FIGURE 3 'BUSH' OR 'MAP' OF WOMEN'S CONSCIOUSNESS/ EXPERIENCE
Teaching in women's studies classrooms is a historically specific activity. Such teaching inherits, constructs, and transmits particular reading and writing practices that are politically complex. These material practices are part of the apparatus for producing what will count as 'experience' on personal and collective levels in women's movement.2 It is crucial to be accountable for the politics of experience in the institution of women's studies. Such accountability is not easy, nor is it obvious what forms it might take, nor how struggles over different articulations of experience and different positionings for making these articulations should be addressed. Nor can experience be allowed simply to appear as endlessly plural and unchallengeable, as if self-evident, readily available when we look 'inside' ourselves, and only one's own, or only one's group's. Experience is a crucial product and means of women's movement; we must struggle over the terms of its articulation. Women do not find 'experience' ready to hand any more than they/we find 'nature' or the 'body' preformed, always innocent and waiting outside the violations of language and culture. Just as nature is one of culture's most startling and non-innocent products, so is experience one of the least innocent, least self-evident aspects of historical, embodied movement.
Through the politically explosive terrain of linked experience teminists make connection and enter into movement. Complexity, heterogeneity, specific positioning, and power-charged difference are not the same thing as liberal pluralism. Experience is a semiosis, an embodying of meanings (de Lauretis, 1984, pp. 158-86). The politics of difference that feminists need to articulate must be rooted in a politics of experience that searches for specificity, heterogeneity, and connection through struggle, not through psychologistic, liberal appeals to each her own endless difference. Feminism is collective; and difference is political, that is, about power, accountability, and hope. Experience, like difference, is about contradictory and necessary connection.
I am writing here as a Euro-American, professional, tenured, feminist, middle-class woman in her forties, who works with both undergraduate and graduate students on a campus with a lively feminist culture. It is not the same thing to teach women's studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1989 as it was at the University of Hawaii in 1970. The University of Hawaii was in important respects obviously a colonial institution, located at the periphery of educational privilege in the US, Many of the students in my women's studies classes were women and men of colour, majoring in hotel management and other tourist industry subjects. Feminism as a word was hardly used, and the Women's Liberation Movement seemed to me and many of those I knew in women's movement to be very new, very radical, and unproblematically singular. We were wrong about many of those judgements. UCSC is a relatively left-wing, feminist, and - what ought to be an oxymoron - largely white campus within the most privileged sector of the state higher educational system in a period of acute racism, class antagonism, language chauvinism, sexism, homophobia, and political reaction of many kinds in the state of California and in the nation. It is also a period of tremendous transformation in the racial and ethnic composition and power relations in the state and the nation. And it is a period of exhilarating multi-cultural production; the last quarter of the twentieth century is a time of a many-coloured cultural and political, local, and global renaissance. The days of white hegemony - a power consolidation perhaps more dangerous now than ever - seem visibly numbered. These matters profoundly affect the constructions of 'women's experience' in the classroom.
In these circumstances, I am regularly responsible for teaching 'Methodological Issues in the Study of Women', a required course in a women's studies major. In the present potent political moment, the intense intersections and co-constructions of feminist theory, the critique of colonial discourse, and anti-racist theory have fundamentally restructured individually and collectively the always contested meanings of what counts as 'women's experience'. What may count as 'women's experience' has shifted in the discursive practices of feminism over its history. Showing how teaching arrangements are themselves theoretical practice, those of us teaching women's studies need to come to terms with these issues in our pedagogical approaches for beginning students. Women's studies pedagogy is a theoretical practice through which 'women's experience' is constructed and mobilized as an object of knowledge and action. In this chapter I want to inspect a small part of the apparatus for the discursive production of women's experience in the women's studies classrooms which I inhabit and for which I am accountable to and with others in the circuits of women's movement.
