Women Writing Women: Re-Defining the Identity of African Women in African Literary Texts

Due to the several years of misrepresentation and malignment by misogynist male writers, feminist writers have endeavored to reconstruct and redefine the identity of the African woman in African literature. African women’s writings can therefore be viewed as an objection to patriarchal supremacy with the aim to uncover the injustices inflicted on women by the patriarchal African tradition. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s Subaltern concept along with Helene Cixous’s concept of women’s writing, this study examines how African female writers represent the atrocities of female characters to tell the stories of African women from women’s perspective. The study focuses on four selected African texts: Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Faceless. The study revealed that female authors do not only expose and lampoon the inhumane treatment of African women in marriage, but they also provide avenues for these women to triumph. The two main ways by which women are exploited in the texts are commodification of women and sexual abuse. The authors made strong appeal to African women to embrace assertiveness and sisterhood harmony in order to emancipate themselves from the burden of patriarchal subjugation. The findings of this study have implications for redefining women’s identity in Africa, point to the effectiveness of sisterhood, and invite the active involvement of all women in the struggle to end patriarchal oppression.