Buchi Emecheta’s literary terrain is the domestic experience of the female characters, and the way in which these characters try to turn the table against the second-class and slavish status to which they are subjected either by their husbands or the male-oriented traditions. Reading Buchi Emecheta informs us of the ways fiction, especially women’s writing, plays a role in constructing a world in which women can live complete lives; a world that may provide women with opportunities for freedom, creativity, self-expression, friendship and love. Welesley Brown Lloyd believes that; “of all women writers in contemporary African literature Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria has been the most sustained and vigorous voice of direct feminist protest” (35) Buchi Emecheta’s major concern is providing a picture of the African women which is nothing to smile about. Providing the readers with the picture taken mostly from her own life she articulates the oppression, predicament and uncertainty prevailing in the lives of African women whom she refers to as “peasant women”. Besides providing a picture of the traditional African woman, Emecheta also has a keen eye in her realistic treatment of women after the country’s colonization. She shows that the identity of the postcolonial woman is fluid and displaces itself in various positions on a constantly evolving continuum. What prevails in Emecheta’s Oeuvre is generally an intense anger at the sexual discrimination at the core of the culture of her people and a concomitant contempt for the men who perpetrate it. Joya Uraizee says about her: In her writing female identity is a product of the ideological history that surrounds it, she describes female subjectivity in terms of fragmentation, displacement,... ... middle of paper ... ...2 (2004):365-373. Schneider, Gregory. “R.K Narayan’s The Guide and Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde” www.assosiatedcontent.com/article. Stanford Friedman, Susa. “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy”. www. Women.it/cyberarchive/files/Stanford.htm Ure Mezu, Rose. “The Perspective of the Other: Rape and Women in Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi". Bookbird 36.1 (1998): 12-16. Ure Mezu, Rose. Buchi Emecheta's "The Bride Price" and "The Slave Girl": A Schizoanalytic Perspective. Van Judith Alan. “Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Last Political Institutions of Igbo Women”. Canadian Journal of American Studies. 28.2 (1972): 165-71. Ward, Cynthia. “What They Told Buchi Emecheta: Oral Subjectivity and The Joys of Motherhood.” PMLA 105.1(1990): 83-97.
Jeyifo, B. (1993). Okonkwo and his mother: ‘Things Fall Apart’ and issues of gender in the constitution of African postcolonial discourse. Callaloo, 16(4), 847-859 Retrieved from http://www.ucd.ie/english/articles/balzano1.htm
(Newell138).Writers like Senegalese Mariama Ba, and Nigerian Buchi Eme Their writings clearly oppose the way the female identity and issues are constructed by the male writers. This argument seems sentimental, because in the novel, he is aware of the trouble polygamy engenders (7). The problem of polygamy is also foundational in Buchi Emecheta’s
Critical analysis “A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never being by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity….Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being …He is the Subject, he is the Absolute- she is the Other”. This piece of writing is taken from the book ‘Y: The Descent of Men’ by Steve Jones published in 2002, Little, Brown. This was written originally by de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, that is later elaborated both in the context and the meaning by Jones. The historical context of the writing follows the academic feminism as an interdisciplinary proposition that is deep rooted in a sort of “political reality that challenges confinement to one particular discipline”. Consequently, philosophies and principles “which developed from the 1960s onwards were shared as feminist philosophers, historians, literary therorists, anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists and others, engaged in a project that had a common political background – to take action against women's subordination. The genesis of fe...
Brief History From the 1500s to the 1700s, African blacks, mainly from the area of West Africa (today's Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Dahomey, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon) were shipped as slaves to North America, Brazil, and the West Indies. For them, local and tribal differences, and even varying cultural backgrounds, soon melded into one common concern: the suffering they all endured. Music, songs, and dances as well as traditional food, helped not only to uplift them but also quite unintentionally added immeasurably to the culture around them. In the approximately 300 years that blacks have made their homes in North America, the West Indies, and Brazil, their highly honed art of the cuisine so treasured and carefully transmitted to their daughters has become part of the great culinary classics of these lands. But seldom are the African blacks given that recognition.
explores not only the way in which patriarchal society, through its concepts of gender , its objectification of women in gender roles, and its institutionalization of marriage, constrains and oppresses women, but also the way in which it, ultimately, erases women and feminine desires. Because women are only secondary and other, they become the invisible counterparts to their husbands, with no desires, no voice, no identity. (Wohlpart 3).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pursue a definition for what it means to be an authoress in a male dominated culture of writers. The central question for Feminists, according to Gilbert and Gubar, is: “Does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, is inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she ‘talk back’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint?” However, I cannot overlook the prospect of a man feeling just as mad and cooped up writing a text that others would view as out of his league. Chinua Achebe is the epitome of this Madman in the Attic. Born and raised in London, and brought up Christian he was as far away from being Okonkwo as I am as a white middle class American female. If Gilbert and Gubar are accusing women of feeling out of place writing in what then was a man’s field of expertise then Achebe masterfully channels the feminine madness into Things Fall Apart by writing a culture of strong independent women masked by silent passive girls.
Arguably, the effects which Europe’s global colonialism have had on women of the African diaspora can be most easily seen on the African continent. Kenyan feminist and environmental activist, Wangari Maathai, explores the legacy of colonialism and oppression in her native country through her moving 2006 memoir, Unbowed. Maathai explains that over t...
Through these two novels, we’re able to see the quandaries that women must face when modernity and old customs come head to head. Both of these women remain brave and to try to sustain their new found freedoms, despite any difficult encounters. It is these women with their fierce ideals that would make them pioneers for all women liberation movements.
Bastian, Misty L.. ""Vultures of the Marketplace": Southeastern Nigerian Women and Discourses of the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women's War) of 1929." Women in African Colonial Histories:. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
In “Under Western Eyes”, Chandra Talpade Mohanty provides a framework or context in which to view some of complexities over limitations of identity-based knowledge from a feminist perspective. This quote expounds on that idea nicely:
...”, in Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis, edited by Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland, 2002, John Benjamins Publishing Company, UK.
...er Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “a new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.
In Vera’s writings, it is clearly evident that women’s sexual roles are disapproved of and criticized in traditional African culture. It is crucial to understand how women were treated toward the beginning of Vera’s story line to fully interpret the theme of sex and freedom in Without a Name. Corwin Mhlahlo, author of “Advocating a Nameable Desire,” explains, “In most patriarchal societies, especially those of Africa, femal...
Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, was based on a story and the culture in Nigeria, Western Africa. Women’s roles and responsibilities have transitioned over several of years. The book arises a situation of how the Ibo women were treated and looked upon. In the Ibo culture, the women did not only suffer a great loss of their dignity, but also their pride as women. The whole role of women in the Ibo culture is different in various ways compared to the female race in modern society. The modern society in Nigeria, women are not so powerless, and also have the opportunity to work alongside the opposite gender.
In the book Second Class Citizen, Emecheta Buchi uses gender and sexuality to express the many ways in which society treated women and the obstacles that they had to overcome. Buchi uses this book and the many issues discussed throughout the book as a tool in the argument of gender and sexuality as a social construct; however, the ways of the world and the views of society do not see how the way women were treated back then as anything but normal. Adah, the main character of the book is a child who wants a Western education but is denied the opportunity to get one because the mere fact that she is a girl and the privilege of school goes to the boys of the family even though she is the one that wants the education. The theme that is openly used throughout the book is one of vehement animosity of gender discrimination that is often found in the culture of Adah’s people. Buchi portrays the way that African women are discriminated and victimized by the men and older women in their lives.