A typical class might begin with the serious logical joke that, especially for the complex category and even more complex people called 'women', A and not-A are likely to be simultaneously true. This correct exaggeration insists that even the simplest matters in feminist analysis require contradictory moments and a wariness of their resolution, dialectically or otherwise. 'Situated knowledges' is a shorthand term for this insistence. Situated knowledges build in accountability.3 Being situated in an ungraspable middle space characterizes actors whose worlds might be described by branching bushes like the map or bush of consciousness I have drawn in Figure 3.4 Situated knowledges are particularly powerful tools to produce maps of consciousness for people who have been inscribed within the marked categories of race and sex that have been so exuberantly produced in the histories of masculinist, racist, and colonialist dominations. Situated knowledges are always marked knowledges; they are re-markings, reorientatings of the great maps that globalized the heterogeneous body of the world in the history of masculinist capitalism and colonialism.
The 'bush of women's consciousness' or the 'bush of women's experience' is a simple diagramatic model for indicating how feminist theory and the critical study of colonial discourse intersect with each other in terms of two crucial binary pairs - that is, local/global and personal/political. While the tones of personal/political sound most strongly in feminist discourse, and local/global in the critical theory of colonial discourse, both binaries are tools essential to the construction of each. Also, of course, each term of the binary constructs its opposite. I have put the pair 'local/global' at the top of the diagram. To begin, drawing from a particular descriptive practice (which can never simply be innocently available; descriptions are produced), place an account of 'women's experience' or 'women's consciousness' at the top. The simple 'dichotomizing machine' immediately bifurcates the experience into two aspects, 'local/global' or 'personal/political'. Wherever one begins, each term in turn bifurcates: the 'local' into 'personal/political' and the 'global' into 'personal/political'. Similarly, continuing indefinitely, every instance of the analytical pair 'personal/political' splits on each side into 'local/global'.
This noisy little analytical engine works almost like the dichotomous systems of European Renaissance rhetoricians, such as Peter Ramus, to persuade, teach, and taxonomize simultaneously by means of an analytical technology that palpably makes its objects simultaneously with bisecting them. Referring to the European Renaissance should also alert us to the particular Western history of binary analysis in general and of the pairs adopted here in particular. Other binary pairs that might well appear in my bush are 'liberatory/oppositional' or 'resistance/revolution', pairs deeply embedded in particular Western histories (Ong, 1988). Noting this tradition does not invalidate its use; it locates its use and insists on its partiality and accountability. The difference is important. Binaries, rather suspect for the feminists I know, can turn out to be nice little tools from time to time.
FIGURE 3 'BUSH' OR 'MAP' OF WOMEN'S CONSCIOUSNESS/ EXPERIENCE
Indeed, the noisiness of the analytical engine is part of its usefulness for feminist accountability; it is difficult to mistake the representation for an innocent, noumenal, transcendent reality. The representational technology makes too much clatter.
The bush plainly does not guarantee unmediated access to some unfixable referent of 'women's experience'. However, the bush does guarantee an open, branching discourse with a high likelihood of reflexivity about its own interpretative and productive technology. Its very arbitrariness and its inescapable encrustings within the traditions of Western rhetoric and semantics are virtues for feminist projects that simultaneously construct the potent object, 'women's experience', and insist on the webs of accountability and politics inherent in the specific form that this artefact takes on.
I suggest that this simple little diagram-machine is a beginning geometry for sketching some of the multiple ways that anti-colonial and feminist discourses speak to each other and require each other for their own analytical progress. One can work one's way through the analytical/ descriptive bush, making decisions to exclude certain regions of the map, for example, by concentrating only on the global dimension of a political aspect of a particular local experience. But the rest of the bush is implicitly present, providing a resonant echo chamber for any particular tracing through the bush of 'women's experience'.
What should be plain from this way of analysing is that what counts as 'experience' is never prior to the particular social occasions, the discourses, and other practices through which experience becomes articulated in itself and able to be articulated with other accounts, enabling the construction of an account of collective experience, a potent and often mystified operation. 'Women's experience' does not pre-exist as a kind of prior resource, ready simply to be appropriated into one or another description. What may count as 'women's experience' is structured within multiple and often inharmonious agendas. 'Experience', like 'consciousness', is an intentional construction, an artefact of the first importance. Experience may also be reconstructed, re-membered, re-articulated. One powerful means to do so is the reading and re-reading of fiction in such a way as to create the effect of having access to another's life and consciousness, whether that other is an individual or a collective person with the lifetime called history. These readings exist in a field of resonating readings, in which each version adds tones and shapes to the others, in both cacophonous and consonant waves.
