Women and Extractivism in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow: A Postcolonial Ecofeminist Critique

78 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews a member (by her admission) until 1940. Her naïveté and hypocrisy in politics seem not to have bothered her. In the 1960s she joined the public outcry against the Soviet show trials that sentenced two dissident writers to hard labor for criticizing the regime. She had done the complete opposite in 1938, when she signed a statement supporting the Moscow trials that condemned several writers to death. Her reputation suffered in her final years when she sued critic Mary McCarthy for libel for her remark, “Every word she [Hellman] writes is a lie. Including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman died before the case went to trial. In her memoirs, Hellman admits that she wrongly believed ideas she now rejected. “Whatever our mistakes , I do not believe we did our country any wrong,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time. The reader can decide. I highly recommend this book. Daniel P. King Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin Tanure Ojaide. Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches. Durham, North Carolina. Carolina Academic Press. 2012. isbn 9781611630299 In ten essays anchored in the search and study of topics and approaches shaping contemporary African literature, Nigerian scholar-poet Tanure Ojaide investigates and examines aesthetics, politics, conflicts, and evolving shifts in the works of contemporary African writers. This book reinforces the importance of Ojaide’s contributions in the area of criticism in modern African literature . In Ojaide, African literature has gained a prolific critic. As described by Kwame Dawes in a book review of Ojaide’s Poetic Imagination in Black Africa, Dawes states that “Ojaide’s prose is decidedly plain, direct, and almost pedantic in style. He writes his essays with a simple logic that is built upon a series of carefully considered examples.” Clearly, Dawes’s assertion translates into the merits of Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches. Each essay shares with the reader Ojaide’s fresh insight into topics that have never been covered by other critics of African literature. His cogent and scholarly examination of the African canon brings to mind a mild but conscious effort by him to act as one of the custodians of the continent’s literature. Although the issue of identifying and discussing an African canon might be considered far too ambitious, given the continent ’s vast cultural fabric that includes the Arab cultures of northern Africa, which tend to be associated with the Arab literary traditions of the Middle East by Western scholars , Ojaide’s scholarly and authentic views remain valid and convincing. The editorial guidance for these essays appears far superior to Ojaide’s past books, including Poetic Imagination in Black Africa, Ordering the African Imagination, and Culture , Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature, among others. As usual, Ojaide’s claims depend on his view that literature is a cultural production. The majority of the essays included here are predicated on the same view and much more. Also, each essay is carefully framed and guided by convincing examples. Where Ojaide’s statements appear to be polemic, he wins over his readers with plausible references linking approaches in contemporary African literature to globalization, environment , migration, conflict resolution, language, identity, and aesthetics. Some of the topics in this book have never been examined in African literary criticism. The idea of the scholar-poet tradition and canonization in modern African literature are chiefly new areas of study that are yet to generate voluminous and critical scholarship. Contemporary African Literature is a useful contribution to the ever-growing body of African literary criticism. At its hub is the regard for much of what is shaping contemporary African fiction, poetry, scholarship, politics, oral traditions, and the challenges and prospects affecting the continent’s literary ethos. This book is a worthy read, and its panoramic view will leave any reader familiar with African literature, especially in the areas of poetry and fiction , with ample cause to appreciate Tanure Ojaide’s literary foresight and the merits of his scholarship. Dike Okoro Northwestern University ...

<p>The aim of this paper is to analyze mood, epistemic and deontic modality patterns in an extract culled from <em>Yellow-Yellow</em> (2006) by one of the Nigerian new millennium female writer, Kaine Agary. The findings data revealed by the interpersonal meaning analysis are discussed against the backdrop of critical discourse analysis and womanist theory. The discussion contended that, despite the blend of monologic and dialogic organization of the novel, Kaine Agary has tried to portray the sociological schisms making up the daily life of young girls in the oil-resourced region of Nigeria. More importantly, the authoress has shown women’s determination and commitment to support Zilayefa to succeed in achieving good results in education while the major male character goes against this developmental stream flow by impregnating her. The mood and modality choices operated show some kind of power and hierarchy relations and conflicting ideologies between Sisi, Lolo, Zilayefa and Admiral. The discursive interpretation eventually found out that the interpersonal meaning description and critical discussion can properly work together towards achieving consensus. It is agreed that the hidden authorial ideology behind Kaine Agary’s fictional text is geared towards a pro-women social change for a more balanced African society. This is, of course, the gist priorities and great topical issues calling for urgent response at this time.</p>

It has been commonly asserted that Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow (2006) presents a sordid account of the deprivation of the protagonist’s subsistence livelihood by oil despoilment. This assertion is made without much regard to the repressed and manifest anxieties and desires profoundly induced in the novel’s central character by a male who is present, onto whom the absent malefigure is displaced. This article, therefore, investigates the provocations, corollaries, and correlations of the displaced male-image through its absence and presence and examines how the various offshoots of this image, whether as a father, lover, friend, autocrat or deliverer, are posited by the work’s major characters. The manifestation of the varied shades of the male-image is vital for the destiny of the main character and a few others, accounting for their sexual behaviours, consequent torture and the work’s tragic form. Also closely examined, through the coalescing and the application of Freudian and Jungian theories, are the anxieties stimulated by the absence or presence of the male-image, how they come about, are made manifest in the Nigerian literary tradition and repressed at the same time. From here, works that display the repressed are analysed and aligned to Yellow-Yellow. Besides the main characters’ heeding of some kind of pleasure code, the super-structural image of the male person hangs, like an unseen shadow, over and above Yellow-Yellow’s major character, motivating her actions

