Without a Name, a novel written by Yvonne Vera, explores the journey of a young Zimbabwean woman, Mazvita, during the late 1970’s guerilla war. In 1963, the two political parties in Zimbabwe were banned, which led to guerilla warfare in 1966. This ultimately led to emigration out of Rhodesia. In the novel, Mazvita traveled from her hometown of Mubaira, to the city of Harare. In her hometown, she faced rebel forces, who sexually abused her along with destroyed her village. In the course of her journey to Kadoma and the city of Harare, Mazvita encountered more political violence and a revolutionary social change. Along with the never-ending political revolution, it is important to note the gender differences at this time. Women were considered inferior in this male dominating culture; this idea is central to Vera’s writings and plays a significant role in Without A Name, where Vera attempts to establish a change in the traditional views in Africa. Due to women’s traditional roles in Zimbabwe, females become a site of oppression and bodily confinement, which give colonial powers an opportunity to use this secret sexuality as a way to abuse; Vera uses her female protagonist’s body and sexual pleasure to challenge patriarchy, with sex as a central symbol for resistance and ultimately freedom against colonial powers.
In Vera’s writings, it is clearly evident that women’s sexual roles are disapproved of and criticized in traditional African culture. It is crucial to understand how women were treated toward the beginning of Vera’s story line to fully interpret the theme of sex and freedom in Without a Name. Corwin Mhlahlo, author of “Advocating a Nameable Desire,” explains, “In most patriarchal societies, especially those of Africa, femal...
... middle of paper ...
... control of their bodies… consequently, they can defiantly enjoy their sexual encounters as expressions of sexual freedom,” (Mhlahlo 104). Through these modes of expression, the female protagonist Mazvita truly breaks away from the oppression, confinement, and restrictions to have control over her own body and sexual pleasures.
Works Cited
Mhlahlo, Corwin L. "Advocating A Nameable Desire." Matatu: Journal For African Culture &
Society 41 (2013): 97-104. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 May 2014.
Musila, Grace. "Embodying Experience And Agency In Yvonne Vera's Without A Name And
Butterfly Burning." Research In African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 49-63. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 20 May 2014.
Shaw, Carolyn Martin. "Turning Her Back on the Moon: Virginity, Sexuality, and Mothering in the Works of Yvonne Vera." Africa Today 51.2 (2004): 35-51. Web. 20 May 2014.
Imagination is a quality that everyone has, but only some are capable of using. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “No Name Woman” using a great deal of her imagination. She uses this imagination to give a story to a person whose name has been forgotten. A person whose entire life was erased from the family’s history. Her story was not written to amuse or entertain, but rather to share her aunts’ story, a story that no one else would ever share. The use of imagination in Kingston’s creative nonfiction is the foundation of the story. It fills the gaps of reality while creating a perfect path to show respect to Kingston’s aunt, and simultaneously explains her disagreement with the women in her culture.
In Maxine Kingston’s “No Name Woman” she retells the story about a tragic past family secret. Kingston reveals the horrible family dishonor of her aunt who committed suicide, and murdered her newborn son, by jumping into the family well in China. She continues to explain her thoughts and emotions evoked from her aunt’s actions. As time passes, Kingston’s opinion and thoughts change and her perspective is altered. Kingston shows an evolutionary change in opinion toward her aunt by explaining her different thoughts in different stages of her life.
The center of discussion and analysis about the sex/gender system focus on the differences between African, European and Creole Women. The sex/gender system describe by Morgan focus on their production, body and kinship. European women are seen as domestic, African women’s work overlaps between agricultural and pastoral. They’ll work in the field non-stop, even after giving birth. African women hold knowledge about the pastoral and agricultural work “in the planting and cultivation of fields the daily task of a good Negro Woman” (145). While Creole women were subordinated, with the job of produce and reproduce. When it came to body, European women’s bodies were seeing as fragile. After birth the rest for a while before they could stand back again or return to their activities “European observers believed the post-delivery period of abstinence lasted three months, and others commented up two- to three year period o...
Accordingly, I decided the purposes behind women 's resistance neither renamed sexual introduction parts nor overcame money related dependence. I recalled why their yearning for the trappings of progression could darken into a self-compelling consumerism. I evaluated how a conviction arrangement of feeling could end in sexual danger or a married woman 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, regardless, ought to cloud an era 's legacy. I comprehend prerequisites for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the area of women into open space and political fights previously cornered by men all these pushed against ordinary restrictions even as they made new susceptibilities.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. "No Name Woman." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. 4th Edition. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 227-39. Print.
Gender identities and gender relations are determined by the culture of a society. Culture makes gender roles meet certain inescapable beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and obligations. Gender politics camouflaged by cultural norms and governed by patriarchal interests and manifested in cultural practices like female genital mutilation, make the life of women difficult and burdensome. Alice Walker’s fifth novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) discusses a tabooed cultural practice called female genital mutilation, camouflaged by gender politics, that is used to subjugate women, to protect the interests of men. Female Genital Mutilation is a painful procedure considered to be a mark of true womanhood in certain cultures. The procedure
Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. ed. Vance, Carole. Pandora: London, 1992.