Claims about 'women's experience are particularly liable to derive from and contribute to what Wendy Rose, in a poem about appropriations of Native American experience, aptly called 'the tourism of the soul'. Women's studies must negotiate the very fine line between appropriation of another's (never innocent) experience and the delicate construction of the just-barely-possible affinities, the just-barely-possible connections that might actually make a difference in local and global histories. Feminist discourse and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very subtle and delicate effort to build connections and affinities, and not to produce one's own or another's experience as a resource for a closed narrative. These are difficult issues, and 'we' fail frequently. It is easy to find feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial discourses reproducing others and selves as resources for closed narratives, not knowing how to build affinities, knowing instead how to build oppositions. But 'our' writing is also full of hope that we will learn how to structure affinities instead of identities.
The construction of 'women's experience' through the reading of fiction in women's studies classrooms and women's studies publishing is the practice I wish to examine in this chapter. My focus is on particularly non-innocent objects at this moment in 'our' history in Santa Cruz and in the world: 'African' women's fiction; contending readings of this fiction; and the field of constructions of women's consciousness and experience in the 'African diaspora' as an allegorical figure for many political constituencies, local and global. The novels I attend to were written in English; the genre, the language, and the modes of circulation all mark histories full of colonial and post-colonial contradiction and struggle. The contradictions and the struggles are all the sharper for women's writing and reading of these potent fictions. As Lata Mani (1987) has made clear from her study of eighteenth-century colonial discourse on suttee in India, constructions of women's experience can be fundamental to the invention of 'tradition', 'culture', and 'religion'. Women are a privileged 'site of discourse'. On this terrain, taxation, labour migration policies, or family law have been and still can be legitimated or resisted. Women's 'self-constructions' of experience, history, and consciousness will be no less the ground of material practice - including 'our' own. (Watch how 'experience', 'history', and 'consciousness' are all complex European-derived terms with particular resonances in many US cultures, including Euro-American ethnophilosophies important in academic and activist contexts.)5
Reading fiction has had a potent place in women's studies practice. Fiction may be appropriated in many ways. What will count as fiction is itself a contentious matter, resolved partly by market considerations, linguistic and semiotic practices, writing technologies, and circuits of readers. It is possible to foreground or to obscure the publishing practices that make some fiction particularly visible or particularly unavailable in women's studies markets. The material object, the book itself, may be made to seem invisible and transparent or to provide a physical clue to circulations of meanings and power. These points have been made forcefully in Katie King's (1988) reading of the 'genre' of biomythography in Audre Lorde's (1982) Zami. Readings may function as technologies for constructing what may count as women's experience and for mapping connections and separations among women and the social movements which they build and in which they participate in local/global worlds. Fiction may be mobilized to provoke identifications as well as oppositions, divergences, and convergences in maps of consciousness. Fictions may also be read to produce connections without identifications. The fictions published by and about 'women of colour' occupy a particularly potent node in women's studies practice at the present historical moment in many locations. Appropriations through particular reading practices of these fictions are far from innocent, regardless of the locations in the intersecting fields of race, class, and gender of any reader.
Readings must be engaged and produced; they do not flow naturally from the text. The most straightforward readings of any text are also situated arguments about fields of meanings and fields of power. Any reading is also a guide to possible maps of consciousness, coalition, and action. Perhaps these points are especially true when fiction appears to offer the problematic truths of personal autobiography, collective history, and/or cautionary allegory. These are the textual effects that invite identification, comparison, and moral discourse - all inescapable and problematic dimensions of women's studies discourse. Contesting critically for readings is a fundamental women's studies practice that simultaneously insists on the constructed quality of politics and meanings and holds the readers responsible for their constructions as ways of making and unmaking the potent and polysemic category, 'women'. In this category feminist, colonizing, anti-colonial, and womanist discourses converge and diverge powerfully. Partially allied and partially contending, differently situated women's readings of the fiction published by a 'Third World woman of colour', who personally and textually also inhabits the 'First World', foreground the issues I am trying to sketch. The readers themselves are tied and separated by multiple histories and locations, including race, sexuality, nationality, access to reading publics, and access to the fictions themselves. How are these readings maps of possible modes of affinity and difference on the post-colonial terrain of women's liberatory discourses? How do the figures of the unity of women in the African diaspora enter into nationalist, feminist, womanist, postmodernist, black, multi-cultural, white, First World, Third World, and other political locations?
