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Polygamy: a woman's tale
Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia
Paulina Chiziane
2002. 2nd edition
Caminho, Portugal
Reviewed by Tony Simões da Silva
Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (Niketche: A Story of Polygamy), is Paulina Chiziane’s latest novel, and comes twelve years after Balada de Amor ao Vento (1990), her first work and the first novel by a Mozambican woman. This groundbreaking aspect remains central to Chiziane’s career; for not only has she now made her mark in Mozambican literature, she is also becoming one of the most interesting African women writers to follow. The focus on controversial and provocative themes, and the overt concern with ‘women’s issues’ told from an outspoken perspective make Chiziane someone to watch in years to come. In her earlier novel, Ventos do Apocalipse (1999), Chiziane offered a rich and perspicuous examination of the effects an ongoing, and seemingly endless civil war had on ordinary people. In writing that was at once confrontational and beguiling in its attention to the graphic effects of war – the novel repeatedly forced the reader to experience the horror of senseless brutality, in a way that José Craveirinha’s most recent, and his last collection of poems, O Babalaze das Hienas (1997) did – Ventos do Apocalipse stressed in particular the position of women within such a setting. In Minosse’s story we encounter some of the concerns the Nigerian writer, Buchi Emecheta raised in Second Class Citizen (1974), The Joys of Motherhood (1980) [Read extract here] and elsewhere, Bessie Head in A Question of Power (1966) [Read extract here] and Yvonne Vera in The Stone Virgins (2002) [reviewed here], for instance, notably the pressure women face to perform their gender within the conflicting constraints of African traditions and the ‘Christianity of colonialism’.
In Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia, a story about love and power, Chiziane examines the conflicting pressures experienced by individuals caught up in the ‘contact zone'1 where tradition and modernity endlessly vie for supremacy. Specifically, Chiziane explores the complex relationships that unite man and woman to expose the hypocrisy that characterises issues of infidelity and trust in conventional marriages. Through its depiction of the relationship between Rami and Tony, Niketche ventures forth into a polemic exploration of the ways in which African traditions2 and customs have met with and ‘processed’ the teachings or impositions of Christianity and colonialism. Conceptually, it brings together traditional African
customs, the colonial impact on local cultures and more pertinently the effects of the interaction between these various agents. As the novel makes clear, in a suggestion that, as I noted earlier, other African women writers have also pointed out, often the behaviour of men in a postcolonial society reflects the sorts of contradictions that earlier African societies did not show. Here as in earlier works, Chiziane highlights the centrality of women’s role in the new, postcolonial, independent nation by repeatedly emphasising their subaltern position in society. In the Mozambican society in which the novel is set, women are defined exclusively in relation to men – by their ability to attract men, to bear them children, to please them sexually, to nurture their social status. In this novel as in earlier ones, Chiziane alludes to the power positions afforded men by polygamy, and in Ventos do Apocalipse as in Niketche there are countless references to the fact that in polygamous relationships it is men who have the power to move at will between various spouses, discarding old ones as they age and engaging new ones as they seek to increase their position within their social groups. This is a fate both Minosse in the earlier text and Rami in Niketche face, but more to the point, one they are constantly threatened with by Sianga and Tony.
"Chiziane highlights the centrality of women's role by emphasising their subaltern position in society"
In the style that characterises her writing, the novel pulls no punches, and the polemic it constructs is passionate and engaging. Niketche is alive with intrigue and happenings, and in the manner of earlier works the work is populated by a myriad characters involved in labyrinthine and eventful situations. It is obvious too that Chiziane intends the novel as a challenge to perceived notions of victimhood, and at the heart of the narrative is the decision by Rami to challenge Tony’s assumed power over his various spouses. As the first, and only legal spouse, Rami takes over the organisation of Tony’s complex conjugal arrangements, and in the process at once gains the power to determine how he will live his life and accepts her own position as one out of a group of women whom he uses as he pleases. The rambling nature of the narrative, compared in the cover’s blurb to Ariadne’s weavings, might on the one hand be seen as metonymic of Rami’s successful entrapment of Tony within the injustices of his own making. In contrast, though, it also betrays Rami’s inability to adopt a position on polygamy, perhaps because it is an issue in which she herself is too deeply involved. There is at times too much agonising over whether women should be in favour or against the practice of polygamy.
If the first half of the novel offers a dense, fast and provocative web of ideas and opinions, in time the novel’s central thread becomes rather thin. I suppose the fact is that polygamy is about having more than one spouse (and in the context of this novel African polygamy is defined in ways that differ from those found in Western societies, defined as it is in Niketche largely in terms of concerns with lobola and other ‘tribal’ arrangements), means that in theory the story would have made its point with reference to, say two or three spouses. The decision to set the first half of the story around a cluster of five wives, however, also succeeds quite well. For me the problems occur when the story begins to enlist every woman in town, and possibly a few elsewhere, given that at one time Tony journeys to Paris, to prove a point that already had been made quite conclusively. In spite of Chiziane’s reluctance to state her position on the matter, Niketche clearly suggests that polygamy is much more about men wanting to have the freedom to exercise power as they see fit than about a relationship based on genuine love. Niketche’s position may not always be straightforward, but the appeal to Simone de Beauvoir earlier in the narrative is one that clearly frames the novel as a whole.
