A critical divination: reading Sula as ogbanje-abiku.

Isn't it just possible that we are all abikus? ... [W]hy should there be some and not others? Why should the universe be distributed that way? (Ben Okri, Interview with Jane Wilkinson)

Egbe here, Ugo here.... May the Hawk perch, [and] may the Eagle perch.... (Preface to an Igbo proverb)

Toni Morrison's second novel Sula depicts in its marked title character one of the most fascinating figures in African American fiction. It portrays, as it were, an eccentric, powerful, and unmanageable heroine, an "unusual" "child" whose ogbanje-abiku attributes have for years eluded the radars of literary criticism. Since its appearance in 1973, Sula has triggered, to use J. Brooks Bouson's apt phrasing, a "kind of critical stampede" (1). John T. West bluntly observes that since Sula was published, scholars have analyzed it from every kind of critical perspective imaginable (74). A major compliment to Morrison's storytelling genius, Sula's unceasing attraction to pedagogy and to numerous critical schools speaks in part to the novel's immense popularity and to criticism's recent fascination with contemporary black women's writings. It intimates, most of all, the text's thematic and technical density and its ability to handle, without blinking or sweating, such polyvocal scholarship, of all which has, undeniably, enriched our appreciation of Morrison's absorbing work. Surprisingly, hardly any of that scholarship, however, attempts to explore Sula and its title enigma in, specifically, the nuanced vocabulary of ogbanje-abiku: Those Nigerian/West African spirit-children whose many identifiers include their repeated births and deaths to the same mother. In other words, virtually none of the available critiques of the novel expressly remarks on or examines in-depth the striking ontological and ideological equivalencies between Sula and the ogbanje-abiku. This is an unfortunate critical oversight, particularly when Sula's ancestry, idiosyncrasies, and literary cousins have been ascribed to all kinds of things, places, and mythologies but not to those ogbanje-abiku with whom she shares "traits" as sell other, and idea, a loaded idiom, one that embeds and mediates the narrative's philosophic concern with duplicitous nascency, immanent suffering, and cyclical mortality.

Although recent literary criticism has yet to evaluate Sula and its (im)mortal heroine through the conceptual prism of ogbanje-abiku, earlier scholars have, nevertheless, called our attention insightfully to the novel's invocations of West African metaphysics and, thus, have indirectly cleared a way for the present discussion and approach. Among those critical ancestors, Vashti Crutcher Lewis's "African Tradition in Toni Morrison's Sula" (1987) and Gay Wilentz's 1997 piece "An African-Based Reading of Sula" deserve special mention here. Lewis and Wilentz illuminate some of the novel's structuring and thematization of aspects of African cultural and religious thoughts, for instance: Its political encryptions of an "alternative reality" grounded in African cosmologies (Wilentz 128-30) and its positioning of Shadrack and Sula as both displaced Africans and mutually constitutive and ontologically connected water divinities (Lewis 92-93). Wilentz reminds us that "an African-based reading [of Sula, in classroom and criticism and] in conjunction with other interpretations of the work not only enhances understanding of the novel but also addresses some of its more problematic aspects" (127). Both critics provide a much-needed intervention for a work that reincarnates African epistemologies retained in the "New" World and sometimes marked and mocked in mainstream exegesis. "Sula," Lewis argues, "is Morrison's most complex work in reference to traditional African culture ... because the African presence and cultural rootedness is woven into Black-American culture without contrivance and with such extraordinary subtlety that neither the characters nor the reader are immediately aware of it; just as most of us are oblivious to the fact that after some three-hundred plus years in America, African tradition continues to manifest itself in our lives" (91-92). Such seamless interlacing of African traditions in Sula obscures from immediate critical view and divination the "spirit" of ogbanje-abiku lying quietly in the book. Our long inattention to that spirit does not just immobilize our fullest possible understanding of Morrison's "strange" woman and the story as a whole. It also delimits our appreciation of the profound and sometimes subtle epistemes that intermediate, or through which we can reconcile further, African American and West African worldviews and literary imaginations.

One could imagine additional reasons why critics, in considering possible lexicons with which to qualify both Sula and the novel, have overlooked ogbanje-abiku and the enlightening scholarship on it. First, the particular Nigerian words "ogbanje" (in Igbo language) and "abiku" (in Yoruba) are not part of the descriptive register of our understandings of Africanisms in, specifically, North American black culture and socio-linguistics. Interrelated to that is the point that Sula is politically speaking a contemporary descendant of and "sister" to a long line of African American transgressors. Second, Sula does not explicitly undergo the spirit-child's distinctive and ambulatory cycles of "physical" births, deaths, and rebirths. Or does she implicitly? Third, the known existence of a narrative corporeal child who, too obviously, dies and returns to haunt and traumatize her mother in Morrison's fifth novel Beloved deflects our attention from Sula's own manifestation of some ogbanje-abiku peculiarities. And fourth, critics may be dissuaded from divining ogbanje-abiku in Sula because of Morrison's statement to Robert Stepto regarding the difficulty she had in "describ[ing] a woman who could be used as a classic type of evil force." Morrison said she "didn't know anyone like her," but she knew "women who looked like that, who looked like they could be like that" ("Intimate Things" 475-77). Morrison has commented on Beloved's (character)ization in light of African belief in reincarnation, but she has not stated unequivocally, to my knowledge, that she was re-constructing an "ogbanje" or "abiku" in the child Beloved. However, critics such as Davies (1994), Jesser (1999), Keiser (1999), Dathorne (2001), Ogunyemi (2002), and Levin (2003) have discerned, to varying degrees, the correlations of Beloved and ogbanje-abiku.

Encouraged by those perceptions, then, by Morrison's avowals of her indebtedness to African American and African traditions and mythologies, as well as Ogunyemi's recognition of the prospect also that prudent (trans)cultural appropriations and aestheticization of the conceptual cartography of ogbanje-abiku could enhance our analysis of some black Diaspora texts, I argue the following thesis. (1) I propose that such a "diabolic" and yet functionally constructive force to which Morrison alludes has long had human, literary, and tropeic cognates in West Africa in the ogbanje-abiku. I contend more specifically that in Sula's overarching eccentricity--for which the Bottom designates her "evil" and which subsumes and refracts her other ascertained ogbanje-abiku signs, namely, her birthmark, insinuated supernaturality, dogged individualism, intractability, vagrancy, malignancy, ostracizing naming, short life, obvious and implied deaths and (re)births, her burial, and then her equally constitutive but veiled "good"-ness--Sula collates intrinsically and manifests features of the spirit-child. For that, I divine her as a New World, literary ogbanje-abiku.

