Blog by Senayon Olaoluwa
Abstract
This reflection describes the peculiar vulnerability of left-behind women, especially mothers, in the context of migration. Using the theoretical lens of “feminist extalgia”, the essay extends the postulation about the suffering and creativity of the left-behind as affectively predicated on the migration of their loved ones. It demonstrates that left-behind mothers are doubly burdened with the grief of immobility and the compounded responsibility of caregiving and income generation to raise their young children. Using the 2021 Nollywood film, Gone by Daniel Ademinokan, the essay explores the material vulnerability of Ngozi, a left-behind mother, in ways that underscore a collusion of space and time together with human and other non-human factors in reinforcing her fragility. The reading advocates an expansion of the migration arc to include the left-behind. It concludes that such a reorientation must begin with the production of new institutional legal and policy frameworks that cater to the anxiety and fragility of those caught in immobility in general and women in particular.
What is Feminist Extalgia?
Understanding feminist extalgia must begin, first, with an introduction of the main concept, extalgia. The term extalgia describes the affective suffering and grief of the left-behind as predicated on the migration of their loved ones into other lands. It is a critical theory of migration that destabilizes the theoretical closure to the entailments of mobility and migrancy, terms and practices that tend to be configured as unmoored from origins. If at all are otherwise configured, as in the case of, say, exile, the interrelation with homeland is articulated from the angle of grief, trauma and melancholia that conventionally find expression in the language of nostalgia as seen through the lens of the exilic figure. The embodiment of sorrow in the memory of the exilic figure is iconized in what Edward Said refers to as “essential sadness” made poignant by the grievous sorrow of estrangement. However, an assumption such as this, which ascribes exclusive sorrow to the experience of migration, grants visibility to the suffering of mobile lives without any thoughts for the parallel challenges of the those left behind or caught in the emotional and affective mesh of immobility because they are impacted by the dispersal of their loved ones. In an age that is disposed to migration equity as an imperative of justice, exclusive devotion of attention to the suffering of mobile lives based on the assumption about the traumatic challenges of displacement and migrancy undermines the protocol of equity. Borrowing from Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction, extalgia charts a course of migration equity by insisting that just as the suffering of mobile lives has mattered together with all the physical, social and medical challenges that are resonant with it, so also must the trauma of the left-behind be of essential concern. In this way, acknowledgment of the simultaneous “bleeding through one another” of the suffering of the mobile and immobile lives can provide a level playing ground for an appropriate response of care for both categories.
Extalgia and Etymology
Just as nostalgia is indebted etymologically to classical linguistics, extalgia is inspired by the idea of “ex” as denoting exit or exodus or being outside of a range, while “talgia” is realized from the original Greek “algos” that is denotative of grief or suffering. Importantly, extalgia is simultaneously grounded in the cultural practice of effigy carving by the Ogu people of Southwestern Nigeria and Benin Republic. It is an act that is performed in response to the grief of the loss of a twin child. By carving the figurine in representation/substitution of the dead infant, the Ogu commute the death symbolically to a journey, a firewood-fetching journey, to be precise. The act itself signifies an important insight within the context of extalgia because it underscores the simultaneity of the grief and creativity attendant upon the firewood-fetching mission. It further indicates that while the left-behind in the context of literal migration grief over the dispersion of their loved ones, they equally seek creative ways of transcendence for coping. Therefore, extalgia is not only conceived to be evocative of the trauma of the left-behind, as it is also about their creative mechanisms of coping. Invariably, central to the unpacking of the insights facilitated by extalgia are fundamental questions such as: When loved ones are dispersed from the homeland to other lands, what kinds of feelings does their dispersion provoke in those left behind? How do we describe the sense of loss and suffering that the dispersal engenders in the stay-at-home? What are the socio-cultural, economic and even health implications of such dispersion for those left behind in the homeland? In what ways do the left behind navigate and transcend their sense of grief? What are the limits of their transcendence? How do the limits compel a new ethos of migration equity for the institution of new protocols of support systems for the left-behind?
