The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

an India at once familiar and unknown; the
image of a world which eventually raises
the desire in her to become known as a
reality on its 'home ground.' With her
mother dead, the children growing up and
herself divorced and ready temporarily to
separate from her lover, Lucy seemingly
sets out on a journey of discovery. While
travelling in close contact with a people
and culture Amy and Agnes had always
shunned, Lucy's experience is twofold. Her
grandmother's and mother's mumsahiblives
have been completely erased, and she
herself is being cast into the role of a mumsahib
who is in turn despised, exploited, or
simply ignored by her Indian surroundings.
If anything, she eventually realizes that the
cultural gap between a mumsahib and India
is unbridgeable and that she is inextricably
bound to a culture to which she willingly
returns. Indeed, walking back to the family
cabin she feels "someone is in there already
[...], someone is moving towards her as she
moves across the deck [... ] it is herself, her
own reflection coming to meet her..."
Jennifer Mitton's Fadimatu, too, is
implicitly concerned with the question of
intercultural communication, but it is very
differently constituted text. Its main agent
is Fadimatu, a young woman from
Northern Nigeria. Her years of growing-up
are narrated through numerous episodes
which depict her school days and village life
with her father, a short 'career' as an artist,
married life as the third wife of a Muslim,
the loss of her twins shortly after their
birth, a teaching assignment in a college,
the separation from her husband, a quick
visit to London and a temporary stay with
her mother now re-married to a fabulously
rich man. She finally comes to the conclusion
that she should go back to London to
study fine arts: "She knew exactly where St.
Martin's School of Art was and she was no
longer afraid of the trains..."
Described with precise attentiveness,
Fadimatu is made to practice a whole array
of those female roles which a partly traditional
and a partly modern Northern
Nigerian society has instituted: roles which
are meant to assist her search for her
woman identity, whether accepted or
rejected by her. Thus not unlike Mumsahib,
this text also sets out to deconstruct social
woman roles to construct woman. But
whether this goal is achieved is another
question. The narrative strategy attempts to
achieve mimetic authenticity by using
direct speech, dialogue and summarizing
report. The effect is an almost mechanical
test-run of all imaginable social roles for
women and of their supposed subjectengendering
potential. However, as these
roles really are stereotypes, it is all too easy
to dismantle them. And this is where the
narrative stance adopted by Jennifer Mitton
(a cultural outsider figuring as an insider)
eventually fails to mediate the constructedness
of another culture. Based on her life
and experiences in Nigeria, Mitton gives
voice, as it were to a voiceless society; at the
same time she makes it voiceless by appropriating
its voices. She does succeed in
catching rhythms and cadences of everyday
language in Northern Nigeria. Yet the cultural
outsider's position prevents her from
gaining insight into the central literary
concerns of West African women writing,
as a look at the work of Flora Nwapa, Buchi
Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Zulu Sofola and
especially, Zaynab Akali's The Stillborn
(1984) will illustrate. Anne Mitton's novel,
laudable though its intentions are, eventually
fails in overcoming its cultural biases.