So, risking falling into the 'tourism of the soul' that Wendy Rose warned against, I will outline three different readings of a popular author, most of whose readers probably have no interest in women's studies, but whose fiction appears in women's studies courses and is also an object of contention in womanist/feminist literary criticism and politics. Before engaging with these three readings, consider a short construction of the text of the author's life, a text that will become part of my stakes in reading her fiction. The author is Buchi Emecheta, born in Nigeria in 1944 of Ibuza background. Emecheta married in 1962 and went to London with her husband, who had a student fellowship. In England, the couple had five children in difficult circumstances, and the marriage ended painfully. Emecheta found herself a single mother in London, black, immigrant, on welfare, living in council housing, and going to college for a degree in library science and then for a PhD in sociology.6
Emecheta also became a writer. Her becoming a writer was constituted from those webs of 'experience' implicit in the biographical text in the last paragraph. She was a mother, an immigrant, an independent woman, an African, an Ibo, an activist, a 'been to', a writer. It is said that her husband destroyed her first manuscript because he could not bear the idea that his wife was thinking and acting for herself (Schipper, 1985, p. 44). She published a series of novels that are simultaneously pedagogical, popular, historical, political, autobiographical, romantic - and contentious.
Let us study the dust jackets and reference library texts on Emecheta's life a little further. Besides learning about the academic degrees, a job as a sociologist, and her habit of rising to write in the early hours of the day, we learn that in addition to children's novels she has written eight other novels, including The Joys of Motherhood (1979), available in the prestigious African Writers Series, whose founding editor was Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart and other internationally renowned fiction. In the UK, Emecheta's work is published by Allen & Unwin and by Allison & Busby, in the US by Braziller, and in Nigeria by Ogwugwu Afor. Until recently, it was easier to purchase Emecheta's fiction in England or the US than in Nigeria. Emecheta's writing is read as mass-market paperbacks on trains and buses in Britain more than it is read in classrooms. Her work is now published simultaneously in Africa and the West, and it is part of debates among African anglophone readers. In part because of its treatment of African women's issues by an expatriate identified with feminism, Emecheta's writing is controversial, perhaps especially in Nigeria and especially among political academics everywhere it is read.
The Dutch critic, Mineke Schipper (1985, p. 46), claimed that 'Emecheta's novels are extremely popular in Nigeria and elsewhere, but they have sometimes been coolly received or even ignored by African critics.' Emecheta's relations to feminism, and the relations of her readers to feminism, are very much at the heart of this matter. Adopting a perspective that bell hooks in the United States named intrinsic to feminist movement, in an interview in 1979 Emecheta's account of her writing explicitly refused to restrict her attention to women:
The main themes of my novels are African society and family: the historical, social, and political life in Africa as seen by a woman through events. I always try to show that the African male is oppressed and he too oppresses the African women . . . I have not committed myself to the cause of African women only, I write about Africa as a whole. (Bruner, 1983, p. 49)
The Joys of Motherhood, set roughly in the 1920s and 1930s in Nigeria, treated the conflicts and multi-layered contradictions in the life of a young married woman who was unable to conceive a child. The woman subsequently conceived all too many children, but only after she lost access to her own trading networks and so lost her own income. The mother moved from village to city; and her children emigrated to Canada, the United States, and Australia. Although she had many sons, she died childless in an extraordinarily painful story of the confrontation of urban and village realities for women in early twentieth-century Nigeria.
