(continued)

In the context of modern Nigerian literary tradition, women’s writing from the North is a subject of double invisibility and double repression. It can be said without contradiction that the “absence” of women in the nation’s conventional history is only equaled by the unpopular interest in works produced by writers, whether male or female, from the North. There is no gainsaying the fact that if creative writing in Northern Nigeria, derived and greatly influenced by Arabic literary tradition, is considered to be in a state of insignificance, and if women’s literature in the country is generally under-represented, works produced by women from the North are overtly and unceremoniously ignored and repressed by the conventional critical practice of earlier African male scholars. In the traditional history of our literature, the inclusion of efforts by pioneer writers from Northern Nigeria, both male and female, have been rather an unpopular exercise.

 
Wole Soyinka and Remi Raji
at a recent event in Berlin.

The recent and relative visibility which contemporary writing in English from the North seems to be wresting from the grip of obscurity is made possible by strategic recourse to the immediacy of the newspaper medium, the brief enthusiasms of epileptic magazines and journals and indeed, most significantly, by the momentary zeal of publisher-writers like Labo Yari, Joseph Mangut, Ibrahim Malumfashi, Nana Embaga and most recently and sustained, Ibrahim Sheme. Currently a Research Fellow with the Sheu Musa Yar Adua Foundation, Sheme has been for many years political, literary and art editor of the New Nigerian newspaper; he has used his most popular literary column, Write Stuff, to re-present established writers and introduce new writings, a substantial number of them by women, especially from the North.

In 1995, Ibrahim Sheme established Informart, a publishing house dedicated to catering for the creative yearnings of potential and prospective authors all of whom, for the strategic but unannounced reason of its establishment, are Northerners. The Informart list includes fiction and poetry by Hauwa Sambo, Suzanna Onus, Nana Aishatu Ahmad, Fatima Usara Hassan-Tom, Hannatu Tukur Abdullahi, Binta Salma Mohammed, Aishatu Gidado Idris, Bello Musa Dankano, Mohammed Garba Wala, Hawwa M. Allurawa, and Ibrahim Sheme. Apart from the Sheme factor, there have been other individual and institutional efforts to get works by relatively unknown writers published. For instance, Stirling-Horden Publishing has produced two titles of Cecilia Kato, a female poet from Kaduna, the central region of Northern Nigeria while Maria Ajima from Benue has had her first collection of poems - Cycles - published in Britain, a year before Hauwa Sambo’s Genesis, through the support of an in-law and family friend.

Between 1996 and 2006, about 18 volumes of poetry have been published. These include Maria Ajima’s Cycles (1996), Speaking of Wines…(1998), and Poems of Insanity (2000); Hauwa Sambo’s The Genesis and other Poems (circa 1996); Nana Aishatu Ahmad’s Vision of the Jewel (1997), and Voices from the Kitchen and other Poems (1998); Binta Salma Mohammed’s Contours of Life (1999); Cecilia Kato’s Desires (1999), and Victims of Love (2000); Hannatu Tukur Abdullahi’s She Talks, He Talks (1998); Alu Uganden’s My Will, Your Will and other Poems (2001); Ma’azatu Sadiq’s The Blood on Our Hands and other Poems (2002); Halima Sekula’s Tongues of Flame (2005); Victoria Kankara’s Hymns and Hymens (2005), and Angela Miri’s Running Waters and other Poems (2006).

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