Womanhood through the literature and eyes of northern women

If you think men, run the world, think again.
The sun shone deceptively bright on a Saturday morning. And under the canopied-stage, four women sat passing the mic between them and spewing the wisdom that years of toiling as writers and as women in a patriarchal society have conferred on them.
They were all from the North of Nigeria and they were all writers, well, apart from HajaraWodu, the compeer, who is an Ilorin-based Lawyer.
Halima Aliyu, Maryam Bobi and HadizaBagudu are three writers keen to follow in the footsteps of the foremost female writer from the North,Zainab Alkali, as the voice that wails from behind the veil of purdah and documents the experiences of women, especially in the north.  Incidentally, MrsAlkaki, author of the famous Stillborn, was supposed to be in attendance but couldn’t for some reason.
Quite like Mrs Alkali, the two novelists among the three writers built their stories around the plight of women.  Maryam Bobi and HadizaBagudu’s book have some things in common; they explore the situation of women in the oft romanticized Fulani community and they are both named after the lead character –Bongel for Maryam Bobi, and Fantah for HadizaBagudu.
Perhaps because she is the most experienced of the three, Bagudu’sFantah has the greatest scope and ambition. Set in the 19th century, Fantah (published by Author House) chronicles the life of the title character who falls in love with a brave descendant of Shehu Dan Fodio called Hayatu, who had rescued her from a lion.
Their love story is intertwined with civil strife, conspiracies and is capped with a tragedy.
Maryam Bobi’sBongel is a novel. It documents Bongel’s resurgence from an ill-fated early marriage and her recovery from VVF. She overcomes both challenges, continues her education, falls in  love and had to be put to the test to earn the love of her dream man. Whether the object of Bongel’s affection, Abdul is worthy of her love is quite another matter but the important thing was that she envisaged her happiness and pursued it relentlessly.
Bongel and Fantah are two very different characters, they exhibit a quality of bravery that especially for Fantah was inconceivable. A Fulani girl, stood up by her lover on her wedding day, decides to run after him to be his concubine! How often have you heard that?
Listening to Bagudu speak, one could see where this derring-do attitude comes from. She is brave like that.
“I am the only girl from my village who went to the university before being married,” she said.
She is unafraid to talk about sex and sexuality and she does so with confidence.
Though younger, Bobi and Aliyu aren’t shy about that subject either. When reading, both chose to read some explicit excerpts highlighting the sexual frustration that women have to live with, especially in the north.
Aliyu’s title story ‘Fire on The Tip of Ice’, from her debut short story collection captures the frustration of a woman who is disregarded by her husband, except when he has sexual need for her. Her frustration results in her taking some rather shocking actions that affect not only her but her children.
“I don’t want people to have sympathy for her,” Halima says, “I just want people to see what this woman was going through and what it made her do.”
Halima has no qualms about tainting her heroes. Richard, (from the story ‘Soiled’) a victim of serial gang rape in boarding school, has no problem setting up a fellow student to be so desecrated just to expose his abusers.Amina in the title story has no problem molesting her son because he looked like his father, for whom she has no affections, and hardly worries about her children when she decides to leave her husband to pursue the satisfaction of her desires.
Perhaps the common strand that runs through Halima’s collection is that of dominance. Men dominating women.Women dominating men, men and women dominating each other. But for her, women rule.
“Men think they run the world, we know different,” she said.
Though the whole discourse on that day was supposed to be on Reconstructing Womanhood, what became evident, through the divergent narratives on display was the damage women inflict on each other often in understated ways.Sometimes quite brutal.
Bongel’s chief antagonist happens to be her best friend Kauthar, who resents Bongel for having been a victim of child marriage. Fantah’s desire to be with Hayatu is opposed not only by royal machinations but also by her rival Talatu, who freely uses black magic, to deal her rival severe blows. But Fantah herself was very uncaring of the plight of Talatu, who after all was Hayatu’s wife and her absconding to become his concubine was hardly considerate of the plight of her fellow woman.
Perhaps the most graphic depiction of this inter-gender loathing is depicted in Halima Aliyu’s short story ‘Comfort’ in which Prefect Comfort delights in torturing a junior student without just cause. The story begins and ends with the shocking brutality of one woman over the other. None of the men in the three books managed to mete out such violence on a woman.None.
But it was clear, from the reaction of the audience, that the women have only scratched the surface. Members of the audience were keen to relate to what the stories talked about. Some were anxious to share their own experiences.
By coming out of their shells and bringing to the fore issues that have for centuries gone on unaddressed, albeit through books greatly in need of serious editorial inputs, these women might just have started a conversation that will go on for quite a while.

Fire on the Tip of Ice is published in 2015 by Origami, Lagos. Bongel was published also in 2015 by Bookcraft Ibadan while Fantah was published in 2014 by Author House.