An Interaction of the Voices of ‘Speaking Persons’ On Ideal Female Beauty in Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman: A Dialogic Perspective

Citation: Muhammad DAHIRU & Dominic K. MANZO (2021). An Interaction of the Voices of ‘Speaking Persons’ On Ideal Female Beauty in Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman: A Dialogic Perspective. Yobe Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (YOJOLLAC), Vol. 9, Issue 1. Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria. ISSN 2449-0660

AN INTERACTION OF THE VOICES OF ‘SPEAKING PERSONS’ ON IDEAL FEMALE BEAUTY IN ZAYNAB ALKALI’S THE VIRTUOUS WOMAN: A DIALOGIC PERSPECTIVE

By

Muhammad DAHIRU

Dominic K. MANZO

Abstract

Codes, whether religious or cultural, have always been central to critical and novelistic dscourses in northern Nigerian literary space. Debates and polemics tied to the Hausa muslim woman’s body from literary perspectives have been themes of studies and conferences. This paper examines the manner in which Zaynab Alkali interrogates female hair, voice and body as motifs for Hausa female ideal beauty in The Virtuous Woman through the novels’s framework of polyphony. The paper argues that through the orchestration of multiple voices, Alkali is able to interrogate what is the ideal beauty and culturally acceptable etiquette and codes for the Hausa female. The paper concludes that the polyphonic interaction of different speaking voices on the female body in the novel allows Alkali’s authorial intentionality and position to remain fully polyphonic.

Key Words: Polyphony, interaction, voice, female body, hair, etiquette

1.0 Introduction

Doguwa (tall), Fara (fair in complexion), Mai layalaya gashi (with long hair), Kyakkyawa (pretty), Mai kunya (coy with propriety and modesty) have been invariably the cliche terms writers in northern Nigeria use to describe the ideal Hausa female beauty in many literary spaces. Discourses on female body (Oloruntoba-Oju, (2006 & 2007); Brook, (1999); Mohanram, (1999); Synnotte, (1993); Weitz, (2002) etc} and many other female issues in Nigerian and northern Nigerian Hausa feminist fiction have been debated in many literay studies (Musa, (2021); Adamu, (2006) Whitsitt, (2003); Arnd, (2005);; Furniss, (1996); Malumfashi, (1991); Pilaszewicz, (1985); East, (1936) etc). In The Virtuous Woman (1986), Zainab Alkali interrogates the manner in which body, voice and hair determine the accepted standard of what an idealised female beauty image in Hausa culture should be. She reveals this through a ‘speaking person’ in the novel, which according to Bakhtin ‘is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue [whose] words are always ideologemes’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 349).

The story of The Virtuous Woman revolves around three principal female characters - Nana Ai, Hajjo and Laila. It recounts the physical and psychological journey they undertake, the former revealed through an adventure plot, in which the three characters set out from a village in northern Nigeria to a city in the southern part of the country, and the latter through the process of self-discovery that these characters pass through in a bildungsroman narrative structure. The ideological consicousness of these characters become the ‘speaking persons’ and ideologemes on ideal female beauty image in the novel. As Bakhtin postulates, ‘a particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for a social significance’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 333), and so ‘the enormous significance of the motif of the speaking person is obvious in the realm of ethical and legal thought and discourse’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 349). The three characters’ ideologemes dialogise on what is the idealic as regards Hausa woman’s beauty image through her body, hair and voice.

So, the interaction of the ‘speaking persons’ in The Virtuous Woman (1986) comes about through their many polyphonic voices in the novel. ‘Polyphony’ is a concept Bakhtin derived through a metaphor of music - poly (many) and phonus (sound). To complete the musical image, the author of a polyphonic novel is like the concertmaster who orchestrates all other sounds and voices and directs their interactions. Bakhtin states that in a polyphonic novel, there is not just one narrator, but many ‘consciousnesses’, which tell the story through different ideologies and ideologemes. So, rather than establishing an authoritative, single voice as the sole valid discourse in a novel, an author of a polyphonic novel allows conflicting voices, views and languages to interact concurrently within a single discourse. Because ‘dialogism is inherent in language itself’ this makes polyphony dialogic and interrelated concepts of dialogism (Kristeva, 1980, p. 68). Sue Vice reveals that ‘polyphony is dialogic in form’ and that ‘the dialogic nature of Dostoevsky’s works is in part’ due to the presence of polyphony (Vice, 1997, p. 112). Vice further states that ‘dialogism is the governing principle of polyphony’ (Vice, 1997, p. 50), and that it is through polyphonythat the discourse of the multiple characters is realised in the novel.

