Raising Their Voices: Women’s Quest for Freedom and Identity in African Women’s Writing

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue VI, June 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

Raising Their Voices: Women’s Quest for Freedom and Identity in African Women’s Writing

Dr. Muthoni Gachari
Daystar University, Kenya

Abstract: Whether living in the traditional or modern setting, women in Africa often confront a variety of challenges including space and role limitations, social contradictions, cultural disintegration and political struggles. This article attempts to show how women negotiate their space within such constraints. It adopts a feminist analysis of A kind of Marriage by Buchi Emecheta and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie to show that women’s voices as well as acts of everyday resistance portray their understanding of their environment and determined effort to cultivate a new identity. The paper demonstrates that identity within marriage should not be static but a terrain through which women can reconstruct a new identity; a fellowship where they find strength among their own kind. Re-defining women’s identity in African literature is a timely Endeavour as women in real life situations are continually breaking out from the societal prescribed roles and positions to cultivate new identities.

I. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

In today’s society, it can be said that women and men have been consistently socialized into the spaces that they occupy and the stereotypes that have been assigned to them. Simone de Beauvoir (1989), noted that “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” where the author claims that being a woman is not a way in which one is born, but rather something one becomes. This claim exposes the formation of gender roles and also the phenomenon of gender itself as a social construct. The experience of being a woman in the modern world is a role accompanied by societal expectations, imposed from a very young age, and it is an experience that depends frequently on a woman’s relationship with men. In many communities especially in Africa, men view women from a position of power, thereby affecting how women act, as they consistently see themselves through the eyes of men. On the flip side, men’s’ socially constructed identities surround their distance from femininity and their relative position of dominance. This scenario is physically present in men’s and women’s language usage, the way they dress, and how people conduct themselves starting in early childhood.

Women in Africa latterly have joined women in other nations in their quest for their rights, for opportunities, relevance and recognition. This feminist quest is not imported, as many writers claim but it is a reaction of women against different forms of oppression. Though the term “feminism” originated from the West and hence English in expression, its realization is inextricably bound to the culture and peculiar backgrounds and experiences of women from different parts of the world.

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