Abstract
This paper examines the protean nature of the father-figure in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, drawing on Freudian and Jungian theories of the unconscious, the pleasure principle, and the archetype. The study argues that the absence of the father-figure — biological, metaphysical, or divine — operates as a central mechanism of displacement that governs the sexual, psychological, and spiritual behaviours of the principal female characters. Through readings of Zilayefa’s search for paternal affection in Yellow-Yellow and Celie’s fraught relationship with God-as-father-figure in The Color Purple, the paper demonstrates how literary tradition across cultures has deployed father-displacement as a motor for characterization. The principle of displacement, it is concluded, underpins both the physical and metaphysical planes of these two works.
Keywords: father-figure, displacement, Kaine Agary, Yellow-Yellow, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Freud, Jung, Nigerian literature, feminist fiction
Introduction
Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow is a work that falls, chronologically, within the segment of Nigerian literary tradition otherwise known as the 21st century literature like Wale Okediran’s Dreams Die at Twilight (2001), Ezeigbo’s Trafficked (2008), Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2007), Bisi Ojediran’s A Daughter for sale (2006), and Jude Dibia’s Unbridled (2007). In this subset of the entire tradition is found the heated polity making up the discursive formation that forms the platform, and not the root, for the delineation of the behaviour of the principal characters.
Along with what has been termed “the creative distancing” doctrine pervading this segment of the tradition, “emphasis has shifted from the society to the individual” instancing repeated “explorations of individual figures as they struggle to find existential fulfilment in life” (121). We notice that the representation of individuals whose confrontation with forces, environments, sub-human leanings and conflicts of identity has proved to be the hallmark of this particularly historic stratum of the Nigerian tradition. Yet Yellow-Yellow has not been so recognised as it is still seen as a work that resulted from the despoliation of Nigeria’s Niger Delta. This is supported by the fact that it won the ANA/Chevron Prize for Environmental Writing and the Nigerian Liquefied and Natural Gas Prize for Literature in 2007 and 2008 respectively.
The atmosphere in Yellow-Yellow is political, cultural, biological and environmental. And it is not only found in Yellow-Yellow but also in The Color Purple. It is this atmosphere that is commonly mistaken, especially in the instance of Yellow-Yellow, for the violence and violations that push the characters to the edge of desperation and behaviours that one could term as the roots of extreme disorder.
Zilayefa and the Absent Father: Freudian and Jungian Readings
Zilayefa’s mother’s farm has been despoiled by oil that emitted from a vandalized pipeline covering hectares of land. Amidst the uproar that greets the catastrophe throughout Zilayefa’s community, she runs to her mother’s farm to have a first-hand view of the carnage which she relates to us thus:
It was the first time I saw what crude oil looked like. I watched as the thick liquid spread out, covering more land and drowning small animals in its path. It just kept spreading and wondered if it would stop, when it would stop, how far it would spread. Then there was the smell. I can’t describe it but it was strong — so strong it made my head hurt and turned my stomach. I bent over, and retched so hard I became dizzy. It felt like everything had turned to black and was spinning around me. There was so much oil, and we could do nothing with it — viscous oil that would dry out, black oil that was knee-deep. I stayed there, in a daze, until someone shouted at, “You no go commot for there? You dey look like say na beta tin’! Come on, leave dat place!” (Agary 4).
This loss of her mother’s “main source of sustenance” opens a new chapter of lack, deprivation and impoverishment (4). But contrary to critical assertions, this is not the reason for the warped fate she thereafter leads. Her mother who has foisted on her the dream ambition of going to the University, though there was the incident of oil despoliation, does not know that in her heart, as she says, “I knew that I was not very keen on attending university” (25).
In discussing Yellow-Yellow, a fact commonly glossed over is the absence of parental model for Zilayefa’s mother before her escape, during her stay in Port Harcourt, and her eventual return home to face shame as an unwed mother of a somewhat ‘queer’ child. At least, there is no mention of them which indicates their nonexistence, and practically non-influence on the eighteen-year-old mother of Zilayefa at the time. It is this cave in her psyche, grossly disrupted with a lack of template for positive orientation that Zilayefa incidentally inherits. She is the one to whom the baton of wantonness is handed over to.
Freud has had an eminent elucidation on the concept of the repression of memories in The Interpretation of Dreams. He details how the forbidden is made to be submerged by the superego leaving a small tip like an iceberg, lost to the casual observer. It is not until his major apostle, Jacques Lacan, that this theory of his was grounded on language and the structure that it is made up of. Lacan believes that Freud has essentially led him to “promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomenon the notion of signifier, as opposed to that of the signified” (284).
In juxtaposing unconsciousness and consciousness, he does same to Freud and his theory. We are not choosing which is more correct. We are only going to see the lives of the major characters in these two works and references to other from both ways and see how they fare. Jungian principle of the archetypes, for example, would help us to account for why no one is excluded from pleasure chase in one form or the other in Yellow-Yellow.
The Father-figure as Electra Complex
It is appropriate here to invoke the Electra complex of the famed Agamemnon myth — Sophocle’s Electra. Aegisthus has killed Agamemnon with the connivance of the latter’s wife, Clytemnestra immediately he returned from the Trojan War. Her two children: Orestes and Electra flee to Phocis to hatch a plan of avenging the death of their father. Electra, more than the other, mourns her father. She bemoans him thus:
My father, who didst die / A cruel death of piteous agony. / But ne’er will I / Cease form crying and sad agonizing lay, / While I behold the sky … / Here at my father’s door my voice shall sound (Sophocles, lines 101-105, 109).