But, as for Achebe, for Emecheta also there is no moment of innocence in Africa's history before the fall into the conflict between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Much of Emecheta's fiction is set in Ibuza early in the twentieth century, where the great patterns of cultural syncretism in Africa were the matrix of the characters' lives. In The Bride Price (1976) and The Slave Girl (1977), Emecheta explored fundamental issues around marriage, control of one's life from different women's points of view, and the contradictory positions, especially for her Ibuza women characters, in every location on the African cultural map, whether marked foreign or indigenous. Life in Europe was no less the locus of struggle for Emecheta's characters. Second Class Citizen (1974) explored the breakup of the protagonist's marriage in London. In the Ditch (1972, 1979) followed the main character as a single mother into residence in British council housing and her solidarity with white and coloured, working-class, British women's and feminist organizations challenging the terms of the welfare state. The Double Yoke (1983a) returned to Nigeria in the late twentieth century to take up again Emecheta's interrogation of the terms of women's struggles in the local and global webs of the African diaspora, viewed from a fictional reconstruction of the paths of travel from and to a minority region in Nigeria.7
In my course called 'Methodological Issues in the Study of Women, the students read politically engaged essays by two literary theorists who placed Emecheta in their paradigms of women's fiction and women's unity in the African diaspora. One was by Barbara Christian, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and a pioneer of black feminist literary criticism, and the other was by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, a professor teaching Afro-American and African literature in the English Department at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. With women from Ibadan and Ife, Ogunyemi participated in 1988 in a group developing women's studies in Nigeria (Tola Olu Pearce, personal communcation). She has published on Emecheta's fiction elsewhere (Ogunyemi, 1983); but in the text we read in class, it was Ogunyemi's explicit marginalization of Emecheta that organized our reading of her essay in its particular publishing context and in other political aspects. Barbara Christian published Black Feminist Criticism (1985) in the Athena series of Pergamon Press, a major feminist series in British and US women's studies publishing. The third reading was my own, developed from the perspectives of a Euro-American women's studies teacher in a largely white state university in the United States and first delivered in a conference co-constructing the critical study of colonial discourse and feminist theory. I wanted my women's studies undergraduate students to read, mis-read, re-read, and so reflect on the field of possible readings of a particular contested author, including the discursive constructions of her life on the literal surfaces of the published novels themselves. These readings were directed to fictions in which we all had considerable stakes - the publishers', Emecheta's, Ogunyemi's, Christian's, mine, each of the students', and those of anonymous readers of thousands of paperbacks in several nations. I wanted us to watch how those stakes locate readers in a map of women's self-consciously liberatory discourses, including constructions, such as 'womanism', that place 'feminism' under erasure and propose a different normative genealogy for women's movement. The goal was to make these critically reflexive readings open up the complexities of location and affinities in partially allied, partially oppositional drawings of maps of women's consciousness in the local/global, personal/political webs of situated knowledges.
First, let us examine how Ogunyemi (1985, pp. 66-7) read - or declined to read - Emecheta in an essay published for a largely non-African audience in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, a major scholarly organ of feminist theory in the US. Out of seventeen international correspondents for Signs, one was from Africa in 1987 - Achola Pala of Kenya. Many Signs essays are assigned in women's studies courses, where most, but by no means all, of the students would be Euro-Americans. Ogunyemi's essay was an argument to distance herself from the label 'feminist' and to associate herself with the marker 'womanist'. She argued that she had independently developed that term and then found Alice Walker's working of it. Ogunyemi produced an archaeology or mapping of African and Afro-American anglophone women's literature since the end of colonization, roughly from the 1960s. The map led to a place of political hope, called womanism. Ogunyemi used the word to designate a woman committed to the survival and the wholeness of the 'entire people', men and women, Africa and the people of its diaspora. She located her discourse on Emecheta in the diaspora's joining of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, and African anglophone literatures. Ogunyemi argued that a womanist represents a particular moment of maturity that affirms the unity of the whole people through a multi-layered exploration of the experiences of women as 'mothers of the people'. The mother binding up the wounds of a scattered people was an important image, potent for womanist movement away from both black male chauvinism and feminist negativism, iconoclasm, and immaturity.
