Women as muted voices and silenced subalterns in Razinat Mohammed’s A Love Like a Woman’s and Other Stories

Abstract

Women, especially in northern Nigeria have become the silenced “subalterns” due to misconceptions about the Islamic religion especially on issues of polygamy, domestic violence, segregation, exploitation, dehumanization and various types of abuses meted on them. This paper seeks to examine how female characters are depicted in Razinat T. Mohammed’s A Love like a Woman’s and Other Stories and the various mechanisms that have situated them into the position of the silenced subalterns. Anchoring on Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” the paper argues that women in A Love like a Woman’s and Other Stories are doubly marginalized and are constantly silenced by men due to the northern tradition and the misinterpretation of the Islamic religion. This paper posits that women are continually held in a vicious cycle: from birth through death, they are given defined roles. More so, the paper surmises that at adolescence, women in Northern Nigeria are forced into early marriages, bastardized under polygamy, politically dehumanized and sabotaged economically in a male-dominated society.