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Abstract

Amma Darko’s The Housemaid is an attempt to free women from male ascendancy by giving power to the so-called weaker sex. It demolishes the patriarchal social and cultural structures that prevail in literature by male writers. Amma Darko’s second novel focuses on female characters taking the lead in society whereas male characters are viewed as grotesque, irresponsible companions. The purpose of this paper is to show how Darko’s The Housemaid is a reaction to the social injustice inflicted upon women in literature by male writers. 

Keywords: misandry – male writers – female writers – prejudice – responsibility – self-assertion  

 

Résumé

Le roman The Housemaid de Amma Darko est une analyse visant à libérer la gente féminine de la domination masculine en responsabilisant la femme. Cette œuvre romanesque bat en brèche le système patriarcal et culturel véhiculé par les romanciers. Dans le deuxième roman d’Amma Darko, les personnages de sexe féminin jouent des rôles prédominants dans la société et ceux masculins se révèlent des compagnons monstrueux et irresponsables.

Cet article vise à démontrer en quoi The Housemaid de Darko est une réplique à l’injustice sociale que subissent les femmes dans les œuvres littéraires écrites par les hommes.   

Mots clés : misandrie – romanciers – romancières – préjugés – responsabilité – affirmation de soi.

 

 

Introduction

Most of societies in Africa South of the Sahara are characterised by a social system in which men are seen as holders of authority in the family and society. In African society, power and possessions are passed on from father to male children. As Jérôme Kra Koffi rightfully puts it,

if we take time to look closely at the way the community is ruled, we quickly come to the conclusion that it is the male dominated values that prevails. The society is then ruled according to the desires of its male members.[1]

 

In this vein, women and girls are relegated to a position of secondary importance; they are ‘second-class citizens’[2]. Women and girls are assigned such roles as those of housekeepers, wives, child-bearers, and caretakers, to name only a few. In the light of the foregoing, social life is based on “the principle of male success to the detriment of the females’”.[3] Castigating the social injustice inflicted on the female sex, Kra Koffi adds that the woman’s

main activities involve cooking, taking care of the husband and children and on top of it all, bearing children. To send a girl to school is just to give her the necessary tools (reading – writing and counting) to become a good wife and mother.[4]

 

The fair sex is then subjected to oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and violence, and frequently obliged to swallow the male sex’s diktat or rulings. However, since literature appears as the reflection of what happens in society, Carole B. Davies accurately points out that, in novels by male writers, African women are pigeonholed as “foolish virgin”, the “femme fatale” and the “matron”.[5] As can be seen, boys are preferred to girls regarding schooling in the African social and structural system.[6] Facing such a situation, some African female scholars[7] have stood up against such a blatant ‘social injustice’ and thus are changing drastically the socially established order by putting female characters in the forefront of initiatives in their creative writings. In this regard, Jérôme Kra Koffi points out:

Consequently, the social construction of a new reality called gender appeared in many African literary works that reduce these female characters to poor or second-ary [sic.] positions. This conception, which for long stood as the norm got violated recently by some female writers whose approach to the reality of gender is far different from the one pictured in male writers’ novels.[8] 

 

Comparing Western feminist literature with African women novelists, Katherine Frank writes that while:

our [Western] heroine slams the door on her domestic prison, journeys out into the great world, slays the dragon of her patriarchal society, and triumphantly discovers the grail of feminism by ‘finding herself,’ in the African feminist novel, women do not only share responsibilities with men but also engineer ‘a destiny of their own ... a destiny of vengeance.[9]

 

Mawuli Adjei, a Ghanaian scholar, makes the same point about African feminist writers’ commitment when he writes,

A noticeable trend in feminist African literature today appears to be radical separatist feminism. Radical feminism is that branch of feminism which questions why women must adopt certain roles based on their biology, just as it questions why men adopt certain other roles based on theirs.[10] 

 

Amma Darko, a Ghanaian female novelist, is among such African feminist scholars who are striving to put right the ‘wrong’ caused to the female sex by a misogynistic society to such an extent that some African feminist writers appear misandrous in their novels. In this wake, Mawuli Adjei rightfully points out that Amma Darko endeavours to “present and contest the culture of patriarchy. In her works, women are victims of rape, battery, betrayal, abandonment by irresponsible husbands, economic exploitation and obnoxious cultural practices”.[11] Likewise, Louise Zak points out that Amma Darko’s novels tackle “the injustices of patriarchal society....”[12]

 This paper investigates how Amma Darko emphatically draws such a bleak picture of most male characters in her novel The Housemaid that she may elicit anger from the male readership. In an analysis of male bashing in literature, Allan Johnson points out :

Accusations of male bashing and man hating work to discredit feminism because people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people. Given the reality of women's oppression, male privilege, and some men's enforcement of both, it's hardly surprising that EVERY woman should have moments when she resents or even ‘hates’ men.[13]

 

1. Spurious accusation against male characters

In the Oxford Dictionaries, one can read that ‘misandry’ is a “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men (i.e. the male sex)”.[14] Seen from that point of view, most of the female characters in Amma Darko’s The Housemaid (1998) show blatant hatred toward the male sex.  In this regard, Darko’s writing falls into radical feminism, which is “that brand of feminism which questions why women must adopt certain roles based on their biology, just as it questions why men adopt certain other roles based on theirs”.[15] Undoubtedly, there is some sort of “male-bashing”[16] in Darko’s The Housemaid.

Indeed, the woman, who delivers her baby only to get rid of it into the rubbish heap, must be severely punished no matter her motivating force. It is clear as daylight that a woman who keeps a foetus, then a baby for nine months, is bound to develop motherly love toward her newborn baby. In other words, because the baby has stayed in the womb of its mother for quite a time, there is a tender intimacy between it and the mother. The umbilical cord that links the foetus to the mother generates a very tight relationship between the mother and the ‘coming into being’. Hence, it is beyond all understanding that a woman who has gone through all this should end up dumping the ‘fruit of love’ in the bush and sometimes in the rainwater channels. To direct a scathing attack on such a gruesome attitude from some women, a nameless taxi driver in Darko’s The Housemaid, rightfully wonders: “The issue is why she should deliver a baby and dump her in the thicket”.[17] It stands to reason that the woman, who has committed such an infanticide, should face a murder charge.

Unfortunately, some misandrous female characters, in Amma Darko’s second novel, turn a blind eye to the horrifying crime committed by their female peers laying all the blame on the male sex. The misandrous attitude of a woman tomato-seller in   The Housemaid, sounds as follows:

I can see you two young men turning out just like the irresponsible man who impregnated the poor woman in the first place .... You holy fool! ... You think the mother just sat there, opened her legs, and God above pushed the baby into her or what? .... Why do you men always try to make nonsense of issues, just to escape blame? (pp. 6-7)

 

It appears that the woman tomato seller buries her head in the sand instead of blaming the offender as the latter belong to the female sex, that is hers. The woman tomato seller is not the only one to show hatred toward men, only on a genotypic basis, in Amma Darko’s novel. As a matter of fact, to the question: “Who committed the world’s first sin”? (p. 8), a nineteen-year-old girl, a tiger-nut seller, eagerly responds:

It’s the man! ... Go and look at my sister. She is only sixteen and already pregnant with her second child. The man responsible for the first one disappeared as soon as he was told of it. And this second one too, he was a really nice man, till this pregnancy came. Then come and see! He too started talking strange talk. ‘Ah! Didn’t I do it with you all the way only once?’... ‘All the other times, didn’t I remove my thing before the milk came’? Then declared that no, no, no, it sure was not him responsible. So tell me – sixteen, two children, no husband, no job. I tell you. A fine reason to abandon your baby... (p. 8)

 

For sure, the sixteen-year-old ‘mother’ on the one hand, and her two lovers on the other, should be held responsible for her sexual precocity. In this respect Mawuli Adjei accurately writes,

However, from the author’s [Amma Darko’s] point of view, while it appears on the surface that both boys and girls are giving vent to their teenage sex drive, Darko’s focus is on the irresponsible boys who are always on the prowl, callously and indiscriminately displaying their manhood all over the place.[18]

 

From this biased point of view, Darko writes, “Occasionally, some [boys] were booted out, on the chief’s orders, for gross misdemeanour”(p. 30).[19]

Similarly, to back up the authoress’ partiality regarding the fate she reserves for male characters, Mawuli Adjei writes,

the problem with Darko’s position with regard to the sexuality of her male characters is that she ignores sexuality as a natural biological urge involving both males and females, as a shared passion and, consequently, a shared responsibility. To always impute bestiality to the male sex drive is to deny the whole process of being.[20]

 

Nevertheless, any knowledgeable reader will agree with us that the loose attitude from the sexually precocious teenager may largely lie in the education she gets from her parents since at the age of sixteen she has already had two kids. This simply implies that she starts her sexual activity probably at the age of fourteen or worse still before, knowing that a pregnancy lasts nine good months. Even if the ‘irresponsible’ male sexual partner does not take on his responsibility toward his sexual female partner, does the mother have the right to abandon or kill the baby she has kept for nine months in her womb? To Justify such a sordid and criminal deed might border on sadism.   

