Adamma: a contemporary Igbo maiden spirit

African Arts, Autumn, 2003 by Benjamin Hufbauer, Bess Reed

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The play we saw, however, clearly delineates a more ambiguous and complex character. Adamma is a presentation by men of Igbo femininity--glamorized, idealized, parodied, and controlled. While her green, gold, and red metallic body costume with its short skirt emphasizes her luxuriant sensuality, her waist beads indicate that she is marriageable and morally desirable. Together with her makeup and hair beads, Adamma is right on the line between fashionable and outrageous. The play emphasizes that femininity is a performance. The male interpretation of female dance elements undermines the womanly facade of the masquerade, so that Adamma, like other maiden spirits, confuses the division between masculine and feminine. The masculine identity of the performer is tacitly recognized by all except young child ten.

This male-developed story presents women as less morally responsible than men and needing male guidance to live up to their responsibilities. By holding this young woman accountable for the ills that befall her, masculinity is given greater value. Adamma, who stands in for marriageable women generally, makes a terrible mistake in not choosing one of the good men who courted her earlier on. It is she who initiates her marriage to the spirit husband in defiance of Igbo etiquette--for women are supposed to wait until men seek them out. (14) Yet Adamma embraces wifely virtue and works diligently within the bounds of her marriage to the spirit, demonstrating her essentially good female character. Her first marriage, the death of her spirit husband, and her attack by the leopard or monster would have been avoided had she behaved like a proper Igbo woman from the outset.

The palm-wine tapper who becomes Adamma's second husband appears to be a metaphor for men who feel threatened by young women's inappropriate assertiveness in marriage matters. Before her marriage to the spirit, Adamma would surely have rejected this laborer as a suitor, but he wins her by using his gun to demonstrate his virtuous and authoritative masculinity. Adamma's willful femininity would have resulted in disorder, with the animal realm symbolized by the leopard winning out over the human realm safeguarded by men. This is the one moment of the play when Adamma cedes control of the performance arena to the other characters: she stands at the margins while the palm-wine tapper dispatches the leopard. In her second marriage, Adamma seems to accept male authority and becomes a mother, as Igbo women should do.

A quote from an elder in a pamphlet produced for the Mmanwu Festival (1990:13) indicates a desire by many Igbo men to connect gender identity and gender politics with masquerades: "The masquerade institution is what separates men from the women showing us superior to them; it is the only thing that marks-off who is a man and who is a woman." Some men apparently perceive of gender identity as fluid and in need of stabilization. Yet the Adamma masquerade does not offer this stability. Danced and incarnated by a tall man, the lead character is represented as simultaneously female and male. Through parody, femininity is criticized and then idealized, controlled and, finally, playfully indulged. (13) Adamma's concluding flamboyant dance displays suggest that male authority may not control female behavior after all. It blurs the line between "femininity" as enacted by women, and the "feminine" critiqued by male maskers. Because their roles in Adamma chastise women for their vanity and assertiveness, these maskers are allowed to participate in Igbo femininity, normally off limits to men except in the performance of other humorous parodies of women or the maiden-spirit masquerades that honor virtuous female ancestors.