Genealogies as an interpretive paradigm for engaging African women writers’ historical consciousness

Abstract

Historical discourses in women’s writing are inherently revisionist. My paper proposes genealogical narrations as an interpretive paradigm for thinking through women narrators’ engagement with history in Grace Akinyi Ogot’s Days of My Life (2012) and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s This Child Will Be Great (2009). Drawing on autobiographical theories by Jane Marcus and Elleke Boehmer, and on orature, the paper examines how women autobiographers narrate genealogies which contest dominant autobiographical and historical discourses and practices that silence women and their agency, or distort them in history. These genealogical forms draw parallels with oral genres to produce a hybrid form that capitalizes on the agency African women enjoyed in matriarchal cultures before ­colonialism. The emergent power dynamic enables the writers to deploy symbolic grammar and resignify the private act of ­auto-biographical narration as a historical process and women as producers of history. These genealogies (in writing) advanced by the women writers in autobiography and the oral genres they intertextually interact with form the basis for writing alternative histories, and serve as a demonstration of their historical consciousness.