Hudson-Weems emphasizes the importance of a theory that examines the plight of Africana women that is created for and by Africana women. This is the only way to ensure that their particular needs would be addressed. This Afrocentric ideology is better equipped to empower the Africana woman and place her fight in her own hands. Even the approach’s name is rooted in African culture. It adheres to the concept of nommo, the proper naming of a thing which calls it into existence. “The terminology Africana womanism…more appropriately fits the Africana woman, who is both self-namer and self-definer. It is true that if you do not define yourself, someone else surely will” (Hudson-Weems, 2007). Naming has played a large role in empowering and uniting Africana people, particularly in the United States, as shown by the evolution of naming ...
In the age of industrialization when rural life gradually was destroyed, the author as a girl who spent most of her life in countryside could not help writing about it and what she focuses on in her story - femininity and masculinity, which themselves contain the symbolic meanings - come as no surprise.
Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, grandparents, pimps, prostitutes, straight people, gay people, lesbian people, Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans all have once thing in common: they are products of sexuality. Sexuality is the most common activity in the world, yet is considered taboo and “out of the norm” in modern society. Throughout history, people have been harassed, discriminated against, and shunned for their “sexuality”. One person who knows this all too well is activist and author, Angela Davis. From her experiences, Davis has analyzed the weakness of global society in order to propose intellectual theories on how to change the perspective of sexuality. This research paper will explore the discussions of Angela Davis to prove her determination to combat inequality in gender roles, sexuality, and sexual identity through feminism. I will give a brief biography of Davis in order for the readers to better understand her background, but the primary focus of this paper is the prison industry and its effect on female sexuality.
...ut men, family ties and financial stability would be difficult to obtain, which were necessary to secure an identity in the early south. Early Southern women were ultimately forced to identify themselves by the males to which they were tied. Three female characters from the works read thus far, struggled without men to identify them. For Désirée, her past and family heritage proved too much to overcome. Without the surname provided by her husband, Désirée was without an identity to call her own and gave way to societal code. Yet, due to their internal fight for self-satisfaction, Lena and Janie were able to overcome their lack of identity by establishing their own without the aid of a male. In conclusion, identity is attainable for some women. However, it takes a Southern woman dedicated to her own beliefs to overcome such obstacles and return stronger than before.
We must also understand the exclusion of gender from revolutionary discourses as being part of patriarchy that is not challenged in certain revolutions. The exclusion of gender equality from what Lumumba struggled for is where there is a certain patriarchy, and this kind of patriarchy is evident in almost all revolutionary anti-colonial writing.
Mazvita believes that forgetting is the only way towards freedom, but it ends up trapping her. Lavelle writes that Yvonne Vera uses predominantly two words to articulate the rape: “whispering’ and ‘silence’ (Lavelle 110). Vera writes, “The silence was a treasure. Mazvita felt a quietness creep from the earth to her body as he rested above her, spreading his whispered longing over her” (Vera 35). ‘Whispering’ is used in order to represent the violence of the soldier. Mazvita dissociates herself from her rape both physically and mentally. The ‘silence’ becomes her way to deal with the rape where it says, “she gathered the whispering into a silence that she held tightly within her body (Vera 28). She felt a sense of dismemberment as she let go and dissociates herself from her past. It provided a way to escape the trauma, but it was temporary. Without realizing it, Mazvita begins to take a self-destructive pathway away from freedom.
As a female in Africa, the opposite of male, woman suffers sexual oppression; as an African, the opposite of white in an ever-colonized nation, the African woman also suffers racial oppression. Nnu Ego, Emecheta's protagonist, became at once for me the poster female of Africa, a representative of all subjugated African women, and her story alerted me to all the wrongs committed against African women, wrongs that could only be righted through feminist discourse. As with many surface readings I have performed as a student of literature, however, my perspective on The Joys of Motherhood began to evolve. First, I realized and accepted Nnu Ego's failure to react against oppressive forces in order to bring about change for herself and the daughters of Africa. I consoled myself, reasoning that the novel still deserves the feminist label because it calls attention to the plight of the African woman and because its author and protagonist are female.
A feminist analysis on the other hand shows that Anowa is a woman who is struggling against the 1870’s African feminist identity (the identity of weakness). The drama surrounds the story of a young woman called Anowa who disobeys her parents by marrying Kofi Ako, a man who has a reputation for indolence and migrates with him to a far place. Childless after several years of marriage, Anowa realises that Kofi had sacrificed his manhood for wealth. Upon Anowa’s realisation, Kofi in disgrace shoots himself while Anowa too drowns herself. In a postcolonial analysis of “Anowa”, we can see some evidence of colonialism.