Through an analysis of historical and contemporary literature, Visions of Womanhood in Contemporary African Literature argues that African women were not relegated to the background in African society until after colonization. Blessing Diala-Ogamba analyzes the history of women’s roles in African society through oral stories and biographies to show how colonialization worked to oppress women in Africa and explores the ways contemporary African literature confronts and works to overcome its colonial past. Using works by authors such as Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, Lilian Masitera, Nawal El Sadaawi, Lauretta Ncgobo, Sembene Ousmane, and many others, Diala-Ogamba reveals the consistent progression of women and their roles in African novels and society.

Through an analysis of historical and contemporary literature, Visions of Womanhood in Contemporary African Literature argues that African women were not relegated to the background in African society until after colonization. Blessing Diala-Ogamba analyzes the history of women’s roles in African society through oral stories and biographies to show how colonialization worked to oppress women in Africa and explores the ways contemporary African literature confronts and works to overcome its colonial past. Using works by authors such as Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, Lilian Masitera, Nawal El Sadaawi, Lauretta Ncgobo, Sembene Ousmane, and many others, Diala-Ogamba reveals the consistent progression of women and their roles in African novels and society.

Contemporary African literature is, by its very nature, a fertile ground for elucidating the rather symbiotic relation between translation and power differential, given the inherent multilingualism and the implied language hierarchy characteristic of the African postcolonial context. Asymmetry here begins with the unequal power relations between orality and literacy, between oral tradition and writing, between indigenous languages and the languages of colonization. This power differential is enhanced further by the ever-increasing gap between languages of officialdom and the evolving and rapidly assertive languages of creolization. To the extent that African literature is a window into life in contemporary African society, the aesthetic representation of Africanity in writing as well as in colonial or global languages involves translating asymmetry and negotiating, redressing or rewriting power inequalities. This underlying characteristic of African literature dovetails with literary practices in the diaspora whereby migration and identitarian politics draw heavily from the notion of translation as a mechanism for expressing discourses of resistance to oppression and asymmetrical power relations. This chapter seeks to lay bare the underpinnings of power differentials in contemporary African literature and to highlight the role of translation in resisting asymmetry and rewriting power.

The industrial process of solvent extraction of castor oil reduces the toxicity of the meal

Petroleum, Nigeria’s major source of revenue is obtained in the Niger Delta. Yet, the region has been besieged by a lot of crises right from the colonial era. The process of crude oil extraction, resulting in oil pollution has done serious damages to the region, thereby hindering farming and fishing, the main occupations of the Deltans. This plunged the people into the unemployment that is responsible for poverty, hardship, diseases and deaths among the people. Deltans suffer so many losses, yet they are not adequately compensated. This is the cause of the Niger Delta crises. During the colonial era, the British government established oil companies to explore petroleum to enrich her home country, Britain, at the expense of the Niger Delta. Many years after independence, the condition of the region has remained deplorable due to corruption in Nigeria. Being exploited and cheated, the people resorted to different forms of protests, violence and militancy, that have culminated in social unrest in the region. Despite all efforts by the government to arrest the situation, the Niger delta issue has remained a serious problem of public concern, which needs permanent solution. To this effect, many Nigerian literary artists such as Ken Saro-wiwa, Tanure Ojaide, Kaine Agary and Helon Habila expressed their concern over the crises in their literary works, aimed at proffering permanent solution to the problem. This reiterates the importance of literature and the literary artists to the society. This paper examines and expounds how Helon Habila deploys language resources in his novel, Oil on Water, to convey the Niger Delta crises, their security risks to the society and the Nigerian economy, as well as the decisive steps to arrest the ugly situation.

Influence is a widespread and well-documented and widely acknowledged practice in the Western literary tradition, but there has been a flat denial that it exists among African writers. The very fact that a controversy should arise at all as to whether the readership of African writing lies within Africa itself says something about how a different standard is always applied when it comes to things African. Along with fame and fortune, the perception that one’s work could ignite the creative spark for others both in one’s immediate surroundings and afar continues to provide writers worldwide the incentive to keep honoring their calling, in part, because leaving a legacy of hope and inspiration is every writer’s dream. While common sense ought to suggest that the situation of Africa cannot be any different—after all, as a familiar African proverb has it, “it takes a village to raise a child”—the notion of artistic production as a communal affair has continued to be widely thought to be inapplicable to Africa. Why has it become convenient to argue that dialogue of an indigenous nature, as a mode of creative interaction and invention, is absent in contemporary African literature? To take up that question, our argument in this essay proceeds in three interlocking steps. First is an overview of the role professional readers, literary analysts, and scholars have ascribed to literary inheritance in the development of expressive power universally. Next is an attempt to adduce reasons for the persistent regime of denial that over time has established itself firmly in discussions of African writing concerning suggestions of a preoccupation, conceived expansively as disposition, style, thematic engagement, stance, and sensibility, which an informed observer might take as emanating from inspiration of a local origin. The final section makes the case that proper identification and recognition of the conventions of this indigenous literary source would unquestionably provide the best approach to understanding contemporary African literature and stimulating admiration for the creative temper involved in its writing as the case of contemporary African literature cannot be an exception.

