Analysis Of So Long A Letter By Mariam Ba

As time passed, European domination drastically altered the African landscape – both physically and culturally. Traditional roles, practices, and beliefs were either completely subverted or modified to fall in line with European cultural ideals. Doubtlessly, this process of subjugation worked to the detriment of native populations throughout the continent. Even though all members of indigenous communities have suffered under this system, African women remain especially vulnerable to its harmful effects. As Mary Kolawole points out in her comprehensive work, Womanism and African Consciousness, these women must confront a set of oppressions unique to their position as both black Africans and women. During her discussion of African women’s current struggle for recognition, Kolawole argues that, although colonialism displaced many African traditions, the patriarchal social structure remained. In many ways, she holds, European colonization widened the rift between African men and women even further (Kolawole 34). Although African and European traditions share in the elevation of the male over the female, most African cultures offered women a greater position of respect within society, as well as more “positive avenues of self-liberation” than were available to European women

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlights the often challenging lives of Nigerian women living in Africa, but also abroad in the United States. It is however, not the difficulties which Adichie is ultimately focusing on, but the courage and intelligence of women who are able to make ‘small victories’, overcoming various attempts of cultural oppression.

Colonialism is an ongoing practice that is marginalizing indigenous communities because of their race, class, gender, and sexuality. Qwo-li Driskill et al quoted Rayna Green claiming “that colonial discourses represent Native women as sexually available for white men’s pleasure” (34). From their first contact the Europeans through to the present day, Aboriginal, Indigenous, and First Nations women have been categorized and seen as Other. Sarah Hunt employs in her analysis a form of postcolonial critique used by Edward Said, who argues in Orientalism (1978) that there exist constructs of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes towards racialized others, including Indigenous groups, rooted in Eurocentric prejudice, serving as an implicit

Throughout our experience, we have encountered so many challenges when it comes to gender in the society. Gender is being used as a basis for stratifying people in the society. In this article, the racial caste system that used to exist in the United State is depicted. In that the black women were denied the access to justice because of their status. They were perceived to be people who do not have any right within the society and no one could believed them when they were raped by the white men because all the court judges were white men according to this article. The women were classified to be from poor background and they should remain at a low class in the society.

The oppression of certain groups of people is nothing new. These oppressed groups tend to be looked at as different because of their physical features and/or cultural background. Many efforts to improve the lives of the oppressed have been achieved, but there is still a long way to go. These oppressed groups consist of women and different ethnic groups which have had to deal with being pushed around by the white man throughout history. Frantz Fanon deals with his experience as a black man in the French colony of Martinique. Simone de Beauvoir speaks about her experience as a woman in the French mainland. Both authors assert the idea that the man, in particular the white man, sets himself as the superior being that defines what it is to be human and views women and blacks or minorities as the “Other”.

Women are often thought of as the weaker, more vulnerable of the two sexes. Thus, women’s roles in literature are often subdued and subordinate. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, women are repressed by an entrenched structure of the social repression. Women suffer great losses in this novel but, also in certain circumstances, hold tremendous power. Achebe provides progressively changing attitudes towards women’s role. At first glance, the women in Things Fall Apart may seem to be an oppressed group with little power and this characterization is true to some extent. However, this characterization of Igbo women reveals itself to be prematurely simplistic as well as limiting, once

Women face two key forms of oppression in this world, powerlessness and exploitation. These two forms fall into Iris M. Young’s ideas of oppression in her article “Five Faces of Oppression”. The definition of cultural imperialism and exploitation used in this essay are taken from Young’s essay. Cultural imperialism is where the dominant customs and morals of a society are rendered as the norm and those who are not in the norm are considered others. Exploitation is a form of oppression where a class structure is present and this class structure includes a dominant group of people who are in power of a subordinate group. Two authors, John Stuart Mill and Simone de Beauvoir, talk about how the oppression of women is not due to nature. It is rather, in Mill’s view, due to a premodern law of force which divides men and women between the strong and the weak. Beauvoir sees this oppression of women as a result from socialization, which conformed women to become immanent. Both these authors have reasonable arguments and have a similar understanding that the inferiority of women is not from the simple nature of being women. Other factors come into play when understanding why women are oppressed, and both authors recognize the fact that society and old habits must change for the equality of women and men to become a reality.