Feminist Extalgia by Way of Introduction
Therefore, feminist extalgia is a strand of extalgia that describes the peculiar ways in which women are affected by being left behind in the context of migration. A critical reflection in this direction is buoyed by not just the materiality of the peculiar challenges faced by left-behind women. It is further motivated by the realization about the total absence of legal and policy frameworks that recognize their situation, which should be the grounds for institutional interventions. More specifically in this discussion, I am concerned about how the understanding is crystalized in the condition of lone motherhood as represented in the 2021 Nollywood film Gone by Daniel Ademinokan. Using the example of Ngozi, a young wife and mother of two, who is left behind in Lagos by her husband, Animashaun (better known as Ani in the movie), in the hope of becoming a bigger boxing champion in New York, we encounter the materiality of feminist extalgia in an apparently migrant Nollywood film. But while indeed the movie falls within the genre of transnational cinema through its features such as multiracial casting, location of the director in the Global North, and the projection of the challenges faced by immigrants in their destinations, Gone, charts an entirely radical course to its unfurling. This is because much of the narrative in the work is deliberately concentrated on the homeland trauma of the left-behind family, at the centre of which Ngozi is located. This narrative index of the film serves to illuminate what it would mean to define an artistic production as the work of extalgia. While such work is obviously situated within the discourse of migration and transnationalism, it should meet the criterion of being more concentration on the consequences of migration upon the left-behind than on the migrants in their destinations. This radical re-definition contrasts with the typical transnational film genre that projects an essential stream of struggles, travails and sometimes triumphs of migrants from the Global South in their resilient push for survival and visibility despite the intersectionality of racism, gender and other forms of neoliberal capitalist structures of exclusion in the Global North.
The Materiality of Feminist Extalgia in Gone
Ranked as a national boxing champion, Ani reckons that his fortune can be advanced in New York and makes a plan that takes him to the imagined destination of professional greatness and visibility. Ngozi, by this time, is not only nursing their first child, a girl by the name Aanu, she is also heavy with a second child that would be born after Ani is gone away in New York. As is characteristic of such survivalist movies, Ani is constrained to go into an arranged marriage with an American lady in hope to easily obtain the green card. Unfortunately, the lady seeks more than a paperwork by insisting on the legitimate intimacy of nuptial relations. In his refusal to yield to the pressure from the American citizen, Ani is framed and sentenced to jail. Caught off completely from his left-behind family in Lagos for 25 years, the movie centres around what Ani’s incarcerated/ carceral migration means for Ngozi and her two children in an engulfing city.
To make sense of Ngozi’s condition, feminist extalgia subscribes to the notion of feminist economics that is attentive to the challenges of lone motherhood and the necessity of observing the responsibility of caregiving and income generation. This condition of lone motherhood is often compounded by the structural violence that places lone mothers in an economic disadvantage resulting in inequality in income generation, and even more dispossessing are the operational dynamics of the structural violence. They are apparent in a complex of reactions manifesting as hostility, moral panic, refusal of relations to be of help, to say nothing of the absence or non-implementation policies that are sympathetic to the condition of lone motherhood. All these traits are evinced in Ngozi’s case; however, I contend that we must transcend this condition of feminist economist to come to full terms with the enormity of the struggle and trauma that the central character is faced with not just as a lone mother, but as a left behind lone mother. Viewed in this way, the plethora of hostile reactions suffered by Ngozi together with the impact on her two children, Aanu and AyoChukwu, must be seen from the angle of the ignominy of being left behind. Such assertion challenges assumptions that ascribe exclusive “essential sadness” to exilic dislocation because the indignity of being left behind is no less essential.
Hostilities towards Ngozi for being left behind as a lone mother manifest in a plethora of reactions. Among others, there is a whole gamut of unfounded scandal making the rounds in the city of Lagos about her being a prostitute simply because she manages to raise the children in ways that are not totally known to the community. Even when her income generation efforts are ordinarily obvious enough, there is an assumption about her survival and coping in the absence of a migrated husband as based on an imagined transformation into a woman of easy virtue. The assumption strips her of communal dignity and complicates her vulnerabilities, especially because of her son AyoChukwu who turns into a notorious street fighter as his reaction to people and playmates referencing him as the daughter of a prostitute. At another level, his involvement in such street fights creates ripple effects that leave Ngozi at the receiving end. One such instance is the looting of her provision shop by young men AyoChkukwu’s age. It is their reaction to how AyoChukwu has beaten one of them up for calling his mother a prostitute after winning a sports bet. Besides the looting at the scene, it is also worth noting that Ngozi is addressed by these young men as though she were completely worthless, another indication of ignominy faced by lone mothers in the absence of their migrated husbands. The refusal of relations, especially her in-laws, to aid Ngozi in the absence of her migrated husband is confirmed by the total silence on them throughout the duration of the movie. Their refusal to help is further underscored by the derivative suffering of Ani’s mother who dies before his return, an indication of how the migration of a husband leaving an uncared-for wife behind, can also have implications for the health and longevity of his mother. While Ngozi can weather the storm, the death of Ani’s mother in his absence opens up yet another conversation around feminist extalgia and the fatal ignominy of left-behind aged mothers. Still thinking with the model of feminist economics and its resonance with feminist extalgia, it is clear that within the Nigerian context, just as is the case in most parts of the world, the total absence of policy frameworks for the protection of the left-behind is at the centre of Ngozi’s suffering that has devasting impacts of her children. Not only is she denigrated as a prostitute without basis, there is also no formal legal insulation from such castigation. Worse still, there is no state-backed social protection intervention to alleviate her condition. Any wonder then that despite the ubiquity of NGOs within the city of Lagos, none is featured in the movie as concerned with Ngozi’s situation as a left-behind lone mother. The logical absence of an NGO support is reflective of the blind spot of the conception of migration as exclusively constituted by the image and imagination of mobile lives. Therefore, not-for-profits lack the clear policy statements to identify and categorize the left-behind in the context of migration for intervention precisely because policy formulations are non-existent.
