A feminist “family drama

Abstract

"Stories of Women falls into three parts, by the author’s own reckoning: first, Chapters 1 through 4 exemplify the gendered formation of the nation in texts, which herald a family drama, after Freud’s 1909 phrase, itself embodied in "alpha-male” images like “father of the nation” or “son of the soil” (from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi through Jomo Kenyatta and Kenneth Kaunda, to Michael Manley and Nelson Mandela), as opposed to metaphors of motherlands, Mother Africa, the Indian Bharat Mata (Chapter 1). While Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Chapter 2) and Chinua Achebe (Chapter 3) in their later works set out to construct historically redemptive roles for their women characters, which are deemed as objectifying as the iconic mother roles of the past, Chapter 4 concerns the independence autobiography by male leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyatta, as their “ideological patriliny” intensifies the national family plot. The second, unmarked part, made of Chapters 5 and 6 around “Stories of Women and Mothers” and “[the adolescent] Daughters of the House,” deals with the space Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Christina Stead, Shashi Deshpande, and Carol Shields have claimed for themselves in the male-authored national family script. The final part, which groups the last five chapters, deals with the re-imagining of nationality, subjectivity, and sexuality, as a response to the disillusionment of the postcolony, after Achille Mbembe’s apt phrase. Chapter 7 focuses on postcolonial attempts to transfigure the native/colonized body by way of the “talking cure” of narrative in the fiction of Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head, and Michelle Cliff whereas Chapter 8 deals with the exposure, by second-generation male writers like Chenjerai Hove and Dambudzo Marechera as well as Ben Okri, of the nation as traumatic fiction. Chapter 9 examines the fin-de-siècle construction of Sarojini Naidu as Indian female poet in the 1890s and her 1990s homologue Arundhati Roy, whom Boehmer presents unfairly and disrespectfully as a “neo-orientalist” (163) “Indo-chick” (164), after Graham Huggan’s “Indo-chic.” Chapter 10 extends the discussion of the interrelationship of gender and nation into the still little-explored area of same-sex desire in the fiction of two Zimbabwean women writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera. The final chapter returns to the question of how Vera and Roy re-emblematize the nation in their work. The governing principle that traverses broadly the second half of the book is that women writers view the nation “not as a static but as a relational space” (17), a premise that Françoise Lionnet had already put forward."(pg 1-2)