Nwapa The Lake Goddess

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-2385-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 215 Seiten

The Lake Goddess came to be Flora Nwapa's last novel, yet possibly her most important one, as it restores African culture and spirituality. 'Nwapa's message is clear: she-Ona/Ogbuide/woman-may have many children, but she also independently succeeds in her own life, and she is a source of healing and inspiration to all human beings suffering from the ills and madness of modern society worldwide. The goddess whom Nwapa invoked finally reemerges in her original glory in The Lake Goddess to brighten women's path. Her powers and mysteries shine, once again, despite the onslaught of foreign powers and their religions, when Nwapa accounts for the destructive forces of globalization and for attempts to push Uhammiri's children into the abyss of derangement, to rob the deity of her benevolence, and to deny her people both children and wealth. Yet, when the lake goddess finally appears with her image fully restored in Nwapa's last novel, the messenger, who invoked her, has left the land, crossed the river, and joined her ancestors to live on.' Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nwapa, Flora

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION   “It doesn’t matter where we worship or what we call God, there is only one, interdependent human family.” —Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu,1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate   “Great Goddess/The Supreme God/Made you great/By making you/The Water Goddess/ I must be your Priestess/Until I die…” —Flora Nwapa, The Lake Goddess (1992)   Gods are predominantly featured as males in the religious pantheon throughout the world. However, Flora Nwapa projects a female goddess, called Ogbuide, in her novel, The Lake Goddess. In demonstrating female sovereignty in the spiritual realm in her hometown, Oguta, Flora Nwapa establishes the ascendancy and empowerment of the water deity, Ogbuide. In the wake of many religions, in Nigeria, thwarting the supremacy of this rich and powerful Water Monarch, aka, Ezemiri, Flora Nwapa cautions the Oguta Christian community to return to their roots, and worship the water deity, popularly called Mammywater, throughout Nigeria (Jell-Bahlsen, Research in African Literatures, 1995, p. 79). This mystical “Lady of the Lake,” is at the center of Flora Nwapa’s creative corpus, i. e., Efuru, Idu, Never Again, One Is Enough, This Is Lagos and Other Stories, Wives at War and Other Stories, Cassava Song and Rice Song, Women are Different, her children’s book, Mammywater, and her plays, Conversations and The First Lady. The Goddess is symbolic of economic independence for women, female empowerment, and female strength and wisdom. The novel, The Lake Goddess, is a bildungsroman, where the reader follows the life of the protagonist, Ona, from the beginning to the end of the book. In fact, the book is the biography of the Priestess of Oguta Lake around 1989-90 when Flora Nwapa was conducting interviews and research, for a forthcoming conference at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The conference convener, Professor Flora E. S. Kaplan in the Department of Anthropology, at New York University, was on leave in Benin, Nigeria from 1988-1989 conducting research on how African women exercised power, authority, and influence and the subtleties and complexities of the contemporary spheres of power they often share with men (Kaplan 1997, xxxii). She invited Flora Nwapa to the conference to expand the notions of women’s power in Oguta. After Flora Nwapa’s field research at Oguta II, where the Priestess of Oguta Lake lives, she presented a paper at the 1991 conference in New York entitled, Priestesses and Power among the Riverine Igbo, and said: Ezemiri wielded tremendous power in her community. She was a diviner, as well as a medicine woman who could cure the sick and the afflicted with water, roots, herbs and incantations. She ministered to whomsoever consulted her from far and near and spoke authoritatively in the name of the Goddess. Invoking the Goddess, the priestess first called on the Supreme God: ‘Supreme God/You gave me power/You are water.’ Thus water is the most important item of her cure. She also used white chalk and the feathers of different kinds of birds. She gave her sister’s daughter in marriage to her husband, once she entered priesthood. The priestess’s powers are derived from the supernatural. (Kaplan, Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and Power, 1997, p. 419-420). Upon her return to Nigeria, Flora Nwapa began “writing another book, titled, The Story of A Priestess: A Novel.” (Umeh, A Pen and A Press, 103). Without a doubt, Ogbuide is Flora Nwapa’s muse, who inspired her to write and publish books. She shares the circumstances in her life that helped her to find her voice: “As a child I would call on anybody who promised to tell me a story. I would sit down and listen. And when I went to high school I had read practically everything that I could find… Having written Efuru and published it, I continued to write. Now when I had my own publishing company, I decided that I needed good books for my growing children… I started writing children’s books. I wrote Mammywater in 1979” (Umeh, 1995, p. 25). In Nwapa’s last novel, the author demonstrates the ultimate power of Ogbuide. Ona, a priestess, chosen by Ogbuide upon her birth, is empowered with the gift of prophecy, healing and wish fulfillment, as she conducts her rituals for her worshippers, and communicates with Ogbuide. The conflict elevates as Ona’s Christian parents, Mgbada and Akpe, reject the call of Ezemiri, and subsequently send their daughter to a local missionary school. When they fail to initiate her into the church, they approve her marriage to Mr. Sylvester Chukwukere, a successful, travelling pharmaceutical salesman, with the hope of breaking her attachment to the Water Monarch, Ezemiri. Every society has belief systems which teach the community its spiritual values. However, advocates of Christianity failed to recognize the humanity in indigenous religions. Their intolerance for African spirituality was the bedrock for British colonial’s subsequent subjugation of Nigerians and their culture in myriad ways. Flora Nwapa’s double voice censures foreign religious aggression at the beginning of her novel, The Lake Goddess: ‘… [W]hen Mgbada was ten years old, a strange thing happened in the town of Ugwuta. Strange people came to the town with strange ideas. They talked of a god who was born by a woman and who died for the sins of the world. They criticized the religion of the people, calling them pagans and heathens… Mgbada’s father was upset by this new religion. He protested thus: ‘What kind of religion preached that one should abandon the worship of one’s ancestors…’ So before he died, he charged Mgbada thus: ‘Whatever you do, whatever you become, don’t forget the worship of our ancestors…’’ (6-7). In The Lake Goddess, Nwapa questions Christian missionary dogma and she advocates for the return to Oguta traditional cosmology. As Chimalum Nwankwo points out in his essay, The Lake Goddess: The Roots of Nwapa’s Word: In this novel, tradition suffers incursion but survives by a clear authorial privileging that surpasses the political engagement of previous works. The Lake Goddess remains in the center of all this, and that Ona triumphs is an expression which calls for and affirms a continuity of traditional values stretching from Mgbada’s father, through Mgbada, to the fictional present. The situation responds to the widely accepted perception of tradition as a continuum is that well-known essay by T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, p. 345. Nwapa adapts a new voice in The Lake Goddess. Her womanist politics go beyond challenging female representation in Nigerian letters by male authors. Her critique of British religious imperialism—by censuring Christian missionary education intolerance of indigenous Oguta religion—presents a new voice from this gifted author of the biographies of Oguta women and men. Zadie Smith, in her essay, Speaking in Tongues, contends that “Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular… We feel that our voices are who we are and that to have more than one or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls” (p. 2). Flora Nwapa’s adoption of another voice establishes the fact that she has made peace with her paternal grandparents, who practiced ancestor worship, to the chagrin of her Christian peers who would accuse her of class and religious betrayal (Zadie Smith, p. 2). The anthropologist, Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, in her chapter, Ogbuide’s Famous Daughter, Flora Nwapa, in her book, The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology, Ogbuide of Oguta Lake has the last word: Nwapa’s attitude towards her own culture was dynamic and her views on local beliefs and their significance for women have changed throughout her life and oeuvre (385). Flora Nwapa demonstrates Ona’s spiritual power in one of her rituals as she intercedes to the Lake Goddess to answer the prayers of the fish-sellers, Ekecha and Mgbeke: ‘Beautiful woman/Hairy woman/Ageless woman/Mother of all mothers/Owner of the Lake/Owner of the fishes/Owner of the People/Of the Lake/Protector of the Lake People/Ogbuide/ hamiri/ Ezemiri/Queen Mother/Goddesss of the Water/Goddess of the fishes/The Goddess of thunder/The Goddess of lightning/The protector of women/The Lake Goddess/Your priestess/Salutes you/Your fellow women/Salute you/They are here before you/So come to their help/I beseech you/Good Mother/Give them/Your abundant/Blessings/ Show them the light’ (p....