Gender Differentiation In God's Bits Of Wood

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Recommended: Portrayal of women in literature

Looking back on the oral storytelling approaches we learned during the first part of the semester, one in particular can be applied to God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène. The focus on gender differentiation within rites of passages is very prevalent in this novel. By manipulating a typical rite of passage story, using a woman as opposed to a man, Sembène is able to communicate his personal take on society’s conceptions of gender. He aims to comment on the idea that men need women to work with them to achieve something great. Women can be just as powerful and accomplished as men.
N’Deye Touti, a young African woman, is initially enamored with the thought of any French fashions and has the goal of being a black Frenchwoman. She wants nothing to do with her own African culture. “She lived in a kind of separate world; the reading she did…made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token she no longer had a place in theirs.” (57). As an educated woman she sees value in the French culture and is enamored with the idea of monogamist relationships, something that her polygamist African culture doesn't follow. N’Deye wants nothing to do with the strike and contributes very little to the efforts that her …show more content…

Previously, there was an inequality between women and men, but during the strike we see many independent women, like N’Deye, join in the effort to defeat colonialism and protest separating people based on the color of their skin. Stereotypes are broken and women take initiative in fighting for their beliefs. The world in this novel represents an in-between world because the strike being depicted is fictional. The societal norms of gender inequality are commented on and the storyteller tries to examine a world in which women and men work together to enact a

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