 The narrator in Amma Darko’s The Housemaid also seems to lay all the blame on the male sex inasmuch as there is a denunciation of the ‘irresponsibility’ of Mami Korkor’s husband, a character in the novel. For the misandrous narrator, after being abandoned by her ‘irresponsible’ lover, Mami Korkor has been obliged to cope alone with the regrettable aftermaths of their unconsidered sexual deeds. This is how the narrator lays tooth and nail into Mami Korkor’s husband: “she [Mami Korkor] had to hawk fish from dawn to dusk to earn just enough to feed herself and her four children. They all depended on her. Not a pesewa came from their father” (p. 11).

The emphatic use of the personal pronoun “she” simply implies that in the couple, the man shirks his responsibility as spouse and father and the ‘responsible and conscientious’ wife fills the gap by compensating for the glaring irresponsibility of her husband; thus she toils to feed her children. Of course,  Mami Korkor’s husband is to be blamed for not assuming his duty as husband and father, but Mami Korkor has also her share of the responsibility as she has kept their love affair going  long enough to have four children with the ‘irresponsible’ husband! Mami Korkor’s child, Bibio, proves the point when she blames her ‘willing’ mother as follows: “Why, after making Nereley with him [our daddy], when you realised how irresponsible he was, did you go ahead to make Akai, me and Nii Boi as well”? (p. 11) It appears from this edifying remark that there is fault on both sides – the husband’s and his wife’s.

 

2. Physical and Psychological Violence upon Male Characters

Amma Darko creates a world in which female characters commit acts of physical abuse against male characters. Male characters’ domination and battery by women in Darko’s imaginary world occurs with Sekyiwa, a female character, who constantly assaults her ‘good-for-nothing’ husband. As a matter of fact, at the age of twenty-two, Sekyiwa has a secret love affair with a married man who is twenty-four years her senior. The man’s first and legal wife is barren. Sekyiwa becomes pregnant and her lover adores her as he has been childless with his first and legal wife. Extremely joyous, he sets a business up for Sekyiwa and she soon happens to be one of the most prosperous market women in her area. Sekyiwa then becomes the idol of young, good-looking male gold-diggers. Sekyiwa takes to prostitution as her husband’s libido begins to wane. Worse still, considering her him worthless, too old and sexually inactive, she constantly beats the poor husband of hers, which traumatises little Tika. This is how the narrator in The Housemaid conveys what little Tika witnesses in her childhood:

Little Tika remembered the fights and arguments she had witnessed between her parents. All the screaming and yelling had come from her mother; the imploring and pleading from her father. She remembered her mother’s hands flying at her father’s face in time with her insults. It was her father who had wept. After one such argument, her mother had stormed past her and out of the house, without so much as a glance, as Tika leaned confused against the corridor wall. She had gone to find her father and ask why he was weeping. He had cuddled her, managed a weak smile and assured her that he had not been crying, but she knew that he was not telling her the truth. (p. 19)

 

This long but telling quotation exemplifies Darko’s female characters’ misandrous attitude toward the male sex, as the ‘sexually inactive’ man suffers physical assault and trauma from his ‘vigorous’ sexual companion until death.   Misandry in Amma Darko’s The Housemaid often urges female characters to pre-empt events or quite simply to play the part of the head of the household. The reader of Darko’s The Housemaid sees the character Sekyiwa play a key part in her household, which often leads her to prostitution. It is worth saying that Sekyiwa usurps the title of the head of the family not because of the husband’s financial incapability toward her, but oddly enough because the aged man can no longer assuage her sexual desires. This is how the man’s sexual disability leads Sekyiwa to be unfaithful to him:

Young, good-looking male gold-diggers began to vie for her [Sekyiwa’s] attention. Her husband’s libido was waning anyway, so she gave in. She gave them good money; they gave her good sex. Life’s satisfaction shone in her eyes. Her husband mistook it for love; his heart was bursting with affection for his young wife. (p. 18)      

 

The straw that breaks the camel’s back is the ‘clumsy’ remark that Sekyiwa’s her loving husband innocently makes to please his ladylove: “Now that we have achieved what we set out to ..., we can begin to really enjoy life” (p. 18). Oddly enough, Sekyiwa is rather infuriated by her companion’s ‘lovely’ words: “Enjoy what life? What life is there to enjoy with a dead penis” (p. 18)? It appears that, a man’s worth, according to the female character Sekyiwa, is assessed depending on his virility no matter his wealth.

 

3. Misrepresentation of Male Characters in Amma’s The Housemaid

  ‘Hatred’ toward male characters in Amma Darko’s second novel seems obvious since they are assigned wicked roles in the story. Male characters are taken as useless and irresponsible partners. In this vein, Mawuli Adjei points out “the condescending manner in which Darko treats her male characters.”[21] Indeed, other instances of misandrous representations and male-bashing are present in Darko’s novel. Efia’s father is quite often presented as a tippler. Whenever an important decision is to be taken in his household, he is always seen on the leaving streak. As a matter of fact, at any time Efia’s father appears in the narration, the reader sees him senseless and addicted to the local spirit, called akpeteshie, he consumes in his den the ‘Kill-Me-Quick’ bar. Indeed, one might say that it is to prove men’s worthlessness or uselessness that the narrator in Darko’s literary work shows Efia’s father drunk while the fate of his daughter is at stake. In fact, a foreigner – named   Tika, a city dweller – has come to bring Efia to the city as a housekeeper. But at that moment, Efia’s father is inebriated and unable to give his own opinion in the on-going discussion. One can read,

At Kataso on the appointed day, even though it was not even approaching noon, Efia’s father was already drunk and fast asleep on a wicker mat inside the hut.... He was lying spreadeagled on the floor, oblivious to the flies buzzing in and out of his open mouth, and snoring as if tomorrow were doomsday. (pp. 40-41)

 

Is obvious that Darko’s characters dwell in a female-dominated society in which  the mother is in the command while Efia’s father is dead drunk. Such a description highlights women’s contempt for men in Amma Darko’s fiction. To justify the fate reserved for male characters in her writings, Amma Darko, in an interview with Raymond Ayinne, says:

We’ve started writing from our point of view because, for a while, you [men writers] were writing for us [...]. So [... ] if we [women writers] are writing, probably there is some pain that has to come out. And I think rather than take it as male-bashing, you must take it as a means to better understand the women folk of Africa [...]. You were always portraying us as all-enduring, all-giving mothers and that is the attitude we find in males [...] but I don’t want to be all-giving all the time, I don’t want to be all-enduring. I want to be angry, I want to react.[22] (Emphasis mine) 

 

Furthermore, to get Tika not to send Efia back to Kataso, because she utterly disappoints her foster mother by getting pregnant, a man has to pour libations to ask their gods and ancestors to speak in their favour. As a matter of fact, in defiance of tradition and mainly because of the misandry rampant in the narration, Efia’s grandmother scornfully tells Efia’s father, “Go and pour your libation. Who says the gods will favour a drunkard over a woman?” (p. 73). Considering this event, Mawuli Adjei rightly points out,

Her actually pouring the libation, and in so doing breaching the custom of libation as a male preserve, is a way of having women take over gendered male roles in a world in which men have become irresponsible, worthless, dispensable and irrelevant. That the old woman, who in the African feminist discourse usually symbolises tradition, prevails in the end shows that Darko approves of the conscious shattering of the status quo as a mark of female assertion and independence.[23]

 

4. Women’s Supremacy

For Barthélémy Kotchi, a literary piece of work always reflects the social, historical, as well as the institutional context from which it comes out. In other words, in his opinion, there is a tight relationship between the literary text and the community.[24] We are fully in line with Kotchi as the attitude of some successful female characters in Darko’s The Housemaid is a quintessence of the behaviour of most women who have reached the summits of fame in true-to-life African societies. The idea of the submissive African woman in her role as wife and housekeeper is now something of a remote past. African female writers depict the new posture adopted by some African women in their fiction where hatred of the male sex is prevalent.   

