Issue of gender

[Part 1]

In this week’s column, I explore the issue of gender in postcolonial literature. In a number of postcolonial critical texts documented the modes through which the European imperialism ‘colonised’ women. The critical essays which documented the ‘double colonisation’ of women by patriarchy and colonialism began to appear as early as 1986.

Recent studies in the field have explored the relationships of diverse modes of sexuality (homosexuality, lesbianism etc) with colonialism. Studies of women’s condition in postcolonial nations have been carried out in the fields of law, literature and the social sciences. However, in the field of literature, Gender and sexuality became prominent themes in the last decades of the 21st century.

Some of the writers who have focused on gender and role of women in postcolonial nations are Anita Desai, Ama Ata Adidoo, Suniti Namjoshi, Buchi Emacheta and Nawal El Saadawi. The extensive research in the social sciences has focused on the status of women in postcolonial societies considering the factors such as class, caste, economy, political empowerment and literacy which contributed to the status of women in India, the Caribbean, Africa and the Arab world. Interestingly, such studies have also explored the impact of ‘first world’ feminism on ‘Third World’ writers. They also explored the possibilities of ‘Third World’ feminism.

The awareness of the women’s role in the constructions of social, communal and national identities, their oppression at the hands of colonialism and patriarchy in native cultures and their strategies at escaping/ negotiating the power relations between genders has been increased as a result of the retrieval of women’s literary and other texts from the periphery and the exclusion of the canon. It is a fact that literary traditions of most postcolonial nations focused on writings by males. Several feminist critics pointed out that the canon is a male bastion. This has resulted in either exclusion of women’s texts from the cannon or included them as ‘domestic fiction’ virtually relegating the text to a ‘less privilege space’ which ensuing that the political opinions of these narratives are not seriously considered.

Identity

Pramod K. Nayar points out that the significance of women’s narratives, their comments on issues ranging from patriarchy to the community and spiritual lies in the fact that gender has been ‘intrinsic to the national imagination’ as pointed out by Elleke Boehmer.

Nayar observes, “It is fruitful to read postcolonial women’s texts through the prism of identity. In a powerful critique, which is also a manifesto, novelist Mariama Ba says:

“The women writers in Africa have a special task. She has to present the position of women in Africa in all its aspects. There is still so much injustice…in the family, in the institutions, in society, in the streets, in political organisations, discrimination reign supreme…We no longer accept the nostalgic praise to the African Mother, who, in his anxiety, man confesses with Mother Africa. Within African literature, room must be made for women. ”

Mariama Ba’s statement spells out dominant themes of postcolonial women’s writings; political equality and social emancipation, literature as a sources of courage, strength and an agent of social change, re-working of old identities, identity makers and erosion of stereotypes and myths.

Although the primary focus of the women’s fiction in the postcolonial context is on issues of female identity and its constructions, one should not be under the illusion that they have jettisoned the socio-political problems for the sake of psychological exploration of the ‘woman’s condition. In fact, writings of almost all women writers from Asia, Africa and other postcolonial nations present critiques of political economy and society and the vital institutions such as law which affects the lives of the women. Feminist issues have been extensively dealt with in women’s writings in general and novels in particular.

Nayar describes how India’s leading political novelist Nayantara Sahgal highlights the conditions of women workers;

“Hundreds of brick and kilns along [the Ganges] … open and swallow up women…

Women labourers disappeared into kilns where they worked and the pigholes where they lived, sometimes never to return, used…by the kiln masters and their men when they finished carrying brick loads for the day.

In A Situation in New Delhi, Sahgal speaks of urban poverty and the life of women in the slums that mushroom outside Delhi:

They were people who hadn’t known they were people…[that] they need not work as many hours they did , that they were entitled to more pay, if a marauding caste neighbour set fire to one of their huts or rape one of their women, they need not suffer it. The law provides redress… But they couldn’t read and those in authority had not taken trouble to see that the laws were observed… The law of the land lay like disintegrated rubble in the quarry. ”

Nayar points out that “critical approaches to postcoloniality, especially from feminists, have focused on matters of political economy in the age of global capital. For instance, the issues of gender in postcoloniality cannot ignore, ‘Third world’ sweat shops, exploitation of women’s labour, global sex tourism, effects of environmental hazards and accidents, medicine and public health, urban planning, militarisation and education”.

It seems that the women’s literature from Asia, Africa, South America and African Americans in the USA seem to consider themselves at the intersection of three major discourses and structures; racism, imperialism and sexism.