Title: Women Writing Nationhood Differently: Affiliative Critique in Novels by Forna, Atta, and Farah Annie Gagiano
Abstract: And what I wanted ... to show, is--are--the contradictions in [the women's] minds, experiences which are ... kept down, which are in their minds, and I wanted to reveal that. So that men, or people in general, or nation--can be as close as possible to women's experiences. --Yvonne Vera, Place of Woman is Place of Imagination (380) Write poem, song, anthem, from what within you Fused goals with guns & created citizens instead of slaves. --Dambudzo Marechera, Cemetery of Mind (195) The initial overwhelming predominance of male voices in fiction, criticism, and literary theory concerning Africa' is outlined in Biodun Jeyifo's contribution to text Africa in World & World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele (2011), where he refers to race men whom he identifies as or African-American male intellectuals whose lifework consists primarily in elucidation and affirmation of traditions of thought, imagination and spirit of Africa and its diasporas, seen in Pan Africanist terms as a racial community with common or related destinies (68; emphasis in original). Earlier, Jeyifo argued that those authors whom he identified as belonging to Soyinka's generation occupied highly gendered postcolonial national-masculine tradition of patrimonial big man of national, continental or 'racial' destiny (Wole Soyinka xx). Susan Andrade in her recent study suggests that earliest female African Europhone writers were in general oblique and tentative in their references to their nations, while their seemingly domestic focus often failed to be recognized as functioning allegorically (Nation 1). She describes novels by male African authors as evolv[ing] out of their understanding of economic and legal underpinnings of cultural acts and sees earlier African women's novels (written between 1958 and 1988) as converg[ing] around sphere of familial as orchestrating unit that looms over and plays out in national dramas (34). While this distinction is possibly overstated--many male authors give considerable space and prominence to familial, while several of earlier female authors evince strong awareness of the economic and legal underpinnings of cultural acts--Andrade is right in suggesting that national consciousness of continent's women writers was often overlooked or underrated. (2) Evidently, for women writers of African origin, making their voices heard as important evaluators of their societies was itself a struggle in literary sphere even as they sought to delineate unjust stifling of African women's thoughts and feelings on ground as one of gravest faults of their cultures and communities. Bessie Head, Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, Lauretta Ngcobo, and Yvonne Vera are women writers who opened way for contemporary writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (3) Unity Dow, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, and Valerie Tagwira, as well as three writers whose texts are discussed in this article (Aminatta Forna, Sefi Acta, and Cristina Ali Farah) to demonstrate not only that female authors throughout continent have a strong sense of nationhood but that they can articulate their awareness powerfully, critically, and in complex, individual ways. This surge in African women's writing that clearly and skilfully evinces these authors' interest in recording politically and morally evaluative accounts of their nations is one of most interesting features of new(er) corpus of fiction by African authors. It is worth noting that diasporic authors such as Forna, Atta, and Farah do not assume cosmopolitan perspectives in their writing, even as they eschew anti-colonial gestures of earlier generations. The nation is neither romanticised nor sentimentalised, but it is nevertheless acknowledged as an ongoing emotional as well as cultural-political presence in authorial imagination. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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