Creating Transgressive Space in Ezeigbo’s The Last of the Strong Ones and Emecheta’s Double Yoke

Abstract

In tliis essay, I undertake a reading of two contemporary Nigerian feminist novels which are somewhat different, yet similar. These novels are Adimora Akachi-Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones and Buclii Emecheta's Yoke. Yoke is a novel that is set on the campus of a Nigerian university. It tells the story of a young girl, Nko, who struggles against patriarchal assumptions of gender stereotypical roles. Using Nko's experience in the university and her romantic relationship with Ete Kamba-her boyfriend, the novel highlights the burden of African women in a male-dominated enviromnent. The title of the novel, Double is in itself indicative of this burden. For instance, for allowing her boyfriend have premarital sex with her, Nko is seen by him as being wayward. Nko gives her body her boyfriend as a demonstration of her love, yet she is condemned as being wayward for her act of love due patriarchal conjecture of gender conventional roles.Similar Emecheta's Yoke that narrates the female experience from the perspective of a female writer is Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones which is the narrative of four women namely Ejimnaka, Onyekozuru, Chime, and Chibuka. The story is set in a town in eastern Nigeria; and like Emecheta's Yoke, it chronicles the struggle of these four female characters in a patriarchal society; and the survival strategy they adopt subvert and overcome patriarchy. While Emecheta belongs the first generation of Nigerian female writers, Ezeigbo can be categorized into the third generation. Moreover, as against Ezeigbo's novel that was written in 1996 and is set in a colonial Nigerian society, Emecheta's work was published in 1982 and is set in a postcolonial Nigerian community. But in spite of these differences, I argue that what clouds the imagination of both writers is the quest create transgressive space for themselves and their major female characters.Exploiting Jacques Lacan's structuralist polemics of the signifier and the signified and Luce Irigary's counter-narrative of the feminine morphology, I contend that the writers and their female characters by their narrative strategy, actions, and utterances transmute from being the signified the signifiers.While Ezeigbo demonstrates this in a traditional setting, Emecheta exhibits it in a modern locale. Although their efforts are not ultimately successful, focusing on the characters of Nko and Ete Kamba's mother in Emecheta's Yoke, and Ejimnaka and Onyekozuru in Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones; and using them as examples, it is my argument that their female characters are still illustrative of transgressive female behaviors within the Nigerian cultural enviromnent.In formulating Iiis psychoanalytic theory, Jacques Lacan reconstructed Sigmund Freud's psycho-sexual concepts into a psycho-linguistic one. Exploiting the Saussurean categories, he constructs a polemic between the signifier and the signified. According Shannon Winnubust:Although the formal development of Saussurean linguistic postdates Freud, Lacan reads Freud as having conceived of the unconscious in terms of language. In fact, he claims it is Freud's development that gives the signifier/ signified opposition the full extent of its implication: namely, that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. (16)In spite of Lacan's insistence the contrary that a man or woman can assume the power and authority of the signifier, the fact that he uses the phallus as the symbol of that power indicates that he privileges the man over the woman. Since to enter into the Symbolic Order, the speaking subject must accept the phallus as the representation of the Law of the Father (Toril Moi 100), it then means that in Lacan's conceptualizations the phallus is the signifier of all signifiers. …