Writing as a cultural negotiation: a study of Mariama Bâ, Marie NDiaye and Ama Ata Aidoo

226 Pages·2017·0.5 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2006
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Catherine Afua Kapi
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Kapi, Catherine Afua, "Writing as a cultural negotiation: a study of Mariama Bâ, Marie NDiaye and Ama Ata
Aidoo" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 947.
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WRITING AS A CULTURAL NEGOTIATION: A STUDY OF MARIAMA BÂ,
MARIE NDIAYE AND AMA ATA AIDOO

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
In partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

In

The Department of French Studies

By
Catherine Afua Kapi
BA., Université Laval, 1993
M.A., Université Laval, 1999
May 2006
To Mom and Dad, Thank you for sowing the seed.
To Don, you know what we have been through. Thank you
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is darkest before daylight. I would like to thank my dissertation committee for
guiding me from the darkness into the daylight. To my dissertation director, Professor
Adelaide Russo, I would like to express my profound gratitude to you for your complete
dedication and for accepting to make time for me out of your busy schedule. Your words
of encouragement, sound advice, and friendship made all the difference. I am indebted to
you for the discrete reminders of deadlines to be met, and above all, your patience. To Dr.
Denise Égéa-Kuehne, my deepest gratitude to you for being there for me through those
difficult times; to Dr. Kate Jensen and Professor Femi Euba, thank you most sincerely for
willingly accepting on such short notice to be part of my committee; to Professor
Rebecca Crump, the Dean’s representative on my committee, it has been my honor and
fortune that fate has made our paths cross.
Ms. Connie Simpson, you are the lighthouse that guides the lost ships of graduate
students to the academic shore. Continue the good work.
To Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, your support has always meant a lot to me. And last but
not least, I would like to thank all my family and friends for sticking with me through
thick and thin.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..iii

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………….vi.

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1

CHAPTER 1. WRITING AS A CULTURAL NEGOTIATION: DEFINITIONS AND A
CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF SUB-SAHARAN WOMEN WRITERS…13
1.1 Key Issues in Sub-Saharan Women’s Writing………………………………24
1.2 Translation, Hybridized Language and Cultural Transfer…………………..29
1.3 Authors and Their Works: Brief Biographical Sketches and Synopses of Their
Works………………………………………………………………………...37

CHAPTER 2. HYBRIDITY: CONCEPT AND IDENTITY FORMATION……………46
2.1 Linguistic Hybridity: Proverbs, Neologisms and Translations………………48
2.2 Perils To Hybridity: Marriage, Racism and Religious Purity………………..60

CHAPTER 3. IN THE PRISON-HOUSE OF MARRIAGE: BIGAMY, POLYGAMY
AND CULTURAL STATUS QUO…………………..………………….79

CHAPTER 4. MOTHERHOOD: A WOMAN’S BURDEN………….……………..... 117
4.1 A Mother as a Woman Fulfilled …………………………………..............118
4.2 Contesting Motherhood: Abusive and Abused Mothers and Their
Unyielding Daughters………………………………………………………125
4.3 Motherhood: Subservience and Patriarchy Reversed ……………………...140

CHAPTER 5. UNDERSTANDING WITCHCRAFT: WITCHES, WITCH HUNTERS,
HEALERS AND THE SUPERNATURAL…………………………...152
5.1 Living with Witchcraft and Its Ubiquitous Evil Eye.....................................155
5.2 Witchcraft and the Literary Imagination…………………………………...164
5.3 Reclaiming the Feminine Power: The Witchcraft Model…………………..176

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...181

END NOTES…………………………………………………………………………..197

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………201

VITA……………………………………………………………………………………219

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ABSTRACT

Critical review of the existing literature on African women writers clearly shows that
nowhere is the question of writing as a cultural negotiation posed, discussed or much less
addressed. This is a lacuna that this dissertation addresses for the first time by proposing
a re-reading of the selected works of Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ and Marie NDiaye
through the new prism of writing as part of cultural negotiation. In doing so, the
dissertation goes beyond the paradigm of binary oppositions that undergirds the critical
literature on writing by Sub-Saharan women in favor of the innovative concept of
negotiation. In addressing women’s issues such as marriage and polygamy, motherhood
and witchcraft, this study makes the powerful case that Mariama Bâ, Ama Ata Aidoo and
Marie NDiaye have negotiated a space of creativity for themselves through writing,
hitherto the preserve of men, and from which they pose, discuss and address through
negotiation, those cultural issues affecting them.

