Mma Ken-Akparanta’s Amazon in the Gully is a cross between a Bildungsroman and a social novel. It is essentially the story of Amarachi, the narrator, who loses her parents at the age of eighteen months and is adopted by her uncle and his wife Ukwunna and Ezenwanyi Onwukanma. We follow her physical and intellectual growth in Nigeria and abroad until she gets married to her politician boy friend Albert Efosa.
As a social novel, Amazon in the Gully portrays a rich diversity of themes ranging from rape, corruption, bureaucratic ineptitude, violence to environmental degradation (especially gully erosion), homosexuality, sexual promiscuity as well as, believe it or not, husband battery. Indeed, the most fascinating feature of Ken-Akparanta’s novel is the patent reversal of conventional Nigerian male/female roles, characterized by the deliberate feminization, nay emasculation of the men folk. Ezenwanyi (the ‘Queen’ in Igbo) is a ‘man-eater’ riding roughshod over all men and especially her husband Ukwunna who, In the Onwukanma household plays the role of the housewife and cook. Nonetheless, the “provider and protector,” Ezenwanyi, still beats him up until he breaks down in tears. To further compound this emasculation, the only offspring of the unequal couple, Omekannaya (in Igbo, ‘like his father’), turns out to be a closet homosexual.
It is, therefore, rather implausible that, later in Amazon in the Gully, Ukwunna indulges in a new-found randiness that leads him to impregnate a housemaid and even his step daughter. Nonetheless, when the eponymous Amazon falls into a gully in her village, Eluogu, and gets into a depression, Ukwunna nurses her back to recovery. But the damage has been done. A year later, she suffers a stroke that sends her to her grave. The role reversal continues as Ukwunna is subjected to all the humiliating rituals that widows endure in some Nigerian cultures.
There is therefore no doubt that Ken-Akparanta’s provoking novel will elicit the ire of men and the glee of many a feminist. Written in a daring, unabashed style and interspersed with numerous poems and expressions in Igbo, Amazon in the Gully is a stimulating and well-written novel that is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing list of works by committed Nigerian female writers.
Victor O. AIRE
Professor of African Literature
University of Jos, Jos
Nigeria
