Anglophone Nigerian writer Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms opens up northern Nigerian Hausa society to an international novel-reading audience. His concern with female experience and intimate relationships resonates with the vision of Cassava Republic, the Abuja- and London-based publisher, with whom Ibrahim has collaborated. Both publisher and author are especially concerned with foregrounding romantic love. The investment in romance is, however, riven by an uneasiness about the feminist and literary potential of popular romance. A distinction is made by the author between “love stories” (or popular romance) and “stories about love” (or literary romance), which reflects the assumptions of the publisher about romance. In Season of Crimson Blossoms, the feminist and literary shortcomings of popular romance are implied through the nature of the representation of the littattafan soyayya, or Hausa love stories, read by young women in the novel. The representation of love in the popular romances in the subplot of the novel is compared with the romance of an older woman, the protagonist in the main plot. This essay argues that the distinction made between the two forms of romance rests upon a false dichotomy and that the feminist potential of popular romance, as a genre that embodies hope, is as significant as the feminist potential that may sometimes be found in literary romance.
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