I propose also that an understanding of the powerful ideological subtexts of ogbanje-abiku would help us grasp more firmly the novel's deep thematic and structural ruminations on the existential etiology, imperative, and repetitiveness of death. (2) Such an understanding would, furthermore, enable readers to consider whether, as Ben Okri asks, there is not an abikuishness in all of us, and in the universe's elements: Sun, earth, wind, fire, and water, all of which are, like the child-spirit, both mystification and active agent. But before closely analyzing Sula, I want to examine the specific cultural, idiosyncratic and thematic coordinates I see between it, Sula, and the story's philosophic arch.

The terms defined

In brief, "ogbanje" and "abiku" are Igbo and Yoruba names respectively for a spirit-child or spirit-children who are said to die early only to be reborn again and again to the same mother. The belief/idea is so gripping, enduring, and widespread that researchers have noted its existence proper and/or its variants among other Nigerian, West African, and Diasporic African groups. (3) As Douglas McCabe demonstrates in his introduction to "Born-to-Die"--a recent study that explores the historicity and politics of ogbanje and abiku in Nigerian letters--the autochthonicity and socio-literary imaginings of the belief have not remained impermeable to socio-historical, geographical, cultural, or discursive and literary practices and exchanges. In other words, popular understandings and literary renditions of aspects of the concept, across Nigeria's ethnicities particularly, have hardly stayed singular but rather, and predictably, have tended to shift over time. Stevenson and Edelstein suspect, nevertheless, that the idea may have arisen hundreds of years ago in West Africa. In addition to being taken through the Middle Passage to the New World, to such locales as Brazil and Trinidad, the belief may also have been brought by enslaved West Africans to what became the United States and syncretized in Southern Black religious attitudes to spirits, (ab)normal births, and to life, death, and reincarnation. (4)

In any case, belief in "ogbanje," specifically, is enmeshed ideologically in Igbo worldview rooted firmly in the notion of binarism and reciprocity. Consistent generally with many African traditional religions' organic structuring of the universe, Igbo cosmology articulates interactive worlds, including "the world of man and the world of the dead"; it invariably rejects absolutes in favor of dualism, dialogue, multiplicity, complementarity, and the interconnectedness of all things, "the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the good and the bad" (Uchendu 11-12). Conceptually, ogbanje subsumes also that axiom of doubleness, creative paradox, and of mutual cohabitation of the-good and the-bad. In Igbo language, the term "ogbanje," or its urbanized neologism "Ogbaanjism [sic] is not gendered" as in conventional usage (Bastian 59). And with its evocations of continuous movement and indeterminacy, ogbanje means "one who has engaged in repeated reincarnation" (Nzewi 1404). This description aligns it with what John Mbiti, in his study of African religions, calls "the living dead" (83).

In The World of the Ogbanje, Chinwe Achebe examines the concept in terms of Igbo religion and philosophy, generally, and specifically as it is understood among Afa diviners or traditional medical practitioners from select communities in Anambra State, a region of Igboland. She describes the ogbanje as:

   part human and part spirit beings
   whose lives are confounded by the
   added loyalty which they owe to the
   spirit deities. A "normal" individual is
   born owing his loyalty to his "chi." But
   an "ogbanje's" life is complicated by
   being mixed up with the demands of
   paranormal deities. The most notable
   of these demands is that the "ogbanje"
   will not be allowed to enjoy a full life
   circle. An individual may therefore be
   an "ogbanje" at birth ... [but] the manifestation
   of this phenomenon in a
   given "ogbanje" may not be immediately
   apparent ... until adulthood. (5)
   (27)

Esther Nzewi further asserts that malevolent ogbanje children are "believed to be born with weak, disease-ridden ... and chronically ill" bodies; they die young, are reborn, and die again repeatedly in mocking defiance of the "culturally prescribed rituals of atonement and rites of passage" that their distressed parents perform to contain that tortuous circularity (1404). In addition to the use of distinguishing, affectionate, and sometimes indirectly ostracizing names/naming as markers of the ogbanje or as efforts to deter the ogbanje, as well as the employment of rituals to unearth the ogbanje's buried iyi-uwa, literally an oath-of-the-world that can be seen as an additional source of the ogbanje's plot, powers, and prodigality, parents sometimes take other measures. These might include "mutilation or amputation of body parts of deceased ogbanje (usually toes or fingers) to facilitate identification of body marks should reincarnation occur" (Nzewi 1404). In many cases, the "vicious" ogbanje still dies, then returns. In some ways differing from the idea of "reincarnation," ogbanje is "difficult to explain or fathom" fully and, as Christie Achebe writes, it also "defies categorization in the strict western psychological sense" because it belongs in a "mysterious and supernatural etiology" ("Literary" 32-33). (6) Nzewi concludes that most of ogbanje mortality--70 out of 100 children she examined--shares symptomology with sickle cell disease (SCD). Stevenson and also Edelstein, who has studied SCD's possible links to the phenomenon in Igboland, are unsure, however, that SCD explains or can explain all the cases of children identified as ogbanje.

Niyi Osundare and S. Solagbade Popoola are among the many writers and researchers who have either studied or commented on the abiku mythology and cases of "abiku" children among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. "In a society [as in the Igbo case] plagued by phenomenal infant mortality, the Abiku myth becomes a way of coping with the painful reality of premature death" (93). Echoing Christie Achebe, Popoola insists that abiku [with its "Iku" or death/dying prefiguration] is a super-natural phenomenon. The abiku life-death cycle persists, Popoola stresses, "where causes of death such as diseases, illnesses, malnutrition, evil machinations of witches, wizards and herbalists had been eliminated" (22). In addition to other contrasts, the Yoruba do not necessarily believe, as do the Igbo, that abiku buried an iyi-uwa. They too employ rituals, charms, and other means, however, to intervene in the abiku's orbicular death, including having the incarnate child wear "[p]rotective bracelets and anklets and bells" (Parrinder 98). The preventive actions could also range from names designed to conciliate, supplicate, persuade and/or humiliate the abiku to frustrated, punitive mutilation [marking and signing] of a dead abiku's cadaver (Mobolade 63; Bascom 74; and Parrinder 98). In many cases, these steps fail as the abiku still die and thus thwart the fetish priest Babalawo's medical skills, indirectly ridiculing them as "mumbo jumbo" (Mobolade 62). Almost comparable in intensity to their fear of or respect for the believed metaphysical powers of twins, or "ibeji" (Bascom 74), the Yoruba so dread the mystifying abiku children with "occult powers" that they have a "prayer for a new bride: O ko ni pade Abiku (May you never come across an Abiku child)" (Mobolade 62).

