Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy

240 Pages·2016·8.422 MB·English

by  Chielozona Eze (auth.)

Comparative Feminist Studies
Series Editor
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Syracuse University
Syracuse
New York
USA
COMPARATIVEFEMINISTSTUDIESforegroundswriting,organizing,
and reflection on feminist trajectories across the historical and cultural
bordersofnation-states.Ittakesupfundamentalanalyticandpoliticalissues
involved in the cross-cultural production of knowledge about women and
feminism,examiningindepththepoliticsofscholarshipandknowledgein
relationtofeministorganizingandsocialmovements.Thisseriesdrawson
feminist thinking in a number of fields, targeting innovative, comparative
feministscholarship;pedagogicalandcurricularstrategies;communityorga-
nizing,andpoliticaleducation.Volumesinthisserieswillprovidesystematic
andchallenginginterventionsintothe(still)largelyEuro-Westernfeminist
studies knowledge base, while simultaneously highlighting the work that
can and needs to be done to envision and enact cross-cultural, multiracial
feminist solidarity. CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY is Professor of
Women’s Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse
University. Her work focuses on transnational feminist theory, cultural
studies, and anti-racist education. She is the author of Feminism Without
Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity and co-editor of
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, and Feminist
Genealogies,ColonialLegacies,DemocraticFutures.Mohantyhasworked
with three grassroots community organizations, Grassroots Leadership of
North Carolina, Center for Immigrant Families in New York City,
and Awareness, Orissa, India, and has been a consultant/evaluator for
AAC&UandtheFordFoundation.
More information aboutthisseries at
http://www.springer.com/series/14906
ChielozonaEze
Ethics and Human
Rights in
Anglophone African
’
Women s Literature
Feminist Empathy
ChielozonaEze
NortheasternIllinoisUniversity
Chicago,USA
ComparativeFeministStudies
ISBN978-3-319-40921-4 ISBN978-3-319-40922-1(eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-40922-1
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2016951317
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P
REFACE
ThisisabookaboutAfricanwomenandhumanrights.Itexamineswomen’s
rights as a synecdoche for universal human rights. Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie,aprominentnameamongthird-generationAfricanwomenwriters,
hasbeencreditedwithrevivingsomeinterestinfeminismnotonlyinAfrica
but also in other parts of the world. Her TEDx talk, “We Should All Be
Feminists,” has become a popularteachingresource for undergraduates in
African literature in the USA. Adichie states that all fair-minded people
should be feminists. I believe that her call represents the concerns of the
Africanwomenwritersandactivistsofhergenerationwhoidentifyasfem-
inists,andwhointerprettheirfeminismintermsofhumanrights.
Africanliteraturehasalwaysaddressedhumanrights.Increasingly,scholars
havebeguntopayattentiontothat.Worksthatcomeeasilytomindinclude
JosephR.Slaughter’sHumanRights,Inc:TheWorldNovel,NarrativeForm,
and International Law (2007); Elizabeth S. Anker’s Fictions of Dignity:
Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012), Zoe Norridge’s
Perceiving Pain in African Literature (2012), Odile Cazenave and Patricia
Célérier’s Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of
Commitment (2011), and Rosemary Joll’s Cultured Violence: Narrative,
Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South
Africa(2010).Noneoftheseworks,however,focusesonfeminismasarich
sourceofunderstandingofhumanrights.Mybookseekstofillthisgap.
This book is based on the assumption that third-generation African
women writers believe that gender equality in most African societies has
not yet been realized. Indeed, in most African cultures women are still
viewed largely through the lenses of culture and tradition rather than as
v
vi PREFACE
individualswithdistinctwishes,rights,anddignities.Focusingonselected
fiction andpoetry of Anglophonewomen writersin the newmillennium,
it examines how African patriarchal societies have disabled women’s
bodies by subjectingthem to needlesspain andprivation.
MybookcelebratesthehumanistidealscapturedbytheAfricanconcept
of ubuntu and those expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights(UDHR);itarguesthatliteraturecanhelpusinterpretthoseideals.