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/ Modern Gender System,” Maria Lugones offers the idea that gender targets women of color. Lugones brings up the research of Oyeronke Oyewumi, who looked into how gender affected the structure of the Yoruba people, especially since gender was not a concept that was originally part of their culture. Once the idea of “women,” was implemented into the community through colonization, women were identified in contrast to men who were then considered the “norm.” (Lugones). If the women did not have a penis, they were reduced as women, beneath men and they no longer had any power in their communities. The Yoruba men accepted this idea and then collaborated with colonists to further oppress women (Lugones). Paula

As European nations traversed the seas seeking riches, spices, and new beginnings, cultural anxieties began to surface that greatly shaped society in the colonies and on the home front. Mass colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and Australia created a new world staunchly different from the normative and “proper” societal life that defined Britain during the nineteenth century. European colonizers found themselves amongst natives, people they not only misunderstood but sought to reform in order to fit the British hegemony during this period. However, colonizers did not only transform the way of life for those they colonized, but the native populations also had a firm influence on the cultural shifts that would shake and shape British empire. As Britain became the major formal empire of the world by the late nineteenth century, colonial life began to influence understandings of gender, sexuality, indigenous culture, and race. Power struggles rocked colonial establishments and the idea of freedom from the sexually composed values on the home front flourished, creating a sexually charged atmosphere that would trigger cultural anxieties throughout the colonies and in Britain. Maintenance of the masculine preserve that strengthened the framework of British rule was constantly questioned, fueling colonial anxieties and the continued construction of racial and gender hierarchies that would perpetuate well into the twentieth century. The popularity of rape scandals and

It is this dignity that many African people's all but lost in the colonial period...The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost." (Achebe/Killam Eds. Pg. 159.)

Throughout the post-independence era of Africa, gender roles and gender relations are changing. In a few countries in Africa, during the post-independence period, there are women that want to break the traditions of male generated fields in the work and politics. The film Faat Kinè by Ousmane Sembène, follows African woman Faat Kinè through her day to day struggles for success in work and family during the post-independence era of Africa. Wangari Maathai’s book Unbowed: A Memoir describes her childhood and accomplishments that she made in Kenya. African American women around the world are overcoming the gender barriers in work forces that are commonly operated by men.

Gender roles govern the way that most of the world’s population interact with one another. Many African cultures uphold deeply patriarchal gender roles which dictate how women and men interact with one another. Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, a staunch feminist, gives readers a look into Nigerian gender roles in her short story Birdsong. Her writing in Birdsong and her TEDtalks explore and expose how these gender roles are harmful and how important it is for many stories of young women of color to be heard.

Furthermore, women are often seen as a symbol of cultural preservation and a measure of family honor. In conditions of war and colonial rule, which represents an attack on men’s honor and dignity, attention to women’s roles as prescribed by cultural tradition is often intensified. However, the unusual conditions of war and resistance to colonial rule also may provide openings for women to reconfigure their roles and rights, based on new needs of society.

While Victorian literature represented the colonized as unintelligible and voiceless, both novels tackle the representation of masculinity in colonized communities. On a first reading, the representation of masculinity seems to contrast in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and in Schreiner’s Story Of An African Farm. Achebe represents a community trapped in a single and fixed representation of manhood. The narrative performance of the protagonist’s masculinity is staged and questioned in relation to the values of the village and to the colonial power. In Story of An African Farm, traditional gender paradigms are disrupted: colonial masculinity and masculine ideas of imperial power are both questioned and satirised. However, a closer analogy of the staging of masculinity in both novels can reveal how the dynamics of colonial power are made visible in and through the performances of masculinity. Previous critics have considered manhood as largely universal, defining what it means to be a man but it would be simplistic to reduce masculinity as rooted in a biological or cultural essence therefore supporting the idea of a masculine ideal. My essay argues that manhood is embodied, it relies on a series of performances but is masculinity an internal reality? A consideration of how these performances are made intelligible and whether they allow to consolidate a sense of masculine identity can make us think

“negotiate not only the imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the baroque and violent array of hierarchal rules and restrictions that structured their relations with imperial men and women” Clintock p.6). Exploitation is the colonizers logo and women in this novel are being manipulated for the benefit of the patriarchal society in the same manner the colonizer deploys the colonized for his own means.