As Maduka reports, these "spirits in human form [therefore] constitute such a terrifying experience to mortals" and have "such a firm grip in the mythic imagination of the people [that they have been] variously celebrated in literature" (18). They have been figured in different capacities in several works of Nigerian literature. These varied adaptations and celebrations of the spirit-child as character, motif, and moment in written and oral literatures, and in dramatic as well as other sociopolitical performances and commentaries, presuppose a further recognition of its potential as a concept that both encapsulates and expresses a people's dynamic views of our universe's complexity. And it also becomes, more broadly, a powerful signifier of the human existential condition, a metaphor of "some of the enigma and insoluble aspects of existence" (Soyinka, qtd. in Wilkinson 108). As Eldestein proclaims, ogbanje (re)enacts "[the] human drama" (21). Or as Maduka phrases it, in Igbo language, "the word ogbanje can be used [idiomatically] to designate any person who in a given situation behaves in a weird, capricious, callous or even sadistic way" (18). Thus, as ideologically loaded as the notion of the blues (Baker, Blues, Ideology), the construct of the spirit-child is "a constellar concept" (Quayson 123). It is a rich matrix that not only invokes but also bridges fragmented, sometimes dissonant, philosophic questions.

Sula's forebears: ogbanje-abiku in modern African American literature

Seen as a matrix, then, ogbanje-abiku yields a language that illuminates aspects of Sula's complex ontology, especially her existential "difference"--that independence and independent self that she chooses and guards fiercely against the Bottom's encroaching traditions and institutions. If viewed simply as a wicked and unsettling spirit "plaguing" its mother and family (Jabbi 19)/as the "metaphor[ic] bad child that enters its mother's womb through the back door" (Christie Achebe, "Literary" 33), ogbanje is, on the one hand, some bad news! But then as a spirit and a flesh-and-blood child, as life and death, joy and pain, entwined, ogbanje couches the subject of dualism and mediation. It is conceptually a living contradiction, an embodiment, Achebe says, of the coexisting forces of or the dialectical tension between those phenomena we generally construe and separate as "good" and "evil" ("Literary" 33).

In The Philosophy of Evil, Paul Ziwek writes that Western thought often posits good and evil as rivalrous universal powers caught in a Zoroastrianianic, Manichaean, and Neo-Manichaean battle and irreconciliation (v). Such antagonism is even evident sometimes in Western Christianity's and rationalism's tendency to draw strict, combative lines between "God" and "Devil," heaven and hell, "religion" and "superstition," the natural and the supernatural, sin and innocence, the sacred and the profane, and between the chosen and the damned/outcast. This propensity to dichotomize resolvable phenomena is fundamentally incongruent with African traditional philosophies that insist on interplay, interdependencies, and an organic universe.

John Mbiti, however, states that African societies do have ideas about good and evil. They generally interpret both concepts in terms of community and individual conduct or in terms of function and action of the individual within her community. African societies also elevate community over the individual, recognize the intricate and mutual reliance of self and the collective, take ethical behavior seriously, and assert God as the ultimate arbiter of righteousness. They emphasize the intrinsic human worth of community members (Mbiti 177-79). Furthermore, Yoruba religion proclaims that evil and good occupy and emanate from the same entity and are equally functionally integrated. In "Evil in Yoruba Religion and Culture," E. O. Oyelade explains that the deity Esu--whom the Yoruba look upon as mischief quintessence!--for whom performing evil is indeed a hobby, likewise embodies benevolence. They also see Esu as "a good divinity, very close to [God] Olodumare [and one] able to obtain good things for its worshippers" (Oyelade 158-59).

Melville Herskovits argues that African American notions of the mystical are fundamentally influenced by African world views rather than incompatible Western European opinions (Wilentz 132). Thus, African American fiction and folklore problematize figures of "God" and "the oppressor," or "God" and Satan/"the Devil," and imbue them with religious, racial, socio-political, gendered, and ethical resonances, instead of pitting them irreconcilably one against the other. They are depicted occasionally as sharing and switching their performative and positional robes, when Sula accuses God of participating in Plum's death through divine inaction. Sometimes also the outmatched "Devil," extended as it were in the willful, "degenerate" and "retrograde" badman or badwoman figure in African American cultural expression, is cast as either victor, messiah, hero(ine), or celebrant.

Good and evil define also issues beyond both terms' conventional application to ethics. Good-and-evil tension manifests equally in the stress balanced dialectically, socially, and experientially between the material and the immaterial, calm and anarchy, predictability and mystery, conformity and lawlessness, integrity and disorder, virtue and depravity, life and death, fear and courage, oppression and empowerment, wisdom and foolishness, clean and dirty, and between sameness and difference. And almost always, determinations of either phenomenon are matters of perception. Good and evil raise ontological questions about nature's sometimes aberrant conduct, as evidenced in the tense relationship between nature and the Bottom's black community.

Returning now to ogbanje, the question becomes: How can the same child that brings promise and joy also cause uncertainty and grief? How, for example, can Ezinma the ogbanje girl in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart cause her mother Ekwefi, especially, and Okonkwo her father extreme anxiety and heartbreak and yet remain such a humanizing and constructively functional part of Okonkwo's life, family, and the Umuofia village at large? How can, or cannot she, be such "diabolism" and "so much beneficence" all at once?

Complementary to enigmatic Ezinma, Soyinka's compelling poem "Abiku" metonymicizes the abiku, figured male, and positions him as a brazen, self-knowing, self-enunciating, and self-directed subject. The poem significantly depicts the second prism, inextricable from Achebe's more ethnographic handling of the subject, through which to extend not merely the elemental complicatedness of the notion of good and evil but our discussion of Sula as ogbanje-abiku figure. The entire poem reads:

ABIKU

   In vain your bangles cast
   Charmed circles at my feet
   I am Abiku, calling for the first
   And the repeated time.

   Must I weep for goats and cowries
   For palm oil and the sprinkled ash?
   Yams do not sprout in amulets
   To earth Abiku's limbs.