Indeed, it might be possible to read the novel’s endless sense of repetition in terms that seek to account for the repetitive nature of women’s existences across historical periods, geographical locations and cultural settings. The repetition and unravelling that Niketche sets up as its main narrative impetus are in many ways typical of a Mozambican oral tradition to which Chiziane lays claim (much as ‘typical’ may not necessarily be the most correct term here, given the baggage colonial ethnography has placed on it, it captures the sense in which the novel repeatedly alludes to its ability to tell a story that is symbolic of a broader cultural practice). As I read Niketche I was reminded repeatedly both of the author’s earlier Ventos do Apocalipse, which opens with a reference to the story-telling opening of oral strorytelling in southern Mozambique – Karingana wa Karingana (roughly translated as Once Upon a Time) – and of another recent African novel, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (2003), in which orality also comprises the main narrative framework to the story. Although the political concerns of both works are only tangentially similar, both narratives foreground the oral underpinnings of the cultures out of which they emerge (and my choice of syntax here is itself intentional). There is much both novels share at the level of a polemic intervention they undertake, too. Both novels are impelled by a utopian political vision, one heralding an African society in which corruption and the abuse of power are less the norm than the exception.
That said, however, Niketche stretches this clever, potentially very useful narrative device a little too thin. Thematically this is a novel that successfully conveys the painful contradictions of cultural traditions, and the case it makes for a re-evaluation of the naturalisation of social and historical practices is argued with passion and insight. As I have noted above, the extent to which the novel works as a philosophical disquisition on social practices, and centrally on the role of gender in such contexts, is one that might have been made with greater clarity and more straightforwardly. Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia represents nevertheless an important contribution to continuing debates between traditionalists and modernisers in African societies, all the more powerful for its imaginative dimension. The concerns the novel betrays and sets out to address are those other writers, working in a number of other African languages, have also sought to examine and explore. In Niketche Paulina Chiziane has created a seductive narrative in which imagination and politics go hand in hand, and the novel’s aesthetic concerns too are intrinsically political. She writes with conviction of the difficulties faced by Mozambican women in pre- and post-independence days, and in passages of great lyricism and beauty evokes the internal turmoil of the new nation. Women, and the experiences they undergo, come to epitomise both the resourcefulness and strength of the new society. In one specific instance the life of one such woman is offered as a metonym for the historical oppression of women in a passage that would not be out of place in some of the most radical writings of western feminism:
Nós mulheres fazemos existir, mas não existimos. Fazemos nascer, mas não nascemos. Há dias conheci uma mulher do interior da Zambézia. Tem cinco filhos, já crescidos. O primeiro, um mulatto esbelto, é dos portugueses que a violaram durante a Guerra colonial. O segundo, um preto, elegante e forte como um guerreiro, é fruto de outra violação dos guerrilheiros de libertação da mesma Guerra colonial. O terceiro, outro mulato, mimoso como um gato, é dos comandos rodesianos brancos que arrasaram esta terra para aniquilar as bases dos querrilheiros do Zimbabwe. O quarto é dos rebeldes que fizeram a Guerra civil no interior do país. A primeira e à segunda vez foi violada, mas à terceira e à quarta entregou-se de livre vontade, porque se sentia especializada em violação sexual. O quinto é de um homen com quem se deitou por amor pela primeira vez.
Esta mulher carregou a história de todas as guerras do país num so ventre. Mas ela canta e ri. Conta a sua história a qualquer um que passa, de lágrimas nos olhos e sorriso nos lábios e declara: Os meus quatro filhos sem pai nem apelido são filhos dos deuses do fogo, filhos da história, nascidos pelo poder dos braços armados com metralhadoras. A minha felicidade foi ter gerado só homens, diz ela, nenhum deles conhecerá a dor da violação sexual. (277 – 278).
We women make existing, but we do not exist. We make birth, but we are not born. There was a time I knew a women from the interior of Zambezia province. She has five children, already grown up. The first, an elegant mulatto, is from the Portuguese who violated her during the colonial war. The second, a black, elegant and strong, like a warrior, is the product of another violation by the liberation soldiers of that same colonial war. The third, another mulatto, sleek as a cat, is from the Rhodesian commandos who invaded this land to eradicate the Zimbabwean guerrilla bases.The fourth is from the rebels who conducted the civil war in the interior of this country. The first and the second times she was violated, but the third and fourth she offered herself freely, because she felt herself an expert in being violated sexually. The fifth is from a man whom she lay with out of love for the first time.
This woman carried the history of all the wars of the country in her belly. But she sand and laughed. She tells her story to anyone who passes, with tears in her eyes and a smile on her lips and declares: my four children without father nor surname are children of the gods of fire, children of history, born of the power of hands armed with machine guns. My happiness is that I only gave birth to men, she says, none of them will know the pain of sexual violation.
It is this sense of strength, of resilience, of passion, and simultaneously of acceptance, of resignation that both excite and irritate that make Niketche such an enjoyable and provocative read.
Tony Simoes da Silva
University of Exeter
Tony Simões da Silva is an English lecturer at the University of Exeter, England.
1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London and New York: Routledge, 1992): 7.
2. I am using the term here as the novelist herself does. I felt uncomfortable with the sweeping assertion that ‘African’ traditions are thus, others something else, as it presupposed a rather problematic conflation of diverse and contrasting traditions under the same umbrella.
