From Anote Ajeluorou and Greg Nwakunor (reporting from Port Harcourt)
For many, literature has very little role, if any, to
play in enhancing or contributing to national development. Those who argue or
think in this vein do not see the necessity of devoting time and resources to
the study of literature or even reading literary works for the sheer pleasure
and delight such exercises offer the reader.
It’s
also partly the reason a ready dichotomy has been created between the arts and
the sciences, with those inclined towards the sciences being denied benefits of
the humanising and liberating resourcefulness in language mastery, cultural
education and re-education, and value-orientation that novels, plays, short
stories and poems offer readers.
Consequently, Nigerian society has become very philistinic or
anti-intellectual in tenor, with poor results being recorded yearly in national
examinations as rewards for the anti-reading malaise. Indeed, it is why a vast
majority of young Nigerians are on a steady march on the path of illiteracy even
when they are still in school.
These
were some of the issues that came to the fore on Tuesday at the on-going Garden
City Literary Festival organised by the Rainbow Book Club at Hotel
Presidential, Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
It was
Day Two at the festival that brought writers from Nigeria and other parts of
the world to celebrate virtues of literary engagement. The festival comes to a
close tomorrow.
The event was a seminar session held in
conjunction with the Association of Nigerian Authors, Rivers State chapter,
with the topic, Literature and Women in National development; it was moderated by the association’s chairman, Mr. Obinna Nwodim.
The
three-woman panel included a lecturer at University of Education, Port
Harcourt, Dr. Chinyere Agabi, ANA Rivers treasurer, Mrs. Ekaete George and Mrs.
Nneka Joyce Duru. They took time to both restate the crucial role literature
plays in national development and how a robust, rounded portrayal of women in
literature plus women actively writing to correct negative portrayal of women,
can make for a society that is able to reshape the values of its young ones so
as to impact society positively.
Duru’s
argument captured the essence of the seminar debate when she stated that “women
are the culture-bearers of the nation”, with Agabi also noting that society’s
humanising values are best imparted to the young through Africa’s age-old folk
narratives in which are embedded values and virtues that have long nurtured the
African soul, but which are currently in danger of being lost due to
modernisation that has no space for such once-cherished pastimes.
She,
however, foresaw a challenge for city women in this regard, saying they might
be handicapped in not being able to tell their young ones a good folktale as
was also her case. To overcome such challenge, Agabi said she had to formulate
tales to tell her daughter, who constantly upbraided her for not being able to
retell the same story right a second time.
What could
be done, Agabi further argued, is for parents, particularly women or mothers,
to try as much as possible to record or write down these folktales, as she was
to learn from her own daughter who would rather listen to a folk narrative than
be read to from a written text.
For the
three women, the closeness of women or mothers to their children is key to
facilitating a re-orientation of social values through narratives that morally
edify and reknit the fabric of society away from the corrupting tendency so
prevalent today.
So, Agabi
argued that through fiction such as her recent work, The Survival and other ones, “Women are able to tell children about things that are
valuable in society; women can talk about values that shape children’s lives.
In female writing, you find forced marriages, peer influence, female
circumcision, laziness and also things that can change wayward behaviours. It’s
important to highlight the things that impede social growth of children and
amplify those that enhance it.”
One way
to do this, the university don stated, is to give the girl-child a ready access
to education, even compulsory education, up to secondary school level, so she
could discharge her role better in society by imparting better values to her
young ones. She noted that women are badly challenged by the scourge of
illiteracy, which a free education could easily mitigate.
For Duru,
literature offers a bridge between women and power. For her literature is not
only beautiful and a breath of fresh air, but that it gives the woman the
all-important “notion of self-awareness, self-realisation, awareness of her
constitutional rights and how to contribute socially, economically, culturally
and politically to her society. Literature can spur a woman into going onto
higher ground; help a woman to break down social shackles that hold her down.
Literature helps her know her rights and for her to be confident to shape her life
and to live her life the way she wants it to be”.
She
argued that women writers should write positive things that would help the
girl-child to grow up morally and strong, with awareness of who she really is
as a human being that has relevance in her society.