   So when the snail is burnt in his shell,
   Whet the heated fragment, brand me
   Deeply on the breast. You must know him
   When Abiku calls again.

   I am the squirrel teeth, cracked
   The riddle of the palm. Remember
   This, and dig me deeper still into
   The god's swollen foot.

   Once and the repeated time, ageless
   Though I puke; and when you pour
   Libations, each finger points me near
   The way I came, where

   The ground is wet with mourning
   White dew suckles flesh-birds
   Evening befriends the spider, trapping
   Flies in wind-froth;

   Night, and Abiku sucks the oil
   From lamps. Mothers! I'll be the
   Suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep
   Yours the killing cry.

   The ripest fruit was saddest;
   Where I crept, the warmth was cloying.
   In silence of webs, Abiku moans, shaping
   Mounds from the yolk.

Numerous critics have examined this magnificent poem. (8) In addition to historicizing, thematizing, and aestheticizing it and, more importantly, elucidating the tenuous relationship between abiku and those who would control him, scholars characterize the poem's abiku protagonist in similar ways. They call him marked, powerful, forceful, mocking, boastful, self-centered, iconoclastic, carefree, defiant, unknowable and uncontrollable, timeless, errant, ephemeral, aberrant, heartless, brash, and so on, in descriptors that capture the abiku's wanderings, vagrancy, irreducibility, intransigence, lawlessness, and heroism, in short his difference. In fact, Sula, whom Morrison calls "an adventurer," a "law-breaker ... lawless," "strange," "atypical" and "eccentric[,]" bears all the attributes of an abiku (qtd. in Stepto 476-83).

The abiku figure in Soyinka's poem is a "persistently self-defining (I am ...)," "an individual that contests and resists being ruled by its parents and community" (McCabe, "Errancy" 59-60). This self insists on choice, on its rights to "a separate existence" (Ogunyemi, Palava 65), to self-creation and recreation and is therefore relentlessly opposed to "correctness," to regular, implied subjugation, and to familial and communal/societal structures designed to regulate its independence, impede its possibilities, and invalidate its ontological difference--in short, its place in the world, even if that place is disruptive or "evilish."

Why do the malevolent ogbanje-abiku and the unfilial Sula so trouble both friend and foe? Partly, the spirit-children's and Sula's deviations from the normative render them contrary: Both to be a Sula and "to be an ogbaanje [sic] is to be categorized other" (Bastian 59). Both are doggedly disagreeable and vicious because, like all others, they demand to be allowed just to be, to occupy their own place in the universe's grand scheme of things, to live and perform fully and consistently that atypical self, no matter how aberrant or grievous others experience them to be. For just as the ogbanje are sometimes (erroneously) branded evil, ironically, their constructive ("good") qualities are sometimes overlooked. This dialectic between familial and collective normativity and unorthodox self-actualization creates and is the catalytic tension permeating the ogbanje-abiku drama and Sula's experience with her community.

African ogbanje and Morrison's (9)

Morrison explores that tension in the story of the Bottom and also grafts it, in the case of women's friendship, onto the community that is The Bottom, created mythically out of what was intended as a "Nigger joke," out of a white farmer's mockery and betrayal of his former-slave. The survival of this "outcast" community, situated up a pernicious hill, is affected invariably by a complex interaction of powerful forces: natural, human, and inanimate. Among the forces and figures that populate the Bottom lives the firebrand Sula. A live wire and life's wire all at once, an "electric seal" (Lewis 91), Sula is not only the childhood friend of Nel, her spiritual double, and the Bottom's ogbanje figure, she is also Morrison's human evidence of nature's paradox. The Bottom community must find a way to manage and survive this marked spirit-child, whom it will come to condemn. But it is precisely how the Bottom responds to this embodied puzzle and difference, to nature's rough-hand, white injustice, and the perceived twilight of racial and economic integration that ultimately determines its continued survival.

Sula is the community's pulse, and like the ogbanje-abiku children Mezie in Nathan Nkala's Mezie, the ogbanje boy and Azaro in Ben Okri's The Famished Road, she commands attention. However, because Morrison centers community, elevating it over the individual, her narrator subordinates Sula's appearance to a prologue that, first, places the Bottom in space and time. The novel starts with creation or, rather, deconstruction, foreshadowing its preoccupation with mortality. As in Morrison's insistence that good and evil are universally ordered, the Bottom was once a society in which everything had its own features and functionality.

The narrator mourns the Bottom's passing, to invoke its geographic, human, communal, and commercial features. Early character introductions prepare readers' first meeting with Sula, with Nel, and with the novel's particular natural world. However, it is not until Part Two of the novel, with Sula's catalytic "return" to Medallion, or what I construe as her implicit ogbanje re-birth after a 10-year absence (or "death"), that Morrison introduces evil in the narrative lexicon and then illuminates it in the religious consciousness, communal ethos, gender politics, and racial survivalism of the Bottom's black community. Consistent with ogbanje (re)birth and divination (Jabbi 19), Sula's "return" or her second coming in 1937 similarly accompanies a "plague" of robins (89). The narrator thus casts her "reincarnation" in cosmic terms.

In terms of Sula's ogbanje atypicality, her eccentricity starts manifesting early in her childhood, even before she, with a smile and a glide, departs Medallion in 1927 following Nel's marriage to Jude. Her "unusualness" reveals itself in her inconsistent temperament and moodiness (53), her self mutilation in deterrence of Irish boys (54-55), her involvement in Chicken Little's accidental drowning (60-61), in her "acting up, fretting the deweys and meddling ... newly married couple." It is communicated in her "dropping things," and in what the narrator calls her unbearable "sulking and irritation" and, more tellingly, her "craziness" (74-75). Subtly associating this "craziness" with puberty because it occurs at age 13, with "everybody suppos[ing] her nature was coming down" (74), the narrator suggests that Sula's "weirdness" is normal teen behavior. But both biology and psychology change within Sula. Like her progressively darkening birthmark (74), this strangeness is becoming manifestly clearer and "readable." In addition, even in the context of the Peace women's history and their liberal influence on her, Sula is far from ordinary.