2.1 The Ideal Hausa Female Beauty

Hausa denotes a language, a people and an ethnic group. It has the largest number of first-speakers and second-speakers in sub-Saharan Africa. There are about 25 million Hausa first-language speakers and close to 50 million second Hausa language speakers (Pawlak, 1998, p. 6) from across Africa and the diaspora. As an ethnic group, the roots of the Hausa people is in northern Nigeria. But as a culturally homogeneous group, Hausa people are found in other African countries such as Niger, Cameroon, Cote d’voire, Chad, Ghana, Sudan, Gabon and many other places in the African diaspora. Hausa as a language is spoken by people who are not originally Hausas because it has become the lingua franca among all minor languages in northern Nigeria and Niger (Forkel et al, 2016). Most speakers of Hausa are Muslims and so their culture is also governed by Islamic ideals. There are, however, some Hausa speakers that are non-Muslims among the diverse tribes in the region. But they are all influenced by Hausa culture due to the dominant position that the Hausa ethnic group has long held in the area. Although Alkali is from the Tula-Wazila ethnic tribe, she speaks Hausa as a lingua franca and adopts Hausa ethnic cultural traditions, like most tribes living in the northern Nigerian region, for her fiction.

Alkali reveals several viganattes to interrogate the construction of idealistic Hausa female beauty in both her earlier novel The Stillborn (1984) and The Virtuous Woman. Quite often most readers see these two novels as advancing the same feminist concerns. This is because the two novels share similar thematic concerns and textual approaches, and are all set in the same cultural milieu (Amase et al, 2014; Alabi 1988). In The Stillborn, for instance, the scene in which the ‘fat woman’ who sells beancake in the market, who ‘got up angrily and chased away’ a mad man who comes to her bean cake stall (p.28) is one of the many vignattes through which Alkali ochestrates speaking voices on Hausa woman ideal body image. Being ‘fat’ is not a sign of importance but a grotesque representation of the female body in the Hausa culture. By describing the woman selling the bean cake as such, Alkali hides her authorial intention as the author but is directed through a focalisation on Li to describe her as ‘fat’.

In the traditional Hausa village sphere, virtue is tied to what Islamic religion regards as morally right or wrong for the female. The ideal female beauty is revealed through propriety, decency, purity and respectability, all as features of virtue. Sexuality and dating etiquette are the other two cultural issues related to virtue that parents and the patriarchal culture are critical of in Hausa traditional village society. These also relate to female beauty ideal.

In The Virtuous Woman, Alkali foregrounds the discourse on what makes an ideal woman beauty through the ideological consciousnesses of the female characters. Through Laila’s, Alkali puts the issue of hair, voice, sexuality and cultural etiquette as forms of motifs to negotiate female beauty ideals. After Nana A’i, Hajjo and herself wait for a long time for a ride on their way to the city, and after being shunned by all the drivers passing by, Laila resorts to primping in order to attract the attention of the male drivers. She first washes her face and ‘powdered’ it, ‘treated her eyes with kohl’ and ‘smeared on a deep lipstick, smacking her lips several times in the process’ (p. 23). Like a magic wand, she attracts the first male driver, Secretary, who they are later chanced to meet again when they reach Birnin Dala. He pulls over and offers to give them a free ride. This ritual of primping performed by Laila is classified as immorality because she does so with the sole aim of attracting the malespecie. As a Hausa Muslim woman, she is required, as a demonstration of virtue, to cover up parts of her female sensual body rather than flaunt it tantalisingly. As the ideological consciousness and a voice of tradition and religion, Nana A’i suggests this act Laila staged makes her ‘a street hawker’ rather than a school girl (p. 23). She suggests that Laila’s objectifying herself in order to draw the attention of men to her femininity is not a demonstration of what Shirley Tate calls ‘beauty artifice’ (Tate, 2009). But a hidden authorial position suggests that a female is only attracted to the male when she makes herself ‘presentable’ and feminine since all the drivers ignored them until Laila shows off her body.

An interaction of these speaking voices negotiate how a Hausa female should dress or reveal any part of her body. First, dress codes represent chastity, honour and decency as features of female virtue. Both traditional and religious values expect the Hausa female to be conscious of dressing to cover up her whole body. Alkali draws from the Bible, Proverbs 31: 25-31, to support this: ‘strength and honour are her clothing’ (p. 86). This is exemplified by the dressings of Miss Rossycheeks and the effigy of Mary the mother of Jesus in their school. Alkali draws on the Christian scripture as a form of ‘sideward glance’ to a Christian reader outside Islamic tradition, by quoting something such reader might probably know. 

