This paper examines different ways in which new Nigerian writers engage with their literary heritage in textual explorations of women’s gendered positions and sexualities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This heritage includes the work of Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali and other Nigerian women authors who published in the decades after independence and who concentrated on questions of gender, particularly in relation to marriage. However, in this paper, I argue that some novels emerging in the contemporary landscape of creative writing show a particular interest in ideas related to the ‘immoral woman’, a trope which often featured at the centre of cautionary tales circulating in colonial and postcolonial West African popular culture. Including texts such as I. B. Thomas’s Life story of me, Sẹgilọla (1929), these cautionary tales form an important part of the literary heritage of contemporary Nigerian writing and signify one way in which authors have pondered how women’s sexual activities come to be labelled as illegitimate.
With Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer (2012) and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms (2016) as case studies, the paper claims that new texts simultaneously converge with, and diverge from, their literary ancestors. Echoing Thomas’s Sẹgilọla, for instance, Night Dancer and Season of Crimson Blossoms explore stereotypical images of women (e.g. ‘good-time’ girls and prostitutes) so as to ask what (and who) constitutes perceptions of (im)morality in the popular imagination of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Nigeria. And much like Sẹgilọla, these new texts indicate that (im)morality is linked to normative discourses of gender and sexuality. Such convergences imply that writing from different decades is connected through thematic currents and trajectories. A key divergence, I suggest, is that whereas Sẹgilọla could be said to carry a strong moral message about the sexual behaviour and practice of its main character at the same time as its author appears to revel in her sexual transgressions (see also Barber in Barber & Thomas, 2012), Night Dancer and Season of Crimson Blossoms take a different didactic approach in the portrayal of their female protagonists. Although the main character in each of these stories is turned into a scapegoat because of her non-normative behaviour, I demonstrate that the literary techniques utilised by the authors operate to complicate narrow definitions and stereotypical representations of women and to invite readers to suspend moral judgment of the protagonist. In this way, these new novels push the boundaries of (im)morality set up in earlier examples of creative writing.