But Ogunyemi's principal image was somewhat oblique to that of the mother; it was a married woman. Ogunyemi read the fiction since the 1960s in order to construct the relationships of women in the diaspora as 'amicable co-wives with an invisible husband' (1985, p. 74). In her archaeology of anglophone African and African-American literature that finds the traces of womanism in black foremothers-as-writers, Ogunyemi rejected Emecheta. Her fiction did not affirm marriage as the image of full maturity that could represent the unity of black people internationally. Quite the opposite, Emecheta's explorations frequently involved an account of the failure of marriage. In particular, far from recuperating polygamy as an image for liberatory women's movement, Emecheta regarded the practice as a 'decaying institution' that would disappear 'as women became more and more educated and free to decide for themselves' (Bruner, 1983, p. 49). Emecheta's fiction has a sharp edge on marriage throughout, even where it is most affirmed, as in The Double Yoke. Seeing the novelist's characters as merely rebellious, Ogunyemi treated Emecheta's fictional and personal relation to marriage harshly, even scornfully, stating that she started to write 'after a marital fiasco', that her writing feminizes black men, and that she finally kills off her heroines in childbirth, enslavement in marriage, insanity, or abandonment by their children. Ogunyemi went so far as to claim, 'Emecheta's destruction of her heroines is a feminist trait that can be partly attributed to narcissism on the part of the writer' (1985, p. 67).
Emecheta in political action allied herself with Irish and British feminists and developed an international discourse quite different from Ogunyemi's account of womanism. In addition to criticizing Emecheta's discourse on and history in relation to marriage, Ogunyemi highlighted Emecheta's exile status. Having lived abroad for twenty years, Emecheta returned to Nigeria to teach in 1980-81 as a senior research fellow at the University of Calabar. On this specific publishing occasion, Ogunyemi problematized Emecheta's 'authenticity' as a returned emigrant writer. In Ogunyemi's archaeology of African anglophone literature, socialism, feminism, and lesbianism all stood explicitly for an immature moment, perhaps recuperable later, but for the moment not incorporable within the voices of the 'co-wives', who figured a normative kind of black women's unity. Womanism meant that the demands of 'culture' take precedence over those of 'sexual polities'. Because of that relationship, for the womanist writer who still does not forget the inequities of patriarchy, 'the matrilineal and polygynous societies in Africa are dynamic sources for the womanist novel' (1985, p. 76). Ogunyemi proposed a logic of inclusion and exclusion in an emerging literary canon as part of a politics about nationalism, gender, and internationalism, argued through the central images of polygynous African marriage.
Barbara Christian had very different stakes in reading Emecheta. In Black Feminist Criticism Christian read The Joys of Motherhood (1979) in close relation with Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), in order specifically to reclaim a matrilineal tradition around the images of a particular feminism that Christian's text foregrounds. Christian located this discourse on matrilineal connection and mothering in these two important novels of the 1970s in order to discuss the simultaneous exaltation and disruption/destruction of mothering for black women in African traditions, in Afro-American slavery, and in post-slavery and post-civil rights movement contexts in the US.8 She uncovered the contradictions and complexities of mothering, reflecting on the many ways in which it is both enjoyed, celebrated, enforced, and turned into a double bind for women in all of those historical locations. So while Christian sounded a faint note of a lost utopian moment of mothering before the 'invaders' came, the invaders were not only the white slave traders. Rather the invaders seemed to be coeval with mothering; the world is always already fallen apart.
But the mother was no more Christian's fundamental image for the unity of women in the African diaspora through time and space than it was for Ogunyemi. Christian read Meridian and The Joys of Motherhood in delicate echo with each other in order to foreground a particular kind of feminism that also carried with it an agenda of affirming lesbianism within black feminism and within the model of the inheritance from Africa of the tie between mother and daughter, caring for each other in the impossible conditions of a world that constantly disrupts the caring. Barbara Christian was committed to forbidding the marginalization of lesbianism in feminist discourse by women of colour, and she subtly enlisted Emecheta as one of her texts, for precisely the same reasons that Ogunyemi excluded Emecheta from her genealogy of womanism in the African diaspora. But like Ogunyemi, Christian proposed a narrative of maturation in the history of the writing of her literary foremothers. The trajectory of maturation for each theorist provided a specific model of the growth of selfhood and community for the women of the diaspora. Ogunyemi schematized the history of West African women writers' consciousness since national independence movements in terms of an initial 'flirtation' with feminism and socialism, culminating in a mature womanism organized around the trope of the community of women as mothers, healers, and writers centred in the image of'co-wives with an absent husband'. That last image could not avoid being a stark reminder of the labour migration realities for many rural women in colonial and post-colonial Africa, even as it invoked the positive self-sufficiency of married women, in contrast to the Western stereotyped figure of the (hetero)sexualized white bourgeois couple with its dependent and isolated wife and her consequent negative 'feminist' politics of protest.