Indeed, in the misandrous society created by Amma Darko in her novel, female characters rule society so much so that male characters, like Sekyiwa’s companion, are petrified with fear at the sight of their female partner. In this wake, Mawuli Adjei writes that Amma Darko, in her novel, strives to “present and contest the culture of patriarchy”[25] which prevails in most African societies. The reader gets to know the highly charged or strained atmosphere in which Tika’s father lives. Indeed, alone with his beloved daughter and only child, one can notice that the man is in bliss when playing with her. Nevertheless, this relaxed atmosphere suddenly turns sour once Madam Sekyiwa appears. This is what one learns when little Tika happens not to go to market with her mother but stays home with her loving father:

It had been even more glaringly clear on those free Saturdays when her mother had not taken her to the shop. On such days her father had become a completely different person, playing and laughing with her. All it had taken was the sound of her mother’s arrival for the gaiety to halt abruptly, as if the light of her father’s life had been extinguished by the flick of a switch. (p. 19)    

 

It appears from this edifying citation that the character Madam Sekyiwa exerts her superiority over her ‘husband’ as if she were the head of the family, so much so that the miserable other half withdraws into his shell, very frightened, at the very sight of the chauvinistic ‘torturer’. In other words, the cheerfulness of Sekyiwa’s companion fades into scare as soon as his very young spouse sets foot on their dwelling place. In this woman-dominated universe wanted by the female writer Amma Darko, one learns that Tika, despite her failure at school, has been Owuraku’s financial prop in the completion of his study at university. One can clearly guess Darko’s intention here as she wants to demonstrate that women play a key part in men’s prosperity or bloom better still, women are as worthy as men or even worthier. Darko has written this to her incredulous readers, as for the paramount part of the fair sex in conjugal life: “By the time Owuraku had finished with the sixth form and was going on to university Tika was providing for all his needs” (p. 22).It is worth mentioning that Tika and Owuraku have been going out together for quite a long time. Knowing that she is Owuraku’s financial provider, Tika utterly keeps control over him to such an extent that she has an affair with other men behind Owuraku’s back. Mockingly, this is what the narrator in Amma Darko’s The Housemaid says about the strange relationship between Tika and Owuraku:

Then it reached the ears of Owuraku’s friends that Owuraku was unknowingly paying a price for his good luck [being financed by a richer sexual partner, Tika]. He was having to share Tika with other men, something they were certain he had no idea about. (p. 22)

 

One might put forward that Owuraku becomes Tika’s hostage and his friends’ laughing stock basically because Tika is the breadwinner in their marital life. It is worth mentioning that there is nothing wrong with having a supportive wife in the household; but it becomes a matter of concern when on account of this, the wife grows disrespectful and unfaithful. This is how one of Owuraku’s friends derides him: “The way your woman has become your provider, she could be hijacking your manhood, while you have no control over her womanhood at all”! (p. 22).  Tika takes such the liberty to bed “shop owners, bank managers, custom officers” (p. 23) while, oddly enough, Owuraku and she are living together as husband and wife. It is clear that Tika takes Owuraku as a puppet as she is quite convinced that Owuraku does not carry much weight financially.

One might think that Owuraku, financially impotent, deliberately bears Tika’s intrigues; yet, he will not surrender. The narrator in The Housemaid says this about Owuraku’s sudden awareness:

But Owuraku was not like these other men [those who turn a blind eye to their spouses’ loose living]. He was a university undergraduate with pride and prospects. For Owuraku, money was good, but not at any price. And that was a point Tika had missed.”(p. 24)

 

Fortunately, Owuraku is dignified unlike some deceived husbands, who because of the financial power of their wives, pretend not to be aware of their wives’ deception lest they should lose them or lose the wives’ financial liberties. Owuraku regains his lost dignity in the sense that when he decides to part with Tika, he finds a poorer sexual partner to show Tika that his love for her is not self-interested or better still, he is not money-conscious. This is what the reader learns about Owuraku’s U-turn or sudden awareness:

Owuraku decided on an exit plan. In his heart [sic.] he was finished with Tika, but he decided that he would not tell her immediately. He would leave her to think the affair was still on, and continue to benefit from her financially for as long as it would take her to realise that it was over between them. Next, he picked a girlfriend from campus. When Tika heard about it, she refused to believe it and confronted Owuraku. He did not deny it. But Tika still would not give up. It was a reaction against the pain she had caused him, she told herself. She initiated an investigation into her rival’s background, learnt that she was from a poor family, and convinced herself even more that things would sort themselves out given time. Owuraku would realise that the girl had nothing to offer him. (pp. 23-24)

 

It appears that Tika relies on her financial base to two-time Owuraku and she is entangled in her loose life deluding herself about Owuraku. Now that he has become aware about Tika’s well-orchestrated deceptions, Owuraku’s stratagem is to spin-dry his financial provider as much as possible and to move out with a student as an alternative. But stunned at Owuraku’s decision to move out with a destitute student to make her see sense, Tika boasts this way, counting on her financial base: “How can she [the student Owuraku is moving out with now] even try to step into my shoes? What has she to offer Owuraku? Money is the power word. Not books” (p. 24). It is clear that prosperity has made Tika bigheaded and condescending to the extent that she looks down on her scholarly rival who is trying to snatch her partner from her. To keep Owuraku for herself, Tika showers him with more cash and gifts; nevertheless, Owuraku will not listen to reason. To cap it all, Tika suggests that she should “provide the cash” (p. 24) to “perform the marriages rites” (p. 24). She jilts Owuraku for four good men because he proves not to collaborate. The narrator in Amma Darko’s The Housemaid ironically highlights such an attitude when he points out:

Other women’s husbands just closed their ears and minds to it [their wives’ prostitution]. Business was business ... For what would happen if they interfered and the women stopped their antics, the business went down and the cash stopped flowing”? (p. 23)

 

It appears that those men bear the unbearable owing to their wives’ financial supremacy over them, by allowing them to sell their body so that the entire household can make both ends meet. Such men are nothing but doormats being manipulated by their ‘powerful’, lecherous and adulterous wives who buy their silence over their promiscuous conduct. As can be seen, Tika is among such women. Indeed, in the mind of Tika she can reach all her dishonest aim with her wealth including buying her companion’s conscience, not to mention Owuraku’s regained determination to get back prestige after a long time’s dormancy.

 

Conclusion

In The Housemaid, Amma Darko demolishes the privilege that society tacitly grants the male sex because of their gender. Indeed, the Ghanaian authoress creates in her novel a society in which female characters are at the forefront of agency. They take the lead and are breadwinners of the family. In this prospect, Amma Darko draws a despicable picture of male characters in which they are shown as failures, nonentities, and irresponsible partners. Amma Darko’s second novel seems to create the social divide between men and women with the latter accusing the former of being a victimiser.   

