Technique of Exploring Women’s Choice in Select Novels of El Sadaawi, Ba, Alkali and Adichie

Abstract

Women writers in Africa have enjoyed wider audience especially in higher institutions where the curriculum includes African Women Writers, Gender Studies and other related courses. African women writers may focus on a variety of subject matters but what is common to their literary art is that they concentrate on the experience of women. This article focuses on how the authors use their literary art to portray women’s experiences in their social melieu. Nawal El Sadaawi, Mariama Ba, Zaynab Alkali and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are women writers from Africa. The first three women are older and from Moslem background. Adichie is younger and from a Christian background. The choice made of the novels of these women is due to the recurrent problem of being a woman everywhere. In contemporary times women are still treated differently just because they are women. However, it has been observed that there is nothing intrinsic in women that depict them as the bad or inferior species of human beings. This article focuses on the commonality of style used by the select African novelists in couching the predicament of women in the African society. The novels chosen in this research are El Sadaawi’s Woman at Point Zero and God Dies by the Nile; Ba’s So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song; Alkali’s The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman and Adichie’s Americanah.