Christian's narrative schematized the history of Afro-American women writers' consciousness in terms of a chronology with suggestive similarities to and differences from Ogunyemi's. Christian argued that, before about 1950, American black women wrote for audiences that largely excluded themselves. Christian characterized the fiction as other-directed, rather than inward searching, in response to the dominating white society's racist definitions of black women. Zora Neale Hurston was the exception to the pattern. Christian traced a process of initial self-definition in the 1950s and the emergence of attention to the ordinary dark-skinned black women. Roughly, the 1960s was a decade of finding unity in shared blackness, the 1970s a period of exposure of sexism in the black community, and the 1980s a time of emergence of a diverse culture of black women engaged in finding selfhood and forming connections among women that promised to transcend race and class in a world-wide community patterned on the ties of mother and daughter. In the 1980s, the terrain for the growing understanding of the personhood of black women, figured in the fictions of the diaspora, was world-wide.
I will conclude by suggesting a third non-innocent reading of Emecheta's fiction - my own, as a Euro-American, middle-class, university-based feminist, who produced this reading as part of a pedagogical practice in US women's studies in the 1980s, in a class in which white students greatly outnumbered students of colour and women greatly outnumbered men. Enmeshed in the debates about postmodernism, the multiplicity of women's self-crafted and imposed social subjectivities, and questions about the possibility of feminist politics in late twentieth-century global and local worlds, my own stakes were in the potent ambiguities of Emecheta's fiction and of the fictions of her life. My reading valorized her heterogeneous statuses as exile, Nigerian, Ibo, Irish-British feminist, black woman, writer canonized in the African Writers Series, popular writer published in cheap paperback books and children's literature, librarian, mother on welfare, sociologist, single woman, reinventor of African tradition, deconstructor of African tradition, member of the Advisory Council to the British Home Secretary on race and equality, subject of contention among committed multi-racial womanist and feminist theorists, and international figure. As for Ogunyemi and Christian, there was a Utopian moment nestled in my reading, one that hoped for a space for political accountability and for cherishing ambiguities, multiplicities, and affinities without freezing identities. These risk being the pleasures of the eternal tourist of experience in devastated postmodern terrains. But I wanted to stay with affinities that refused to resolve into identities or searches for a true self. My reading naturalized precisely the moments of ambiguity, the exile status and the dilemma of a 'been-to' for whom the time of origins and returns is inaccessible. Contradiction held in tension with the crafting of accountability was my image of the hoped-for unity of women across the holocaust of imperialism, racism, and masculinist supremacy. This was a feminist image that figured not mothers and daughters, co-wives, sisters, or lesbian lovers, but adopted families and imperfect intentional communities, based not so much on 'choice' as on hope and memory of the always already fallen apart structure of the world. I valued in Emecheta the similarities to the post-holocaust reinvented 'families' in the fiction of Afro-American SF writer, Octavia Butler, as tropes to guide 'us' through the ravages of gender, class, imperialism, racism, and nuclear exterminist global culture.
My reading of Emecheta drew on The Double Yoke (1983a), in which the incoherent demands on and possibilities for women in the collision of 'tradition' and 'modernity' are interrogated. At the same time, what counts as 'traditional' or 'modern' emerges as highly problematic. The fictions important to the intersection of postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonial local/global webs begin with the book as a material object and the biographical fragments inscribed on it that construct the author's life for international anglophone audiences. In the prose of the dust jacket, the author metamorphosed from the earlier book jackets' accounts of the woman with five children, on welfare and simultaneously going to college, who rose at 4.00 a.m. in order to write her first six novels, into a senior research fellow at Nigeria's University of Calabar and a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain. There are many Emechetas on the different dust jackets, but all of these texts insist on joining the images of a mother, writer, and émigré Nigerian in London.
