Ignorance of Consciousness in Safi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

 .           Ignorance of Consciousness in Safi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

In Sefi Atta's Everything, good will come, ignorance of conscience can be revealed in Sheri‘s rape. Three boys pin her down; they cover her mouth and then proceed to rape her. Neither Sheri nor Enitan is able to speak about the event afterward. Sheri‘s rape can, hence, be viewed as an act that not only violates her sexual autonomy but also as one that silences her, leaving her bereft of almost any form of power and agency that she might have had to speak herself. The rape also robs Enitan of the power and agency to speak herself, even though she, herself, is not physically violated. Enitan and Sheri alternate as double and foil of each other.30 Sheri‘s doubling of Enitan robs Enitan, by implication, of power and agency, leading her to become obsessed with washing herself after sexual intercourse and being unable to speak about the incident until many years have passed.

In Everything Good Will Come, national identity implies sameness, comprising a unification and homogenization of an agglomeration of diverse individuals into a single Nigerian‘category. The individual, in this case, Enitan, can, however, not be contained within a single category. She believes that the identities of the diverse people living in Nigeria should not be restricted to their national status. She asks herself: ―What was the country I loved? The country I would fight for? Should it have borders?‖ (Everything 299). Enitan finds that her identity is too multi-layered and fluid to be contained within a single spatial category. In the same way in which personhood and identity cannot be boxed in, one cannot draw borders around national identity.

Seeing where and how Enitan situates her country – historically, spatially and politically – opens the way to understanding how a contemporary ‗situated-ness‘ continually informs and feeds the problematic construction of the Nigerian state and nation. Enitan narrates: ―We had no sense of continent really, or of the nation in a country like mine until we traveled abroad; no sense of Africa presented outside. In a world of East and West, there was nowhere to place us‖ (Everything 261-262). According to Enitan, Nigeria falls neither in the East nor in the West. Enitan portrays Africa as a fabrication, with no single genesis or inherent reason for its collective name as a continent. She draws on the ‗constructedness‘ of geographical space, demarcated by, for example, the Cold War divisions of the First and Second World, as well as by the colonizing Western empires, to express the dilemma implicit in the forging of African identity in its broadest sense

Duara‘s second contention is that nationality is simultaneously constructed and subversive. The intersection between these two distinct layers of identity allows Enitan simultaneously to be both subjected to, and a subject in and of, the nation. By acting out what it means to be Nigerian, Enitan, as a rational actor, builds the nation, such that nation building becomes the focus of Everything Good Will Come. Enitan‘s actions and experiences open up into those of national experience, thus implying that her experiences are constructed by the author to reveal, albeit briefly, the truth of the nation. Moment-specific allegory, in conjunction with the way in which experience opens up into the nation, links national and personal identity and confirms Enitan‘s view of identity as being multi-layered. Such a multilayered identity also echoes Mbembe‘s point of view that stylised self-representation is only possible through focusing on the individual and his or her specific relationship with his or her surroundings (in this case, the nation). Two specific moments (those of Sheri‘s rape and Enitan‘s first attendance of a political meeting) in the text exemplify the individual–nation relationship, as well as draw into focus the possibility of being both a subject of an actor within, the nation. Though Enitan admits that she was only hurt by association (Everything 33), the violent rape of her double, Sheri, profoundly shapes her own process of becoming. Enitan witnesses how Sheri‘s agency and her right of choice about her own body are suddenly and mercilessly taken away from her when she is subjected to the violence of the three boys. It is possible to read this rape scene as a national allegory that mirrors the way in which earlier male authors allegorically depicted rape in their works. However, though the text initially invites an allegorical reading, it eventually undercuts such reading through the textual emphasis on the experience of rape as being both intimately personal and private.

Inconclusively, Everything Good Will Come simultaneously draws from African feminism‘s understanding of self and society in order to subvert the classic Bildungsroman while subverting this analytic framework through its focus on a woman as an individual, rather than on women as a group. The process of becoming a woman‘(as part of a collective) and individual‘is set within, and played out in between, the borders of the respective private/personal and public/political spaces. The Bildungsroman, as a genre of personal expansion, thus functions effectively as a vehicle that transports the individual from the private to the public sphere. Whereas Enitan initially has to fight for her right to enter the public/political sphere, she is able, in the closing pages of the novel, to shuttle back and fought ignorance of consciousness between private and public spaces.