Returned to the Bottom in grand style, Sula engages in anti-social behaviors that subvert the community's moral and gender barriers. The community expects its members to observe its social and ethical codes, to respect its traditions and institutions, as it struggles for group survival despite its vexed relationship to the universe. Thus, as evident in the reaction of horror from her grandmother Eva and from the larger community to Sula's ogbanje-like experimentation with life, evil also appears with human attributes that destabilize rather than preserve fixed gender boundaries, familial ethos, interpersonal relationship, marital codes, and reverence for age, the divine, and for the supremacy of community.

A brief heated exchange between Sula and her matriarchal grandmother, Eva, once Sula steps into the old woman's house, signifies both women's steeliness, their suspicions and embittered memories, as well as Eva's quest to retain her grandparental control and Sula's intent to contest, resist, usurp, and even deride that right and power; hence, her intent to "create" herself. The women's argument is key, however, for two other reasons. One, it codifies the extreme oddity the Bottom groups into evil and evil days and, two, it functions quietly as harbinger of the chaos--the ogbanje plague--awaiting the larger community.

Once past social amenities (92), Sula's reunion with Eva resonates with the troublous timbre between an ogbanje and parent. The ideological conflict that ensues unravels that, consistent with the ogbanje's rugged individualism and self-direction. Sula, unlike her "good" friend Nel now married to Jude Greene, intends to stay single and would neither have/make babies nor settle as both Eva and the community expect. Reflective of the abiku's resistance to and rejection of "the claims made on the individual by family and community" (McCabe, "Errancy" 60), Sula chooses to remain a stand-alone self in a community: "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself" (Sula 92).

Eva reads Sula's insistence as selfishness; contrastively, Nel interprets Sula's unabashed propensity for explorations of self, sensuality, and sexuality as her friend's "act[ing] like a man." To Nel, Sula cannot be so uninhibited because she is "a woman and a colored woman at that" (142). A "prime example of a female mind controlled by masculine thought patterns" (Personi 443), Sula disrupts the experimental and daredevil lifestyle that has been a male province for centuries. Sula's trespass into male subjectivity and privilege, as well as her callous disrespect of the old (in her grandmother) amount to evil where narcissism and impertinence are negative conducts in male-driven community. Moreover, Sula's irreverence becomes almost sacrilegious. For instance, when Eva invokes the "Bible" and "God," Sula counters, "Which God? The one watched you burn Plum?" When Eva warns that "Pride goeth before a fall" (92-93), Sula confidently boasts her ogbanje powers to disrupt: She threatens to "split this town in two and everything in it" if anyone dares to impede her self-actualization (93).

Part of that self-actualization sends her drifting from Nashville, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York to Philadelphia, Macon, and San Diego. Thus, she embodies the ogbanje's archetypal errancy, itinerancy, and mockery of bounded space and linear time, their fluid "wander[ings] insolently back and forth across temporal distinctions," violating and hence rendering contestable, as it were, the boundaries "between past, present, and future" (McCabe, "Errancy" 60). Just as the ogbanje resist permanent temporality and human attachments, Sula also "has trouble making a connection with other people" (Morrison, "Intimate Things" 477). But the Bottom community, having restrictive social, moral, and gender expectations, frowns at such extremes, such inconstancy and impermanent allegiance, even as it tolerates them. In J. P. Clark's poem "Abiku," the frustrated supplicant--perhaps parent or elder--tries persuasion, reason, and command to get the roaming abiku child to "step in, step in and stay" "indoors" because its "Coming and going these several seasons" has overtaxed its mother's body and "sour[ed]" her milk (260: lines 23, 1, 4, and 24-25). Similarly, the Bottom would rather Sula too stayed "indoors": They cannot stand her "waywardness"! It is, however, the vast and potentially delimiting implications of this "indoors," in the broader context of the tension between self and the collectivity of parents, family, and extended community, that Sula emphatically resists and defiles. Sula resists it because forced stasis (and its denotations of immobility, changelessness, and durability not elected by self) neither is her nature nor represents for her acceptable prospects. Fixity restrains and defeats.

Rejecting Sula in Life and Afterlife

Issues of self-determination and fixity are critical in ogbanje context. If ultimately Ezinma yields to spatial and temporal permanence, to order instead of to chaos (Maduka 17-29), if she "stays" alive, "indoors," with family and in the human realm and thus becomes a "good," understanding (ogbanje) girl, it is considerably because, in love and sympathy for her long-suffering mother, especially, she chooses to break her pact with her spirit companions by revealing the location of her iyi-uwa. The spirit-child "stays" neither because of Okonkwo's intimidating physical size, parental command, verbal threats and assaults, nor because of the community's hopes, curiosity, and doubts during Okagbue's ritual performance. She stays not in uncontested and thus unqualified submission to Okagbue, but because she wants to remain with her parents, especially her mother. Thus, refusing to ingratiate family and society, to be a good girl through spatial stability and interpersonal attachments, Sula is deemed capricious.

Sula's capriciousness mounts and the Bottom further derides her as evil when she commits two cultural taboos. Sula places in a nursing home not just any family member, but her aging grandmother, Eva. Then she not only sleeps with her best friend's husband but also rationalizes her action on the grounds of friendship.

Sula's flagrant violations of filial and communal values earn her pejorative names and evoke the abiku-ogbanje. In addition to a ritual mutilation of the body of a deceased malevolent ogbanje, the act of disgracing it is another measure that family and community adopt to humiliate and ameliorate (if not annihilate) a child's aberrant "behavior." So, despised as a pariah, Sula is called both "roach" and "bitch." In addition, because "She came to their church suppers without underwear, bought their steaming platters of food and merely picked at it--relishing nothing, exclaiming over no one's ribs or cobbler[, they] believed that she was laughing at their God" (114-15). Worst of all, the men of the community gossip that she sleeps with white men, an allegation that stimulates discussion of issues of miscegenation, integration, and racial betrayal. Together with Shadrack, Sula becomes a "pariah," a community outcast, one of its "Two [d]evils" (117).

Morrison raises the issue of gender victimization in the community's treatments of both "devils." The Bottom accommodates Shadrack's (male) aberration and casts aspersion at Sula. To fortify themselves against the presence of that now-gendered (d)evil in their midst, the people resort to conjuration: "They laid broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkled salt on porch steps" (Sula 113). Families perform similar rituals to ward off ogbanje from their household. In effect, the Bottomites invoke the Yoruba prayer for new brides, "O ko ni pade Abiku" (May you[/we] never come across [Sula] an Abiku)." Just as an abiku ignores and mocks the medicine of the fetish priest Babalawo, Sula does not "acknowledge" the community's counter-conjure. However, just as Okonkwo, his family, and Umuofia village accept Ezinma, the "evil" ogbanje child in their midst, no matter how egregious people of the Bottom consider Sula's conjure, her evilishness, "they did nothing to harm her. As always," the narrator says, "the black people looked at evil stony-eyed and let it run" its course (Sula 113). They read Sula's death from sudden sickness as the answer to their prayers (89-90).