2.2 Hair, Beauty and Etiquette

Nana A’i feels somewhat embarrassed as her scarf flies off, exposing ‘a mass of black silky hair’ (p. 57). In contrast to the epitome of virtue that Nana A’i represents, and which Alkali is accused of supporting (Alabi, 1998). Laila on the other hand ‘grows sullen’ when she realises Abubakar and Bello have seen Nana’s hair and ‘she remembers her own short kinky hair’ (p.57). Alkali suggests that Laila is rather envious that Nana A’i exposes her hair rather than being sullen for the latter’s failure to preserve a conservative religious code, The fact that she has a short hair reveals it is what inhibits her exposing it rather than the moral codes to cover it up. 

The issue of the female hair is also central to Igbo and Yoruba cultural codes, as revealed in the fictions of Adichie and Atta, respectively. But they each present different cultural concerns. While Alkali considers covering the female hair as a cultural and religious ethics in Hausa culture in The Virtuous Woman, Adichie is worried about looking at the racial, professional and politics of hair across racial divides in her novel Americanah (2013), just as Sefi Atta also sees hair making racial statement about Yoruba female hair in her novel Everything Good Will comei (2005). While hair is significant in negotiating racial identity and inclusion to Atta and Adichie, Alkali, through Nana A’I, demonstrates that etiquette in handling hair is an ethical cultural act. While Igbo and Yoruba girls attach wigs and expose their hair, and their cultures allow it, Nana A’i’s cultural and religious norms stop her from exposing her hair. It is this act of modesty and propriety’ that makes her ‘beautiful’ and earns her love and respect from Bello. The character image of Laila, however, suggests that if she were in a culture that allows exposing hair, she would have attached a wig like Adichie’s and Atta’s Igbo and Yoruba female characters, respectively.

2.3 Female Height and Ideal Body

Alkali creates inversion on the female and the male body. When Bello and Abubakar meet Nana A’i and Laila on their journey, the narrator reverses gender stereotypes on body when describing them. First, the males are described with these feminine features: ‘one of them was tall, lean and light skinned. The other was short, stoutly built with the look of an overfed baby and a massive head supported by a boxer’s chest. He looked manly and full of life’ (p. 25).

Being ‘tall’, ‘light skinned’ and ‘lean’ are attributes of female beauty in Hausa culture and what makes ‘manly and lively’ figure is ‘short’, ‘stout’, ‘overfed’ ‘massive head’ and ‘boxer’s chest’. It is short, stoutly built and bloated and athletic features that are attributes of man. Ironically, however, Nana A’i is attracted to the male with more feminine feature, Bello, who ‘looked delicate, feminine and highly vulnerable’, with a ‘dimple’ on his cheeks ‘adding more femininity to his looks’ (p. 30). The narrator does not define ‘femininity’ to the reader but taking a cue from calling a man feminine suggests having feminine features are not valorised for the menfolk. But in a rather inverted dialogic technique, Falta, the mother of the twins in the lorry, is described as having ‘a deep muscular voice, and was large, angular and generally mannish’ (p.45). This ‘mannish’ woman is the person that Nana A’i feels is the ‘epitome of motherhood and [she] wished for a mother like’ her because she had not been ‘fortunate enough to grow up with a mother’ (p. 45).

The voice of Alkali behind Nana A’I’s consciousness suggests Falta possesses ‘wisdom and could impart to her number of things she did not know about human behaviour’ (p. 45). Interestingly, while feminine attributes in Bello are seen as ideal man to Nana A’i, it is the masculine quality that she sees in Falta that is the ideal for motherhood, a sort of womanist complementarity that Africana Womanism always advocates. Alkali’s authorial intention, therefore, points towards multiple perspectives on ideal body image. Her views make femininity both a means of restricting the female and at the same time a means of offering the female the freedom to negotiate her social space in the culture. Taking all the characters’ personal choices differently, as Nana A’i and Laila demonstrate, it is, therefore, apposite to accept that an argument Alkali puts forward on ideal female body image remains polyphonic and dialogic rather than pinned to a single ideal female beauty model.

Laila’s choice of going against the cultural demands as regards female propriety may represent a feminist and Western idea of a ‘permissible culture’ within which John Ayto suggests ‘sexual freedom is tolerated’ (Ayto, 2006, p. 172) and which Alan Petigny defines as being governed by ‘few moral legal codes’ (Petigny, 2009, pp. 199-200). Nana A’i’s choice however is from within a conservative Islamic society in which female sexuality is strictly restricted and does not allow a matured female to show any part of her body except her face in a few circumstances, and where ‘illegal’ sex is punishable by lashes and by death.