Sergio and Pa are like swishing interfaces, the images of that which totally absent but has also been fulsomely present — say represented, or heirlooms of the past as they of the instant. They also represent the ideal, the somewhat unknowable like Celie’s God which could only be appreciated by the exercise of imagination, thinking in layers, with the past submerged beyond recognition the continual dropping of time and history.
The latent desire for pleasure is exemplified in Yellow-Yellow by the “Gbein mo episode” and tune that Yellow dances to in company of other teenage girls of her age. The tune instructed them to “throw our backsides and the boys to pick them up” (Agary 15). The repressed would later have occasion to flower, and it is not to be until the three years later when Chief Tariye’s funeral ceremony was to take place, in the person of Sergio, the expatriate furniture dealer from Spain who has come to Nigeria to investigate some business propositions with Tarilabo. Sergio is to become the presence of the absence; the image of the absent which is now present and the past which correlates with the picture of the remote unrememberable past and absence.
She narrates the overwhelming feeling that sends shivers through her:
While I was talking, I noticed a man across the room. I don’t know how I missed him before, because his complexion stood out just as mine did in that room. His skin was colour of ripe plantain peel. His hair was black and had the same big waves as my own. I had been staring at him for much longer than was comfortable, so he smiled at me and I smiled back. I wondered if he was Greek. The similarities in our physical attributes reminded me how different I was from everyone else in the village. / I cannot say that I ever really longed for my father; in fact, I barely thought of him at all. My mother hardly spoke about him. I had learnt not to ask questions, because each time I did, she very tactfully dodged them, changed the subject … I did not care for him one way or another, but seeing this man brought me thoughts of my father. Where was he? Did he ever come back to Nigeria? Did he ever thing of my mother? Would I know him if I saw him? I had no clue what my father looked like. My mother had no pictures of him (19-21).
A lot has been said in that extract. The words nice, and never talked about it afterwards bear echoes of a provoked latent desire for pleasure that is already carving out a lee-way despite some lingering restraints by the time Sergio kissed her. Yet the agency of this present surge of feelings is Sergio.
Pa, God, and the Color Purple
But it is exactly these that Celie lacks with Mr.__ having allowed her emotion to fall into disuse with Pa during his constant visitations of violations in The Color Purple. She has been in some sort of psychological break-down — a state where she has been finding it difficult to reconcile the action perpetrated by Pa as a sexual mate, and the image there from to the image of a parent. There is therefore the presence of two conflictual images in one presence where the image taken to be present is purely a displacement of the real, unknowable and unfelt. She confesses: “Pa is not our pa” and “Pa not pa” (Walker 182, 183), therefore, there is no God. God either standing behind Pa and his activities or Pa is his agent. It is a conceptual image which one can hardly visualize but one may have an idea of, that is, “God”. Shug acknowledges this to Celie, “Man corrupt everything … . He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t” (204).
It is found in the salutations of Celie’s letters and subsequent discussions between Shug Avery and Celie. It is one singular image that forms a network of imagery with the others. From religious discourse, ‘God’ is a being that created and saves humans — a good father-figure. This is the religious image set up by Celie’s salutations: “Dear God”, Nettie’s prayers to God, Samuels and Corrine’s belief and trust in him for sending their children. But this image is later deflated in Celie’s letter when she tells her mother that her missing children got by incestuous intimacy with Pa is stolen by God: “She ast me bout the first one. Whose it is? I say God’s. I don’t know no other man or what else to say. I say God took it. He took it. He took it while I was sleeping. Kilt it out there in the woods. Kill this one too if he can” (Walker 3).
Nettie’s assertion that it is a miracle is self-mockery and self-explosion when one considers her earlier remark that she finds it difficult to say that “God” sent her to the children. The image of God set up by this text appears to have limited powers, alluring coincidences and human machinations to render an action successful.
This is where God as absence and as presence — all in images that represent the absent — come together as an inseparable but indivisible entity. God here is an image that flourishes in every protean ambiguity in The Color Purple, by far superior to the Father-figure that Zilayefa misses and is eternally drawn to without knowing in Yellow-Yellow.
The Displacement Principle
The delineation of the father-figure and the trouble it provokes is indeed a protean issue to Zilayefa. Instead of thanking her father, she “thanked God … for my luck” (68). In another instance, she says “I quietly begged God to include an escape from the village in my plan” (43). God has now become the distant father-figure, the one who has taken the position of her absent physical father.
From above, while the presence of a father-figure has started a chord unknowingly in Zilayefa, it repulsed Celie in The Color Purple. The same father-figure crushed Zilayefa’s first-inner seal in a sexual encounter in Yellow-Yellow as the same figure has done to Celie and Ngozi in The Color Purple and Jude Dibia’s Unbridled initiating them for the very first time into “the pleasures of a life time” (Agary 133). Zilayefa even owns up that “he is old enough to be my father” to which Emem replies that “when he is rubbing your body, do you think he will be thinking about how old you are? If he wants you to act like his daughter, then he will not ask you to give him things that he cannot have from his daughter” (133).
Zilayefa, on her first night with Admiral, rattles in thought thus: “I felt a deep sense of longing for him, not because of the comfort Emem hinted at, which was money, but because I was hoping that the relationship would give me a taste of close paternal affection that I had never had” (138). And this paternal affection can only be filled by a present father.
Conclusion
So far, we have seen the protean nature of the father-figure in these two works as it would probably be in most literatures. It has ranged from what is present to that which is absent as it has also ranged from the physical to the metaphysical, greatly motivated the behaviours of these characters, sexually or otherwise. The manifestations have just one operational principle: that of displacement. Other spheres this principle provoked may be subject to further investigations just as it is hoped that this study would illuminate not only Freudian but also Jungian studies concerning displacements of the father-image in literature.
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