 

Bibliography

• Achebe, Chinua.Arrow of God.London: Heinemann,1964.  
• Adjei, Mawuli. “Male-bashing and Narrative Subjectivity in Amma Darko’s First Three Novels” inSKASE Journal of Literary Studies [online], 2009, vol. 1 n° 1.
• Ayinne, Raymond Akolbine. “Emerging Issues in Amma Darko’s Novels: Beyond the Horizon,The HousemaidandFaceless.” Undergraduate Long Essay. Legon: University of Ghana, 2004.
• Darko, Amma.The Housemaid.Edinburgh: Heinemann, 1998.
• Davies, Carole Boyce. “Maidens, Mistresses and Matrons: Feminine Images in Selected Soyinka Works” in Davies Carole
• Boyce and Graves A. A. (eds.)Ngambika: Studies of Women in Africa. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1986.
• Dickey, Charles “Review: Privilege, Power, and Difference by Allan G. Johnson” (Second Edition). fromhttp://leftunderbooks.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/review-privilege-power-and-difference-second-edition-by-allan-g-johnson/(25 /05 /2013)
• Emecheta, Buchi.Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby, 1976.
• Frank, Katherine “Women Without Men: The Feminist Novel in Africa” in Durosimi, E., et al. (ed.)Women in African Literature Today. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1987.
• Johnson, Allan.Privilege, Power, and Difference. USA: McGraw Hill Higher Education (2^nded.), 2005.
• ---The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005
• Kotchi, Barthélémy.Méthodologie et Idéologie.Abidjan : CEDA, 1989.
• Kra Koffi, Jérôme. “The Problematic of Gender and Racial Discrimination in Buchi Emecheta’sSecond-Class Citizen” inParticip’Action: Revue Interafricaine de Littérature, Linguistique et Philosophie. Lomé: Imprimerie ST. Louis, Volume 5, N°1 Janvier 2013.
• Oxford Dictionaries:The World’s most Trusted Dictionaries. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Zak, Louise Allen.“Amma Darko: Writing Her Own Way, Creating a New Life” in Odamtten Vincent O. (ed.),Broadening the Horizon: Critical Introductions to Amma Darko. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, 2007.

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Abstract

This paper scrutinises some strange uses of pronominal reference in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1978) to come to the conclusion that such uses are influenced by traditional grammar, on the one hand, and by the context of culture and the idiosyncratic belonging of the chief character-narrators in the novel, on the other. The researchers have also established intertextual links between their findings and other writings to show that such pronominalisation is not peculiar to Achebe.

Key words: pronominalisation, personification, metaphor, interpersonal relationship, context of culture, andocentrism.

 

Résumé

Cet article analyse des cas étranges de pronominalisation dans le roman Anthills of the Savannah (1978) de l’écrivain nigérian Chinua Achebe. Il parvient à la conclusion que ces cas sont influencés par la ‘loi andocentrique’ de la grammaire traditionnelle, d’une part, et le contexte culturel et idéologique des principaux personnages-narrateurs du roman, d’autre part. Les critiques ont aussi établi des liens intertextuels avec d’autres écrits pour montrer que la pronominalisation interpersonnelle n’est pas forcément propre à Achebe.   

Mots clés : pronominalisation, personnification, métaphore, relation interpersonnelle, contexte culturel, andocentrisme.

 

 

1. Introduction.

     We all have been taught in secondary school that the pronoun set “he-him-his-his-himself” should be used to refer to human-male gender, “she-her-her-hers-herself” for the female one and “it-it-its-its-itself” for neuter, i.e., a thing or an animal, heedless of gender. In addition, reference to the indefinite personal pronouns and noun phrases such as “somebody, someone, everybody, everyone, anybody, anyone, nobody, no one, any student, every candidate, any person, etc” should be made with the “they-them-their-theirs-themselves” pronoun set to avoid sexist language. What is more, the English grammar we have learnt and taught so far recommends the use of the “it-it-its-its-itself” pronoun set for the item “baby”.

          However, such prescriptions at times happen to be breached, consciously or not, in narratives. This paper identifies and analyses ‘strange’ cases of pronominal reference to animals, concepts, and some humans in Achebe’s Anthills of Savannah (1978) to point out their apparent deviation. But after their contextualisation, most such uses are found to be influenced by their cultural, ideological and interpersonal contexts. The paper overviews the concept of personal reference and related issues before tackling the analysis proper.  

 

 

2. Metalinguistic Overview and Research Orientation

The term ‘reference’ is traditionally used in semantics as a synonym for ‘sense’ or ‘denotative meaning’ of a word (Saussure, 1959; Lyons, 1977). In discourse analysis and functional linguistics, however, more stress is laid on ‘discourse reference’. Thus, though Halliday (2004) acknowledges the meaning of ‘reference’ as the ideational denotation of a word, he, drawing on Halliday and Hasan (1976), opines that it is a textual cohesive strategy of identifiability, that is, how a given element can be identified or recovered by the listener or reader at a given point in the discourse (p.550). For Brown and Yule (1988), ‘reference’ is the

function whereby speakers (writers) indicate, via the use of a linguistic expression, the entities they are talking (writing) about” (p.205). As for Yule (1988:130), it is “an act by which a speaker or writer uses language to enable a listener or reader to identify something.

 

Though Halliday and Hasan (1976), Brown and Yule (1988), Bloor and Bloor (2004), and Halliday (2004) distinguish three broad types of reference – personal, demonstrative, and comparative – only the first type is considered in this paper.

          Indeed, personal reference is dependent on the use of personal pronouns, which is why it is also known as pronominal reference or personal deixis (Bloor & Bloor, 2004: 94; Yule, 1988: 132). This is of three types: anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric. Exophoric reference is made to an entity that lies outside the text, as when we say “look at that”, by pointing our finger in the direction of the entity. It is thus not textual, while the other two are. While anaphoric reference or anaphora is seen as “subsequent reference to an already introduced entity in the discourse” (Yule, 1988:131), cataphora is one to an entity that is to be mentioned later in the discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:72). Here are two examples to illustrate the two concepts.

(a) “John came on stage and the audience gave him a standing ovation”

       (b) “When he came on stage, the audience gave John a standing ovation”

While the pronoun in (a) has an anaphoric function, the one in (b) has a cataphoric one. Verma and Krishnaswamy (2009), however, use the phrases “forward pronominalisation” and “backward pronominalisation” to respectively refer to those two types of reference. While the former is seen as “the replacement of the second of two identical noun phrases by a pronoun”, the latter consists “in replacing the first of two identical NPs by a pronoun” (pp.234-5).

          It must be pointed out that this analysis is  interested neither in classifying reference into the “exophoric-anaphoric-cataphoric” types, nor is it so in judging this or that as correct or true reference. The discourse analyst, according to Brown and Yule (1988), is mainly interested in successful reference, that is, the hearer or reader’s ability to identify, for the purpose of understanding the current linguistic message, the speaker or writer’s intended referent (p.205). That is why the present analysis lays emphasis on how third-person pronouns are unusually used to refer to some animals and humans and tries to explain the contextual, interpersonal and ideological foundations of their unusuality. Yet, it must be noted that the notion of ‘speaker’s intended referent’ points to the personal meaning and should be dissociated from the denotative one. This focus on the speaker’s intended meaning is expressed, too freely indeed,  by a comic character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, cited in Yule (1988), who says: “when I use a word,…it means what I choose it to mean –neither more nor less” (p.92). So discourse reference here should be understood both in terms of speaker’s referent and pronominal reference to that.

 

3. Analysis of Deviant pronominal references in Anthills of the Savannah.                                                   

3.1. Indefinite Pronoun References: Andocentrism and Political Correctness

One of the outstanding features of this novel is andocentric pronominalisation of indefinite antecedents. Indeed, the use of politically incorrect pronominal reference, consciously or not, suggests some sexual discrimination as this entails complete elimination of women from the residents of the Government Reserved Area where Beatrice, however, lives, as in (1) “You wouldn’t see any of their black successors walking his dog today” (p.107), the possessive adjective “his” is used to refer to “any of the black successors” while political correctness would require “their”. In addition, in this section about obituaries or dead-alive celebrities, the same adjective “his” is used in reference to “someone” where “their” would be politically acceptable:

(2) And once in a while among these dead-alive celebrities a disclaimer of someone newly disreputable, inserted by his former employer or partner using naturally a photograph of the unflattering quality of a police WANTED poster (pp.110-11).

