“Potent Ambiguities” and “Life Outside the Text” in Buchi Emecheta’s Fiction

Abstract

In reading African literature, as in consuming any text cross-culturally, we encounter more than the ranges and plays of meanings which the text as figure has from its author and that author’s cultural context; we encounter, too, our own habits of categorization and configuration, of reading between figure and ground, text and context. Cross-cultural reading is as much a process of interpreting ourselves－of reading across, not merely through, our own frames of references－as it is of interpreting texts and their (alien) contexts. Emecheta’s version of human reality resists overtly utopian visions: life is inherently problematic, troubled by tensions that cannot be resolved. The site of these tensions, however, is the only opportunity that we have to act on and fulfill our humanity－whatever that might turn out to be. Emecheta’s ironies argue a resistance to the alienating dichotomies, typified by the Cartesian split, that characterize “modern” culture, and which enable the various rationalizations, alienations and exploitations that that culture is built on. As we have seen, the crossing and interaction of these spheres in Emecheta’s narratives, rather than multiplying the possibilities open to her characters. It seems possible, however, that in considering the effect of multiple marginalizations, we might learn to shift our focus from the multiply crossed-out, multiply bound space that remains within the frame of the cultural crossings and crossings-out of the human. Although Emecheta offers no utopian vision, her literary production argues for the presence of a genuine humanity which exists at the margins; there is in Emecheta’s fictions an implicit argument for “life outside the text,” for an “ungraspable middle space” in which the paradoxical effort to figure the unfigurable, in fiction or in life, is at once unavoidable and good.