Gender, Narrative Space, and Modern Hausa Literature

Abstract

This essay seeks to demonstrate the interplay between gender and (oral and written) narrative spaces, and the relationship between those spaces and the shifting roles of men and women in the production of literatures in Hausa culture. The term Hausa is used to refer broadly to a putatively multi-ethnic and predominantly Muslim community of speakers of Hausa as a native language. Over the centuries the neighboring peoples from various ethnic backgrounds (e.g., some Fulani, Kanuri, and Nupe) have adopted Hausa identity simply by virtue of linguistic assimilation. The discussion here will be placed in historical space—from the indigenous oral heritage, through the Islamic and Jihadist phase, to the more modern period of the Western impact. This historical course reveals how a conjuncture of different kinds of forces has impacted differently on men and women as producers of verbal arts (literature). These gender-based divergences, however, have not obliterated the fact of their interdependency. At the same time, to the extent that the gender factor is related, to some degree or other, to the dichotomy between orality and literacy, it has naturally featured in the discourse on tradition and modernity. And it is to this interplay between tradition and modernity, on the one hand, and orality and literacy, on the other, that we must first turn.

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