 

Does this mean that there is no woman among those obituaries? The answer is definitely ‘NO’. Such a use derives from the traditional view of the male-superior-to-the female, one according to which the presence of one man among any indefinite number of women is enough for the use of the male related pronoun “he” and its derivatives, a case more remarkable with the French plural form “ils”. A third instance of discriminatory personal deixis can be found in the use of “he” to refer to the indefinite noun phrase “a deity”: (3) “A deity who does as he says never lacks in worshippers” (p.103). This denies even the faintest grain of femininity to the concept of “deity”, especially in this context where the deity is Idemili, a female deity, the Daughter of God. Thus, there is no other justification whatsoever for the use of a male-endowed pronouns, unless unconsciously or discriminatorily. Even Ikem, a protagonist who has taken many feminist stands in the story, can be heard to say: (4) “Every genuine artist feels it in his bone” (p.99). Maybe, he should be reminded that political correctness is part and parcel of the feminist struggle for parity.

          Indeed, this preferential use of “he” and its derivatives may not be conscious as its roots can be traced back to traditional prescriptive grammar and its corollary, the andocentric pronominalisation. John Kirkby (1746:117), cited in Coates (1986:23), puts it this way: “The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as Any Person, who knows what he says”. The ‘male-superior-to-female’ idea has been the precursor of the sex-indefinite use of “he” rule which has for long proscribed the use of “they” or “he/she” where the sex of the antecedent is unknown. This trend is opposed by feminists who insist on political correctness. Let us consider these sentences:

(a)Someone rang up last night but he had hung up when I picked the receiver.

(b)Someone rang up last night but he or she had hung up when I picked the receiver.

(a) Someone rang up last night but they had hung up when I picked the receiver.

 

Prescriptive grammarians would consider (a) as ‘correct’, (b) as clumsy and (c) as ‘incorrect’ while by today’s standards the rating is the reverse. The andocentric pronominalisation is at work in these other sentences from the novel under study:

 (5) “Isn’t the great thing about a VIP that his share of good things is always there waiting for him in abundance even while he relaxes in the coolness of home…?” (p.42).

 (6) “They didn’t see why anybody should let a drunken idiot walk all over him in this outrageous way unless there was something indeed wrong with him” (p.47).

(7) “Everyone and his own. The bush-fowl, her work; and the farmer, his” (p.123).

(8) “Beatrice….told Agatha that she was expecting someone and did not wish to be disturbed when he came up” (p.111).

 

It must, however, be remarked that the use of ‘he’ for ‘someone’ in (8) is contextually appropriate as the speaker knows in advance who she is expecting.

 

3.2. Pronominalisation of Animals, Concepts and Humans: Personification and Dehumanisation.

           As announced in the outset, the pronominalisation of animals, concepts and some humans in the novel departs from the ‘male-female-neuter’ classification and prescription of traditional grammar. Indeed, reference to the crowned bird that has come to sing in Beatrice’s courtyard suggests that the use of “he” and “she” and their derivatives does not relate to human-animal distinction, but to gender distinction for both:

     (9) “The bird…was the chief servant of the king and every morning he asks the guards of the treasury: Is the king’s property correct?.... Is the king’s property correct?.... the king’s property…. the king’s property…. Is the king’s property correct?” (p.108)

    (10) “And he spoke again, the diligent chamberlain: Is the king’s property correct? And now she saw him against the light –a little dark-brownish fellow with a creamy belly and the faintest suggestion of a ceremonial plume on the crown of his head. He was perched on the taller of the two pine trees standing guard at the driveway into the block of flats” (p.108).

   (11) “Again he demanded: the king’s property… the king’s property… Is the king’s property correct?” (p.108)

   (12) “He continued intermittently to make his strong-voiced inquiry until the sun came up…” (p.109).

   (13) “Even her poor mother terrorized as she was by her woman’s lot could fabricate from immemorial birdsong this tale of an African bird waking up his new world in words of English (p.109). 

As can be seen from the examples above, the singing bird is referred to with the pronouns “he, he, him, his, He, he, He, his, his” where “it” and its derivatives are expected, especially in this context where the use of ‘it’ would not blur the male-female distinction; only the male bird being pronominalised. This leads to some personification of animals as is in the case of traditional African folktales, but looked at closely, it may be the narrator’s way of implying that, when it comes to matters of sex, all males, whether human or animal, behave similarly, and so do females. Indeed, the eighth chapter of the novel depicts four scenes of sex struggles: two by humans and two by animals. The domineering presence of the male bird, described as the “caretaker of the crown jewels” over the females, content as they are with “making sharp calls of satisfaction” (p.109), is one. The “ferocious sexuality” of the red-blue male lizard over the drab-grey female is another (p.110). The case of the polygamous man, who is so unsatisfied with his many wives as to go and climb a widow at night despite the deity’s prescriptions, stands out here as he is indirectly referred to as a he-goat:

(14) The story goes that in the distant past a certain man handsome beyond compare but in randiness as unbridled as the odorous he-goat from the shrine of Udo planting his plenitude of seeds from a huge pod swinging between hind legs into she-goats tethered for him in front of numerous homesteads; this man, they said, finally desired also the ozo title and took the word to Idemili” (p.104) 

 

As can be seen, the deictics “his” and “him” refer to the goat, but by inference they indirectly relate to the man, as no difference is made between his sexual avidity and that of the goat. For reminders, the term ‘goat’ is pejoratively used to refer to ‘a man with such offensive or excessive sexual desire that he can go as far as have sex with close blood relations’. The same ambiguous pronominalisation can be found out in the quote below:

(15) On his way to resume his hard-lying pretence at cockcrow one morning who should he behold stretched right across his path its head lost in the shrubbery to the left and its tail likewise to the right? None other than Eke-Idemili itself, royal python, messenger of the Daughter of God –the very one who carries not a drop of venom in its mouth and yet is held in greater awe than the deadliest of serpents! (p.105)

 

Here, the royal python, messenger of the daughter of God, is referred to with the pronouns “who, who, its, its, its”. This gives the impression of both a human-related python and an animal. Indeed, the word “serpent” or “python” is used in the book to metaphorically refer to the male sexual organ, just as the word “shrubbery” is to contextually or connotatively allude to the female pubic hair. That is what Beatrice, a female protagonist, clearly suggests in describing her dance with His Excellency: (16)”The big snake, the royal python of a gigantic erection began to stir in the shrubbery of my shrine as we danced closer and closer ….” (p.81). The phrases “bearded meat” used in the saying (17) “Unless the penis dies young it will surely eat bearded meat” (Arrow of God, p.142), and “bush/hair”, in the curse of “fire to scorch their mothers’ bushes” (209) or “Make your mother hair catch fire” (p.206) used by drivers against the policemen who demand bribe from them, clearly confirm the use of figurative language by the Igbo people to refer to sexual organs.

          Coming back to the issue of pronominalisation, the singing bird discussed earlier is also compared to Beatrice’s father, whom she remembers as (18) “a total stranger, like the bird who lived and sang in her tree unknown to her till now” (p.110). While this bird is male-personified, the deictic “its” is used to refer to “a bird” in (19): “She left her office like a bird released from its cage, on the dot of three-thirty” (p.180). Pronominal reference to the male and female lizards in (20) and (21) below also lends to personification; but it clearly points out gender dichotomy through the use of “he, his, his” for the male and “she, she, she” for the female.

(20) “A lizard, red in head and tail, blue in trunk, chased a drab-grey female furiously….She darted through the edges as though her life depended on it. Unraffled he took a position of high visibility at the centre of the compound and began to do his endless press-ups no doubt to impress upon the coy female, wherever she might be hiding in the shrubbery, the fact of his physical stamina” (p.110) 

(21) As she looked at herself in her bedroom mirror and liked what she saw, she thought: we can safely leave grey drabness in female attire to the family of lizards and visiting American journalists. The case of the lizard is probably quite understandable. With the ferocious sexuality of her man she must need all the drabness she can muster for a shield” (p.110).

