West Africa

Introduction

The reception of Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me indicates that polygamous relationships, while sociologically passé in parts, continue to be a useful medium for exploring the power dynamics of gender inequality in West African fiction. It is as though Ousmane Sembène in Xala (1973), Buchi Emecheta in The Joys of Motherhood (1979) or, more recently, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin (2011) have not exhaustively explored the theme with remarkable success. Yet, it is a testament to Ayobami Adebayo’s creative genius in this debut novel to have achieved a renewed focus on contemporary ways in which heteronormative and patriarchal codes constrain and encumber women. This, perhaps, is due to the novel’s focus on the privacy of intimate struggles. A further illustration of the increased scrutiny by emerging women writers of gender dynamics within the traditional institutions that regulate gender relations is Ezanya: The Nigerian Housewife by Iyaiya Thomas.

Ayobami Adebayo is part of the new wave of women writers in West Africa whose works made very strong impressions in 2017. Among others are Yewande Omotoso, based in South Africa and Chibundu Onuzo, whose Welcome to Lagos is a fascinating expression of the blossoming Lagos-novel genre. Karen King-Aribisala’s Bitter Leafing Woman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions expound the feminist agenda of these writers.

A major development is the rising popularity of genre fiction, with the order of a new science-fiction series from Nnedi Okorafor by HBO, currently serializing her Binti, and with Tochi Onyebuchi’s fantasy novel, Beasts Made of Night and Deji Olukotun’s After the Flare: Nigerians in Space, as well as What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah.

Genre-bending works by Ben Okri and Teju Cole focus on the relationship of fiction to painting and photography, respectively. There are conceptual parallels in these works, and they reveal the philosophical depth and expansion that have occurred in the artistic practices of both authors.

Reprints of new editions of classics of African literature by major publishing houses, including Penguin’s 2017 edition of Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy and the reproduction of Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine by Waveland Press, have enabled a broader perspective on contemporary writing. Paradoxically, however, rather than seizing upon this historically broad offering of texts for comparative work, criticism tends, instead, to compare recent writers like Chimamanda Adichie to African American women writers such as Toni Morrison. There is a logic to this resurgence of the black experience as a critical frame for West African Literature. Indeed, it may be that West African Literature will be as inextricable from transatlantic literature as North African literature is from Mediterranean literature and culture.

The work of Kwame Dawes in editing what amounts to anthologies of poetry in the form of chapbooks collections has revived African poetry, especially in West Africa. The box set in which the chapbooks of poetry appear are well-designed and bring together poets of extraordinary talent that have reshaped the genre.