A triple heritage of minoritization confronts the typical female poet writing in, and affiliated to, the northern region of Nigeria. She works within the unpredictable tedium of a broad home-spawn literary tradition, the significant diversity of which is unknown outside Africa and which is barely qualified within the West African sub-region; she belongs to the ‘other’ group, undefined by the quality of production but defined and limited by the discursive ring of gender relations; and alas, she devotes her creative energies to the composition of poetry, a genre that is constantly losing ground to the general preference for the narrative form in the country.

Poetry written in English by women from the northern axis of the country is indeed a very young and developing tradition in the broad dynamism of contemporary Nigerian Literature.  By “northern axis”, I refer to the mass of land naturally separated from Southern Nigeria by a combination of physical geography and colonial history. Literally speaking, “Northern Nigeria” is a reference to the entire trough and bulk of land above Rivers Niger and Benue; it is also the savannah space occupied by various ethnic nationalities, with the Hausa and the Fulani in majority, governed by colonial British authority in the 19th century and designated until 1914 as “the Northern Protectorate.” It is paradoxical to note that the writing and recitation of poetry was a popular activity among women in the pre-colonial empire of Usman dan Fodiyyo and one prominent female poet during this glorious period greatly influenced by Arabic literary tradition was Nana Asmau, daughter of the emperor.

Collections of poetry by women are a rarity until the second half of the 1990s; precisely the last four years of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of works which has given significant leverage to the activity of the Northern Nigerian female writer as poet. Therefore, the criticism of such a very young tradition is generally, or at best, a tentative one not only because the field is still sparsely populated by critics and writers alike but also because definitive and precise theoretical viewpoints would be too anticipatory of the unfolding tradition. However, one of the central, and as yet enduring, statements contained in Lloyd Brown’s book Women Writers in Black Africa, is the treatment of women’s writings in African literature as the “other voices, the unheard voices, rarely discussed and seldom accorded space in the repetitive anthologies and the predictably male-oriented studies in the field.”(3) Brown’s observation is as valid now as it was made about 25 years ago especially if it is applied to developments in regional and specific national literatures across the continent.

The historical fact of the absence of the female writer, especially the female poet, is sufficiently highlighted in Creative Writing, Writers and Publishing in Northern Nigeria, an IFRA publication written in parts by Abba Aliyu Sani and Jibrin Ibrahim, and Emmanuel B. Omobowale. According to the authors, Zaynab Alkali’s The Stillborn (1984) “was a milestone in northern Nigerian women’s writing in English” (3); it was to Northern Nigeria what Aminata Sow Fall’s Le Revenant was to Senegalese literary history as the first novel written by a woman within the specified culture.

It is an obvious point that contemporary Northern Nigerian literature, in the tradition of several other regional and national literatures in Africa, is highly dominated by men. From available records, not more than 5 out of about 66 publications have been ascribed to women between 1973 and 1995. A few women writers have however been represented in a major anthology of Northern Nigerian writing – Vultures in the Air: Voices from Northern Nigeria, edited by Zaynab Alkali and Al Imfeld and published by Spectrum in 1995.   Poetry from Northern Nigeria”.

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