 

However, this personification helps the narrator to liken animals to humans in sex matters. Just like the case of the he-goat and the polygamous man discussed earlier, the sex struggle between the male and female lizards turns out to be compared to that of humans, with more favourable vote for the animal side. In (21), the term “man” refers not to human male in particular but to the male gender in general, whether human or animal. The lexical item ‘drab,’ or its derivative ‘drabness,’ refers to a slovenly, untidy and dirty woman. Thus the comparison of the drab-grey female lizard to a visiting American journalist is interpersonally outstanding. This is a certain Cranford Lou, who has come to see if the bad news being heard in America about the fictional country Kangan is true, and Beatrice’s view on her, after refusing to be one of his Excellency’s ‘bed-wife’ at the private reception, clearly shows the mutual unfriendly tenor between the two ladies. Such tenor is reflected in this statement by Beatrice:

(22) pretentious journalists hoping to catch the attention of the new military rulers created an image of me as ‘the latter-day Madame Pompadour’ who manipulated generals and patronised journalists (p.84).

 

Even the bus named Luxurious is ambiguously pronominalised for both genre-related and interpersonal reasons:

(23) “Before embarking on Luxurious, Chris walked around it sizing it up like a prospective buyer. He felt a curious pride in its transformation which had not entirely abandoned its origins” (p.201)

(24) “Luxurious had inscribed on its blue body in reds, yellows and whites three different legends.” (p.201).

(25) “But Chris welcomed this disappointment of comfort for the blessing it had in tow, for it curtailed the recklessness of Luxurious which had been conducting herself like a termagant of the highway treating her passengers’ safety cavalierly and bullying every smaller vehicle she encountered clean out of the way as though traffic rights were a matter of size” (p.205).

 

While this bus is initially referred to, neutrally, with the pronouns “it, it, its, its, its” in (23) and (24), it gets personified in (25) with the use of “herself, her, she” used for it. The pronominal shift here comes from the fact that Chris, the focaliser, has initially taken Luxurious as an ordinary bus, any bus. Yet, as he boards it and starts interpreting the inscriptions on it, he finds out the bus represents, ‘three legends’ p.202), thus the change from neutral to genre-dictated and affective pronominalisation.

     Moreover, the reference to the horse is built upon the proverb “a man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof” (p.177) used by the Captain come to Beatrice’s to search for papers and books while Chris, her fiancé, is hiding out. From the use of ‘him-him-him-him-him’ to refer to ‘the horse,’ one can deduce that it is a human horse, Chris:

(26) “I know where the horse is. But I don’t want to find him. Get him moved. Before tonight” (p.179).

(27) “Move him? Was it a trap? To lure him into soldier-infested streets?” (p.179).

(28) “In the morning it was to give her full marks for moving the horse; but, if the horse was still in Bassa, to impress upon her that the city was not a safe environment for him” (p.185).

 

          The mosquito is referred to with the male-endowed pronominal deictic “his”, as in (29) “the mosquito…was taunting the ear in revenge for the insult with which his suit had once been rejected” (p.199), while the bedbug is pointed to with the female-endowed pronoun “she” and its derivatives:

    (30) “Her story is that man once tried to destroy her and her new-hatched brood by pouring a kettle of hot water on them. Her little ones were about to give up the struggle but she said to them: Don’t give up, whatever is hot will become cold” (p.199).

     (31) “I wonder what she will tell them after a good spray of aerosol insecticide” (p.199).

    (32) “Then he quoted the words of encouragement which the bedbug was said to have spoken to her children when hot water was poured on them all. She told them not to lose heart because whatever was hot must in the end turn cold” (NLAE, p.114).

 

It must be noticed that (32) above is another version of the bedbug story in No Longer At Ease which has the same pronominal reference as (30) and (31). Different pronominal references are used for the co-hyponyms of the super-ordinate ‘bird’: ‘the cock’ (his), ‘the bush-fowl (her-her), ‘the chicken’ (its-it-it), and ‘the hen’ (her), as in these passages:

(33) “The cock that crows in the morning belongs to one compound but his voice is the property of the neighbourhood” (p.122)

(34) “Long before sunrise in the planting or harvesting season,… the bush-fowl will suddenly startle the farmer with her scream…. If he is a farmer who means to prosper he will not challenge the bush-fowl; he will not dispute her battle-cry; he will get up and obey” (p.123).

(35) “What is the use of bending your neck at me like a chicken to the pot when its real enemy is not the pot in which it cooks nor even the fire which cooks it but the knife?” (p.226)

(36) “Most of the men emboldened by tradition and regular travel did not wander around like a hen looking for a place to drop her egg but simply picked a big parked truck, moved up close enough and   relieved themselves against one of the tyres” (p.207).

 

In the long quote below, even concepts like ‘Agwu’, the god of healers, which actually stands for “Sense” or “Right Hand”, and its opposite “Madness”, or “Left Hand”, are personified and deified as the former is four times referred to with human-male endowed pronouns “his, his, he, his” and the latter, just once, with “his”.

(37) “Then, one day Agwu comes along… and hands the story over to a man of his choice….Agwu does not call a meeting to choose his seers and diviners and artists. Agwu, the god of healers, Agwu, brother to Madness! But though born from the same womb he and Madness were not created by the same chi. Agwu is the right hand a man extends to his fellows; Madness, the forbidden hand. Madness unleashes and rides his man roughly into the wild savannah. Agwu picks his disciple, rings his eye with white chalk and dips his tongue, willing or not, in the brew of prophecy; and right away the man will speak and put head and tail to the severed trunk of our tale” (p.125)

 

The preferential treatment of the “Right Hand” by the story-teller over the “Left Hand” may be a reflection of the stigma generally associated with the “Left Hand” in some African societies as parents are hardly keen on seeing their children become left-handers; they do whatever is possible to prevent it from happening, even if this requires deforming the young ones. What is more, in the story about the leopard and the tortoise that is about to die (p.128), the former is referred to with the pronouns “who-he” and the latter, likewise, with “him, his”. Initially, the old storyteller in the novel has invariably used the neutral pronouns ‘it-its-itself’ to refer to the items ‘war-cry’, ‘war’ and ‘war-story’ to show the relative importance of each. But as soon as he considers ‘story’ to ‘take the eagle-feather’, i.e., he upgrades ‘it’ over the others; it becomes personified in (38) “So why do I say that the story is chief among his fellows?” (p.124), as it is referred to with the human-endowed deictic “his”. This somewhat draws attention to the importance of story in the context of the novel, where the speaker establishes a special affective or interpersonal relationship with it over others like “war-cry” and “war” to which it is compared and uprated (pp.123-4). 

          Finally, reference to Elewa’s baby-girl apparently shows the narrator’s inconsistency in the use of pronouns. In the quote below, the dummy pronouns “it” and “its” are profusely used, thirteen times in all, to refer to the baby.

        (39) But a baby had to have a name, and there seemed nothing particularly wrong in giving it one in the company of a few friends, or doing it on the seventh market as tradition prescribed. Every other detail, however, would fall into abeyance, for this was a baby born into deprivation –like most, of course; but unlike most it was not even blessed with an incurably optimistic sponsor ready to hold it up on its naming day and call it The-one-who-walks-into-abundance or The-one-who-comes-to-eat or suchlike and then blithely hand it back to its mother to begin a wretched trudge through life, a parody of its own name. No, this baby would not lie in cushioned safety from daily stings of the little ants of the floor. Indeed it was already having to manage without one necessity even the poorest may take for granted –a father…to hold it in his hand and pronounce its name on this twenty-eighth day of its life (p.217).

 

The same pronouns are used in other isolated sentences picked up here and there, as in (40) and (41):

(40) “She picked up the tiny bundle from its cot and, turning to Elewa, said: ‘Name this child’” (p.222);

(41) “What does a man know about a child anyway that he should presume to give it a name?” (p.222).

(42) “Beatrice got up, put the baby down in her cot, went to the sideboard and soon returned with a bottle of White Horse whisky” (p.225).

