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Martha represents the brand of few visionary women who courageously and ceaselessly fight in defense of what they believe is right. The right to enjoy uncensored pleasures and individual freedoms to choose what pleases them. She deconstructs the socially ascribed identity of the woman and reconstructs a new and energized one. Her education and level of awareness challenges the power dynamics governing male- female relationships in the Shona society.
Freddy actually physically assaults Martha in spite of her condition, in order to force her to leave his house and make way for his mistress during odd hours of the night. Such insensitivity and brutal violence with which Freddy treats Martha marks him off as bestial, barbaric and uncivilized.
This is what leads Martha to lament as follows: For eight years, I have thought about how Freddy has ruined my life. Because of him I am an outcast. Because of him I must live my life in loneliness and unhappiness.
Martha is totally convinced that the root cause of all her problems stem from a man, Freddy, the man who impregnates and abandons her. Dangarembga also shows that even the family under the helm of patriarchal fathers is far less compassionate and caring than is to be expected. Everybody did. The playwright critically interrogates the culturally accepted and canonized role and position of a woman in the Shona family. Dangarembga also challenges asymmetrical power relations between Shona men and women in the negotiation of sex and sexual roles.
Martha makes it overtly clear that Lovemore is not in control of the relationship on the basis of his sexual services which may be needed from time to time. She can easily dispense with him at any moment. Martha is endowed with the power to redefine and reverse sexual roles between a man and a woman in the Shona society. This is clearly captured when Martha explains: We forget that there was a time we had no alternative except to accept such domestic subservience, but now that part of the struggle has already been fought and won.
It is the way, even for our children. Equipping Martha with the capacity and confidence to challenge and contest the position and role of women in the Shona family, the playwright advances the need to reform sexist institutions and bring an end to patriarchal systems of power beginning with the Shona society.
According to Ellen Willis radical feminist, 1 got sexual politics recognized as a public issue; 2 created second- wave feminism vocabulary; 3 helped to legalize abortion in the USA; 4 were the first to demand total equality in the so-called private sphere house work, child care, emotional and sexual needs , and 5 created an atmosphere of urgency through the creation of various women pressure groups for gender activism.
There is little effort made by the playwright to fully contextualize the origins of forces abetting the oppression of women in the Shona society.
Such a history was accompanied by a radical wholesale appropriation and re-orientation of the autochthonous values and customs of the indigenous African people who were compelled to embrace the new religion of the so-called torch-bearers of civilization- the white colonialists.
He is entrapped somewhere in-between his culture from which he was displaced and nowhere in the Western culture. The agenda taken up by radical feminists in this vein is clearly therefore an alien agenda, a Western agenda Hudson-Weems , There are several other charges that have been leveled against the radical feminism approach.
The core of radical feminists standpoint is that women are oppressed because [they are] women living in a patriarchal world. Their argument is built around the notion of one universal experience for all women. Generalizing from one point of view ignores or invalidates the experiences of others. All the male characters in the play She No Longer Weeps are portrayed as essentially bad Freddy, Joe, Lovemore, and father without exception, which per se is an overgeneralization.
Radical feminists are thus accused of being essentialists who risk doing to others what they do not want done to them.
They have tended to ignore experiences of happy marriages and relationships based on mutual complimentarity and genuine love. According to Hudson-Weems ; When an Africana womanist writes about male-female relationships, for example, she must present them in all dimensions. She must explore the dynamics of the relationships, which go beyond the mere surface interaction between the man and the woman…She must realistically and objectively examine the dominant forces at play, forces that dictate the very nature of the conflicts and the ways they are handled.
These forces in many instances are deeply rooted in economics, particularly the economic failure of Africana man. In the ongoing struggle to liberate themselves from all the forms of gender oppression which they believe affects them, women ought to circumvent becoming oppressors themselves. The survival of the family and community development is inconceivable if men and women fail to work together and consider each other as equally valuable in the cause of group progress as echoed in the Afrocentric universe of thought and practice Asante Conclusion The foregoing discussion has demonstrated and explored how different statuses of women in the play affect their individual abilities to transcend social trappings and barriers which the Shona society casts in their lives.
Furthermore, it has been shown that both married and unmarried women collaborate, facilitate and participate in the entrenchment, and consolidation of the forces which are ranged against their best interests.
Married women are hesitant and jittery in approaching matters which affect them. Consequently, they face the imperative to work together for the survival of their families, progress of their communities and ultimate goal of achieving complete freedom, dignity and equality.
References Asante, K. The researcher recommended a prolific and more balanced approach to family disintegration from the female writer's perspective. A sense of hope had to be instilled in the mindset of victims so that they do not accept the negative impact of fate was another recommendation.
The researcher also recommended positive solutions to perennial problems affecting families within literary works as pointing them out was not enough. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others.
Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.
But the country's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed these hopes. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, Carolyn Martin Shaw surveys Zimbabwean feminisms from the colonial era to today. She examines how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. She also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society--rural and urban, professional and domestic--accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks.
Finally, Shaw offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the prevailing view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women. The result of thirty years of experience, Women and Power in Zimbabwe addresses what happened when a generation of African women deferred their dreams of empowerment.
Edward Mallot Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: Category: Literary Criticism Page: View: Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia investigates how English-language fiction, Hindi cinema, and postcolonial urban planning have provided surprisingly ambivalent and deeply controversial responses to the twinned compulsions of memory and forgetting on the Indian subcontinent.
Edward Mallot examines how Eurocentric assumptions about trauma and testimony need to be challenged in South Asian contexts. In literature, writers such as Salman Rushdie, Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh turn to unexpected strategies of encoding and understanding the past.
Mallot argues that these controversies and strategies expand memory studies in new, provocative directions. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Libraries near you: WorldCat. She no longer weeps First published in Subjects Drama. Places Zimbabwe. The Physical Object Pagination 59 p. Community Reviews 0 Feedback?
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