2.4 Propriety and Female Beauty Image

Nana A’i is depicted as ‘quiet and good natured […] not aggressive but coy, not boisterous but quite, not assertive but compromising’ (Alabi, 1998, p. 25). It is here that some critics place Alkali’s Muslim conservative point of view about the value of female propreity and modesty. Adetayo Alabi argues that Nana A’i’s character image represents the image of the ideal Hausa woman that Alkali epitomises. The authorial intention of Alkali is not only to support sanctioning sexual freedom but in showing the value of modesty.

It is important to critically re-examine the actions of Nana A’i and Laila, which point to Alkali’s Muslim conservative voice on female virtue as Alabi suggests. It is the actions of these characters that reveal the multiplicity of voices Alkali presents. But the contexts of the characters’ actions are significant in locating Alkali’s authorial intention on female virtue in Hausa culture. While waiting for a lift by the road side, Laila only succeeds in getting them the favour they so desperately need through flaunting her sexuality, which suggests some men favour this free rather than restrictive show of sexuality. Nana A’I, however, turns down the free ride offer, restraining herself due to her moral consciousness. It is a consciousness stirred by the Islamic and cultural demands that require her to guard her chastity (pp. 23-25). Nana A’i’s action is, therefore, to be judged by the social environment, in which Islamic religion governs the lives of the people, females and males alike. Apart from going against flaunting of sexuality that Laila enacts, the place and context in which this act is enacted is significant in understanding Alkali’s voice being Nana A’i’s sense of moral rectitude as a female. The space, a highway junction, is where sex-workers stand to get clients, usually identified as the rich who usually come with cars. It is a marketplace where people drink, gamble and is characterised by ‘the atmosphere stank of petty thieving and prostitution’ (p. 21). It brings to mind Mama Maria’s Place in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005), where sex-workers ‘wiggled their tongues and pressed their breasts to the windscreen’ of Mike’s car taking him to be one of those clients who pay huge sums for their services (p. 87). Any girl that stands at the Highway in Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman is treated as the girls at Mama Maria’s place in Atta’s Lagos. But does this mean Alkali is critical about female sex work and regards it as a vice for society?

According to Adetayo Alabi, The Virtuous Woman, ‘operates almost exclusively within the realm of the phallocratic depiction of female characters’ (Alabi, 1998, p. 25). This suggests that Alkali blames women for immorality through sexuality, absolving men and, therefore, supporting the patriarchal hierarchy in Hausa culture. Without trying to defend Alkali, I may attribute this creation of hierarchy to the religious influence on Alkali’s Hausa culture and to the women’s life in the Hausa community. This does not only affect the thinking of female characters as Alkali depicts but also the manner in which female writers write in order to avoid losing readership or incurring the wrath of the authorities.

Hausa cultural authorities censors the activities of the females more than the males in relation to what is morally right. An example of such censorship is demonstrated in the northern Nigerian film industry on Rahama Sadau, an actress banned from acting due to ‘immoral behaviour’ of hugging a male pop singer in a video (BBC, 2016). The Nigerian film industry in Nigeria is generally known as Nollywood. But due to the conservative nature of the northern Nigerian culture, a different type of censored film is produced in the Hausa language, fashioned in the Bollywood conservative image. No man is allowed to touch a woman in any form in such films and videos, even if the woman in question is depicted as a wife, a sibling, a mother or somebody that needs help and should be touched. There is no show of affection involving touching between male and female in whatsoever manner. Sadau’s crime of touching the singer in the video drew the wrath of producers and directors in the industry, and irked northern religious leaders and many of her fans. An Islamic scholar based in Kano warned and advised Rahama Sadau to get married instead of promoting such ‘immoral behaviour’ (Igwe, 2016).

Sede Alonge asserts that Nigeria is home to the largest number of child brides in Africa, with about 23 million girls and women married in childhood and the bulk of those child brides come from the northern region (Alonge, 2016). The religious and cultural codes enjoin parents to marry off their daughters at the onset of puberty, hence the Islamic scholar’s call on Sadau to abandon acting in movies and get married. It is this mind-set that makes Dogo in The Virtuous Woman choose not to send his daughters to school but rather get them married. Within the cultural convention of northern Nigeria that Alkali depicts in the novel, girls’ education usually ends after primary school, by which they are married off and moved to their husband’s houses as child-brides. As Margaret Hauwa Kassam puts it, ‘very few young girls obtain secondary and tertiary education because tradition requires them to be married early in life [and so females’] chances of enhancing their social status seems to be jeopardized’ (Kassam,1996, p. 122).

