'I am not a man-hater feminist' - The Nation Nigeria

One of Nigeria’s literary scholars and researchers at the University of Maiduguri, Borno State, Dr. Razinat Mohammed, is interested in the development of humanity.  Her  first book Love like a Woman’s and other stories won the ANA Prize in 2005, followed by her second book, Habiba, a novel that was a finalist for the ANA Prize for Prose in 2014. In 2015, she wrote a third novel, The Travails of A First Wife. She spoke with Assistant Editor (Arts) OZOLUA UHAKHEME on feminism, her inspiration to write and the growth of women writers in the north among other issues.

What has been the challenge for you as a writer and a scholar?

We are overwhelmed by our regular teaching. By the time you have to grade student essays, assignments, test scripts, you are totally tired and exhausted. So you do not have that frame of mind to sit down and do creative writing. I’ve had several short stories published. What I want now is to bring them together and publish them.

Short stories or novellas?

No, short stories. I can write in two hours, if I’m inspired and I can go for one more year and I’ve not written anything. The moment I’m inspired, it doesn’t take me time.

So what inspires you to write?

It is the moment. I can encounter something right now and I bring out my computer and produce a story in two hours, then I leave it. I have many like that which need editing, so if I have the time, I go back, sit down and edit it. I work best under pressure. If you now give me a challenge and say, ‘write a story’, I can produce that faster than the one I give myself. Recently, I edited an anthology with a professor. It’s “The Markas”. It’s about the experiences and the feelings of Boko Haram. “The Markas: An Anthology of Literary Works on Boko Haram” edited by Tanure Ojaide, Razinat T. Mohammed and Abubakar Othman – It’s an anthology. The anthology is an outcome of literary writers’ reaction to the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-east, Nigeria. That is the name of the Boko Haram then in Maiduguri.  If you read it, you’ll find a lot about Boko Haram. Everything there is about Boko Haram in the whole anthology. It’s the first of its kind.

Are we actually seeing the end of this calamity?

We don’t know. I think the Borno person did not get used to the herdsmen because they are not used to cattle. They are not Fulani. We are also reading about the herdsmen just like you. I haven’t had any encounter with them.

How did the crisis in Borno affect your creative writing?

I have written an article, which has been published in the UK. The title is: The experiences of the creative writers in times of crisis. Prof. Ernest Emenyonu sent me African literature today, Love in times of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez. So, I wrote that article and you may want to read it. I think it should be on the internet.

What is your take on feminist reactions to issues created by religion and culture?

For Buchi Emecheta, the culture of a woman who gives birth to a female child consistently, say five daughters in a row is not considered complete yet by the Igbo society, which she projects. That is it. Now, she writes to question this sort of belief. Why will you call a woman who has gone through labour five times without a male child ‘half-a-woman’?

Why is it only the woman that bears the burden?

That is the kind of thing that her culture and her religion allow, and the culture of the Igbo that prefers male children to female. That is what this society has imposed on her mind to write about.

For El Saadawi, she is from a largely Muslim environment, and being that, the Arab culture is different from what Emecheta writes about. Now, their culture is not much different from this. They too prefer male children. Maybe it’s an African weakness or problem. The Arab societies equally want to have a son in the family, if a female child cannot project the family name to great heights. El Saadawi is a revolutionary feminist, because hers is not as peaceful as that of Emecheta.

She hunts and attacks the authority and the culture that determines what the fate of a woman is. She says these cultural laws are not made by God, but by man. So, it is the man that she sees physically that is oppressing the woman. Both religion and African culture, they prefer the male child. If you go to Rwanda today, they prefer a male child. If you go to South Africa, they will tell you they prefer a male child.

In Ghana, among the Ashanti’s, they prefer the female child. Is it not the same Africa?

