Representing Gender on the Move from Africa to Spain: Donato Ndongo's El metro

Abstract

This paper argues that literary representations of migration from Africa to Spain hold the potential to create alternative visions of gender, identity, and the nation. I analyze the work of the Equatorial Guinean author, Donato Ndongo, whose novel El metro (2007) demonstrates how gender and migration intersect to shatter any fixed notion of the African migrant experience. The migratory journey from Africa to Spain becomes a space where normative notions of gender and sexuality are contested. Informed by postcolonial and gender theory, this article seeks to shed light on a number of questions related to gender and migration: How are the traditional gender norms strengthened or interrogated in these literary narratives? How do these representations challenge masculine hegemony by presenting alternative images of masculinity and femininity? Finally, what larger implications do these visions of masculinity and femininity have on the nation? In order to answer these research questions, I focus on the following themes: the role African gender relations play in the decision making process, the existence of gendered social networks; how the migratory journey reconfigures or reaffirms gender roles, and how the return of the migrant is a gendered performance of masculinity. My analysis reveals how Ndongo creates subversive gendered identities, which emerge from the migratory experience, that contradict the normative discourse in Spain surrounding the phenomenon.