In Sula's ogbanje-like short life, quick death, and in the circumstances of her internment another illuminating moment enables examination of the Bottom's serious response to something/someone it has determined as a communal evil, and it also locates Sula within ogbanje mythology and lexicon. Up in the Bottom, they had accused her of the serious crime of being "a witch" (Sula 151). Her death becomes "the best news folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel" (Sula 150). While they divine her death as precursor to better days ahead, their refusal to bury her stands as the ultimate act of contempt. In fact, it severs kinship ties. It confirms their stance that Sula is indeed evil; her corpse, untouched by people of cultures who attach great importance to proper burial liturgy, though postmoertem speaks volumes. Descended from black folk who generally believe life to be cyclical and ancestors often "reborn" among the living, people of the Bottom seem intent on disrupting Sula's passage to the beyond. They don't want her tarnished ancestorship, they do not want her returning.

Just as the family and community members of ogbanje children sometimes refuse to bury them or to bury them properly, (10) the Bottomites refuse to grieve. Worse still, they abandon Sula's body to "strangers": They let "the white people [take] over" (172) and it was they, the white people, who "had to wash her body, dress her, prepare her and finally lower her. [But it] was done elegantly, for it was discovered that she had a substantial death policy" (173). The black people who do attend the burial come to confirm that they have indeed outlasted the evil that was Sula (173).

Sula's intrigue, as she dies, with the nature of death, indeed her ogbanje laughter at death's dread and power to hurt, extends her search for thrill and self. Her final uttered response and casual attitude to death's call are seemingly those of a person/self used to mortality. And the fact she outlives death through such postmortem consciousness further underlines her suggested supernaturality and ogbanje-like timelessness. The idea that "In death Sula returns to infancy [in her curled, fetal death-position], to the watery womb of the river in which she accidentally killed Chicken Little" helps substantiate the present deductions of Sula's insinuated reincarnation (Basu 189; De Weever 170). Like spirit-children, Sula does implicitly undergo multiple births, deaths, and rebirths in narrative space and time, her death in fetal position is telling. In that position she prepares for a temporal return, re-entry, and renewal. As Laurie Vickroy posits correctly, Sula's "return to the womb reflects [her] desire for ... rebirth, with all its possibilities and potential" (38, my italics). In other words, Sula is in that birth position depicted as a baby, the same spirit/baby/child/woman already in the womb, some womb, ready to be reborn, for another corporeal life (cycle). The discernible imminence of that signified (re)birth could be viewed also as a statement of the ogbanje's immunity to and triumph over parental, familial, and/or communal concerted efforts to arrest and hence hinder their rebirth. Such an intention is laced in the Bottom's disparaging responses to her death. Indeed, Sula has lived multiple lives, has endured many beginnings, disappearances, and continuations or, rather, she has technically "lived," "died," and been "reborn" in several places (Nashville, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Macon, San Diego)--or drifted through them for 10 years and more.

As the narrative ends, Sula meets Nel on a spiritual and a physical plane. She appears to Nel near a tree, signaling through "mud," "leaves," and "soft ball of fur" (174) her still unfettered spiritual access to and physical presence in the human realm. Brooks De Vita writes insightfully that trees signify "life, death, and afterlife" in African cosmology and that "Across the Pan-African world, the tree is both the watcher at the gravesite and the visual symbol of the deceased's spirit, for tree binds and bridges the worlds of the living and dead between the reaches of its roots and branches" (37). But as Mobolade reminds us, trees, "roadsides and foot paths in suburban areas," are also one of the abiku's special spiritual residences (62). And it is from such abodes that they, as does Sula, re-enter the human realm.

If conservative Nel, raised in an orderly albeit stifling home, epitomizes Morrison's vision of conventional goodness, then Sula--the roaming, baseless "artist with no art form," "dangerous" and strange (121)--earns the status of evil despised among her people. But Morrison insists against any simplistic or totalized assessment of that evil, or anything deemed "evil" for that matter, since good and evil coexist in mutual, metaphysical and material complementarity and sometimes inhabit and are refracted in the same entity or self. In other words, as in the ogbanje child, nuances of both conventional and metaphysical evil and good converge in Sula. As the above discussion of Ezinma illustrates, even with the pain and disruption they cause, the ogbanje-abiku are not ontologically simplifiable; they merge and mirror construction and Deconstruction. Ezinma exerts a powerful, positive influence that reveals the female element of masculinist Okonkwo. Her presence and nurturance literally restore Okonkwo to life in the wake of Ikemefuna's death and his forced, seven-year exile in Mbanta. As Aron Aji and Kirstin Lynne Ellsworth state: "Amid pervasive change, she [Ezinma, a force deemed "evil"] stands out as a symbol of hope, renewal, and continuity for both Okonkwo and Umuofia [her village]" (174). In a similar vein, Sula does not merely disrupt the Bottom's master mores, she also constructs a presence in her community. However, the people of the Bottom cannot see what positive outcomes she orchestrates in their lives any more than they can see how their lore determines their lives under oppressive whites, horrible weather, and failed crops.

On Sula's complexity, Bonnie Barthold writes that "Sula clearly conjures with evil, she is also a means, however ironic, toward both goodness and truth" (110). A conversation between Nel and Sula near the end of the novel suggests Sula's affinity with the abiku whom Niyi Osaundare calls a "child god" (93), that is, one cognizant of her own creator/creative powers. Sula challenges Nel's assumptions about who or what is good. Sula asks her friend, "How you know it was you? I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me" (146, my italics). Earlier in the novel, Eva, too, suggests that Nel might be as "evil" as Sula, and accuses Nel of complicity in Chicken Little's death. She tells her knowingly: "Just alike. Both of you. Never no difference between you" (169). "Both of you" here identifies not just Sula's and Nel's personhoods but the parity and interchangeability of their human and spiritual essences.

