The 30 million Hausa of northern Nigeria have a history going back more than a 1,000 years. Theirs is a rich and vibrant culture, but also a patriarchal one. And in recent years, the region has been terrorized by the brutality of jihadist militant group Boko Haram. It is not, in short, a place you’d expect a literary movement of Muslim women to flourish, especially one that sells pulpy novels in the very marketplaces targeted by jihadists.

These women write sultry romances, scandalous family dramas and other stories. Some are universal—the classic Cinderella tale of a poor woman marrying a rich man—but others are more socially risqué, like the story of a divorced woman romantically involved with a virgin man. Whatever the plot, these stories frequently denounce child marriage, sex trafficking, and slavery in all its forms. They are often handwritten, transcribed onto a computer, self-published and sold in markets throughout the Sahel region of Africa. The women who write them brave censorship and become leaders of their community, working within the bounds of society even as they shape it.

They are not what I thought feminism looked like, but then I had to change my idea of what feminism looked like. Glenna Gordon

"I didn’t expect to meet such powerful women in a place where everything I had heard about was men and the patriarchy," says photographer Glenna Gordon. Her photos, compiled in the book Diagram of the Heart, spotlight the women writing these littattafan soyayya ("books of love") and other stories in the Hausa language. Meeting them was, she says, life-changing. "[They are] not what I thought feminism looked like, but then I had to change my idea of what feminism looked like," she says.

The genre, often called Kano market literature, emerged in the late 1980s in Kano, northern Nigeria’s commercial center. One of its earliest breakout writers was Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, whose traumatic early love life inspired her writing. Yakubu was married and divorced twice by the time she was 15, and turned to writing. Her first book, 1987's Young at Heart, is a searing critique of polygamy told through the moral depravity of a man who cycles through one unhappy wife after another. Her most famous book, Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home, published in 1990, tells the story of a woman whose adulterous husband takes a prostitute as his second wife. It was made into a film in 1998 and in 2012 it became the first Hausa novel by a woman to be translated to English.

The most popular stories are written by women, but men write Kano market literature as well. Such stories resonate because they explore life from the perspective of ordinary Hausa, says Carmen McCain, a Hausa scholar who translated the excerpts of various stories that appear in Gordon’s book. "[Yakubu] was part of a revolutionary movement of young people writing stories about issues and concerns they saw daily, and often about things that had happened in their own lives,” she says. “They were popular because they spoke to the daily lives of their audiences and often became seen as people who could advise others.”

Diagram of the Heart , Red Hook Editions, 2016.

The women fearlessly raise pressing societal issues while promoting literacy among women, says Abdalla Uba Adama, a Kano literature scholar at Bayero University in Kano. "[They] empower Hausa women and girls to read in a language they can understand and connect with,” he says.

At first, writers like Yakubu wrote their stories longhand, then paid typists to transcribe them. That changed as Internet cafes and business centers provided easy access to computers. The writers live throughout the cities and villages of northern Nigeria, but the books typically find their way to printers in Kano. The authors often hire local artists to design the cover, and pay the printer to produce a few thousand stapled copies. Sometimes they sell the rights to the printer, who decorates the books with colorful covers showing Bollywood or Kannywood actresses Photoshopped into traditional Hausa clothing. Shopkeepers sell them in Kano's Sabon Gari market for about a dollar a piece alongside everything from tomatoes to tires.

The books are popular, but that doesn't make writing them any easier. In the 1990s, many viewed the authors with disdain because they often presented love outside of arranged marriages, which could encourage premarital sex. That led to the creation, in 2001, of a censorship board to ensure the stories did not break taboos. In 2007, the government burned many littattafan soyayya, and the censorship board grew more onerous. Noted author Sa'adatu Baba Ahmed says censors insisted she remove a scene in which a husband wipes away his wife’s tears. "How can this be?" she says. “The husband’s responsibility is to console his wife, to sympathize with her. How can your own husband allow you to scream and shout in front of him and he has no right to console her?”

Despite the government's best efforts, the popularity of *littattafan soyayya *only grew. These days, the government generally leaves writers alone. The books provide the authors with a decent living—the most popular making between $600 and $1,200 per novel—raising their stature at home and within the community. Local universities often invite authors to speak, and their work is the subject of dissertations. "Wherever I go, people respect me, they show their love to me," Ahmed says.

Glenna Gordon

Gordon has spent a decade documenting Africa and discovered Kano market literature in late 2012. She was traveling to photograph a mass wedding in northern Nigeria for her project Nigeria Ever After when her friend and Hausa scholar McCain recommended she read Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home. "I was instantly interested and wanted to learn more," she says.

She visited Kano in early 2013. McCain provided phone numbers for a few women, and one contact led to another. The project started with portraits made with a medium format Bronica, but Gordon eventually decided to capture the women more candidly with a 35mm camera or an iPhone. She made six trips to Kano and elsewhere in just two years, photographing the world these women inhabit. “I tried to use the novels as a guide," she says. “I wanted to seek out some of the scenes they described, to make images that echoed their aesthetics, and to focus on the spaces where women live their lives.”

She formed close relationships with women like Kano novelist Rabi Talle, who she photographed throughout the project. They would spend hours together in Talle’s house chatting and sipping juice. In one image Talle chats on one of several phone lines she keeps to talk with suitors, family members, and readers seeking love advice. Another catches Talle smiling at the man who would become her husband as he stops by with fruit from the market. Another shows her cupping her pregnant belly, her face illuminated by the cool light of a window. "Sometimes [Rabi] would get tired of [the camera] and sigh deeply, and I knew that was my cue to put [it] down," Gordon says. “But for the most part, she liked having her picture taken and was very open.”

They call me a feminist. They call me a womanist. I do not know which one I am. All I want is that any woman get her rights. Balaraba Ramat Yakubu

The photographs depict a world as textured and complex as that within the littattafan soyayya. Some illuminate cultural traditions and scenes foreign to many westerners—a dowry exchange at a wedding, men surrounded by multiple wives, the morality police settling a family dispute. Others capture the rich inner lives of the writers. In one photo, Hadiza Sani Garba bends over a small notebook composing a novel by hand, a red floral bedspread laid out beneath her like a carpet. The intimacy of the moment is wonderfully moving.

But the portraits of the authors are equally compelling—particularly of Yakubu. She stands beneath an archway in a baby blue hijab speckled with orange and yellow leaves. Her eyes are bright and her smile resplendent, her face flanked by images of herself at a younger age hanging behind her. It's tempting to call her a feminist, but Yakubu chuckles at that term. "They call me a feminist. They call me a womanist. I do not know which one I am,” she says. "All I want is that any woman get her rights."

Women like Yakubu challenged Gordon’s idea of what it meant to be a Muslim woman in northern Nigeria. They may not have all the same freedoms and opportunities of women in the west, but still hold a measure of power. They fall in love, build friendships, and raise families. They are influencing their culture, and speaking out against inequality and injustice. "I loved how wrong I was about northern Nigeria," Gordon says. "There was this big blank spot in my knowledge before I went, and the vague outlines I had were filled in in a way that was totally different than anything I expected."

Glenna Gordon’s photo book Diagram of the Heart is currently available through Red Hook Editions and on her website.