The Àbikú Mystique — The Metaphor of Subversive Narrative in Buchi Emecheta’s

Abstract

Contemporary African literature pervasively represents corporeal fragmentation; unstable and incoherent selves emerge from the collisive transcultural space of postcolonial existence. Buchi Emecheta’s 1994 novel Kehinde dramatizes the tensions between the incoherent self and the quest for self-realization. It is a novel of crossroads – of cultures and traditions – of crises of identifications variously experienced by its major characters. In this autobiographical narrative, the eponymous protagonist is engaged in intense resistance to dominant discourses and patriarchal institutions at home and in the diaspora. Kehinde assumes a heterodox nature akin to that of Soyinka’s Abiku. Abiku, a primordial presence withcomplex, multiple, and contradictory identities and accretions, social, emotional, and cultural, serves as both a resistance trope and a theoretical frame for the recovery of disarticulated female identities in Emecheta’s novel. The Abiku mystique involves the distinctive narration of fractured or subsumed identities embedded as a figuration of agency. The paradoxes of Abiku’s existence offer a conceptual space; Abiku works as a thematic, aesthetic, and narratological device which destabilizes essentialist and unified identities of postcolonial Nigerian women.