WhatI seek toarticulate, therefore,arethe stirringsofcomplex interroga-
tions of societies whose ideas of resistance to oppression are beginning to
movebeyondtheresistancetotheWest.Africaincreasinglyturnsattention
to self without the gaze of the West, and one of the areas it does so is in
gender politics and women’s rights. Whereas it is expedient to address
queernessas a human rights issue, I focus chieflyonmale–femalerelations
to the degree that they prevent women from thriving and living morally
fulfilling lives. Where African politics normalizes polygamy as in Kenya,
female genital mutilationasinSierra Leone, girl-children forced intomar-
riage as in Nigeria, or women’s subservient positions in families, African
women writers express the impact of such aspects of African cultures in
women’slives.ThereisnothingtypicalaboutAfricangenderrelations.They
are guided by patriarchal norms, and, as in other patriarchal and sexist
cultures, women are disadvantaged. When African women writers expose
gender inequality and outright sexism in their cultures, they do so, not
becausetheybelievethesetobespecifictoAfrica,butbecausetheywantto
exposethosebehaviorsinordertoenhancehumanflourishing.
Mychoiceofthesewriterswasguidedprimarilybythedegreetowhich
theirworksbestexemplifythenewturntowardethicsandwomen’srights
inAfricanliteratureinthenewmillennium.Inworksofthisnature,there
areobviouslyimportantliteraryworkstobeleftout.Theirabsenceisnota
statementontheirvalue;itisratherthatitwouldbeimpossibletoinclude
allimportant works.
The chapters are arranged in a rhetorical sequence that highlights
variouswaysthewritersconfrontthesystemsthatdisableAfricanwomen’s
bodies.Afterestablishingmytheoreticalparametersintheintroduction,I
move from micro (Chapters 2–5) to macro (Chapters 6–8) instances of
painandtheabuseofhumanrights,fromthedisablingofwomenbytheir
culture and tradition to the disabling of society by military regimes and
civilwars.1Intheintroduction“TheEthicalTurninAfricanLiterature,”I
situatemyusesoftheconcepts:feminism,ethics,empathy,humanrights.
How are these termsrelated? The architecture of the argumentis simple:
PREFACE vii
Feminism is the belief in the moral equality of men and women. Ethics
recognizestheotherandthequalityofrelationbetweenhumansasendsin
themselves, rather than as means to other humans’ ends. In narrating
stories of women incapacitated by the ideologies of tradition and patri-
archy,thewritersdemandthatthewomenberecognizedforwhotheyare.
In their feminism, these writers propose fairness as a starting principle in
therelationshipbetweenmenandwomen.Oneofthewaystoconceiveof
that fairness is through empathy; that is, switching perspectives with
women who have been disadvantaged by their gender. Empathy is not a
mereintellectualexercise.Nordoesitseektopatronizetheother.Itsgoal,
in this context, is to identify and address the pain of the other. Feminist
empathy is the ability to feel oneself into the experience of a woman in
unwarrantedsuffering,thatis,sufferingthatresultedduetonofaultofher
own. Narratives, I argue, project and enact ways of being human; they
script humanrights.
To be sure, issues of human rights are not new in African women’s
literature; Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Grace Ogot, Buchi Emecheta,
Mariama Bâ, Flora Nwapa, Ellen Kuzwayo, Zoë Wicomb et cetera, have
writtenstoriesthataddressthem.Theirworkswere,however,interpreted
largelyfromapostcolonialperspective,whichitselfwasheavilyinvestedin
combatingthecolonialmisrepresentationoftheAfricanpersonhood.The
theoretical approach to their works therefore blurred their human rights
concernsbynothighlightingaspectsofAfricanculturesthatimpederights
as much as colonialism had. My interpretive model for African women’s
literature is in response to the writers’ bold embrace of feminist identity,
their call on all, especially men, to be fair-minded in relating to them.
Feminism, understood within the framework suggested by these writers,
functions in the assumption that women want no more than a space in
which they can take charge of their minds and bodies as men do theirs,a
space where they can exist without the obtrusive intervention of ideolo-
gies.Thisisnotanimpossibledemand,anditsmoralimpetuscanbestbe
understood by switching perspectives with women whose lives have been
hamperedby many ideologies ofpatriarchaldominance.
