Genre and Authority in Some Popular Nigerian Women's Novels

Abstract

This essay is an experiment in disarticulating the term romance from the category of Nigerian women's popular fiction, with which it has become linked in recent criticism. This is neither to deny the impor? tance of romance elements in many such novels, nor to devalue the romance as a form through which women might imaginatively negotiate aspects of their domestic and social positions. Rather my intention is to alter the terms of analysis to account for features elided in read? ing the and to suggest that the primary burden of the novels is not the sexualized gender relations that dominate Western reading prac? tices, but a broader negotiation of gendered social formations in which what is conventionally defined as romance constitutes only one of several strands. Rather than positing the romance as the term of analysis and iden? tifying examples of textual deviancy and cultural syncretism, as Jane Bryce and Kari Darko put it, I suggest that the novels' generic syncretism enacts an insistent concern with authority, both within the texts themselves as well as in the cultural arena of their production. My primary focus is on novels by Helen Ovbiagele, Buchi Emecheta, Yemi Sikuade, and Rosina Umelo written in the early to mid-1980s for Macmillan's Pacesetter series, as well as novels by Zaynab Alkali and Ifeoma Okoye for Longman. These by-now-familiar series, representing multinational publishers' efforts to capitalize not only on the growing readership for accessible fiction in English cultivated by the Onitsha and other market literatures (as Virginia Coulon argues) but also to the grow? ing educational market for young adult reading materials, present special problems of genre as a result. The novels' colorful covers, the brevity and accessibility of their texts, the prominence of women writers among their authors, and the treatment of subjects such as adultery and illegitimacy may have led to a too hasty assimilation of these novels to the more famil? iar generic model of the popular romance, which had already gained a foothold in West Africa. Their target readership at the secondary-school level, on the other hand, which is both off the radar of conventional lit? erary criticism and in part supported by educational funding, may have let them serve, as Helen Chukwuma suggests, as a site of experimentation (141). While the novels' marketing as secondary-school ESL readers places them in an ambiguous sociocultural position?neither an elite literature that might be read and taught as part of university curricula, both in Nigeria and abroad, nor an unambiguously popular literature, produced locally with local resources (see, e.g., Newell, Brink 64; Barber 4)?these novels may nonetheless be read as in some ways recasting the us versus