Whether or not Nel shares her propensity for good, Sula is certain of her constructive meaning to the town. She knows that what the Bottom transcribes narrowly as "dirt," it needs to balance the absence of dirt that she embodies. Her absence, she insists, would cost the town:

   Oh, they'll love me all right.... It will
   take time, but they'll love [or miss] me.
   ... After all the old women have lain
   with the teen-agers; when all the
   young girls have slept with their old
   drunken uncles; after all the black men
   fuck all the white ones; when all the
   white women kiss all the black ones;
   when the guards have raped all the
   jailbirds and after all the whores make
   love to their grannies; after all the faggots
   get their mothers' trim; when
   Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith
   and Norma Shearer makes it with
   Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have
   fucked all the cats and every weathervane
   on every barn flies off the roof to
   mount the hogs ... then there'll be a
   little love left over for me. And I know
   just what it will feel like. (145-46)

This prophetic curse is Sula's intransigent rejection of the Bottom's collective moral dispensation. She is the reason that a flawed town, unreflective of its own collective shortcomings, has yet to be disordered by its own excesses.

The Bottom of Evil

What Sula manifests becomes clear once the Bottom defines her as the evil in its midst. The effect situates Sula in cosmic operation, as she becomes at once destroyer and rebuilder, life and death, order and chaos, uniter and divider, a free force, knowing, unknowable, inseparable, unbreakable, protean. Just as ogbanje-Ezinma humanizes Okonkwo and Azaro the wearisome abiku child in Ben Okri's The Famished Road painfully provokes his mother's best nurturance, Sula becomes a positive enabler. As illustrated in the Teapot incident, for example, negligent mothers see Sula as evil from which to protect their children, and suddenly become devoted, caring parents (114). Wives, fearing that Sula would sexually sample their husbands, start to value their men more (115). Illicit sexual liaison thus figures paradigmatically as good.

Moreover, the Sula principle--mystery--generates communal conversation and thought. It engages and expands the people's folk logic, as the women weave wicked fables of Sula's irreadability and her body's baffling immunity to natural laws of aging (115). Like the abiku, she is hardened, ageless and "superior over ordinary mortals" (Osundare 99).

That both Sula and the ogbanje are signally "marked" cannot be overlooked. Wilentz writes that in different African societies peculiar markings on children generally suggest their ancestral ties and their destiny (131). In the Bottom community, Sula's birthmark "engenders all kinds of community mythologies" (Wilentz 130). And in all manner of responses visceral, virulent, political, gendered, and salutary, literary critics have further conjectured about Sula's birthmark. Nancy Tenfelde Clasby, for instance, characterizes it psychoanalytically as "a metaphor for Sula's multivalent role. Like the snake in the young woman's belly, it represents a plenitude of meaning overflowing the categories imposed on consciousness" (24). In her enlightening discussion of Sula as an African water spirit/priestess, Lewis says the mark "links [Sula] ontologically to Shadrack, the water spirit, priest, oracle of the river god" (93). Maggie Galehouse, citing Carolyn Jones's association of the mark with Cain, gives it a "biblical resonance" (349). It is clear, as Lewis suggests, that the birthmark distinguishes Sula personally, socially, and religiously.

The mark can be further associated with a form of ogbanje branding, an impression of metaphysical difference, identity, powers, elusiveness, and timelessness. It announces what McCabe calls the abiku's "I am." The ogbanje, on his return, retains lacerations from the previous sojourn in allegorical, bravado proof of his insusceptibility to mortal control, and Sula's mark, in darkening and becoming more structured with years, seems to echo the abiku in Soyinka's poem: "I am Abiku [Sula], calling for the first/ And the repeated time." And, the abiku-protagonist stresses, "You must know [me by this mark, the stem rose,]/ When [I] Abiku call again" ("Abiku," lines 4-13). Administered by an extended community out of frustration, helplessness, and rage, the ogbanje mark both punishes and, ideally, reforms. Similarly, although Sula's mysterious stem rose is a power-point, it distances her socially and politically from others in the Bottom. But most significantly, in its capacity to excite popular theories and narratives, her mark's indeterminacy helps channel the Bottom's energy, in the way of the enigma of an ogbanje's unlocated/unsolved iyi-uwa.

Speculating about Sula helps to sustain the Bottom's internal politics. Led by Dessie, the community's women dissect Sula's "alarming" unorthodoxy. Disenfranchised from real [read patriarchal] power in Medallion, they create oppositional, intracommunal blocs: "we" against "she." Thus, as Lewis argues, they "reject the most African of them all--indeed the most sacred of them all" (96). Ironically also, their persecution of Sula reveals her limitless shadow over them.

Moreover, identifying Sula as one who cannot be ostracized or stigmatized without dire repercussions, Lewis points out, "Sula had been the scapegoat for the long and bitter disappointment of the people in the Bottoms [sic]. They had damned the wrong person" (96). If we were guided by that insight and by Sula's own knowledge, or abiku's "extraterrestrial authority" (Ogunyemi, Palava 63), that she is indispensable to the Bottom, then events succeeding her death become added confirmation of her role as the enabler. For Michele Pesoni, Sula is the people's "missing center" (441). Rekindling here the biblical moment of apostolic chaos following Christ the Messiah's capture and subsequent crucifixion, the narrator tells us that "Sula's death brought a restless irritability" to the town (153), because the town's center has fallen. Remember Teapot's mother? She now beats him hard over perceived insult. And "mothers who had defended their children from Sula's malevolence ... now had nothing to rub against. The tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made. Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid despair" (153). Daughters start neglecting elderly mothers-in-law; wives stop indulging husbands; and intraracial egos flare (153-54).

Once we look at Sula also as a powerful and positive spiritual force not indulged but instead scandalized and discredited by the very people she consolidated, events at her burial magnify in significance. We infer that, because the community at large spitefully discards her body to strangers, consequently denying her--their priestess and "child god"--a deserved community funeral, Sula herself, in her mystical power, rejects them at the entombment. For when they sing, "Shall We Gather at the River?" (betraying grudge and disinclination), Sula responsively unlocks rain after them (173). The heavens above would weep even if the Bottom does not.