(43) “’This baby has already received its name. She is called Amaechina” (p.225)

(44) “’Who gave her the name?....All of you here are her father?” (p.225)

(45) “’Our daughter has a child an both d I want you to come and give her a name’” (pp.226-7)

(46) “’Wherever the child sleeps let it wake up in the morning, is my prayer’” (p.227).

(47) “’What brings us here is the child you sent us. May her path be straight…May she have life and

      may her mother have life…What happened to her father, may it not happen again…When I asked

      who named her they told me All of Us. May this child be the daughter of all of us ….May these

      people here when they make plans of their world not forget her….(p.228)

(48) “ Ama whom Beatrice nicknamed Greedymouth having drunk both from the bottle and from

         Elewa’s breast, pendant like a gorgeous ripe papaya on the tree, was sleeping quietly in her cot”   (p.232). 

 

However, it must be noticed that the child gets to be referred to with the female-endowed pronoun after receiving a name. This may imply that it is the name that determines not only humanness but also maleness or femaleness. This shift from the use of “it” to that of “she” to refer to “baby” may also have its roots in the interpersonal relationship, namely, the affective involvement established with the name and the named entity. Interestingly, Beatrice the name-giver qualifies it as (49) “a beautiful name” (p.222), and Elewa uses phrases like “wonderful name”, “fine name” to do the same. The paradox here, yet, is that the name given to this baby-girl, and which leads to the use of ‘she’ for reference, is a boy’s name. This simply means that it is not the name or the signifier that determines gender but the named entity or signified; as the name-giver justifies in Pidgin “Girl fit answer am also”, which means a girl can also be called by a boy’s name. Another use of “it” to refer to “baby” in general appears in (50) “Even a one-day-old baby does not make itself available for your root-and-branch psychological engineering, for it comes trailing clouds of immortality” (p.100).

          The Earth is capitalised and personified in (51) “In the last desperate acts the Earth would now ignite herself and send up a shield of billowing of black smoke over her head” (p.32) to affectively illustrate the concept of “Mother Earth” and similar ones like “Mother Nation”, “Mother Africa”, etc. In (52) “Our proverb says that the earthworm is not dancing, it is only its manner of walking” (p.157), the antecedent “earthworm” is referred to with “it, its” though it appears in a proverb, while the item ‘crowd’ is referred to with “it” and “its” in such a phrases as (53) “its desire to catch the command…” (pp.41-42) where the use of “they, them” for such collective nouns as “crowd, people, police, etc” is required. The same item is referred to with ‘their’ in (54): “The little crowd that had gathered around their story-teller…joined in the laughter” (p.212)

          A good case of interpersonal pronominalisation appears in  (55) “I knew then that if its own mother was at that moment held up by her legs and torn down the middle like a piece of old rag that crowd would have yelled with eye-watering laughter” (p.42), where “its” refers to the robber to be publicly executed: Maybe, his bragging that he “shall be born again” and a woman’s reply in Pidgin “No goat go born you nex time, noto woman” (p.42) are drawn on by the narrator to see him as a goat, as only a goat can give birth to a goat.

          The next section looks into the figurative use of  language to refer to sex and sex-related topics, which leads to metaphorical comparison and pronominalisation.

 

3.3. Figurative Comparison and Pronominalisation.

          As discussed in section 3. 2, the Igbo people metaphorically use terms like “snake, serpent, python, royal python” to refer to the male sex and “shrubbery, greenery, temple, shrine, bearded meat” for the female one. For example, when a sex maniac girlfriend of his demands more after an all-night series, Sam uses the word ‘pipeline’ to refer to the male organ in saying that  (56)  “there was nothing left in the pipeline” (p.69). Likewise, the word “Power” (57) below, with human-endowed features like “naked”, “rude waist”, stands for “Woman”. In (57) and (58), the item ‘God/Almighty’ is differently pronominalised:

         (57)  In the beginning Power rampaged through our world, naked. So the Almighty, looking at his creation through the round undying eye of the Sun, saw and pondered and finally decided to send his daughter, Idemili, to bear witness to the moral nature of authority by wrapping around Power’s rude waist a loincloth of peace and modesty” (p.102)

(58) “I tell you it is the way the Almighty has divided the work of the world….To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He gives the eagerness to rise when they have heard the call…” (p.123).

 

While the narrator in (57) uses small-letter deictics “his, his” to refer to the “Almighty”, the old story-teller, jailed for the threat his stories represent for the military Government, uses capitalised pronoun “He” for the same entity in (58). This suggests that the former may be referring to a personalised God, while the latter is doing so to the real one. Indeed, there clearly appears a synonymy between Idemili, God’s daughter, and the mysterious “Pillar of Water” which she embodies. This “Pillar of Water” is described in terms to hint to the clitoris: (59) “It rises majestically from the bowl of the dark lake pushing itself upward and erect like the bole of the father of iroko trees its head commanding not the forest below but the very firmament of heaven” (p.102). Lexical items like “dark lake”, “upward”, “erect”, “bole”, “the majesty of the Pillar of Water standing in the dark lake” (p.103), and “the indescribable Pillar of Water fusing earth and heaven at the navel of the dark lake” (p.103) are figurative ways to refer to the female pubic hair or organ and position of the clitoris in this hair, which is clearly likened to a “dark/holy lake” or the “shrine” to Idemili, ‘a forest’, ‘a bush,’ etc. Intertextually, one gets some insight into the Idemili concept from Arrow of God (1964): “Idemili means Pillar of Water. As the pillar of this house holds the roof so does Idemili hold up the Raincloud in the sky so that it does not fall down” (p.41). If ‘Idemili’ equals ‘Pillar of Water’, why should the narrator use ‘it-its’ for the latter in (59) above but “her-her” for the former here?: (60) “Idemili, travelling through the country disguised as a hunter, saw this and on her return sent a stream from her lake to snake ...Niger” (p.103). This pronominal clash helps the narrator to metaphorically use the concept of Power to refer to female sex, which he sees as the stronger. The figurative use of lexis reaches its tour de force in this depiction of a sex ritual:

         (61) And they fairly scrambled out of the sofa into the bedroom and peeled off their garment and cast them away like things on fire, and fell in together into the wide, open space of her bed and began to roll over and over until she could roll no more and said: ‘Come in.’ And as he did she uttered a strangled cry that was not just a cry but also a command or password into her temple. From there she took charge of him leading him by the hand silently through the heaving groves mottled in subdued yellow sunlight, treading dry leaves underfoot till they came to streams of clear blue water. More than once he had slipped on the steep banks and she had pulled him up with such power and authority as he had never seen her exercise before. Clearly this was her grove and these her own peculiar rites over which she held absolute power. Priestess or goddess herself? No matter. But would he be found worthy? Would he survive? This unending, excruciating joyfulness in the crossroads of laughter and tears. Yes, I must, oh yes, I must, yes, oh yes, yes, oh yes. I must, must, must. Oh holy priestess, hold me now. I am slipping, slipping, slipping. And now he was not just slipping but falling, crumbling into himself. Just as he was going to plead for mercy she screamed an order: ‘OK!’ and he exploded into stars and floated through the fluffy white clouds and began a long and slow and weightless falling and sinking into deep, blue sleep. When he woke up like a child cradled in her arms and breasts her eyes watching anxiously over him, he asked languorously if she slept. ‘Priestesses don’t sleep’ (pp.113-14; our boldings).

 

As can be seen the narrator has intensely resorted to the use of geographic imagery to liken the female sex or woman to landscape. Such phrases as “her temple, heaving groves, yellow sunlight, dry leaves, streams of clear blue water, steep banks, her grove, exploded into stars, floated through the fluffy white clouds” clearly relate to the landscape, shrubbery, river, and sky and connote the enjoyment of exuberant sexual intercourse. In addition, terms like “temple, shrine, grove, rites” hint to sex as a ritual, and the concept of ‘power/authority’ here reveals the woman as the power-holder in this ritual. The woman’s commands “come in” and “OK” uttered respectively before Chris enters her shrine and before he explodes clearly confirm her as the embodiment of “Power” and of the Pillar of Water. The same hyperbolic and metaphorical language is earlier used by Chris, the focaliser in the long quote above, to note down his first time with Beatrice: “Her passion begins like the mild ripples of some tropical river approaching the turbulence of a waterfall in slow, peaceful, immense orbits” (p.68). 