A short synopsis must serve to highlight the multiply criss-crossing worlds of ethnicity, region, gender, religion, 'tradition' and 'modernity', social class, and professional status in which Emecheta's characters reinvent their senses of self and their commitments and connections to each other. In The Double Yoke, a 'been-to', Miss Bulewao, taught creative writing to a group of mainly young men at the University of Calabar. Framed by Miss Bulewao's assignment to the students and her response to the moral dilemmas posed in one man's story, the core of the novel was the essay submitted by Ete Kamba, who had fallen in love with a young woman, Nko, who lived a mile from his village. Nko, a young Efik woman, came from a different ethnic group from Ete Kamba, an Ikikio. Hoping to marry, both were at the university on scholarships and both had complicated obligations to parents as well as ambitions of their own. But gender made their situations far from symmetrical. In a narrative that cannot but refer the reader to Aihwa Ong's (1987) account of young Malay factory workers in Japanese multinationals in Malaysia, Emecheta sketched the University of Calabar as a microcosm of the contending forces within post-independence Nigeria, including the New Christian Movement, Islamic identities, demands of ethnic groups, economic constraints from both family and national locations in the global economy, contradictions between village and university, and controversy over 'foreign' ideologies such as feminism.
All of these structured the consequences of the love between Ete Kamba and Nko, The pair had intercourse one night outside the village, and afterwards he was consumed with worry over whether Nko was or was not still a virgin, since they had had intercourse with their clothes on and standing up. It was crucial to him that she was still a virgin if he was to marry her. Nko refused to answer his obsessive questions about her virginity. Instead of images of matrilineality linking mother and daughter or of the community of women as co-wives as emblems of collective unity, a deconstruction of 'virginity' structures this novel's arguments about origins, authenticity, and women's positions in constructing the potent unit called 'the people' in the heterogeneous worlds of post-independence Nigeria. The young man went for advice to an elder of Nko's village, who was also a faculty member and a leader of the American-inspired, revivalist, New Christian Movement at the university. The professor, religious leader, and model family man had been sexually harassing Nko, who was also his student; and following Ete Kamba's visit, the older man forced her into a sexual relationship in which she became pregnant.
Nko told Ete Kamba that whether he called her 'virgin', 'prostitute', or 'wife', those were all his names. She came to the university to get a degree by the fruits of her own study. If she were forced to get her degree through negotiating the tightening webs of sexualization drawn around her, she would still not flatten into the blank sheet on which would be written the text of post-colonial 'woman'. She would not allow the local/global and personal/political contradictions figured in Ete Kamba's need for her to be an impossible symbol of non-contradiction and purity to define who she and they - might be. Perhaps Emecheta's fiction should be read to argue that women like Nko struggle to prevent post-colonial discourse being written by others on the terrain of their bodies, as so much of colonial discourse was. Perhaps Emecheta is arguing that African women will no longer be figures for any of the great images of Woman, whether voiced by the colonizer or by the indigenous nationalist - virgin, whore, mother, sister, or co-wife. Something else is happening for which names have hardly been uttered in any region of the great anglophone diaspora. Perhaps part of this process will mean that, locally and globally, women's part in the building of persons, families, and communities cannot be fixed in any of the names of Woman and her functions.
Ete Kamba related his dilemma and Nko's story in his assigned essay for Miss Bulewao, who called him in to talk. In a wonderful depiction of a faculty-student meeting where the personal, political and academic are profoundly interwined, Miss Bulewao advised Ete Kamba to marry the woman he loved. The young man was absent when the papers were passed back; he had gone to join Nko, who had returned to her village to bury her father. Their marriage was left open.
Ogunyemi's, Christian's, and my readings of Emecheta are all grounded in the texts of the published fiction; and all are part of a contemporary struggle to articulate sensitively specific and powerfully collective women's liberatory discourses. Inclusions and exclusions are not determined in advance by fixed categories of race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. 'We' are accountable for the inclusions and exclusions, identifications and separations, produced in the highly political practices called reading fiction. To whom we are accountable is part of what is produced in the readings themselves. All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes. From our very specific, non-innocent positions in the local/global and personal/ political terrain of contemporary mappings of women's consciousness, each of these readings is a pedagogic practice, working through the naming of the power-charged differences, specificities, and affinities that structure the potent, world-changing artefacts called 'women's experience'. In difference is the irretrievable loss of the illusion of the one.