Archipelagic Thinking and Mozambican Women's Multivalent Articulations: Paulina Chiziane's The First Wife

Abstract

Archipelagic thinking today has ventured beyond its shores of merely dialoguing with island narratives and their related territorialities. Perusing this in contemporary times calls for a flexible definition of this, via conversations that engage textual heterogeneity. The article examines contemporary notions of archipelagic thought together with the women-centric Afro-Luso writing of Mozambican author Paulina Chiziane. It analyzes Chiziane's novel The First Wife or Niketche, with its intrinsically archipelagic-centric female articulations, through its multivalent prisms of island-configured thought that counters the petrified continental rhetoric pervading in her society. Chiziane's nonconforming viewpoints offer distinction from colonial and postindependence rhetoric that has attempted to hegemonize Mozambique's diverse regional social and cultural outlooks. The article contends that through ruminating on its Indian Ocean imaginaries, the divergent impetuses of women-centric language in Chiziane's Afro-Luso writings arise, revealing its polyphonic cadences and traits. The movements of island thought lend cogency to unraveling Chiziane's writing through its interpersonal yet paradoxically collective approach, which underscores the multivalence of Mozambican women's distinctive voices.