| Southern African women's writing resists the social silencing and political disenfranchisement of African women in colonial and neo-colonial communities. Placing women at the center of textual representation refuses their relegation to a "matrix of marginality" that oppresses according to race, class, gender, and culture and restores women's centrality in self- and cultural-definition. African women are represented by such writers as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ellen Kuzwayo, Sindiwe Magona, Lauretta Ngcobo, and Zoe Wicomb as agents and actors; they engage in multiple experiences, maneuvering within and around oppression, certainly, but living their lives in spite of it. The African women represented by the writers I examine in this work do not simply re-act; they act. And in their very action--in their refusal to live their lives only in response to oppression--lies their resistance.; Manifold images of women in southern African women's writing resist singular and immutable representations of "African Woman" as victim, replacing reductive stereotypes with a full yet subtle spectrum of individual and cultural identity. The texts examined here interrogate the very terms "African" and "woman" in their representations of women who negotiate the roles constructed for them within traditional and western "custom." The women of Nervous Conditions, Call Me Woman, To My Children's Children, And They Didn't Die, and You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town engage on various levels in efforts to redefine those roles within a womanist epistemology that recognizes allegiance to traditional heritage and to women's emancipation in the changing dynamics of traditional, colonial, and neo-colonial social and political arenas. In the spirit of womanism that has "wholeness" and cultural "healing" as its aim, African women engage in the interplay of traditional preservation and progress; they dance a "dialectic of autonomy and community" that leads them to the third point of the dialectic, one that synthesizes traditional notions of African community from a womanist perspective with women's autonomy as defined from an "African" perspective.; By defining themselves within African- and women-centered textual spaces, African women refuse to be spoken for; they become none "other" than themselves. |
