² Referred to as “the loyal mirror of African sensibility and wisdom,” it is, of all literary genres, the one to circulate the most, and its extreme mobility has led literary critics to proclaim it not only the best genre to depict rural life, but also one whose continuity and variety cuts across cultural and ethnic boundaries. While remaining specific to local events, customs, and landscapes, the tale also functions as a depersonalizing, hence a generalizing tool for initiating talk around a moral instruction. Each society has its own treasure-house from which its culture draws in order to live, and it is precisely through storytelling that one is said to encounter the genius of a people. To (re)tell stories is “to enter into the constant recreation of the world, of community, of mankind.”³ Talking therefore brings the impossible within reach. It contributes to widening the horizon of one’s imagination; to constantly shifting the frontier between reality and fantasy; and to questioning, through the gifts of the so-called supernatural and the unusual, the limits of all that is thought to be “ordinary” and “believable.”

Nothing seems more ordinary in the tale of Mother Crocodile than the gendered construction of wisdom. Diassigue is here presented both as a palaverer and a wise matron. Typically, Mother’s talk is exasperating, nonsensical, at the same time as it is perilously clairvoyant and caringly farsighted. By persisting in remembering, it tends to overplay and to reiterate the immorality of men’s his/ stories. The division set up between the worlds of crocodiles and of men is one that differentiates not only animals from humans, but also mothertellers from fathertellers, warfleers from warmakers, sapience from stupidity. African folklore abounds with stories and proverbs whose moral is to caution men against women’s supposedly most treacherous shortcoming: their indiscretion. “Give your love to the woman, but do not trust her” remains, for example, one of the best advice a man can give another man.⁴ Utterly incapable of holding their tongues when they are asked to keep a secret (in a male-is-norm world), women are repeatedly depicted as those who “work their tongues so much harder than their hands,” and they are always seen chattering away nineteen to the dozen.

Wisdom is here at the heart of the struggle of memory against forgetting. Without it, history is bound to repeat itself blindly; and access to the forces of the surreal is impossible, for the surreal universe is hidden from men by the screen of the real. To be able to see beyond sensible manifestations is to understand that “A thing is always itself and more than itself.”⁵ Mother’s prosy knowledge of men’s his/stories is, in fact, no ordinary gossip. In the village environment, idle talk may contribute to the communal mapping of the social terrain, while ill-considered talk is likely to sow dissension in the group. As the result of the compilation work of several generations of mothers, Diassigue’s history-informed accounts could neither be reduced to trivial interpersonal reactions among women, nor can they be attributed to any malevolently divisive intent. On the contrary, if these accounts recalled the deeds of the great men of Black Africa, it was mainly to display the continuity of violence and of wars in men’s world; wars which had already forced her grandmother to leave her home, the Senegal River, only to encounter everywhere else, in her search for peaceful waters, more killings and more corpses.

Commonly enough, however, Mother’s dignified speeches failed to command (men’s) respect. (It is, indeed, significant that the child who questioned Diassigue’s decision to leave home at the outbreak of war, was her youngest son.) What was believable from mothers to daughters may become (temporarily) unbelievable in the process of transmitting men’s his/stories (to crocodiles). “A woman will find ninety-nine lies, but she will betray herself with the hundredth,” says a Hausa proverb;⁶ while a multitude of Fulani sayings warn: “If your mother has prepared food, eat; if she has concocted [a plan for you], refuse;” because “He who follows a woman’s plan, is bound to drown.” Or else: “One does not confide in a woman,” for “[a] woman is the fresh water that kills, the shallow water that drowns.”⁷ In many African folktales, male wisdom thus departs markedly from female wisdom. The wisdom attributed to men is one that generally works at conserving the social group, while the wisdom attributed to women is consistently equated with a supernatural malefic power. She who appears in almost every tale in the form of “an old, old woman” often holds powers that are both maleficent and beneficent, black and white magic. She can operate wonders, she can heal and make dreams come true at will; but she can also kill, punish, and prompt

irrevocable losses. As she names death, Death appears.

