Flora Nwapa
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa (13 January 1931 – 16 October 1993) was a Nigerian author best known as Flora Nwapa She was a Nigerian author who has been called the mother of modern African Literature. She was the forerunner to a generation of African women writers, and the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain. She achieved international recognition with her first novel Efuru, published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books. While never considering herself a feminist, she was best known for recreating life and traditions from an Igbo woman's viewpoint.
Quotes
[edit]- What can a woman do? You say everyday. In the end, a woman does something, and even then still you look down on women.
- There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.
- Efuru 1966
- There was nothing in me when I was in school that made me feel I was going to be a writer. It was one of those things that just happened. I didn’t have the ambition to say, “Oh, Flora, you are going to be a writer, so work towards it
- [1] Nwapa on how she became Africa best female author.
- We are well, Efuru replied. It is only hunger. It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for.
- Efuru told him that she would drown herself in the lake if he did not marry her. Adizua told her he loved her very much and that even the dust she trod on meant something to him.
- (Chapter 1, Location 65)
- I am sure you will like this gin. Nwabuzo had it buried in the ground last year when there was rumour that policemen were sent to search her house. When the policemen left, finding nothing, Nwabuzo was still afraid and left it in the ground. A week later, she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital where she remained for six months. She came back only a week ago. So the gin is a very good one.
- (Chapter 1, Location 114)
- They did not see the reason why Adizua should not marry another woman since according to them two men do not live together. To them Efuru was a man, since she could not reproduce.
- (Chapter 2, Location 385,)
- If I am considered the doyenne of African female writers, the glory goes to the oral historians and griottes who mesmerized me with stories about the mystical powers of Ogbuide, the mother of the lake, my family members of industrious women and men who served as role models, as well as my penchant for service and the pursuit of excellence.
- I don’t think that I’m a radical feminist,”
- I don’t even accept that I’m a feminist. I accept that I’m an ordinary woman who is writing about what she knows. I try to project the image of women positively.
- Women have always been powerful and striven to achieve financial independence. I wanted a politics that fought for expanding and nurturing the power that women already had. It is not that I believed that there was no such thing as gender inequality. I just did not want to see a woman as a victim but as someone who was always enterprising and looking for ways to undermine the systems of power that tried to put her down.
- Feminism was a politics of empowerment that assumed that a woman was a victim. I saw feminism as a politics that had to first position women as victims so that it can then empower them.
- There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.
- As Adiewere and Efuru were eating, a troop of children with shining tummies in front of them were seen approaching. "These children are just in time. The way they time themselves is admirable.
- What can a woman do?" you say everyday. In the end, a woman does something, and even then still you look down on women.
- When Efuru went home, Ajanupu could not help admiring her character. "She is a woman among women. I like the way she is carrying her burden. She still loves that imbecile husband of hers and she is going in search of him.
- The novel captures the ongoing changes in Nigerian society where women strive for (economic) independence and personal happiness and growth rather than a life within the boundaries of an outdated tradition. In stressing the economic independence of women, Nwapa reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her essay “A Room Of One’s Own”.
- Contrary to Woolf, who I personally always found to be overly dramatic and elitist, and, thus, exclusive, in her viewpoints and demands to literature and feminism, Nwapa did not think of herself as a feminist. At the same time, she is crucially aware of the misrepresentation of women in literature by fellow male authors who tend to display women as prostitutes or mischievous creatures, all of which Nwapa counteracts in her own writing by displaying women as positive, independent and real as they are.