2.5 Voice and Female Beauty Ideal

As Christine Loflin observes, ‘Nana, careful and conservative finds a serious man’ while the ‘more impulsive [Laila] is still mistaking affection for romance at the end of the novel’ (Loflin,1988, p. 41). During their journey, while Nana A’i gets the attention and love from Bello, Laila does not get any from the men they meet. She mistakes lust from Secretary, who pulls over to offer them a ride, and mistakes affection from Major A.Z. Lawan, who invites them to his side in the train, as love. While the latter seeks to take advantage of her, the former is just being friendly to her. But Laila mistakes both intentions of the men. Alkali’s conservative Islamic voice is critical of Laila and glorifies the ‘virtue’ of Nana A’i who is the perfect example of the female the culture wants to be: ‘more composed than many an adolescent’ (p. 10). Nana A’i’s deformity and Hajjo’s social background metaphorically represent the ‘voiceless’ state of women as regards beauty ideal. While Hajjo remains taciturn and withdrawn in most parts of the novel because she is born out of wedlock, and Nana A’i shows some degree of self-doubt due to he deformity, Laila, despite her lack of physical beauty, is free spirited and generally extrovert and sociable (p. 52). It is this lively spirit, which Nana A’i envies she ‘wished at that moment she was in Laila’s place’ and ‘wondered if she could ever bring laughter to the lip’ (p.52) and that she could be like Laila and ‘talk the way you do [...] but I am dumb, dumb, dumb’ (p. 61). It is this spirit that Alkali wants the Hausa females to imbibe for a progressive culture and as an idealistic beauty. As a bildungsroman and polyphonic character, Nana A’I’s fluidity and unfinalizability allows her to find her voice like Laila’s, when she eventuallydecides that ‘she had to say something to prove that she was not dumb as well as crippled’ (p. 30). She starts with a stutter, just like Kambili in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), when she asks the boys, ‘The se-cre-tary’ in a voice that ‘broke with nervousness’ (p. 31).

Laila is the complete opposite of all that Nana A’i represents. Another liberal feminist voice of Alkali may endorse Laila’s behaviour as a means of sexual freedom for the female based on personal choice. Therefore, the character consciousnesses of Laila and Nana A’i both represent Alkali’s authorial intention on ideal female beauty. As Kassam states ‘apart from gender, other variables like education, social status, class, and age seem to militate against the expression of voice by women in northern Nigeria’ (p. 12). Alkali suggests that while education gives the females social and economic status in the culture, it is their voice that sustains it. As Adetayo Alabi argues, ‘the structure of the dialogue in The Virtuous Woman does not allow forceful feminine voice’ (Alabi, 1998, p. 23). I do not concur with Alabi due to the contradictory perspectives the polyphonic structure provides. Bakhtin states that where there are contradictions in a polyphonic novel, they are ‘spread out in one plane, as standing alongside or opposite one another, as consonant but not merging or as hopelessly contradictory, as an eternal harmony of unmerged voices or as their unceasing and irreconcilable quarrel’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 30). So, Alkali succeeds in orchestrating various ‘speaking voices’ for the depiction of the ideal Hausa female beauty through the actions and consciousness of Laila and Nana A’I in order to reveal her authorial intention in The Virtuous Woman.

3.0 Conclusion

The paper has argued that the coexistence of contradictory and similar views on what constitutes ideal female beauty in The Virtuous Woman makes the novel polyphonic and dialogic through and through. However, that may also be considered as one of the limitations of the polyphonic framework for a feminist pursuit. The contradictory voices on the same plane do not seem to present any definite perspective since Alkali does not ‘retain any essential ‘surplus’ of meaning, but only that indispensable minimum of pragmatic, purely information-bearing ‘surplus’ necessary to carry forward the story’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 3) on the characters. The whole dialogic interaction of ‘speaking voices’ may, therefore, turn out to be mere ‘dialectics’ if Alkali’s standpoint is not located. But as Simon Dentith points out, ‘Bakhtin equally rejects the dialectic as a way of conceiving the structure of the novel, for the dialectic is a way of recognizing conflict and contradiction only to resolve them ultimately. The dialectic might only be appropriate to the monologic novel’ (Dentith, 1995, p. 42). Through a polyphonic structure, Alkali has negotiated what is ideal as regards what is an ideallic female beauty in Hausa culture, albeit seen from different perspectives.

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