It’s the same Africa. They have a reason. Their own is that they feel because only a mother can tell the real father of the child. I don’t know the genesis of this. I was in Cape Coast some months ago and somebody asked that question. The answer I got from them was that the woman can say, ‘yes, this is my child’ and the child can say ‘this is my mother’. People witness you coming out. But the father cannot say ‘this is my son’, ‘this is my daughter’, not 100 per cent. Then I asked, ‘what if the child comes out looking exactly like the father’? They said, ‘how many persons do you have like that?’ There are some that will come out not looking like the father or the mother. Perhaps the father is somewhere and that child is looking like him. So, the case with Ghana, it’s a bit different society because they take after their mothers. That is a drop of water in the ocean.

So, how much of a feminist are you?

I am a feminist not in a derogatory term. I am a feminist not in the western sense of it. I am a feminist if because I write my fiction about the suffering and problems that women face. Then, indeed, I am a feminist. But if it is the men-hating feminist, I am not. Challenging the structure of society, I am not. The structure of society I am referring to is that one that says, ‘this is the role of a man’. Man has his role. Gender construction, I believe, is done by society. Man has his role. I cannot go and fall a tree when a man is there. He is supposed to be stronger than me; he should go and do it. I can chop the firewood and bring them home. That is the gender role that I want to play. If my supporting this makes me a feminist, then in that case, I am a feminist. I’m not a men-beating feminist or anything.

Will you say your gender construction is determined by your relationship with God?

Yes. Islam divides the roles: man does this, a woman does that. You know, people misconstrue certain cultural traits to Islam. It is not true. Islam does not distinguish between a male and a female when it comes to learning. Islam permits you to seek knowledge. It is our culture that keeps our Northern women at home but those of our men, our fathers, that are broad-minded, that have read, travelled and understood the true meaning of the Quran, do not interpret it that way. They do not inhibit their daughters from gaining knowledge. If you go to our schools now, you will see, side by side, a western education running with Islamic knowledge.

Why feminism and not other studies like developmental literature?

Well, I think that in the course of my reading, the two female writers that appealed to me the most were Emecheta who is late and Nawal, an Egyptian writer. She is 87 years now. To an extent, I loved those two women. I love what they stand for. In the case of Nawal, I love what she stands for. Buchi always writes from the Igbo point of view and the Niger Delta. She writes about the challenges women face in that region and I always loved that. Nawal writes about the challenges that the Arab women face in Egypt and the way that she projects it. It appeals to me. In my study, I compared these two female writers. My work can be said to be an anti-feminist, as I actually looked at women as the oppressors of other women because the common thing we see is men oppressing women. If you read my work you will see that some of those incidences in the text, I will stand to be corrected that women actually were the reason for women suffering. For instance, in female circumcision, it is women who carry out this. If the women stop this act, will the men tell them they must continue? No. It is women who continue to do these bad things to other women. That is how I found myself in feminist study. But, my researches, as a university teacher, you do researches and my researches have been on theories and creative writing.

What is this cultural inhibition that you mentioned?

Whether it is South or North or anywhere, it is cultural. Starting with Zainab Alkali, she has projected in her writing. You see women becoming medical doctors. Check the Internet you’ll see one article I presented in Lagos in 2007. The topic that the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Lagos gave me to discuss was the ‘representation of women in Nigerian literature’ and I think I did an extensive work there. In the past, our earlier writers used to resent women. This is not just in the north. Look at Things Fall Apart, where is the big role that a woman plays there? There were only Okonkwo’s wives and when they do anything wrong, Okonkwo would pick his gun and would want to shoot or beat them. It is not only in the North. This is the misconception that we Nigerians have. It is the same thing in Igbo land. Women were not allowed to do anything. Look at Things Fall Apart after all it was not a Hausa person that wrote it.  Now, it started for us in the north to give women big roles, medical doctors, achievers, women who would go to Colleges of Education, graduate and come out while the man is lagging behind. She started that. In her descendant, that was when she gave a woman a role of a medical doctor who was now contributing to the society and from there we picked up. There are so many women now from the North coming up as writers, mostly novelists. I’ve not seen a woman that is yet into drama but most of us are writing prose, novels and so on.