Chapter 2, “Feminism as Fairness,” interprets Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s talk, “WeShould All BeFeminists,” and restatesthe importance
offeminismasethics.IengageAdichie’sideaswiththehelpofJohnRawls’s
conceptofjusticeasfairness.Rawlssuggeststheoriginalposition,whichisa
thoughtexperimentthatproposesaconditioninwhichpeoplearefree,and
are able to make choices about the principles that would guide their lives.
viii PREFACE
Rawls’sideaoftheoriginalpositionandworksoffictionhaveonethingin
common: they ask people to deploy their imagination and visualize ideal
situationsinwhichfairnessisthenorm.Iconcludemydiscussionbyexam-
iningAdichie’sfictionsasinstantiationsofherethicalcall.
Chapter3,“DiaryofIntensePain:ThePostcolonialTrapandWomen’s
Rights,” picks up a major strain of the arguments established in the
introduction, which is the idea that writing back to the Empire hardly
addresses the needs of Africans as individuals; rather it insinuates a post-
colonialideologycomparabletotheoppressivetraditionalcosmologythat
the African women writers are challenging. NoViolet Bulawayo and
ChineloOkparantahavebeencriticized,bymostlymalecritics,asserving
the imperial needs of Western audiences by indulging in a pornographic
display of poverty and misery. But the so-called poverty porn consists of
instancesofintensepainthattheAfricanpatriarchalcultureshaveinflicted
onAfricanwomen’sbodies.Inthiscontext,IdiscussBulawayo’sWeNeed
NewNames(2013) andOkparanta’s Happiness,Like Water(2013).
Starting with the idea that the body of a woman who has undergone
genital mutilation is disabled, the fourth chapter, “The Body in Pain and
the Politics of Culture,” engages Warsan Shire’s poetry collection,
Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Nnedi Okorafor’s
work of magical realism, Who Fears Death (2010) as narratives that
demonstrate the ethical stance of writing back to the body on the one
hand, and on the other, challenge the (mis)use of culture as a means of
legitimizingpain.
Chapter 5, “Abstractions asDisablers of Women’s Rights,” brings to a
conclusiontheargumentpositedinChapters3and4,andwhichconcerns
the relation between African cultures and the female body in pain. I read
Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), which is a
narrative of polygamy as an institution that inherently incapacitates
women’s bodies, and Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly (2009), a
collection of short stories set in Zimbabwe, as expressions of contempor-
aryAfricanwomen’seffortstochallengetherigidityofAfricanculturaland
nationalistparadigmsandgenderrelationsinordertoenhancetheaware-
ness ofhumanrights.
Chapter6addressesslaveryasasymbolofuniversalhumanrightsabuse.
The discussion of slavery segues into a macro discourse of human rights.
Chika Unigwe’s novel, On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) tells the stories of
four African women who work as sex slaves in Brussels. The story is a
PREFACE ix
metaphorofthe conditionof womeninAfrica becauseitdrawsattention
to theindignities inflictedon women’s bodies directly.
Chapter 7, “Human Rights as Liberatory Social Thought,” focuses on
the macro instances of human rights abuses in society through the lenses
of abuse of women. This chapter engages Atta’s Everything Good Will
Come (2004) and Swallow (2010). Through them it examines the break-
downinintersubjectivitybetweenmenandwomenaswellasinsocietyasa
whole. Atta makes a connection between the patriarchal abuses in the
family and the military abuses in society, and pays particular attention to
thedignitiesofchildrenandtherightsofwomenascorrelativetothosein
society.
Chapter8,“TheObligationtoBearTestimonytoHumanRightsAbuses,”
expandstheargumentofChapters6and7byunderliningtheethicalobliga-
tiontobearwitnessnotonlytowomen’ssufferingsthatarespecifictocultural
ideologies,butalsotootherformsofhumanrightsabuses,especiallyduring
wars.This chapter studiesthe poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who details
thehumanrightsabusesduringthebrutalcivilwarinLiberia.Itthusenhances
thetruththatwomen’srightsarehumanrightsandhumanrightsarewomen’s
rights.
NOTE
1. Admit these distinctions are not clear-cut. Essentially you cannot have a
macro instance of pain that does not affect individuals. The reverse is also
thecase.