While so far, I have focused on the human angle to reactions of opposition and insensitivity to Ngozi as a left-behind lone mother, it is important to state that within the context of extalgia, it is also possible to talk about the collusion of non-human factors against left-behind individuals. Here, I am particularly interested in the spatiotemporal forces that Ngozi must also contend with. This is not surprising because there are established assumptions about the entanglement of space and time in cinematic production. What is more, that the complication has implications for the purgation of emotions is a stock conversation in scholarship. The non-human entanglement in the rendition of Ngozi’s case may as well begin with the city of Lagos. Lagos is a typical example of an engulfing city, a feature that is often agential when migrancy is in context. Ngozi’s extalgic condition is layered in ignominy and essential sadness because, according to Helon Habila, a Nigerian novelist and consistent theorist of Lagos:
young girls from all over the country went to Lagos looking for opportunity, most of them from respectable backgrounds, but Lagos doesn’t care how respectable you were in your village.
For Ngozi, therefore, it is a case of double jeopardy because her ignominy is not caused only by Ani’s migration to New York; it is further complicated by the fact that she falls in the category of the young girls that turn up in Lagos from different parts of the country. As her name indicates, she is from the Eastern part of Nigeria, whereas Lagos is in the West. And because Lagos is a city that strips migrants, especially young women of their respectability, Ngozi becomes a spatial victim. Just as the people around her do not care, Lagos, too, cares less about her particularly difficult situation of navigating life not just as a left-behind lone mother, but as one that is hardly welcome as a migrant from another part of the country. In the unpacking of the full work, Linda McDowell’s foundational work on feminist geography will be especially productive because it stands to guide analysis around space, place and environment and their entanglement with social processes that discriminate against women into disadvantage. It is through such understanding that we come to terms with the enormity of her extalgic condition when saddled with caregiving for two children while navigating the treacherous ambience of income generation in the informal sector. The diegetic music in the film says it all through the repetitive emphasis on “Eko ni won pe’bi!” (This place is called Lagos!). As the popular legend goes, all other Nigerian cities but Lagos are considered welcoming to strangers. This urban legend thrives on the evidence of a gigantic billboard at the main entrance of the city from other parts of the country where the inscription is “This is Lagos!” instead of “Welcome to Lagos!” From this angle, even when Lagos is a left-behind space against the backdrop of Ani’s emigration, which makes it fall into the same category as Ngozi, rather than being kind to her in demonstration of the solidarity of the left-behind, the city does the opposite, leaving up to its notoriety as unrespectful of migrant young ladies. Lagos, to that extent, contributes to the discourse of toxic masculinity for its collusion with human acts of hostility against Ngozi because the situation could have been different were she to be in another city where the ethos of communalism would have ensured a certain level of care. This assertion is borne out by the role of silence as another non-human factor against Ngozi as deployed by neighbours in the community. During tension-soaked moments when things come to a head in the family at Ani’s unexpected return, there are moments when feisty disagreements break out between Aanu and his street fighter-brother, AyoChukwu. But instead for neighbours to intervene as peacemakers, they weaponize silence in their voyeurism as they look on, baying for bloody violence to subsequently feed their communal gossip mill. In Lagos’ deployment of silence where interventions for peace could have been a natural reaction, Ngozi’s extalgic vulnerability cannot be denied. This is because Lagos is a typical simulation of Western urban modernity of unequal development and individualism that trumps the sanctity of African communalism while instructing everyone to mind their own business.
A final note on non-human hostility to the extalgic condition of Ngozi is encapsulated in the repetitive narrative technique of “25 years”. Here, time becomes a dominant source of trauma in the left-behind Ngozi as a lone mother. The materiality of her extalgic sensibilities of trauma is reinforced in expressions such as “He left me to suffer with two children for 25 years”; “25 years, Ani, 25 years! “You left me with a baby and an unborn child with no money, nothing to feed, or do anything else; “You haven’t seen or talked to them in 25 years.”; “As far as I am concerned, you died 25 years ago”. All of these are indicative of the layered trauma of Ngozi’s condition as generative of the passage of time. To that extent, I arrogate essential sadness to Ngozi’s situation, which allows us to view the traumatic extalgic sadness of her children as layered on their mother’s. For instance, in a bid to respond to the necessity of assuming full authority of childrearing, she moderates the name Ayodele to AyoChukwu, which translates to a blend of two languages—Yoruba and Igbo—into one name. In itself, this is a creative response to her situation; but unfortunately, there is a strong sense in which the renaming complicates the son’s identity crisis, making him neither Yoruba (his father’s ethnicity) nor Igbo (his mother’s). The taunting often provokes a reaction of confusion and violence because of the weirdness of his naming, which underscores what I prefer to call the immanent violence of the biotechnology of grafting. The grafting of an Igbo name into a Yoruba name does not only attract derision; it also serves to reinforce AyoChukwu’s bipolar malady in the movie. As an extension of Ngozi’s trauma, Aanu secretly enrolls as a strip dancer in a night club, leaving the family in a cinematic irony until it pushes Ani, the father, to the threshold of incestuous voyeurism on an occasion of his patronage of the club at his return. Yet, one must return to AyoChukwu’s bipolar malady to reexamine its entanglement with his mother’s emotional condition that is divided between Ani, her husband, and Mr Philip, her lover. While at return, Ani ultimately succeeds in winning back Ngozi for their marital stability, Philip would not have any of it. His reckoning of Ngozi is that of an object, which is why he traces Ani to his boxing gym to enquire the financial value of his wife. By the time he lets out the query, “How much? How much for your wife, Ngozi?”, it has become clear that Ngozi is nothing but a mere commodity to be acquired by Philip. Even when Ani insists on keeping his wife, Ngozi is nothing but a pawn in the hands of both men, a situation of commodification that is caused and precipitated by being left behind in the context of migration.
Conclusion
In the end, feminist extalgia facilities a radically productive insight into the understanding of migration from the angle of left-behind lone mothers and remains potentially applicable to other categories of female conditions associated with being left-behind. As the case of Ngozi has shown in the Nollywood film, Gone, there is a critical blind spot in our conception, rendition and administration of migration affairs that hegemonizes the suffering of migrants while failing to acknowledge the parallel struggles of the left-behind, especially those of mothers whose vulnerabilities should warrant new relational ethos. The situation of left-behind women, as depicted in the movie, is thoroughly vulnerable because of the limits of their creative capacity for transcendence, especially in a situation where geography and economics collude with human allies to make life unbearable for them. This view finds amplification in the conceptual insight of “feminist fragility” that resists “the neoliberal ideologies of resilience and recovery”. Certainly, it is necessary to consider new legal and policy frameworks that cater to the left-behind generally and mothers and women as constitutive categories in the migration arc. The recommendation is informed by the imperative of attaining migration equity, especially in a global age that is framed by the Sustainable Development Goals and which insist on “leaving no one behind”. The perspective warrants new conversations around commitment towards a holistic review of existing institutional systems of care that exclude the left-behind, considering the profound ways in which they are affected by the migration of their loved ones. The quest for a more equitable and just world challenges us to a radical review of migration protocols and their recalibration to acknowledge the necessity of care for the left-behind. Therefore, just as there are institutional structures rendering support and care systems to mobile lives of various categories in their vulnerability, it is imperative that new legal frameworks of support and policy interventions should be instituted to mediate care systems for left-behind lone mothers and other gender categories in the context of migration.
Senayon Olaoluwa is Professor of Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Institute of African Studies and Inaugural Director of the African Diaspora Resource and Research Centre (ADRRC) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the originator of extalgia and Founder of the Ibadan School Diaspora Studies. Email: samsenayon@gmail.com
A version of this reflection was presented at the University of Oxford in June, watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ULnVH9RYLM
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