Review of 'Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?'

Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

This article is an invaluable theoretical and personal contribution for those who want to approach the concept of "feminism" and its possible application to the study of African culture and literature.

But each word needs to be qualified before we begin. “Feminism” is not a concept that can be defined in an easy way, ignoring the differences, the polemics, and sometimes even the open wars between the different currents. In this case, these polemics are left aside in order to take the “lowest common denominator” of white and Western feminism and try to see to what extent it is applicable to another infinite world, that of African literature. To be even more precise, it is a matter of understanding that the realm of the spiritual and the sacred in Nigerian literature (not only, but above all) has a power that cannot be analysed or understood with the theoretical instruments of white, Western feminism. It is no longer just a matter of denouncing the effects of European colonial domination and its gender politics onto Igbo and Yoruba women: “Prior to colonialism, not only were gender arrangements infinitely more flexible in these societies than in the West, but the relations between males and females were constructed as complementary rather than hierarchical. Gender/sex by itself was by no means the main factor in determining the status of a person, and men (“anamales”) and women (“anafemales”) shared social, political, religious, and economic power through dual structures that governed different spheres of communal life. (...)“the fundamental category ‘woman’ –which is foundational in feminist Western discourses– simply did not exist in Yorubaland prior to its sustained contact with the West. There was not such preexisting group characterized by shared interests, desires, or social position”.

Colonisation and the introduction of Christianity led to the loss of status for women in many parts of the continent. But it is no longer even a matter of denouncing this fact but of trying to understand and, ideally, incorporate the presence of African Indigenous Religions. As the author points out: “Then again, Western feminism, an offshoot of modernity and its secular frames of knowledge, has also at best ignored and, at worst, sentenced (indigenous) spirituality to the realm of the obsolete, the irrelevant or even the pernicious for the advancement of women’s rights”.

Through the analysis of three works - Freshwater (2018), by Akwaeke Emezi's; Black Bull, Ancestors and Me. My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008), by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, and Flora Nwapa's The Lake Goddess (1995) - the author of the article offers the methodological tools necessary to incorporate a perspective that embraces spirituality and religion into literary and feminist analysis of literature (not only African literature). But not as just another perspective, eligible in a list of different academic approaches, but as an indispensable tool that respects a way of seeing the world that need not conform to the otherwise recent dichotomies with which white, Western feminist critique operates.