In the name of war: Hypermasculinity in Elma Shaw’s redemption road

Abstract

The paper examines hyper-masculinity in West African war literature. Masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, and hyper-masculinity are all recurrent themes in Social Sciences and other fields of study but not so much in Literature. The disparity between the war history of West Africa, the few literary works on conflicts in West Africa, and the dearth of literary studies on Africa’s war literature underscore this study. Elma Shaw’s Redemption Road is one of the very few war novels on Liberia’s civil war that spanned from 1989 to 2003 and cost the lives of over 250,000 people. Through the frameworks of postcolonialism and hypermasculinity, this paper analyses hypermasculinity and gender relations in Shaw’s post-colonial war novel. The geopolitical struggles of the post-colony, the emblematic dichotomies of feminine and masculine, and their implications on gender relations in war discourse are centralized. The study demonstrates that faulty childhood context, faulty governance, poor coping strategies, and the fear-loaded cultural oppression of males to show manliness culminate in the trials of men in this fictional post-colonial Liberia. These tensions exacerbate the chaos of war as they render the conflict setting a ripe fodder for violent gender relations. They also engender the inexplicability of femininity in masculinity discourses for the only reason that females are the litmus for the test and measurement of masculinity in many patriarchal cultures as demonstrated in the novel. Thus, the paper reveals insights into why male characters become hyper-masculine in the novel. This revelation facilitates a better understanding of gender issues in war contexts. The conclusion to the discourse is that in fictional war-torn Liberia, excessive masculinity is not a masculine nomenclature but a colonially influenced gender coping parading that has lasting negative implications on gender relations.