African Literature and the Woman:The Imagined Reality as a Strategy of Dissidence

Abstract

Whenever transformation becomes necessary in human society, it must begin with some kind of alteration or fixing of an internal cartography, or what David Punter calls violent geographies (2000, 29) in Postcolonial Imaginings. African woman's literature reveals attempts at such reparations and reconciliations through its reimaginations of reality, deployed via dissident rhetorical strategies. The old platonic dualism has been boosted by corresponding neo-platonisms in numerous non-Western cultures to the extent that we can affirm that many of the problems in the world today are related to our readings of the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, the concrete environment and the ethereal environment, the world of a palpable humanity and the intangible and perplexing Great Imaginary that we associate with God and deities. The gender crises in Africa could be read in terms of a conflict reterritorialized into a double jeopardy in which women must against God and the deities and men either simultaneously or one after the other. This dilemma extends beyond the notion of double colonization characterized by Kirsten Hoist Petersen and Anna Rutherford in the preface of their anthology of essays A Double Colonization: Colonial and Postcolonial Women's Writing (1986). If the choice for African women is to fight patriarchal culture alone, it would be akin to the old cliche of trying to fell a tree by cutting down the branches. It seems to me that the more potent human combat is in the interior, in the Great Imaginary where we situate God and deities. There is still a lot of wisdom in what Sir Francis Bacon suggested hundreds of years ago