Cooking with one’s Firewood: Myth as a Conflict Generator and Conflict Resolver in Flora Nwapa’s <i>Efuru</i> and <i>Idu</i>

Abstract

Myth is one of the elements of folklore and its importance in the matrix of African culture can never be overemphasized. Myth which comprises of stories, tales and ideas that try to account about the origin of things and answer important questions about how certain phenomenon came into existence has become necessary and significant in the analysis of the worldview, outlook, general belief, custom, tradition, culture and perception of a homogenous group of people to life. Folklore comprises a set of belief,principles, stories, charms among the bulk of other elements of oral tradition which distinguishes a given set of people from another and gives them mark of uniqueness, identification and recognition as well as maintain their link with their past with all its imperfection as a way of understanding their present and making meaningful assessment of the future. Myth as one of the elements of folklore fulfils this function even much more. Flora Nwapa is one of Africa‟s famous writers who like Achebe used her literary works to reconstruct the African history especially as it relates to her Igbo community against the distorted views of the European colonizers. An Igbo proverb has it that one cooks with the amount of firewood in one‟s farm. This obvious is why Flora Nwapa chose to cook with her native firewood by making the myth of Uhamiri a crucial element of her story. In a similar study carried early, we studied myth as a plot generator in the two novels of Flora Nwapa Efuru and Idu. We were able to showcase how myth generated the plots of the two popular novels of Nwapa. In this paper, we extended the study to demonstrate how myth as an element of folklore also functions as a conflict generator and resolver in the two selected novels of Nwapa, Efuru and Idu respectively. How myth helped the author to sharpen and create her conflicts which led to the suspense and intrigues in the novels and how it helped in the resolution and denouement afterwards is the crux of this present study.