Thus, Morrison writes against binaries: Sula suggests that in an organic universe where a life force permeates all, good and evil and their semantic properties are perceptible. And in understanding ogbanje's apropos, ideological metafunction, that point becomes more lucid. As Morrison maps in her novel, nature's creative elements/forces--sun, earth, wind, fire, water, the tomato fruit--all are "good," or can and do effect positive outcomes, on account of their benefits to life. Biman Basu notes correctly that "The references to soil, loam, and mud, on the one hand and to water on the other, Earth and Water, male and female principles, suggest creation and procreation" (187). But as Morrison implies and as the Bottom knows too well, the forces that sustain life also take it, wrest it quickly and with mystifying and immeasurable ogbanje-indifference. Like Ala, the Igbo earth goddess who destroys while she nourishes (Brooks De Vita 55), as in ogbanje's pernicious life-mortality vacillations, those forces conflate inherently creative and negative/evil-ish energies and also capacitate enormous human suffering.

The elements' negative energies, their analogical and operational evilness, are nuanced in the novel. The drowning of Chicken Little illustrates human sacrifice in reverse, (Lewis 93): A little "chicken" being sacrificed on behalf of the Bottom to pacify the spirit of a restive and "consumptive" river and thus to harmonize it again with community (61). And when the wind destroys property and plants, "[it] just swept through, took what dampness there was out of the air, messed up the yards, and went on" (73).

Hannah's awful death by burning forms another example. Although accidental, Hannah's demise offers Morrison an event in which to explore the inevitability of hurt and mortality and human vulnerability to natural power. Hannah pleads "Help me, ya'll" as she burns, but the flame negates decisively the assistance rendered (75-77). Communal defeat at that fatal moment recalls parental despair with ogbanje's menacing riddle. Even the tight red tomatoes in the water Mr. and Mrs. Suggs throw on Hannah to douse the fire perform as death's enforcer: "The water did put out the flames, but it also made steam, which seared to sealing all that was left of the beautiful Hannah Peace" (104, my italics).

Similarly, at the novel's gripping denouement several Bottomites perish in mass drowning, a tragedy that marks Sula's role as a New World ogbanje. In consort with the novel's pairing and parting of good and evil and its "glor[ying] in paradox and ambiguity" (McDowell 80), the community's celebration of the renewal of life (underscored in its jubilee over the sun's re-appearance) is followed by mass fatality. The same sun that restores joy and hope spurs the ice-choked river into deadly action and also helps galvanize the group energy that leads to suffering and death. The road to integration, "a project-in-process" intended as path to progress and racial unification, leads instead to death. Its corollary, the tunnel--metamorphasizes into mass grave/yard. And just as the sun executes death's directives, the water becomes "a chamber" (162) in which many are sacrificed. "Shall We Gather at the River" becomes an eerie, self-fulfilling dirge.

A political piece, a protest novel (Wessling 283), Sula literarily looks up at serious issues of black folk thought, as well as racial, class, and gender injustice. It wrestles with the politics of racial, spatial, and economic integration and the question of progress, especially in the context of black people's group survival. While Morrison does not ostensibly endorse racial separatism or supremacy, she highlights (also through Sula's ogbanje parabolic experience with negative marking) the mammoth cost of legitimized group branding, political and economic repression, de facto segregation and de jure integration for black people. Progress is not always positive and constructive, and integration, with its potential to empower and simultaneously dispossess is, like ogbanje, both ambiguously "good" and "evil." After the 46 years covered in the novel's narrative time, after 46 years of waiting and hoping and enduring, what do black people calculatedly steered toward US society's bottom have to show for those years, except failed promises, pervasive suffering, and senseless deaths.

In understanding the idea of death in ogbanje-abiku, we understand far better Sula and its eponymous hero. We make better sense of Morrison's continued authorial concern with suffering and death as immanent and repetitive. Her arguably full inauguration of a death motif in Sula/Sula anticipates the Dead family of Song of Solomon. It prepares us for the ogbanje of Beloved, for inhabitants dead and undead of Paradise. As Sharon Patricia Holland notes in Raising the Dead and in consonance with ogbanje's complex locations, the child-spirit Beloved is, like the Yoruba deity Esu, "a blessing to those who wish to know her and a promoter of chaos to those who do not" (51). In its mortality logos, ogbanje enables us to deduce more acutely the existential etiology and imperative of death--an idea Morrison thematizes in the narrative (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 40). Ogbanje reifies death in all of its intricacies.

Morrison has said that she makes Sula die early in the story so the Bottom and the reader can miss her. Certainly, we do. Her death forces the feel of "the sting ... of death" (Banyiwa-Horne 28). Yet, Morrison affirms that death can be endured, survived. After all, not all black Medallions perish in the Bottom bridge tragedy. Sula leaves Nel in "circles and circles of sorrow," but nonetheless alive. Entwined a la abiku, in a "timeless reciprocity" with life (Osundare 99), death lives, as does life.

Perhaps nothing articulates better the maxim that there is a place for everything, or the need for unfettered agency than the wisdom of the Igbo proverb with which I began. "Egbe bere, Ugo bere; nke si ibe ya ebela, nku kwa ya": May the Hawk perch, and may the Eagle perch; if one tells the other not to perch, may he lose his wing! Prayerful, incantatory, and yet firmly cautionary, the proverb reminds us, as do idiomatic ogbanje and Sula, of the great need for self actualization, fair play, and social movement against injustice.

Notes

(1.) See also my 2001 dissertation on this idea.

(2.) Cf. Stein 146.

(3.) See, for instance, McCabe, Stevenson, and Eldestein.

(4.) See, for instance, Puckett or Herskovits.

(5.) See Isichei; Chinua Achebe, "Chi"; and Chukwukere, "Chi," for enlightening discussions on the concept of "chi" and binarism in Igbo thought.

(6.) See Stevenson, "Belief," p.20.

(7.) See also Soyinka, Ake 15-21.

(8.) Cf. Taiwo (1970), Jabbi (1974), Achebe ("Literary" 1980), Maduka (1987), Senanu and Vincent (1988), Osundare (1989), Ogunyemi ("Atlas"; Palava), and McCabe ("Errancy"; "Born-to-Die").

(9.) In the discussion that follows, I simplify my terms by using "ogbanje" for general reference and "abiku" in cases requiring nominal, cultural, or textual specificity.

(10.) See, for example, Things Fall Apart 78-79.

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Christopher N. Okonkwo, Assistant Professor of English, teaches African American and African literatures at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has published in Research in African Literatures, African American Review, MELUS, and African Literature Today. His book project, "Archetype and Median: The Spirit Child in African American Literature," looks at signifyin(g) adaptations and intertextual possibilities of ogbanje-abiku in late twentieth-century African American literature. He would like to thank Professor Gay Wilentz for her insightful suggestions on a previous draft of this essay.