• —A story is coming!
• —A story.
• —Let it go, let it come.
• ….
• —Call it back!
• —It has already started. It cannot be called back.

Destructive wisdom remains the prerogative of women. Such a clear (unacknowledged) moral implication is likely to be divisive, but even in its divisiveness it should remain open to talk, if the function of storytelling in African contexts is to be respected. The moral retrieved from the tale of Mother Crocodile can easily be: “Always listen to the wisdom of the elders.” But a gendered reading of this same tale can hardly be content with such a genderless generalization. The reader remembers, instead, that it was through a deferred male voice that we were told the story of a female character who failed to spellbind her children with tales of wondrous men (she equally failed to indulge in tales of crocodile exploits). And as the story drew to its “last word,” the reader is again abruptly faced with another female character—albeit “an old, old woman”—who succeeded in healing the young captive prince by dooming the destiny of the young crocodiles. Once the healing words of malediction are let out, they cannot be taken back. Thus, She warns first, then She acts accordingly: for whoever remembers her words with good intent, She cures; while for those who neglect, forget, or use them with ill intent, her punishment is irrepealable. If the crocodiles had disobeyed their mother, it was largely due to the fact that they trusted the immediate believability of Golo-the-He-Monkey’s words and their vision stopped at the screen of the real (the illusory separation of the animals’s world from that of the humans). They had, in other words, sided with the men (whether the latter praise or blame) in judging mother, and had thus failed to recognize that mother’s talk was talk but also more than talk.

• Ho! call the women
• call the women
• I didn’t know what it means
• to be a woman
• if I knew
• I would have changed into a bird
• in the bush
• if I could not change into a bird
• in the bush
• I would have changed into a hind
• in the bush
• to be married
• is a misfortune
• not to be married
• is a misfortune
• I would have changed into a bird
• in the bush
• to have a child
• is a misfortune
• not to have a child
• is a misfortune
• I would have changed into a hind
• in the bush
• call the women
• call the women
• I didn’t know what it means
• to be a woman

(A song by women in Mali)⁸

Talk is what it takes to expose motherhood in all its ambivalences. Mothering is exalted only so long as women either conscientiously conform to their role as guardians of the status quo and protectors of the established order, or they perform a fairygodmother’s task of fulfilling harmless wishes, dreams, and desire. Since wisdom may be defined as a form of knowledge based on discretion, it is not readily perceived as knowledge by the unwise, and cannot be measured or controlled in a system of power relations dependent on accumulative, factual knowledge. The need to contain and restrict women’s wisdom within the mothering role is therefore a constant in social institutions across cultures; and women’s status as childbearer continues in many African contexts to be the test of their womanhood. From one generation to another, mothers are called upon to perfect their duty as the killjoy keepers of tradition—especially in matters that concern their gender. As is well-known, a woman’s lot is to conceive, bear, feed, and, above all, indoctrinate her children. The tale of Mother Crocodile revolves, typically enough, round Diassigue’s role as e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Politics of (M)Othering
• Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins
• 1: Mother’s Talk
• 2: Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist Reinvention of Fanon
• 3: Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering “Nneka” in Things Fall Apart
• 4: The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction
• 5: Enlightenment Epistemology and “Aesthetic Cognition”: Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter
• 6: Calixthe Beyala’s “Femme-Fillette”: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering
• 7: Bound to Matter: The Father’s Pen and Mother Tongues
• 8: MotherTongues and Childless Women: The Construction of “Kenyan” “Womanhood”
• 9: Ontological Victimhood: “Other” Bodies in Madness and Exile—Toward a Third World Feminist Epistemology
• 10: Urban Spaces, Women’s Places: Polygamy As Sign in Mariama Bâ’s Novels
• 11: Reconstructing Motherhood: Francophone African Women Autobiographers
• 12: Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Gayl Jones, Bessie Head, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra