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Rewriting the Bildungsroman: A Case Study of Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow and Sefi
Atta’s Everything Good Will Come
OLADEPO, Oladiipo Ishola
(EGL/2009/186)
BEING A LONG ESSAY SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,
FACULTY OF ARTS, OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY, ILE-IFE, OSUN STATE,
NIGERIA
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS DEGREE IN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
JULY 2014

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ABSTRACT
The traditional bildungsroman has mostly been read as being Eurocentric, male-centred
and bourgeois. Conversely, contemporary writers (especially those from Africa) have modified
the scope of the genre to allow for the experiences of non-Europeans and as well as females.
However, little has been done to identify these new features that have been added to the
bildungsroman. This research, therefore, studies two postcolonial Nigerian literatures in a bid to
identify additions made to the traditional bildungsroman. Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come
and Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow are studied as exhibiting new features that were absent in the
German narrative mode.
In doing this, the research depends on multiple theoretical reading of relevant materials.
Critical opinions of scholars and critics on the bildungsroman are also used. A thorough reading
and analysis of the primary texts is done to justify the extension of the bildungsroman.
The study reveals that both Sefi Atta and Kaine Agary both use female protagonists
unlike the traditional form where primacy is on the development of the male protagonist. Finally,
this research makes the important contribution that contemporary writers now adopt and also
modify the constituents of the bildungsroman to cater for peculiar questions and situations of
their societies.

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CHAPTER ONE
Bildungsroman: The Initial and the Deviations
Recent African writings have taken on different topical subjects that the African world is
fraught with; especially those literatures published from the twentieth century till date. African
writers have attempted to divest the notion of the European racial hegemony, critique the post-
colonial political situation of Africa and also proffer solutions to the seemingly never-ending
travails of the African world. In trying to do this, writers like Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Kaine
Agary, Yewande Omotosho Chimamanda Adiche and others have employed several narrative
modes like the Bildungsroman, to explicate their points. This novelistic outlet employed by some
of these writers was originally perceived as being European, male and bourgeoisie. However,
these writers (especially females) have shed the bildungsroman of its Eurocentric and
phallocentric garb and re-written it to address and answer some African socio-political questions.
A reading of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come and Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow reveals
the adaptation of the bildungsroman to question the socio-political atmosphere in Africa.
The bildungsroman otherwise known as “coming of age” is a novelistic trend that was
coined by Karl Morgenstein in his 1819 university lecture but made prominent by Wilhelm
Dithley in 1905. It is a literary trend that chronicles the development of a young protagonist who,
during the course of the novel, experiences both psychological and moral growth as a result of
certain realities encountered in his maturation journey. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship can be said to be the inaugural text of this narrative (Buckley 12).
Goethe’s character seeks self-realization through art, thereby reflecting the idealist tradition of
enlightenment which assumes achievement and social integration (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland

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5). Subsequently notable writers like Friedrich Schiller, Christopher Martin Wieland, alongside
Goethe, popularized this genre in and outside nineteenth century Germany.
Although this genre started out in Germany, it gained adherents in other parts of Europe
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Noticeably, in England and France, it was made to
“realize its full potential as a pragmatic ideological discourse” (Castle 13). In England, it became
the choice of prominent novelists as lots of English literatures exhibited this narrative technique.
Some of these books include David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), Sons and
Lovers (1913) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). These books mark a subtle
shift in the paradigm of Goethe’s form of bildungsroman in that they foreground the fact that
personal development not only “involves achievement and integration but also conflict and
rebellion” (Okuyade 4). Although English writers modified the scope of the bildungsroman, they
still maintained its traditional markers of being European, male and bourgeois.
The popularity of this technique did not just stop with French and English literatures; it
was also prevalent with some twentieth century African novels. The bildungsroman has been
associated with earlier works written by Africans in the late 1960s and 70s. The African Child by
Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane‘s L’Aventure Ambiguë and Achebe’s No Longer at Ease
have been read in some senses as exhibiting the bildungsroman tradition. These novels exhibit
traits of the bildungsroman in that they present youthful characters that fall out with society at
the beginning only to realize that the individual is inferior to the society. Although, in the
traditional bildungsroman, the protagonist at the end harmonizes with the society, in the African
version of the bildungsroman, the protagonists become disillusioned and filled with regret
because they have wished to change their societies and have failed as a result of collective force
of “corrupt systems that are stronger than they are” (Omotoso 17). Since this study is concerned

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with examining the trend and features of the traditional mode of the bildungsroman and
juxtaposing it with its variants in Africa as well as studying its significance(s) in the attempt by
African writers to portray and correct problems of post-colonial Africa, then it is expedient to
have a concise understanding of how the bildungsroman emanated the way it did and why it has
continued to change with alterations in human societies. It is also important to know the reason it
has been adapted into different literary environments (especially the African).
The bildungsroman is by far one of the greatest and also one of the most controversial
contributions to the world of creative writing. As the term suggests, its origin can be traced to
German literature dating back to the Pietistic literature of the 17th
and 18th
centuries (Smit 15). It
became well grounded in the 18th
century after the demise of the feudal system and the
subsequent rise of democratic ideas. In a deep conceptualization, the bildungsroman
encompasses three sub- categories of formation novel – an Erziehungsroman (education novel
that is concerned with the development of the individual through self-cultivation), an
Entwicklungsroman (a novel about growth generally), and a Kunstlerroman (a novel about the
development of an artist) (Okuyade 2). Hence, the protagonist of a bildungsroman can be of
different variations as long as he seeks self-realization. There is little agreement on what the term
bildungsroman actually means, but since Goethe was the one to write the very first
bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the plan is to apply his definition of bildung,
which suggests that personal growth cannot be controlled indiscriminately by fixed rules of
conduct:
His [Goethe’s] definition includes the idea of reciprocal growth or
change in which the individual and his environment are engaged in
a process of mutual transformation, each shaping the other until the
individual has reached the point where he or she experiences a
sense of harmony with the environment. Because Goethe places

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the individual rather than society at the center of the Bildungs
process […] we may conveniently use this definition in evaluating
bildungsromane of our time (Gohlman x)
What then defines a bildungsroman? According to Gohlman, “any novel containing a young hero
(usually male), a wide range of experiences and a sense of the ultimate practical value of these
experiences in later life can be said to belong to the bildungsroman genre” (4). Furthermore, a
classical bildungsroman generally takes the course of the protagonist’s growth from child to
adult, and according to Buckley, the child must possess a sense of awareness and he or she
(mostly he) grows up in the country or in a provincial town (Buckley 17). Moreover, the
protagonist must have a reason to embark upon his or her journey. Ordinarily, loss or
dissatisfaction at an early stage in the protagonist’s life propels him from home and family. As
stated by Buckley, this discontent could be either a social or intellectual constraint placed upon
the free imagination (17). Additionally, the protagonist’s family and especially his father proves
persistently hostile to his creative drive or flights of fancy and is quite impermeable to the new
ideas gained from unprescribed reading (17). The process of development is long, stressful and
gradual, involving constant clashes between the hero's needs and desires and the views and
judgments enforced by a rigid social order. The traditional bildungsroman focuses on the male
European subject‘s apprenticeship to adult life – it maps and plots his journey into selfhood and
illumination within the parameters of his own specific society.
The stress on male formation in the genre can be attributed to, and is the result of, the
political, social, economic and religious climate of the two epochs that followed European post-
Enlightenment. In his book, Tracing Personal Expansion, Walter P.Collins affirms: “Certainly,
female characters did abound in bildungsroman, but they were there to ensure that the male
characters developed appropriately” (21). Admittedly, the majority of characters featured in the

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bildungsroman were male, and, when female characters surfaced, they were presented as
subordinate, rather than as central characters, important only as long as they facilitated and
helped in the male bildung.
Ironically, although the bildungsroman was first credited to romantic writers in Germany,
its finest example are visible in English and French literary outputs. The genre became the
significant literary form in French and English literature as the German writers shifted their
attention to the novella. Thomas Carlyle was so impressed by Goethe’s work he translated it into
English in 1824 and imitated it in his Sartor Resartus (1833). Other nineteenth century English
authors produced similar novels- Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) are generally considered examples of the bildungsroman. Though
these novels resemble their German counterparts, scholars have affirmed that the English form
took on some unique characteristics. The English bildungsroman seemed to possess a more
confessional quality; it often presents the protagonist as moving from country to city. It was
more concerned with the theme of religious doubt and it ended less optimistically than the
German variety, often portraying society as a somewhat destructive force. This last feature is
also prevalent in the French version of the bildungsroman; as it is seen in Gustave’s L’Education
Sentimentale (1869). The young protagonist’s desires are realistic and reasonable desires the
society will not fulfill.
The male inclination of the classical bildungsroman changed in the 19th century, when
women authors started to appropriate the genre as a vehicle by means of which to voice female
(un)becoming. Though female bildung occurred in these bildungsromans, such growth usually
took place in a negative way. The ‘negative’ bildung was usually marked by “sacrifice and
alienation in the process of becoming and developing” (Collins 25). One of the distinguishing

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features between male and female bildungsroman, as explained by Susan Rosowski in her essay
The Novel of Awakening, is that the female “protagonist’s growth results typically not with ‘an
art of living’, as for her male counterpart, but instead with a realization that for a woman such
an art of living is difficult or impossible: it is an awakening to limitation” (49). In Victorian
Britain, the need for personal growth and desire to fit in a changing world led to intricate
characterization. At this same time, the female bildungsroman advanced, and this version
survived its male variant in the twentieth century. The first examples of this version emanated
from Britain. Maira Edgeworth’s Belinda and Jane Austen’s Emma are examples of this form
during the Victorian epoch. In the 1950s and 60s the bildungsroman became more popular due
to feminist and leftist political movements. It became a collective ground for theories and
ideologies, for unsung groups such as homosexuals, women and non-whites. This is simply due
to the focus on the individual, as well as group development and education. The genre allowed
writers and activists the opportunity to portray socio-political realities and how some hegemonic
structures restrict individual and group development in the modern world.
In addition to European women’s appropriation of the mode, African writers have
also found their voice in this genre of personal growth and mental development. A few
examples of bildungsroman to emerge from Africa are Camara Laye‘s The African Child
(1953), Mongo Beti‘s Mission terminée (1957), Cheikh Hamidou Kane‘s L’Aventure Ambiguë
(1961) and Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. Such bildungsroman make up part of Africa‘s first
literary stage, and are thus intricately linked with the colonial experience. Cultural and gender
prejudice towards female writers did, however, influence the literary production of women.
Female bildungsroman in Africa, therefore, generally only emerged during the second and third
stages of the production of African literature. Buchi Emecheta‘s Second-Class Citizen (1974)

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and The Bride Price (1976), Tsitsi Dangarembga‘s Nervous Conditions (1988), are a few texts
that describe the becoming of female protagonists.
The African bildungsroman (usually set in the colonial era), typically examines
the conflict of cultures in which a young character struggles to reach a balance between the
“civilizing” education of the colonial power and the traditional culture of his forefathers”
(Mickelsen 481). Such is certainly the case in Mongo Beti’s Mission terminé. The protagonists in
the first form of the African bildungsroman are usually described as attending either a mission or
a colonial school, where their eyes are “opened” to the possibilities with which Western-styled
education and modernity present them. The Western form of tutelage is highly individualizing,
being focused on the Western “I”, which is independent and endowed with the right to self-
governance. This education is usually contrasted with more traditional forms, such as the
“informal modeling of elders to folklore, apprenticeship, and most formally, ‘bush school’”
(Mickelsen 419). The second was aimed at preserving and supporting a collective, rather than an
individual, identity. Accordingly, the Western ‘I’ comes to knockbacks with the African ‘us’; the
African ‘us’ promotes the sense of a collective identity that spreads sameness and uniformity,
rather than the self-willed individuality inscribed by the European ‘I’. Nonetheless, the novels of
the third generation are often highly individualized. The feelings of the central character of this
generation’s bildungsroman still combat with the hegemonic ideologies and values of their
respective societies, even though the novels are set in (post)modern Nigeria (smit 17). The
‘stages’ of development, as well as the essence of the genre, are, therefore, rather similar in both
the European and the African bildungsroman, which were specifically penned during the epoch
of colonial rule. Both entail a dialectic relationship between the individual and a society which is

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conveyed primarily through the protagonist‘s relationship with other members of his family (the
extended family in the case of the African bildungsroman).
An important difference, however, is that the first (and sometimes the second) generation
African protagonists needed to negotiate with two societies: the aboriginal society and the
foreign. Since society is an important catalyst in the formation of identity, the individual
becomes aware of culturally enforced boundaries. In struggling to reunite his or her own needs
and desires with the burdens of the society, the individual comes to a greater understanding of
his or her role in the existing social order. Thus, in contrast to the European bildungsroman, the
protagonist of the African bildungsroman can neither embrace the beliefs and cultural practices
of his or her society, nor emulate them, as he or she is neither part of the one, nor of the other,
culture. The tension between the self and society in the African bildungsroman, in contrast with
the European, is concurrently an epitome of the strain “existing between African modernity
(manifested in Western education, capitalism, commoditization, and a desire for agency, self-
conscious subjectivity and self-governance) and African traditionalism (manifested in group
identity, traditional epistemological belief systems, and the authority of ancestral tradition)”
(smit 18).
Regardless of whether the conversion of the genre in Africa is male or female- centred,
the African bildungsroman is still primarily, and integrally, a novel of becoming, which is set
within a specific society. The genre consequently typifies the process of becoming, which is
marked by negotiation between individual desires and social expectations, norms and values. The
key difference between the African and the classic bildungsroman is that the protagonist in the
African bildungsroman does not necessarily become an epitome, a sign (as Moretti argues in
relation to the European bildungsroman). In other words, though it seems as if the African

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protagonist could be read as a sign of modernity, the African bildungsroman often complicates
such an oversimplified reading of its protagonist.
The conceptual conventions of the classical bildungsroman also encourage one to view
the maturation of the protagonist as allegorizing the becoming of the nation. Societal
conventions, in terms of which society is understood to function as a miniature of the national
milieu, inherently form part of the classic Bildung. Such a reading is, however, subject to
foreclosure, as such conventions do not always manifest themselves in the protagonists of the
third generation. The principal texts in the current study deviate from the traditional first-
generation African, as well as the classic European bildungsroman, in that their protagonists
challenge and defy the values of their corresponding societies, rather than personifying them.
Critics of recent African literature have identified the bildungsroman in contemporary
African novels. Yet, these analyses have not explored in detail the similarities and dichotomies
between the traditional bildungsroman and its African “rewritten” variant. More so, little
attention has been paid to the significances of the adaptation of this genre into African literature.
Also there has been a scanty comparative study of Kane Agary’s Yellow Yellow and Seffi Ata’s
Everything Good will Come to show how the African adaptation of the bildungsroman differs
and still reconciles with the classical bildungsroman.
Thus, the aim of this study is to explore and identify the bildungsroman in Sefi
Ata’s Everything Good will Come and Kane Agary’s Yellow Yellow with the view to establishing
how these writers have adopted and re-written this literary mode that was originally European,
male and bourgeoisie.

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In doing this therefore, the study will use both primary and secondary texts. Primary
sources would mean Seffi Ata’s Everything Good will Come and Kane Agary’s Yellow Yellow.
Contributions of notable critics and scholars will also be taken into consideration as secondary
materials. The analysis will adopt multiple reading of relevant texts as a theoretical framework in
ascertaining the significance of the adaptation of the novelistic trend.

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CHAPTER TWO
Literature Review: Rewriting the bildungsroman
The bildungsroman genre remains one of the most prosperous and one of the most
provocative contributions that German literature has made to the global vocabulary of literary
studies, perhaps, than any other genre designation like romance, historical novel, novel of
manners, to mention just a few examples from the jurisdiction of narrative long fiction.
Provocative in the sense that there seems to be an ever present controversy around the genre as to
what are the delineating traits and of what significance it is. Tobias Boes, in his essay Modernist
Studies and the bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends says:
The heuristic value of the bildungsroman label has been disputed,
defended, taken for granted, and otherwise muddled. The term is
sometimes –especially within English departments – used so
broadly that seemingly any novel (and on extreme occasions even
verse epics, such as The Prelude) might be subsumed by it (230).
Although, the aim of this work is not to drool unnecessarily on debates as to what makes a
bildungsroman, it is nonetheless of crucial importance to understand what constitutes the original
form of the genre; so as to juxtapose it with the various forms that exist today and establish how
and why these differences exist. Thereby correcting the erroneous notion by some that “the genre
continues to diminish with the passage of time, especially as its peak moment was in the
nineteenth century” (Okuyade 1).
Many scholars have attempted to define the genre in order to make it easily identifiable.
M. M. Bakhtin advances a definition of the bildungsroman in his fragmentary article, “The
bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”- He categorizes the
bildungsroman as one of the subcategories of novel genre that is classified by the construction of

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the image of its main hero. He defines the bildungsroman as “novel of emergence,” which
thematically provides an image of “man in the process of becoming” (19). According to Marc
Redfield, the bildungsroman is frequently “borrowed” because the word itself connotes
representation (Bild) and formation (Bildung), which creates a similarity between “the education
of the subject” and “the figuration of the text” (38-39). Franco Moretti defines it as “the
‘symbolic form’ of modernity.” He posits that the bildungsroman has characterized the features
of youth in mobility and interiority. As a form of modernity, the bildungsroman conveys
“youthful attributes of mobility and inner restlessness” (5). Buckley also tries to contribute his
definition of the genre in his essay- Season of Youth: The bildungsroman from Dickens to
Golding, he states that:
the bildungsroman in its pure form has been defined as a “novel of
all around development or self-culture” with a more or less
conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to
cultivate himself by his experience (13).
Despite the ambiguity associated with the bildungsroman, there are popular consent on
certain historical details, for instance that the advent of the genre can be traced back to late
eighteenth century Germany and that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is to be
considered its “prototype” (Buckley 12). Additionally, it is without doubts that the term was first
employed by Karl Morgenstern in his 1820 lecture “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman”, which
stressed the moralistic aspects of the genre:
We may call a novel a bildungsroman first and foremost on
account of its content, because it represents the development of the
hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion,
but also, second, because this depiction promotes the development
of the reader to a greater extent than any other kind of novel. (654-
655)

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From the above, it is obvious with the definition of Morgenstern that a bildungsroman not only
seeks to educate the protagonist, but also the reader, such that the reader draws morals and
knowledge from the problems faced by the protagonist. However, with respect to the general
definitions, some critics such as James Hardin have reacted to the “looseness” in classifying
almost every literature that describes, even in most implausible way, a protagonist’s formative
years and asserted that the bildungsroman comprises “a type of novel more talked about than
understood” (x). Bearing in mind this summation of Hardin and the different views of scholars
and critics, it is not far from being obvious that there is little agreement on what makes a
bildungsroman. The idea is to employ the definition and delineation made by Goethe in Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre, which suggests that personal growth cannot be hampered by fixed rules:
His [Goethe’s] definition includes the idea of reciprocal growth or
change in which the individual and his environment are engaged in
a process of mutual transformation, each shaping the other until the
individual has reached the point where he or she experiences a
sense of harmony with the environment. Because Goethe places
the individual rather than society at the center of the
Bildungsprozess […] we may conveniently use this definition in
evaluating bildungsromane of our time. (Gohlman x)
In furtherance, Gohlman describes the main traits of a bildungsroman as any novel
containing a young hero (usually male), “a wide range of experiences and a sense of the ultimate
practical value of these experiences in later life can be said to belong to the bildungsroman
genre” (4). Also, it takes the course of a protagonist’s formative years from childhood to
adulthood and this child, according to Buckley, is expected to be of “some sensibilities growing
up in a country or provincial town” (Buckley 17). Moreover, something is expected to be
responsible for his journey away from home. Usually as stated by Buckley, loss or dissatisfaction
that is in form of social or intellectual constraint jars him away from home and family (17).

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Buckley states that the protagonist’s first schooling may be frustrating since it may
suggest options not available to his present setting; he therefore leaves the repressive atmosphere
of home to make his way independently in the city. There his real “education” begins, not only
his preparation for a career but also his direct experience of urban life. The experience of urban
life involves at least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one debasing and one exalting, thus
demanding that in this respect and others, the hero reappraise his values (17). The protagonist
eventually inculcates the spirit and values of the society and reconciles with the society.
On the other hand, the genre has been criticized for being obviously Eurocentric,
bourgeois and male-centred (Ogaga 1). This traditional variant obviously excluded gender
discourse, race, post-colonial issues and subjects of identity dilemma, contemporary issues that
the bildungsroman has been made to accommodate. Contemporary definitions of the term also
seem a bit wider in incorporating female characters and heroines. Chris Baldick, for instance,
defines the bildungsroman as “a kind of novel that follows the development of the hero or
heroine from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, through a troubled quest for identity”
(27). Okuyade corroborates this notion of the extension of the genre in his essay- “The
Postcolonial African bildungsroman: Extending the Paradigm”, He submits:
African and Caribbean women writers continue to subvert the traditional markers of the
bildungsroman in its being white, male and bourgeois. They employ the traditional
bildungsroman form to portray the development of black, female and oppressed or colonized
subjects. As a result of these transformations when speaking about the bildungsroman in this era,
it is no longer considered as a biased genre which only applies to the experience of a certain
group of people, especially dominant groups.(1)

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Today the narrative genre embodies the developmental experiences of both male and female,
whites and coloured worldwide. With Caribbean literature, the new variant of the genre emerged
with the advent of literature by female writers in the 1980s. According to Louis James, author of
Caribbean Literature in English:
Merle Hodges’s novel, Crick Crack Monkey (1970) has been
regarded as the marker of this phenomenon. Her coming of age
marked a shift from the European way of telling the story. A move
from the male protagonist to the female protagonist and a new
modernist search for unity (James 200)
Also, Caribbean bildungsroman focuses on relationship between gender and colonialism. A new
character trope based on the experiences of women in the Americas who have lived in a world
divided by colonialism, gender and slavery (James 200). Hodge, in her novel, creates a world of
binary opposites between the European and the local. Her novel makes meaning in the interstitial
space between the two binaries such that these two worlds exist symbiotically and
simultaneously. Her protagonist- Tee is torn between two contrasting worlds of Tantie and
Beatrice. Tantie world is rural and unschooled in western culture while Beatrice represents
everything European and colonial. Hodge takes an observer standpoint in the dialogue between
the two competing voices; she does not privilege any of the worlds. The novel is resolved not
with a reconciliation but with a simultaneous existence of the two worlds in the character of Tee.
This concept of duality in the character of the protagonist represents a refinement of the
traditional bildungsroman where the hero ‘matures’ into the society. Also Hodges uses a heroine
and also employs themes that might seem alien to the traditional bildungsroman of the 18th
century German society.
The term bildungsroman with reference to Anglophone literature has acquired various
meaning from those associated with German post-Enlightenment literature. There have been

18. 18
opinions that the German subcategories of the genre, such has Entwicklungsroman,
Erziehungsroman and Kunstleroman, have been “far less rigid” in British literature (Buckley 13)
and that “the emphasis in English bildungsroman is on “activity” rather than reflection (Hardin
xxv). An additional point is that non-German bildungsroman generally tends to underscore the
social situations of their protagonists (Minden 122). English literatures like – Emma (1816), Jane
Eyre (1847), The Mill on the Floss (1860), David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations
(1861), Jude the Obscure (1895), have all indicated signs of paradigm shift of the traditional
form of the genre. These narratives have shown, unlike the traditional bildungsroman, that
personal maturation is not just about “social integration and development but also conflict and
rebellion” (Okuyade 3).
Considering these differences, the notion that the bildungsroman should incorporate
humanist ideals of 18th
and 19th
century Germany is insignificant. Furthermore the idea of
proposing a typical plot structure for a whole literary genre appears impracticable and it would
be surprising for someone to provide an outline that is applicable to bildungsroman from all
literary periods and contexts. From the foregoing, it can therefore be concluded that there could
exist several variants and modulations of the genre such that it becomes something of a problem
to state specifically what a bildungsroman is. These variants in a way exemplify the social,
cultural and political ethos of the society and age they represent. This modulation is usually as a
result of the need for the writers to capture the experiences of a people in a society and also
channel a possible way out of the miasma. Citing reasons for this variation, Boes observes:
The rise of feminist, post-colonial and minority studies during the
1980s and 90s led to an expansion of the traditional bildungsroman
definition; the genre was broadened to include coming-of-age
narratives that bear only cursory resemblance to nineteenth-century
European models. In the wake of this expansion, scholars of

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modernism began to see their period as an era of transition from
traditional metropolitan novels of formation and social affirmation
to increasingly global and fragmentary narratives of transformation
and rebellion (231).
Thus, from the statement of Boes above, it is deducible that the changes in the demands of
twentieth century necessitated the inflection of the traditional genre to accommodate the
yearnings of the twentieth century such that certain traditional features of the genre seem to be
giving way for new ones that best address pressing issues.
In the twentieth century, the genre has been particularly popular among women and
minority writers and it has gained numerous proponents round the world. Female bildungsroman
is not a new concept, although it started receiving scholarly attention in the middle of the 20th
century. Its tradition has been linked with the increase in the female middle-class readership of
the 18th
and 19th
centuries (Feng 10-11). According to Abel, Hirsh and Langland,
Women’s increased sense of freedom in this century, when
women’s experience has begun to approach that of the traditional
male Bildungsheld, finds expression in a variety of fictions.
Although […] the evolution of a coherent self […] has come under
attack in modernist and avant-garde fiction, this assumption
remains cogent for women writers who now for the first time find
themselves in a world increasingly responsive to their needs (13).
Thus, female writers document the societal constraints on their being and struggle to “voice their
aspiration” (7). These characters not only break from parental control but also marital “authority”
(12). Though these features seem to be a break from the traditional form of the bildungsroman, it
nonetheless share certain attributes with the old form. In the words of Abel, Hirsch and
Langland:
While emphasizing gender differences, our definition shares common
ground with the presuppositions and generic features of the traditional
bildungsroman: belief in a coherent self (although not necessarily an
autonomous one); faith in the possibility of development (although change

20. 20
may be frustrated, may occur at different stages and rates, and may be
concealed in the narrative); insistence on a time span in which
development occurs (although the time span may exist only in memory);
and emphasis on social context (even as an adversary). (14)
This definition of the female bildungsroman tends to be Eurocentric by “showing signs of the
unconscious cultural hegemony of early feminist criticism which centres on white, middle-class
women’s issues” (Feng 13). It may not be applicable to novels from other contexts; but it can be
regarded as a starting point for subsequent expansion of the bildungsroman’s generic features.
Traditionally, the bildungsroman is known to focus on a character’s development from
childhood to adulthood. However, some novels within the genre have been noticed to feature
more than one protagonist and have been labeled the “double” or “dual” bildungsroman. Buckley
remains the first to identify this structure with reference to The Mill on the Floss, which traces
the development of a brother and sister (Feng 51). Also Abel et. al. claim in The Voyage In, that
this style is a common variant in novels focusing on female characters because women are “more
embedded psychologically in relationship” and therefore sometimes ‘share their formative
voyage with friends, sisters or mothers who also occupy similar spots as protagonists” (Abel,
Hirsch, Langland 12). Critics have also posited that the male-female combination reveals a
“critique of the gender dichotomy imposed by society” (Feng 51). This style also extends to
postcolonial literature. In the postcolonial bildungsroman, similar effect of the double
bildungsroman is achieved by using two characters of different social and racial background
(52).
Just as the bildungsroman has been made to accommodate female protagonists over the
last few decades, it has also been proven that the authors and foci of this long narrative genre do
not have to be Europeans and Eurocentric. Interest in postcolonial writing has revealed that

21. 21
numerous novels from other cultural contexts focus on a protagonist’s identity formation in a
similar manner as the traditional bildungsroman. Postcolonial writers have adapted the European
literary form either “consciously or unconsciously, to tell their stories” (LeSeur 21). LeSeur
observes several thematic parallels as she highlights the distinctiveness of the postcolonial
variant:
Protagonists within both forms may share gender, age “provinciality,” surrogate
parentage, and education. They may also leave home, experience isolation, experience debasing
or exulting sexual experiences, move to the city or enlightened place, change and transform […]
Yet, for Black children the incidents and subsequent responses are different from those of White
children, perhaps because the authors (Black/White) use different styles of presentation.
(LeSeur19)
A different approach to bildungsroman is provided in Mark Stein’s Black British
Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004). This approach differs with respect to cultural
contexts and thematic concern. Contrasting it with Buckley’s outline of a bildungsroman’s
structure, he disputes that the move from country to city is rarely found in those novels, many of
which feature protagonists already born and raised in London or other cities, and that
generational conflict usually possesses a cultural component since the characters’ parents are
immigrants (25). Also, Stein regards the “feature of finding a voice and the relationship between
the individual and a larger group as the main distinction from the traditional bildungsroman”
(30).
Concurrently, African writers from the 19th
century tend to employ a narrative genre that
looks so similar to the European bildungsroman, but which on a closer look, there seems to be

22. 22
certain variations. It seems however that the African writers have mastered and re-written a
“western-oriented narrative form within a postcolonial context to account for African
experience” (Okuyade 142). Okuyade lucidly states that:
The writers manipulate and modify the bildungsroman so as to draw attention to the
specific experience of the postcolonial African child within a particular historical socio-cultural
background –the novels boldly reveal the complexities of identity formation in postcolonial
contexts. The postcolonial African bildungsroman therefore serves as a modern framework of
artistic expression within the broad spectrum of African narratives to account for the African
experience. The traditional bildungsroman has been potentially domesticated within a
postcolonial context to appraise narratives of growth (9).
This concept of the domestication of the genre is not just peculiar to African literature; it
seems to have been adopted by different literary cultures and each adoption witnesses a
modification of the traditional form. This domestication of the genre in Africa has been
attributed to various reasons, one of which is the need to address the devastatingly unpromising
cultural, socio-political and economic disorder characteristic of the postcolonial African setting.
The inability of postcolonial leaders and military rulers to create an environment of political and
economic bliss has made:
Third-generation writers feel a demand to construct their own
values from the only material available to them- the events of their
personal lives […] this generation of writers have withdrawn from
nationalism; thus from the 1990s, almost every first novel appears
to be a novel dealing with the topic of adolescence ( Okuyade141).
Ebele Eko identifies the theme of growing up as a major feature of African novels (especially
those coming from Nigeria). She opines that Nigerian novelists are “actually describing the
world around them, the events of their growing-up years” (45). Since the novelist, in the words

23. 23
of Helen Chukwuma, “arouses in the reader a true sense of himself, evoking his past and linking
it with the present” (vi), The African writer “recreates the problems and efforts of a people
creating a viable culture in response to the demands of their environment and it gives frequent
insights into the effect on men of the culture they have created” (Izevbaye 17). It thus becomes
observable that literature and contemporary events which serve as one of its artistic mine cannot
be separated.
The African form of the bildungsroman presents a growth process that is not fully
physical, neither is it “wholly psychological but established on the attainment of cognition”
(Okuyade 3). Thus, importance is on the process of maturation rather than the destination. These
novels “dramatize the arduous journey from childhood to maturity” (6), by stressing incessant
negotiation of individual and national identity as a procedure without definite endpoint. Novels
like Tsitsi Dagarembga’s Nervous condition, Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Chris
Abani’s Grace Land, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come, Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and
Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of no Nation are some of the instances of postcolonial African
literatures that shift from the traditional form of the genre due to the political setting and their
socio-cultural contexts. One of the things they have in common is the subject of identity
formation but their adoption of the genre differs. Adichie’s use of the form is a bit ambitious as
she employs the maturation of her character to question the growth of her nation. She constructs
an atmosphere where socio-political foibles are related with patriarchal hegemony. In the process
of attenuating the politics of gender in the family, she places the domestic saga against the
backdrop of national politics. She therefore, in the words of Okuyade, “foregrounds duality as an
important feature of the postcolonial African bildungsroman” (5). Dangarembga scrutinizes the
effects of colonization on the search for identity by Africans who sought to define their

24. 24
personality in a society in transition. She explores biculturalism and its results on a youth
developing in a colonial setting. She creates a peculiar inversion of the bildungsroman by
replacing narratives of singular growth with that of multiple identities.
In these novels, their protagonists start their narratives as personal experiences but as the
story unwinds in the course of the novel, the personal story is overshadowed by the collective
narrative of the African people. This submergence of the private by the collective has given the
narratives a sense of duality in which they serve double purpose of “vacillation between personal
history and representational history” (Kester 6). More so, the traditional form of the
bildungsroman portrays the protagonist identifying with accepted socio-cultural order as signs of
his assimilation into the society. Contrarily, the protagonist of the African variant begins with the
assimilation of the societal values but (s)he eventually breaks away from the stifling dictates of
the society. By this and other features of novelty, these writers have rewritten the European and
Eurocentric genre to suit and operate within the African context. The traditional bildungsroman
has been tamed within a postcolonial milieu to appraise narratives of growth of a people trying to
break away from the shackles of oppression, identity clash, political decadence, and socio-
cultural constraints.
Having considered the views of scholars and critics on the meaning, and nature (both past
and present), of the bildungsroman, it is clear that to give a holistic and conclusive definition of
this genre that would be applicable to all socio-cultural and political contexts would be faulty
because the nature and constituents of a bildungsroman differ from one socio-cultural epoch to
another. The genre has undergone transformations with the radical changes in human society,
political epoch and geographical space. These changes buttress the fact that growth and

25. 25
development are universal human phenomena; what makes the difference is the peculiarity in
how a society experiences its own.
Thus, this study will explore Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-
Yellow beyond the borders of the traditional bildungsroman. It will also attempt to examine and
identify signposts of deviation from the traditional variant. More so, beyond the scope of the
bildungsroman, the postcolonial settings of the novels will be examined and its contribution to
the extension of the genre will be discussed. This research will read this new variant of the
bildungsroman as a postcolonial African trend, with which novelists highlight pressing issues.

26. 26
CHAPTER THREE
Extending the Paradigm: An Evaluation of Everything Good Will Come
This chapter attempts to examine Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come as a
bildungsroman and establish the similarities and signposts of modifications this book possesses.
More so, since Ebele Eko has opined that Nigerian novelists are “actually describing the world
around them; the events of their growing-up years” (45), this chapter will explore the author’s
background and also give a plot summary of the book.
Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1964 to a family of seven including the mother
and father. Her dad, Abdul Aziz Atta, was the Secretary to the Federal Government and Head of
Service until his death eight years after Sefi was born. Sefi Atta attended Queen’s College,
Lagos, and later Millfield, England. In 1985 she graduated from Birmingham University and was
trained as a chartered accountant. She relocated from England to the United States in 1994 with
her husband, Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor and son of Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. They
have one daughter and currently live in Mississippi.
She began writing while working as a certified public accountant in New York, and in
2001, she graduated from a Creative Writing programme at Antioch University, Los Angeles.
Her works have been nominated for and have won several awards. She won the Noma Awards
for publishing in 2009, the Wole Soyinka Prize for literature in Africa in 2006, the Red Hen
Press Short Story Award in 2003, among many others. She also served as visiting writer in 2006
at the University of Southern Mississippi and also in 2008 at Northwestern University. Her
books have been translated into several languages. Everything Good will Come was published in
2005.

27. 27
Everything Good will Come presents the story of a young girl, Enitan, born at the time of
Nigeria’s independence in 1960. The story starts in post-civil war Nigeria (1971), and Enitan, a
young girl of eleven years is ensconced in a divided home where the mother is married to her
religion as a result of the death of her brother who dies of a sickle cell disease; her father
Bandele Sunday Taiwo on the other hand is an accomplished lawyer who tries to raise in a
masculine manner. Due to her being the only child and the death of her brother, her parents give
strict orders that restrict her childhood. Despite the orders and restrictions of her mother, Enitan
leaves their house on Sundays to play with the sassy girl next door. Sheri is a rebellious girl who
becomes Enitan’s friend for a while until their friendship takes a drastic swerve one Sunday
when they both attend a party and Sheri is raped by some boys. This incidence of rape leads to a
partial termination of their friendship. Also it leads to Sheri being hospitalized because she
attempts to give herself an abortion with a hanger.
Enitan moves to London to further her education and hears news of Sheri as a beauty
queen. She later returns to Lagos after her education to stay with his father and work for him.
She meets Mike during her national youth service days and they start a relationship. She later
reconnects with Sheri whom she meets during a ten mile run of endurance test. Her relationship
with Mike is short lived as she catches Mike in bed with another lady. She becomes heartbroken
and hateful of men. However, she lets down her guard and gradually moves closer to a man
called Niyi Franco. This relationship leads to marriage with Enitan moving in with Niyi. At first
there is love and tranquility but their relationship soon hit the rock when Enitan is reluctant to
carry a child and also finds it difficult to cope with Niyi’s demanding ways. Niyi wants Enitan to
take charge of her matrimonial duties by staying at home. Enitan complains about the limitation
of women which is as a result of social beliefs and customs. Niyi on the other hand does not have

28. 28
a problem with her as long as she puts up “wifely” appearances whenever his family members
are around.
Meanwhile, Enitan’s father’s political outspokenness in the face of tyrannical military
rule continues to endanger his life and leads to his eventual arrest. On the arrest of her father,
Enitan is left in charge of his law firm and employers. Being unprepared for this, coupled with
the frustrations from home, she finds it very difficult to cope. During the detention of her father
she meets Grace Ameh, a journalist with whom she was subsequently jailed due to their
“disobedience of public order” (258). Despite her pregnancy, Enitan continues to fight for the
release of his father and joins political activism against the wishes of her husband.
During the absence of her father, Enitan experiences double shock with the discovery that
her father had been having extramarital affairs which has yielded a son and the death of her
mother. She gives birth to a girl and walks out of her marriage on the Thanksgiving Day. The
story ends with her moving into her mother’s apartment and the release of her father and other
detainees from prison.
Like the traditional bildungsroman, the novel chronicles the development of Enitan and
from a state of youthful naivety where she believes everything she is told. In her words:
From the beginning I believe everything I was told, downright lies
even, about how best to behave, although I had my own
inclinations. At age ten when other Nigerian girls were master at
ten-ten, the game in which we stamped our feet in rhythm and try
to outwit partners with knee jerks, my favourite moments were
spent sitting on a jetty pretending to fish (11).
From the excerpt, the character’s naivety is slammed in the reader’s face. She affirms her
gullibility by believing everything, even “downright lies about how best to behave”. More so, the
fact that the main character experiences a kind of confinement on “how best to behave” is highly

29. 29
reminiscent of the traditional variant of the bildungsroman where the protagonist suffers due to
stifling prescribed social demands even though he has a different proclivity just as Enitan has
other inclinations too.
Also, it takes the course of a protagonist’s formative years from childhood to adulthood
and this child, according to Buckley, is expected to be of “some sensibilities growing up in a
country or provincial town” (Buckley 17). Sefi Atta starts Everything Good will Come when
Enitan is barely eleven, in fact one can conclude she is ten years old with the statement “At age
ten when other Nigerian girls were master at ten-ten, the game in which we stamped our feet in
rhythm and try to outwit partners with knee jerks, my favourite moments were spent sitting on a
jetty pretending to fish” (11). Although the story starts with young Enitan, it ends with a different
Enitan who has weathered different storms that helped in shaping her into a matured and resolute
woman.
Trends of the bildungsroman are not visible only in the character of Enitan; they are also
inherent in the character of her childhood friend, Sheri. In fact with instances in the book, a
reader is bound to conclude that Sheri represents in many ways the traits of a classical
bildungsroman protagonist than Enitan. The novel starts with both Sheri and Enitan at the age of
ten. They both witness growths but in different ways. Just like the classical protagonist, Sheri
starts out in the novel as a rebel against almost everything. Enitan describes her influence on her
thus:
Sheri had led me to the gap between parental consent and
disapproval. I would learn how to bridge it with deception, wearing
a face as pious as a church sister before my mother and altering
steadily behind her. There was a name mama had for children like
Sheri. They were omo-ita (47).

30. 30
She experiences a debasing sexual encounter with the incidence of the rape just like the
protagonist is expected to go through a humiliating sexual relationship that would help in his
process of maturation. Sheri also changes with the incidence of rape as she never remained the
same rebellious and sassy little girl. In the same vein, she finally personifies the characteristics of
the traditional variant of the genre when she eventually reconciles with the society by
understanding and accepting the dictates of the society on her gender. This incidence of rape
affects not only Sheri but it is of immense effect on Enitan as well. It gives her a glimpse of how
the society regards women and it made her realize the oppressive and stifling dictates of the
society on her gender. She affirms the belief of the society when she says: “Bad girls got raped.
We all knew. Loose girls, forward girls, raw, advanced girls. Laughing with boys…” (68). This
puts her at a discordant position with the patriarchal setting and demands of the society.
Sefi Atta seems to extend the traditional features of the bildungsroman to suit her aim of
addressing issues of identity and place of women in postcolonial Nigeria. She subverts the notion
that the bildungsroman is all “European, male, and bourgeois” (Okuyade 1). She writes a book
that discusses issues pertaining to postcolonial Nigeria and situates two young girls whose
different maturation process is against the larger backdrop of Nigeria’s postcolonial miasma.
Unlike the traditional bildungsroman in which the protagonist is usually a young male of some
sensibilities, Sefi Atta’s main characters are female. She also feminises the genre by writing
about women and their place in the society. She also uses female protagonists in the stead of a
male character as it is common with the bildungsroman of Goethe and Schiller.
The use of female characters, and the fact that she wrote about the development female
characters, buttresses Ogaga Okuyade’s claim in his essay - The Postcolonial African
bildungsroman: Extending the Paradigm that:

31. 31
African female writers have artistically complexified the structural
pattern and function of the bildungsroman to articulate the
asymmetric gender configuration in Africa, most especially to
enunciate the fact that the subordination of the women is not
sudden or transitional, gradually.(4)
The character of Sheri best proves this point. She is portrayed as a victim of patriarchal
brainwashing even at the tender age of 11. Her conversation with Enitan reveals this as Enitan
says:
“I want to be something like… like president.”
She replies- Eh? Women are not presidents.
“Why not?” retorted Enitan. “Our men won’t stand for it.
Who will cook for your husband?”(33).
This exchange goes a long way to reveal that although Sheri is of tender age, she has
been programmed to believe certain roles and positions are not meant for women; that women
should not take up roles that would endanger their matrimonial duties. This conversation is
revealing of how the children have perceived the things that would eventually change their lives.
Sheri eventually grows into the society while Enitan falls out of the society by choosing not to be
imprisoned in the stifling and oppressive dictates of the society on her gender.
The growth process of Enitan also deviates from what obtains in the traditional variant of
the genre. In the traditional variant of the genre, the protagonist gets the opportunity to travel
away from home to an urban area in the quest for independence. Although Enitan travels abroad,
it was not meant to assert her independence. She travels abroad to study because it was the
“fashion in the seventies” (77). More so, according to Labovitz, it is usually the case that
“bildungsroman with female protagonist(s) requires expansion beyond the point when the
heroine is married, for up until this point of maturation the heroine has no sharp delineation of
herself or her role, taking her identity from the man she marries, and wavering between self-

32. 32
narrowing and growth” (194). Enitan’s growth does not end with her marriage to Niyi Franco,
rather, it is her marriage to him that catalyses her decision to break the barrier of social constraint
on women. Unlike the male bildungsroman where the maturation of the protagonist usually ends
with marriage, Atta uses marriage as the catalyst that would eventually lead to the protagonist’s
full assertion of independence.
Another difference from traditional bildungsroman is the subject of gender and sexual
inequality. Everything Good will Come is replete with instances of a gender construct that
favours patriarchy. In the novel, the protagonists struggle to be heard in a male dominated world.
Consequently, the theme of equality between both sexes is raised in the novel. Enitan exclaims
that “How could I defer to a man whose naked buttocks I’d seen? touched? Obey him without
choking on my humility… (184). She revolts against the prescribed roles for women when she
says:
I’d seen the Metamorphosis of women; how age slowed their
expressions… they hid their discontent so other women won’t
deprive them of it. By the time they came of age millions of
personalities were channeled into about three prototypes: the
strong and silent, chatterbox but cheerful, weak and kindhearted…
I wanted to tell everyone, I! Am! Not! Satisfied with these options!
(197).
This attempt to even the scale of gender in the novel is dissimilar to traditional bildungsroman
where the only thing the protagonist usually grapples with is social equality.
More so, she takes her appropriation of the genre to another when she uses the growth
process of her protagonist to interrogate that of her nation. Thus, socio-political problems are
explored as analogous to themes of patriarchal dominance. Both become related forms of
domination over subservient categories. The growth processes of Enitan and Sheri are told
against the larger backdrop of the tumultuous political milieu of post-independence Nigeria. The

33. 33
autocratic military government unjustly detains Enitan and Grace Ameh because they choose to
fight for liberation. They detain them on the flimsy basis of “disobedience of public order” (258).
The protagonists are not only faced with suppression from the opposite gender but are also
muffled by the rule of a tyrannically autocratic military regime.
According to Okuyade, “Atta’s narrative like Adichie’s is a bildungsroman that conflates
the search for an autonomous female identity with the quest for a meaningful national
identity”(5). The maturation of Enitan seems to be concurrent with that of her nation. The peak
of her maturation is seen when she moves out of her matrimonial home and decides to live above
the social standard for her gender. This happens to coincide with the time her country witnesses a
kind of transition which is characterized by the release of her father from prison. Her assertion of
independence coincides with the release of her father. This action of release seems to spur a
sense of optimism in the mind of Enitan who feels everything good can still come to her and her
country. With this, the novel ends with the protagonist in an unusual joyous mood which makes
everybody perceive her as mad:
“Maybe she’s mad”, someone offered
“Are you mad? The driver asked…” (326)
The extension of the paradigm which the title of this chapter suggests is to the effect that
the growths of the main characters of the novel under study seem to expand the borders of the
traditional bildungsroman. This extension of the paradigm is not limited to the growth processes
alone; it is observed in the character mode, themes and other aspects of the narrative. Sefi Atta
has appropriated the genre and made it answer questions peculiar to post-colonial Nigeria and
Africa at large. Her appropriation of the genre allows for the answering of questions the
traditional variant might not be able to answer due to its Eurocentricism and male chauvinism.

34. 34

35. 35
CHAPTER FOUR
Writing Differently: Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow as a bildungsroman
This chapter examines Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow and tries to read it as a new variant
of the German bildungsroman. In doing this, the background of the author will be highlighted
and a plot summary of the novel will be given.
Kaine Agary grew up in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She has lived in the United State of
America and now lives in Lagos, Nigeria. She is currently the editor of TAKAii magazine.
Yellow-Yellow is her first work of fiction.
Yellow- Yellow tells the story of seventeen year old Zilayefa whose nickname, Yellow
Yellow, is the eponym of the novel. Being a half caste of a Greek father and a Nigerian mother,
she never got to know her father as he had already sailed away before her birth. Left with only
her complexion to associate her with her estranged father, she faces the stigma and prejudice that
is associated with “born-troways” like her.
Set in a country fraught with frustrations and deprivations, the novel details the story of
Laye as she is called by some, as she wishes to make a way out of the despair and squalor around
the Niger-Delta. She hopes and prays for a possible escape from the sufferings in the oil region.
Suffocated by the impoverishment and the lack of adventure in her village, she longs for an
exploration of the city and does not give much thought to the alternative of education her mother
had for her. According to her, “I did not care much about finishing school; I just wanted to leave
the village. The sameness of life in the village would kill me if I did not escape”. (10)

36. 36
It did not take long before an idea springs up in her juvenile mind on how to escape. She
plans to leave her village for town when people from her village who reside in the city come
home for functions. It was on one of these occasions that she meets Sergio- an antique dealer
who is a friend of the family of the Semokes. The Semoke family had come to bury their
Patriarch, Chief Semoke. Sergio, being a friend of the family, had accompanied them to the
village and it was during this time that he bonded with Laye. They tryst and Zilayefa was
beginning to put hope in Sergio when he disappeared without notice.
She summons courage and tells her mother she would like to try out her luck in the city
of Port Harcourt. At first her mother refuses on the grounds that she has no place to stay and that
the city is no place for her innocent soul. Eventually she secures a link with a relation in the city
and travels to Port Harcourt. She is thrown aback by the life in the city, the convenience, the
luxury, the poverty and the frustrations that have become “second skin” to the denizens of the
city. She settles in Port Harcourt and it was not long before she becomes the protégé of Lolo, a
younger friend of her benefactor, Sisi.
Zilayefa meets Admiral Amalayefa through Lolo with whom she had gone to decorate his
house in preparation for his birthday party. After the party, she reunites with Admiral and they
both begin their discreet escapade of sex. She is jolted back to reality when she becomes
pregnant and Admiral shows no concern to keep the baby. She later discovers she could not tell
the father of the foetus in her womb as she had already had a fling with Sergio when they met
earlier in the city of Port Harcourt. The novel ends with her coming to a realization of her
mistakes of not heeding her mother’s advice; she aborts the pregnancy and attempts to retrace
her steps.

37. 37
Like the traditional bildungsroman, the novel tells the story of a young Zilayefa growing
up in an oil rich village; it captures the dissatisfaction of the naïve protagonist with the limitation
associated with life in the village. Just as Buckley suggests that loss or dissatisfaction that is in
form of social or intellectual constraint jars the protagonist away from home and family (17),
Zilayefa travels to the city of Port Harcourt in a bid to escape the uninspiring life in the village.
In her words, “the sameness of life in the village would kill me if I did not escape” (10). She
eventually leaves for Port Harcourt after she convinces her mother that life in the village does not
have much in store for her. Although she convinces her mother, her mother has misgivings about
her departure from the village.
Aside from embarking on a journey from the village to the city, the main character of a
traditional bildungsroman is expected to have a figure in the society who serves as a mentor to
his juvenile mind. Zilayefa finds tutelage under the guarded and protective watch of Lolo who
takes her as protégé and educates her on how to survive in the city without overstepping her
bounds.
More so, another point of convergence with the traditional bildungsroman is seen in
Zilayefa’s emotional flight to books. She says “I read because the books took me to other worlds
and made me forget my own reality.” Just as the hero in a traditional bildungsroman finds solace
in books, Laye also flees to the solace Mr. Diseye books offer in a bid to escape the suffocation
of her village.
Converging with the traditional bildungsroman, the novel reveals Zilayefa as she matures
into the society after realising her mistakes. She starts out as a rebel against her mother and her
society only to realise in the end that her mother had been right after all. The novel ends with her

38. 38
making the decision to retrace her steps and live right. Just as the hero in a traditional
bildungsroman reconciles with the society, Zilayefa also grows into her society.
The novel shows Laye as she experiences the stark reality of living as a half caste in the
Niger Delta. She realizes that most of the people carry a prejudiced notion that all half castes are
products of wanton, conceited and undisciplined women. She voices her realization thus:
I came to understand that people had preconceived notions about
others of mixed race- they thought we were conceited,
promiscuous and confused. A mixed race woman in a position of
power must have gotten there by her looks. She was not there
because she was intelligent. There was even less regard for born-
troways such as me. We were products of women of easy virtue
who did not have morals to pass on to their children. (74)
She grows out of her naivety as a village girl who knows next to nothing about what her
circumstance as a half caste offers her. She says, “Folks in my hometown knew me as Yellow-
Yellow, but I never thought much about the circumstances of my existence until I got to Port
Harcourt. In Port Harcourt, being yellow defined my interactions with the people I met”. (74)
Although this novel exhibits certain traits that govern the traditional bildungsroman, there
is however traits of deviations from what obtain in the traditional form of the narrative. Unlike
the traditional bildungsroman that oozes Eurocentric and phallocentric ideals, this novel is about
the identity of women in postcolonial Africa. The traditional bildungsroman is characterized by a
naive male protagonist that rebels against society as a result of social and intellectual constraints
on his being. Agary’s Yellow-Yellow, on the other hand, pictures a young girl of mixed race who
grows to realize her place as a half caste in the oil rich region of Niger Delta. Kaine Agary
changes the garb of the novelistic genre by subverting its Eurocentricism and phallocentricism.

39. 39
More so, she takes her appropriation of the genre to another level when she uses the
growth process of her protagonist to interrogate that of her nation. Thus, socio-political problems
are explored as being analogous to the dilemma of identity Zilayefa encounters in Port Harcourt.
The novel starts on a negative note for Laye and her mother as their only means of survival is
despoiled by crude oil. She talks of the effect of the oil spill on her existence thus:
The day my mother’s farmland was overrun by crude oil was the
day her dream for me started to wither, but she carried on watering
it with hope. The black oil that spilled that day swallowed my
mother’s crops and unraveled the threads that held together her
fantasies for me. (10)
A close study of the novel reveals that most of the problems of female characters are
related to the socio-political decadence in the country. The limitation and denigration females
encounter in the novel is mostly as a result of economic short handedness which seems to
pervade every corner of the country. Laye reveals in a part of the novel:
I could find my way to a place like Bonny, a base of expatriate
working for the oil companies, and sell my body to a whitey. Some
girls from my village in order to send money home to their
families. They all the same look, whether they sold themselves in
Warri, Bonny, or in Port Harcourt (35).
Agary gives the impression that Zilayefa’s experiences is interwoven with that of her
nation, such that the toil this experience takes on her is a microcosm of the larger effects on the
citizenry. She says “things were such that, with frustrations weighing heavily on everyone, even
those who prided themselves on being easygoing and having no enemies were dragged into
miniwars” (106). This interwoven relationship is noticed when Zilayefa speaks of the paternal
void she battles with as being related to the unrest in the country. In her words, “Inside me was
my personal turmoil over Plato and outside was the turmoil of a nation… communities were
fighting over who legitimately own what land after more local government were created…”

40. 40
(109). All these buttress the fact that with Yellow-Yellow, Kaine Agary has modified the
traditional bildungsroman to suit feminine and postcolonial African purposes.
Thus, unlike the western traditional variant, this form of the genre, according to
Jameson’s theoretical thesis, is allegorical (234). This is in the sense that the book serves as a
form of national allegory that is directly linked with the political milieu unlike texts of the
traditional variants that privilege the private and the libidinal. The novel confirms Jameson’s
assertion that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third-world culture and society” (320). The story of Zilayefa’s growth
eventually becomes the story of the turmoil and unrest in Nigeria. Little wonder, her maturation
and resolution to retrace her steps coincides with the welcomed transition happening in her
country. She hopes “however if I lived, it was an opportunity for a personal rebirth along with
Nigeria”. (177)
Thus, Yellow- Yellow as a new variant of the bildungsroman evinces the notion of the
new wine in an antiquated keg. There appears to be an infusion of new ideals into the scope of
the old genre; a redefinition of the novelistic genre to suit postcolonial African situations.

41. 41
CHAPTER FIVE
Comparative analysis of Everything Good will Come and Yellow-Yellow
This chapter is concerned with the examination of both Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will
Come and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow with a view to establishing areas where these texts share
convergences and deviations in their appropriation of the bildungsroman.
It has been mentioned that traditional bildungsroman are novels of formation that depict
the maturation process of a young protagonist from a state of naivety to a state of cognition.
Usually, the protagonist rebels against the status quo and journeys away from home as a result of
social and intellectual constraint on his being; he eventually reconciles with the society after
facing realities that lead to his maturation. Also mentioned is the fact that writers from different
parts of the globe have extended and modified the scope of the genre to suit their aims. Due to
their modifications, new variants of the bildungsroman represent the experiences of people in
different geographical and sociopolitical settings.
Both Everything Good will Come and Yellow-Yellow by Sefi Atta and Kaine Agary
respectively, qualify as bildungsroman. They are both concerned with the developmental
processes of their main characters that progress from a state of youthful naivety to a higher state
of cognition having been faced with realities within their societies. However, these novels
possess features that situate them within the scope of new bildungsroman. Enitan in Sefi Atta’s
novel comes to the realisation that the only way to assert her freedom in the patriarchal society
she finds herself is to live above societal prescription. Thus, she moves out of her matrimonial
home on the “Thanksgiving Day” of her baby. This is unlike the German bildungsroman where
the protagonist grows into the society.

42. 42
Zilayefa in Yellow-Yellow starts out as a naïve village half caste who knows next to
nothing about the socio-cultural realities of her complexion until she reaches the city of Port
Harcourt. In the city she realises that her society carries a prejudiced notion in its relationship
with people of mixed race. She also realises that aside from the pleasure her body offers to
businessmen and merchants in the city, she is of no significant value in the society. She realises
that the only way to assert her value and significance is to begin again and face her education
squarely. Here, the protagonist is a girl unlike the traditional bildungsroman that revolves around
the growth process of a boy.
The two novels possess points of convergences and also areas of deviations as new
bildungsroman. One of the first points of convergence in the novels is the setting. Both novels
are set in postcolonial Nigeria and both stories unfold during the military regime. They both
discuss the socio-political situation of things during the despotic military rule in Nigeria. Also
the stories and situations in Yellow-Yellow and Everything Good will Come are peculiarly and
particularly African unlike the traditional variant of the narrative genre which has been criticised
for being Eurocentric.
Closely related to setting, is the thematic preoccupation of the two novels, both novels
are concerned with the theme of female identity in postcolonial Nigeria. Sefi Atta and Kaine
Agary both capture the snags the Nigerian girl child faces while growing up in postcolonial
Nigeria. Yellow-Yellow and Everything Good will Come presents the story of female protagonists
who grapple with their identities while coming of age in post-independence Nigeria. Kaine
Agary and Sefi Atta both share convergence in their appropriation of the genre by depicting
female protagonists unlike the traditional idea of the male protagonist. In addition, although both
Enitan and Zilayefa exist in different worlds, they both had their share of naivety.

43. 43
However, these novels diverge in certain areas of their modifications of the
bildungsroman. For instance, Sefi Atta places two female protagonists in the heart of her story.
Her novel chronicles the progression of two intimate friends against the stark realities of their
society. She takes her deviation from the traditions of the bildungsroman to another level with
the introduction of not one female protagonist but two. Her contemporary, Kaine Agary,
however uses just the character of Zilayefa to pass across her message. Unlike Everything Good
will Come, Yellow-Yellow presents the story of a single protagonist, Laye, as she matures in the
city of Port Harcourt. This reflects a point of divergence between the two texts.
Also another point of divergence in the two novels is noticed in their discourse of the
subject of female identity formation. For Yellow-Yellow, Kaine Agary interweaves the subject of
female identity with the squalor in the Niger Delta. She populates her novel mostly with female
characters who strive to break free from the shackles of poverty and not the domination of men.
She reveals this through the words of the protagonist:
I could find my way to a place like Bonny, a base of expatriate
working for the oil companies, and sell my body to a whitey. Some
girls from my village in order to send money home to their
families. They all the same look, whether they sold themselves in
Warri, Bonny, or in Port Harcourt (35).
The need to survive and rise above the economic paucity and squalor of the protagonist’s
environment seems to be the major concern of most of the female characters in the novel. Even
Zilayefa’s mother struggles to educate her because she sees her education as their liberation from
the squalor of their village. She says of her mother:
It was almost as though she was obsessed, consumed by the idea
that my education would save me from what I had yet to
understand and what she could not explain to me. Perchance in
saving me, she hoped to save herself (9).

44. 44
Thus, for Agary, female limitation in the novel is not as a result of male domination, but more of
an economic short handedness. This is probably why most of the female characters in a bid to
break from this prevalent social and economic squalor resort to demeaning means of livelihood.
This eventually leads to them being taken advantage of by men. In short, Agary blames the status
of women on economic limitation rather than patriarchal dominance.
On the other hand, Atta relates the problems of female identity with both male hegemony
and the despotism in politics, such that she parallels the discomfort Enitan experiences at home
with that which the citizens experience under the military regime. She intricately narrates both
experiences as forms of subjugation of docile groups of individuals. Little wonder Enitan’s father
is released shortly after she moves out of her matrimonial home. With this coincidence, Atta
appears to say that a radical break from tradition is the only way to better development and
progress. Enitan speaks thus:
Freedom was never intended to be sweet. It was a responsibility
from the onset, for a people, a person, to fight for and hold on to.
In my new life, this meant that there were bills to pay alone;
memories to rock and lay to rest; regrets to snatch and return; tears,
which always did clear my eyes (321).
Sefi Atta’s representation of the status of the female casts a spiteful shadow over the
male gender. She casts the image of man in a negative light in the novel. It was boys who
committed the gruesome act of rape on Sheri. It was also men who were unfaithful and
unsympathetic to Enitan in all of her relationships. Even her father whom she reveres at the
beginning of the story eventually enters into disrepute on her discovery of a brother whom she
never knew existed. Sefi Atta seems to pile the travails and denigration of females on the
patriarchal society. She blames the male gender for the problems of women. Unlike Agary who

45. 45
does not believe that patriarchy is the sole cause of female oppression, Atta blames the
subjugation and oppression of females on the patriarchal nature of the society.
More so, Atta employs the genre to state that the society is ‘anti-female’ and thus affects
the maturation of the girl. She however posits through her female protagonists that the only way
the woman can assert her freedom in such a male-centred society is by living above the society’s
prescription for the female gender. She drives home her point when both Sheri and Enitan move
away from their roles as mistress and wife respectively. They both move out to assert their
autonomy from crippling patriarchal limitation. Contrariwise, Agary preaches a different
recourse to problems of female half-caste identity, with the regrets and resolutions of Zilayefa,
she prescribes that the female child adheres by admonishment and advice of the experienced
females in the society. She tends to say if Laye had listened to her mother and taken to the advice
of Lolo, she would not have fallen victim of men’s desire.
Besides, unlike Agary who seems more concerned with the identity of the female half-
caste, Atta encompasses, within her novel, the travails and ordeals of both Nigerian females.
Both of her characters, Sheri and Enitan, represent different castes in the society and thus suffer
different forms of male suppression. Sheri as a girl of double parental heritage experiences a
different form of male dominance. Most men see her as an object of sexual gratification just like
Agary’s Zilayefa because of her skin colour. Her experience is almost similar to that of Laye in
Yellow-Yellow, only that she has a firsthand experience of male suppression while Laye suffers
mostly from economic short-handedness.
Sefi Atta presents a more holistic story than Kaine Agary. She does not limit her story to
a particular caste and region of the Nigerian society. Rather, she ensures that her protagonists

46. 46
belong to different castes in the society and also these protagonists interact with other regions of
Nigeria. Enitan and Sheri belong to different castes in the society. Sheri is half caste and this
makes her situation quite different from Enitan’s. Agary on the other hand has written a story
that can be read as strictly Niger-Deltan. She pays extra attention to the squalor in the region by
interweaving the status of her female characters with the economic paucity of the region.
This exploration reveals that these two novels fall under the category of female
bildungsroman in which issues pertaining to the identity and status of the female gender is
discussed. Although these novels share common grounds as modifications to the German
bildungsroman, their authors go about the appropriation in different ways. While Sefi Atta uses
two characters to prove her point of male suppression, Agary employs a single protagonist to
reveal that female problems are not always as a result of male hegemony, but rather as a result of
economic paucity (especially the case of women in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria).

47. 47
CHAPTER SIX
Conclusion
The two novels studied in this research qualify as bildungsroman. This is because each
documents the procession of maturation of its protagonist(s). However, these novels do not fully
represent examples of the traditional German bildungsroman, because they possess certain
features that do not agree with the traditional mode of the genre. First, in lieu of the usual male
protagonist associated with German bildungsroman, these novels presents female characters as
protagonists. Also, the traditional bildungsroman is known to be Eurocentric in its
preoccupation. However, both Everything Good will Come and Yellow-Yellow are typical
African novels discussing issues peculiar to Africa. In short, these novels demonstrate an
extension of the borders of the German narrative genre.
Though, these novels share similarity in the fact that they are both examples of the
modifications that has happened to the bildungsroman, they still differ in many significant ways
despite the fact that they are both novels concerned with the identity of women in postcolonial
Nigeria. One can posit that Atta writes a more holistic Nigerian story than Kaine Agary who
seems particularly concerned with the oil rich Niger Delta. Both novelists appropriate the
bildungsroman in their own unique ways. While Sefi Atta uses the genre to accuse patriarchal
society as being anti-feminine, Kaine Agary employs the same genre to reveal the squalor in the
Niger-Delta and how it affects the maturation of the girl child.
However, both novels are replete with instances of challenges to the identity and the
maturation of females. For Agary, the major form of challenge experienced by her female
characters stems from financial insufficiency which permeates the oil rich region. Thus, her

48. 48
characters strive more for financial independence than gender balance. For Atta, her characters
face challenges of gender imbalance in a patriarchal society. Her characters strive more for
gender freedom than financial autonomy.
Thus, both novels are concerned with the challenges faced by women in postcolonial
Nigeria. They also discuss the travails of half castes and the society’s perception of them in
postcolonial African society. In short, these novels can be read as new bildungsroman novels that
domesticate the traditional bildungsroman genre within an African Postcolonial context to serve
as a modern means of documenting the African experience.

49. 49
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