Towards an African Feminist Poetics: An Original Theoretical Contribution from Nigerian Women’s Literary Tradition

African feminist literary theory has produced important critical frameworks, particularly through the work of Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Obioma Nnaemeka, and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, but no comprehensive African feminist poetics, one that addresses the formal literary dimensions of African women's writing as well as its thematic and political content, has yet been developed from within the Nigerian literary tradition. This study developed an original African feminist poetics grounded in a systematic study of Nigerian women's literary production from the 1960s to the present. A theory-building methodology was employed across four stages: systematic review of African feminist literary criticism (62 publications from 1985 to 2024); primary corpus analysis of 35 novels and poetry collections by Nigerian women writers across all six geopolitical zones; structured interviews with 28 Nigerian women writers and feminist literary critics; and expert validation through workshop discussion with 15 scholars. The corpus analysis examined how Nigerian women writers construct narrative voice, use of communal address, integration of oral poetic forms, treatment of female interiority, and formal responses to patriarchal literary conventions. Five original poetic principles were identified as characteristic of Nigerian women's literary tradition: communal female interiority (women's consciousness constructed as inherently social), ancestral voice integration (the presence of female ancestral voices as narrative resource), maternal poetics (the use of maternal language and relationship as formal structure), resistance aesthetics (the use of formal fragmentation as a response to social fragmentation), and spiritual assertiveness (female characters' unmediated access to divine and ancestral power).