          Pronominal reference to Beatrice and other comparisons clearly portray her as both a female and a male. She, for her father, has been a “Female soldier/soldier-girl” who must learn to “sit like a female” (p.87) For Chris, she is a “demure damsel whose still waters nonetheless could conceal deep overpowering eddies of passion that always almost sucked him into fatal depths” (p.105). Later, she is seen as a “soldier” and is ambiguously referred to now with female-endowed pronouns “her, she, her, she, she, her, her, her, her”, then with male-endowed “his, his” (p.106). This bisexual pronominalisation may well be a grammatical reflection of her nickname “the female soldier” or “soldier girl” in which she is seen as a boy-girl and intriguingly, her style of fiction-writing is described as “muscular or masculine” (p.91). It may also be a way of pointing both to her duality and undefinability or mysteriousness as she is referred to in ways similar to the ones in which God is: “a Spirit” (John 4: 19-24); “ a person, an individual” (Psalm 83; 18); “Father” (Matthew 6: 9); “the Rock,” “a sun”, ‘a shield” (Deuteronomy 32: 4; Psalm 84:11). Thus, though the use of “He” and the attribute “Father” may lead to think of God  as ‘male’ in gender, the Bible refutes this conception, reminding us through Apostle Paul that the use of male pronoun for God and other spirit creatures should not be taken literally: “’there is neither male nor female within their ranks when they become glorified spirit sons of God, as they are also described as ‘the bride of the Lamb’” (Galatians 3:26, 28; Revelation 21:9; 1John 3:1, 2).

          Likewise, the “she-he” pronominalisation of Beatrice suggests her portrayal as both female and male, as if she were bisexual. Moreover, she is likened by Chris to ‘the Maiden Spirit Mask’ (p.199), to a ‘Cherubim and Seraphim prophetess’ (p.113); ‘a holy priestess’, “a goddess” (p.114), and to Idemili, the Daughter of God, as can be seen in the clause “would he be found worthy?” (p.114) used by Chris in reference to her, which can be paralleled with “if she finds him worthy” (p.104) used in reference to Idemili. Ikem clearly sees her as (62) “the village priestess who will prophesy when her divinity rides her abandoning if need be her soup-pot on the fire, but returning again when the god departs to the domesticity of kitchen” (p.105). She herself seems to be aware of her duality as she observes: (63) “In a way I felt like two people living inside one skin, not two hostile tenants but two rather friendly people, two people different enough to be interesting to each other without being incompatible” (p.89). In addition, in response to her fiancé’s calling her a ‘Cherubim and Seraphim prophetess’, she has this to emphatically say: (64) “As a matter of fact I do sometimes feel like Chielo in the novel, the priestess and prophetess of the Hills and the Caves” (p.114). This is an intertextual reference to Chielo, the priestess of the Oracle of the Hills and Caves, who is thus described: (65) “Anyone seeing Chielo in ordinary life would hardly believe she was the same person who prophesied when the spirit of Agbala was upon her” (Things Fall Apart, 1958: 35). The next section sums up the different antecedents pronominalised, their referring pronouns and contexts of use, and gives an interpretation to them. 

 

3.4. Recapitulation, Contextualisation and Interpretation of the Findings.

The table below recapitulates the unusual or deviant pronoun uses in the corpus novel

Antecedents	Pronouns	contexts of use
singing bird	he, him, his, etc	legend
A bird	it, its, etc	general use
Male-lizard	he, him, his, etc	metaphorical, interpersonal
female lizard	she, her, etc	metaphorical, interpersonal
Bedbug	she, her, hers	story/tale
Mosquito	He, him, his, etc	story
Baby	it, its, she, her, etc	general use, then interpersonal or affective
Python	it, its, who, etc	general use, then metaphorical
Beatrice	she, he	general use, then metaphorical
Indefinite pronoun	he, him, his	andocentrism
Robber	he, its	general use, interpersonal/metaphorical
Goat	he, him, his	metaphorical, and ideological
Luxurious (a bus)	it, its, she, her	general use, then legend-oriented
Deity	he, his	andocentrism
Bush-fowl	she, her	story
Story	It, its, his	general use, then interpersonal
God	he, He	metaphorical, then real

(Table 1: recapitulation of pronominalisation in the novel)

         

As can be seen in the table, most pronominal deviations come from the fact that the animal antecedents are personified and used metaphorically as characters in stories, legends, and folktales and in comparisons. Sometimes, they are personified for comparison purposes as the aggressive sexual assault of the male lizard on the female one, or the verbal domination of the singing male-bird, is used to show that the male-female tenor in such matters is the same with humans. At other times, a human is somewhat dehumanised and reduced to the state of an animal, as has been the case of the robber. Moreover, the change in the use of pronouns is found to result from affective or interpersonal reasons, as has been the cases of ‘the baby’ and of ‘story’. Part of the reasons is experiential as it relates to the narrator or speaker’s personal or symbolic representation of the notions of “God” and “Power. Finally, pronominal clashes have helped to portray Beatrice, the heroine, as the embodiment of both masculinity and femininity. Indeed, the dual pronominalisation seems to have resulted from her being viewed now as a soldier-girl, then as a ‘damsel’. The use of figurative language is found to coalesce in the description of a sex episode. Maybe, the fact that the three main character-narrators (Ikem, Chris, Beatrice) are people of letters has contributed to the figurativeness/metaphoricalness of language: Ikem is referred to as a “poetry editor” (p.61), “a literary artist” (p.11), “a poet” (209), and he has written “a full-length novel and a play” (p.91) and a prose-poem (p.30, p.208); Beatrice has written “a short-story and a poem” (p.91) and Chris is shown as a part-writer of the novel: “I couldn’t be writing this if I didn’t hang around and observe it” (p.2), and the old man from Ablazon is a story-teller.

 

4. Conclusion.

          It has been noticed that reference to indefinite noun phrases in the novel is influenced by the “Andocentric Rule” of traditional grammar. Achebe being a widely-read writer, such uses should be reviewed to conform with the requirements of political correctness if any feminist struggle through language use is ever to succeed. Opinions do differ here; while some consider the feminist opposition to the sex-indefinite “he” and any attempt to change it as futile and doomed to failure (Lakoff, 1975:45), it must be reminded that such uses have been imposed on users by male grammarians in the 18th Century (Coates, 1986). In addition, in our schools political correctness has been underway for quite a long time as I have learnt and taught the use of “they” for reference to indefinite noun phrases, and it is high time the records were set straight in literature too.

           As for the other deviant uses of pronominal reference to animals and concepts, they are greatly influenced by the context of culture or genre. Here, context of culture stands for both the culture of the society where the work is set and to literary culture/genre in the parlance of functional linguists (Eggins, 1994). Indeed, such uses are not peculiar to the novel under investigation and nor are they limited to African narratives with animal characters. Halliday (2004), for instance, gives this example from a European animal narrative. “There was once a velveteen rabbit. He was fat and bunchy, his coat was spotted brown and white and his ears were lined with pink sateen” (p.551).  

          These uses are also influenced by the interpersonal or affective relationship between the speaker/narrator and the entity being referred to pronominally, as the cases of ‘story’, ‘robber’ and ‘baby’ show. Metaphorical use of language has also contributed to the strangeness of pronominalisation such as the case of ‘python’, ‘shrine’, ‘shrubbery’, ‘God’, ‘Power’, ‘Beatrice’, etc. Above all, the use of pronouns is andocentric; influenced by traditional grammar; interpersonal, influenced by the tenor between the speaker and the entity referred to; cultural, influenced by the literary genre (folktales, myths, sayings, and proverbs); social, guided by the linguistic etiquette of the community; and educational, influenced by the occupational backgrounds of the major character-narrators.

 

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