Women’s writings have increasingly focused more on equality, intersectionality, sexual violence and reproductive rights. Women, hegemony and the survival strategies that they deploy amidst hegemonic institutions have not been given significant attention in contemporary African literature. While previous studies have written on hegemony, there is still a dearth of research on the various forms of hegemony and the survival strategies they deploy in combating such structures. This research used a qualitative content analysis to investigate how selected African female writers depict their female characters as victims of hegemony, and demonstrates how the characters eventually overcome the hegemonic structures that dominate them. Three novels were selected owing to their thematic relevance: Panashe Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine, Abi Dare’s, The Girl with the Louding Voice, and Chika Unigwe’s on Black Sisters’s Street. The various survival strategies that the female characters adopt made it necessary for the research to adopt an eclectic theoretical framework which comprises: radical feminism, snail-sense, feminism, and nego-feminism. The textual analysis reveals that the economy, patriarchy, western hegemony, culture, and family were the hegemonic institutions that the female characters battled with. Women were also found to dominate other women. In Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine, Tsitsi’s survival strategies are sexual compromise and syncretism. In Dare’s The Girl with the Louding Voice, Adunni adopts resilience, defiance, escape and violence as her survival strategies. Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street presents four major female characters who are Efe, Ama, Alek and Sisi, who deploy various survival strategies. Efe’s strategy is hard work followed by Ama who deploy soliloquy. Sisi’s strategy, as well as the others, culminated into emigration to Europe. However, Sisi fails to adopt loyalty as a strategy, which leads to her death. The others eventually succeed because they were loyal. Overall, the study demonstrates that despite the pervasive and multifaceted nature of hegemonic structures, African female characters develop diverse, context-specific strategies that enable them to reclaim agency, assert identity, and navigate oppressive socio-economic and cultural systems

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. This book provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

<i>Traditional and Contemporary African Literature. Yale French Studies</i> Traditional and Contemporary African Literature. Yale French Studies, no. 53. 1976. 212 pp.

SummaryFeminist critics of African literature have observed that the domination of African literary outputs by male writers has led to romanticised and negative portrayals of the female character in contemporary African literature. Male writers have been accused (and often rightly so) of valorising and projecting the female character as not only docile and passive, but largely dependent on menfolk for her basic sustenance and survival (Ajayi 1997; Nfah-Abbenyi 1997).According to these critics, African literature written by men has predominantly robbed the female character of the power of agency, often idealising and romanticising her as fragile and weak. The female character is often conflated with Mother Africa as she is also presented as the ultimate symbol of human fecundity. In those rare instances when she has been credited with the power of agency, she has been portrayed as rebellious, evil and constitutive of mortal threats to stability and social equilibrium.Be that as it may, a considerable number of contemporary African women writers have striven to circumvent these negative portrayals of the female character. They seek to offer more dynamic representations of female subjectivity in African literature. In this paper, however, I argue that Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost presents the reader with striking narratives of traditional African womanhood, which are at once nearly equally progressive and regressive. I argue that whereas Aidoo's play challenges traditional patriarchy by subverting certain discriminatory female stereotypes and normative perceptions of women that are prevalent in traditional African societies, the play nevertheless exudes an ambivalent attitude towards female emancipation. I also argue that this ambivalent attitude unwittingly reinforces the very negative images of the female character which Aidoo sets out to subvert.

(2011). Freud’s “Penis Envy,” Lacan’s the “Desire to be the Other” Nigerian Feminist Aesthetics: Adimora–Ezeigbo’s Children of the Eagle and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow. Journal of the African Literature Association: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 151-163.

African literature is political and politicized as it contests political issues and proffers political visions. In this chapter, effort will be made to interrogate the politics in the production, publishing, and reception of contemporary African literature. This chapter is meant to complement the second chapter, “Contemporary Africa and the Politics in Literature.” As emphasized in the second chapter, almost every human experience in Africa has become political or connected to politics in one way or another. Similarly, there are political issues involved in the production, publishing, and reception of literature written in Africa. Also, as in the second chapter, here politics intersects with the culture, society, economy, zeitgeist, and other aspects of contemporary African reality. Politics in literature, as used in this chapter, has to do with a conscious or unconscious effort, choice, strategy, or the lack of any determination to do something with particular results anticipated. Politics involves ideology, ideas, and notions of the African reality that writers, publishers, and readers have to deal with in relation to contemporary African literature.