Away
from the seemingly negative images that some first generation writers portrayed
women, today’s women writers have begun to give credibility and roundedness to
female characters in fiction to counter such negativity.
One of
the panellists, Mrs. George urged continuing positive portrayal of women in
fiction so that a balanced view of the female could be presented as Buchi
Emecheta, Flora Nwapa and others did in their works. This would serve as
counterpoint to what Chinua Achebe and other male writers did in their early
works that relegated women to positions of servitude in society.
George
stated, “In Nigerian female writing, we began to see how women impacted society
positively to emerge from the position they found themselves and became
productive members of society. Women should be presented in positive light, in
a position of strength as co-creators and social engineers. Nigerian male
writers didn’t portray women right, but the women eventually came to tell women’s
stories the way it is; men talked about the way they perceived women, but women
talked about strong, aggressive women, who are socially and economically
strong. Such stories helped to reshape women’s psyche and make them feel they
are part of the social and economic development agents of society”.
George
also stated that early female writers like Akachi Ezeigbo, Sefi Atta and Kaine
Agary and such platform as Garden City Literary Festival, the brain-child of a
woman, with its 2012 women-centred theme, ‘Women in Literature’, offered women writers a solid platform for self-expression so that
feminine issues could be brought to the fore for discussion and evaluation.
Also for
Agabi, the pervasive use of social media by youths could be another avenue for
female writers to explore to reach a large number of young ones through exploiting
the internet instrument of social media and bombarding such traffic with value-oriented
materials so that youths consume wholesome content and not some of the trash
currently on offer.
She
suggested the possibility of a section in social media devoted entirely to
healthy literary content for young people.
A PARTICIPANT, Ozoma Amara faulted claims that Achebe
presented only docile women in Things Fall Apart.
He argued instead that strong female characters like the priestess of agbala exist in the novel, stating that presentation of female characters is
only situational and not necessarily deliberately to denigrate.
Another
participant urged for closer ties between child-mother relationships as a way
of entrenching strong cultural values in children, saying also that “women
should mentor other women to help in the continuing enhancement of women’s
power”.
In her
own intervention, Prof. Molara Ogundipe (now teaching at the University of Port
Harcourt after a few years’ sojourn in Ghana) stated that African societies are
not only known for negative practices such as human sacrifices, female genital
mutilation and maltreatment of women but that positive values also abound. In
spite of eroded values, she said, Nigerian students still performed excellently
in schools abroad as a result of the strong values they had imbibed at home.
For
women who keep whining about balancing office work with managing the home front,
Ogundipe said the African woman had always worked in traditional societies,
especially in farming, trading or fishing; and contributing to the economic,
cultural and even political wellbeing of societies, which she effectively
combined with managing the home. Ogundipe added that there is the need to
examine women’s contributions back then in the farms and now in the offices.
A strong
campaigner for women’s rights, Ogundipe tasked women to think of themselves first
as human beings, who have certain rights and privileges before seeing
themselves as women. “What makes women not think of themselves as human beings?”
she asked. It’s because they live in patriarchy! And women are trained,
conditioned to support patriarchy”, even when patriarchy degrade the female
person.
Ogundipe charged men to shed the notion
of patriarchy and regard women as co-partners in society. She also noted that
morality needed not be viewed only in the prism of sex, with women always being
seen as the offenders, but that morality should be seen in more encompassing
context of ethics, hard work, excellence and absence of corruption that African
males have so perfected to stunt the continent’s growth.
Ogundipe
noted that a new reading of Things Fall Apart
sees it as a novel about manhood and womanhood, especially with Okonkwo going
into exile in his mother’s place because he beats his wife during the week of
peace that eventually culminates in the tragic event that sent him into exile.
The
notable gender, author and literary critic reiterated her call for a more
generational dialogue to be held between the older and younger generation of
Africans as a means of bridging whatever gap Western civilization has wrought
to disrupt Africa’s moral tenor that has caused disruption in the socio-cultural
fabric of society. She re-emphasised her call for the teaching of indigenous
African languages to the young ones so that African values could be better
transmitted down the line for a continuum of African wholesome cultural values.
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