A Woman among Women

I read Flora Nwapa’s Efuru again a few months after I started my PhD in 2020. I had read it two decades ago, but it was as if I was discovering the novel for the first time and so was struck by the clean pragmatism of its themes, the compelling lives and the richly-drawn family dynamics and relationships, how the women of this world were constantly colliding with or complementing each other; so immersive was this carefully constructed story that time and distance shrunk between us and I was lost in that world. Afterwards, I returned to Isele Magazine submissions with new eyes. We were accepting works for our inaugural quarterly issue, themed ‘The Woman Issue’, and there were days when I hoped for a glimpse of a character like the headstrong Ajanupu or even the cantankerous Omirima, women who undermine that trope of ‘good women’. Women who are both aggressively supportive and aggressively obstinate, each armed with personal desires and motivations, such that their relationships are symbiotic and realistic. With Efuru, what Nwapa successfully did, as Marie Umeh noted in the introduction to ‘The Poetics of Economic Independence for Female Empowerment’, was to initiate a literary tradition that was, ‘rooted in resistance, a protest against the one-dimensional images of Nigerian women either as wives, mothers, femmes fatales, or rebel girls.’ And while Efuru, the eponymous hero of the novel, exemplifies this theme of resistance, so did Ajanupu, the fierce older sister to Ossai—Efuru’s mother-in-law, whose mere presence and unbending will saw Efuru through her most difficult times.