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The Women's Revolt
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19963 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,211 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
I SAW THE SKY CATCH FIRE
T. Obinkaram Echewa
New York: Dutton, 1992
324 pp., $20.00
Examined collectively, the major novels of modern African writing reveal a curious avoidance of interpersonal relationships, specifically between men and women. The tapestry of these works is almost exclusive masculine. Male-female interaction (including the Western theme of romantic love) is largely ignored in favor of more encompassing topics. Stories center on the fate of extended groups of people (a village, a tribe, a nation) often undergoing the collective shock of encounter with another culture, such as the arrival of white people in Africa and, more recently, the continued ripples of that debacle in light of neocolonialism, tribalism, civil strife, or war.
One has to read rather extensively in contemporary African fiction before one encounters a genuine "boy meets girl" story. Extended conversations between characters in African novels--particularly between men and women--are difficult to locate. These characteristics apply not only to the overwhelming majority of novels written by men, but even to most of the works penned by women; though, as one might suspect, there is still only a handful of significant women novelists from tropical Africa.
Easy explanations obviously oversimplify the complexities of many African cultures. After all, there are a number of densely philosophical African novels. But still, one needs to consider individualism as essentially a Western concept, antithetical to traditional life in much of the rest of the world, which is collectively structured or group centered. If marriages traditionally have been arranged, why would a writer need to concern himself or herself with the "boy meets girl" theme?
The wonder of T. Obinkaram Echewa's third novel is not that it dispels many of the stereotypes of African life but that, in doing so, it challenges the reader on both emotional and intellectual levels as brilliantly as it reflects on those concerns of its characters' multifaceted lives. No matter how you look at it, it's been a banner year for the Nigerian novel: First, Ben Okri's magical The Famished Road (see THE WORLD & I, March 1992) and now T.O. Echewa's equally marvelous (though totally different) I Saw the Sky Catch Fire.
The women of
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