Chapter One, with brief biographical sketches of the writers and a summary of their texts,
deals with the theoretical framework for the study by providing the critical overview of
Sub-Saharan women writers and in-depth analyses of the concepts of writing, negotiation
and culture in order to explain how these women writers are able to negotiate their
respective cultures in their writing. In Chapter Two, hybridity and its perils are discussed
specifically in relation to the colonizer/colonized binary model. Through this binary,
displacement of authority is engendered by means of a series of mimetic identifications
with the colonizer by the colonized in an ambivalent hybridized cultural space. We
discuss interracial and inter-caste polygamy and their role in the victimization of women
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in Chapter Three. Chapter Four questions the notion that motherhood is the equivalent of
men’s reproductive labor and a source of oppression suggests that empowerment can be
derived from surrogacy and freedom of choice. Chapter Five explores modern day beliefs
in witchcraft and its cultural impact on women. From the feminist theoretical perspective,
the study suggests that witchcraft, if reclaimed by women, is a powerful negotiating tool.
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INTRODUCTION
From Bessie Head to Buchi Emecheta to Mariama Bâ, many African Women Writers
like to declare that they are not feminists (Code, 2000); however, nothing could be more
feminist than the forceful articulation in their writings of deep preoccupations for, and
attempts at explaining the experiences and fates of women in patriarchal African
societies. Moreover, given the conceptual framework within which African feminism
operates, it is not paradoxical that African Women Writers should want to distance
themselves from Western feminism. Postcolonial feminist critics, like their American
women of color counterparts, have attacked in their engagement with the issue of
representation, both the idea of universal “woman” as well as the reification of the so-
called “Third World” difference that produces the monolithic “Third World woman,”
insisting instead on the specificities of race, class, nationality, religion and sexualities that
intersect with gender, and on the socio-economic hierarchies that exist among women.
While postcolonial feminists have called upon their First World feminist counterparts to
recognize differences, acknowledge historical specificity of women in other places and
times, and to abandon their unexamined ethnocentric thought which underlines a certain
attitude of easy benevolence towards Third World women as victims, First World
Feminists have contended that while it is true that colonial history has taken advantage of
African traditions to locate the place of women in a subservient role, it is also true that
the trend has not changed even after independence. As such the transfer of power to
national elites merely ensured the continuation of colonial structures benefiting the male
national elite.
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In postcolonial thought, two factors have worked hand in hand against women:
religious fundamentalism and cultural nationalism. As a result, postcolonial feminists
have had to contend with two obvious realities: the women’s respect for, and obedience
to their communities’ traditional demands and subservience to the dictates of
fundamentalist religious rules. An African woman’s commitment to community,
nationalistic sentiments and fundamentalist religious rules has more complex causes than
the simplistic cultural “backwardness”. The answer, as proposed by a significant body of
postcolonial literary works, lies in the negotiated space between the emancipatory goals
of feminism and agendas of nationalism and communalism. In these works, that means
positions ranging from total rejection of feminism in favor of solidarity with collective
“national” or community goals, and also a direct opposition to colonial modernity.
Nowhere is this wide-ranging positioning more significant than in the Nigerian critic
Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female
Novel in English” (1985), in which she contrasts “womanist” with “feminist” because she
sees the former to designate women committed to the entire people of Africa and in the
Diaspora. What Ogunyemi’s proposal means, in effect, is that Western white feminists
and black African women are fighting two different battles, but the same war: while
Western White feminists are battling sexism, black women are battling inequality across
social and economic lines. For Ogunyemi, therefore, the womanist vision is, by contrast,
racially conscious in its underscoring of the positive aspects of black life, but unique and
more complex in its racial-sexual ramifications than its white counterpart. Womanism,
she asserts, addresses more directly the need for an equitable distribution of the world’s
wealth and power among all races and between the sexes. So Western feminist literary
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works, in her view, underscore and trivialize black subordination, a stance that black
women do not share since the common black heritage of subjugation by westerners has in
its prescription, added another layer to the nature of modern black life. Ogunyemi’s
response to the prescribed notion of inferior black life, is to write stories appropriate and
instructive enough to empower the black man rendered impotent by a western patriarchal
and racist culture. In other words, the womanist cannot be the natural ally the western
feminist pretends to court as long as the political and economic fortunes of the black race
as a whole do not improve.
Amadiume Ifi disagrees with Ogunyemi’s underlying assertion that all black cultures
are the same. In Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African
Society (1987), Amadiume Ifi refers to the dual-sex social systems among the Igbos in
Nigeria long before colonization by the British. The duality of the society, she observes,
does not need empowering the black man. This observation, based on the fact that Igbo
culture in pre-colonial times did not distinguish between male and female solely in
biological terms, leads her to dispute the conclusion that sexual asymmetry is a universal
fact of human life. The Igbo gender construction distinguished between gender and
biological sex. This fact is borne out linguistically by the neuter gender in the Igbo
language. Gender in this context is also role specific. Hence daughters performing male
roles are considered males. In religious rites, for example, female and male roles may be
interchangeable since gender does not mediate sexual dualism. From the Igbo woman’s
standpoint, therefore, the gender systems of the West are constraining in their role
identification. In Igbo systems, it is not unseemly to view or reclassify women wielding
power as manly or man-like. For Amadiume Ifi, therefore, there is no place for the term
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