The beginning of this study of gender, nation and postcolonial narrative lies, appropriately, in story – a story about a ‘girl’, a girl at war.

The ‘girl’, Gladys, is the at first nameless young woman whom the narrator of Chinua Achebe’s 1960s short story ‘Girls at war’ encounters at three representative moments during the years of the Biafra War.³ Achebe has long been intrigued by the power granted women in myth (take Ani, Idemili), but what is at issue in the present story is not so much mythical presence as the ‘girl’ Gladys’s nationally signifying condition. She is in effect...

Among postcolonial and feminist critics it is now widely accepted that the nationalist ideologies which informed, in particular, the first wave of independence movements and of postcolonial literatures from 1947, are cast in a gendered mould. Nationalism, which has been so fundamental to the decolonisation process around the world, bears a clear mark for gender, and this gender marking, rather than being referred to a monolithic or transhistorical concept of patriarchy, can be explained as a specific historical development of power defined by sexual difference. To put it more plainly, this book submits that, without this marking for gender, it...

With these affirmative words, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o points to the strong position that women characters have held in his work over the years. It is a position virtually unique in Anglophone African literature. Not only is it the case that the internationally renowned African writers concentrating on themes of national self-assertion have by and large been male, but that in their work the emancipation of women has generally been rated as of secondary importance relative to the liberation of nations or of peoples. For this reason Ngugi’s exertions to include women in his vision of a Kenya...

Although he published the autobiographical meditationHome and Exilein 2002, Chinua Achebe’sAnthills of the Savannah(1987) remains the culmination point of his achievement as a writer of fiction, as well as being an elaboration of his earlier novelistic interests. The novel is, as Ben Okri has remarked, Achebe’s ‘most complex and his wisest book to date’.² Dealing in coded terms with Nigeria’s calcified power-elite, and the bankruptcy of its post-independence nepotistic politics,Anthills of the Savannahis in many respects a sequel to the penultimate novelA Man of the People(1966), which explored themes of political corruption...

Narratives, as has already been seen in this book, give form to and legitimate the process of postcolonial and national coming-into-being. Stories codify national reality and space, and allow emergent national identities to be performed. By looking at a particularly definitive,form-givingorin-formingnarrative genre, the independence leader’s autobiography, the work of this chapter is to show how the story of the growth to self-consciousness of the leader at national independence often presents as a synonym for the rise of the nation. In both Indian and African nationalist movements, the two points of focus in this chapter, leaders’ tales...

She is there at the beginning of the lives of individuals and of nations. In nationalist and pan-nationalist mythologies and, more recently, too, in the matriarchal yearnings of historically dispossessed women seeking their own place in tradition and history, mother figures cradle their children in comforting and capacious laps. Symptomatically, in the period before and immediately after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, his then wife and at the time celebrated consort Winnie Mandela (now Madizikela-Mandela) was given the laudatory title ‘Mother of the Nation’.

Elsewhere, as has been seen, mother figures bulk large in nationalist imaginings. By way...

In relation to the national son, the self-defining inheritor of the post-independence era and the protagonist of the nation-shaping narrative, the female child is a – if notthe– non-subject within the national family romance. Revealingly, if paradoxically, given that her self-determination has been in principle achieved, the daughter figure within the framework of the postcolonial narrative that inscribes the new nation is, if not subordinate, peripheral and quiet, then virtually invisible.

The pre-eminent status of national sons, and the overshadowed position of their sisters, is exemplified in postcolonial fiction from the 1950s and into the 1990s by writers...

The silenced and wounded body of the colonised is a pervasive figure in colonial and postcolonial discourses, although its valencies obviously shift with the transition from colonial into postcolonial history. In the postcolonial process of rewriting, certainly, the trope of the dumb, oppressed body undergoes significant translations or transfigurations, which this chapter will examine in closer detail. InMaru(1971), a novelistic indictment of intra-black racism, the South African writer Bessie Head stakes out a number of epigraphic moments with which to begin the discussion.

Marurecounts the tale of a woman who learns to paint – tofigure–...

The first, post-1945 phase of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa, as in other colonised regions, was distinguished byliteralbelief structures: a strong, teleological faith in the actual existence of the nation as ‘people’, and the sense that history essentially unfolded as a process of that nation’s coming-into-being. There was a belief, too, in Africa as in South Asia, as in the Caribbean, that the distinctive forms of modernity, in this case in particular the sovereign state, could be incorporated, indigenised, repatriated.² These may seem at face value rather obvious statements to make about nationalism, which broadly demands some form of...

This chapter, which considers the continuing exoticisation of the other woman that is involved in the postcolonial privileging of her voice, begins with a symptomatic account of the remarkable critical reception in 1890s London of Sarojini Naidu (1876–1949), the Indian woman poet or ‘little Indian princess’, later Gandhi’s right-hand woman.²

Born in Hyderabad into a prominent intellectual Bengali family, the Chattopadhyays or Chatterjees, Sarojini Naidu as a girl showed an extraordinary precocity in writing poetry, mainly in imitation of British Romantic writers: her ambition was to be ‘a Keats for India’.³ At 15 she was sent to England, to...

This chapter seeks to bring into juxtaposition two Zimbabwean women writers and a question of same-sex sexuality: its configurations of desire, its vocabularies of aspiration. It thus extends this book’s overall concern with women’s representation into the area of women’s sexuality, especially in so far as sexuality remains the dark secret of the Third World nation. Queer sexuality, in point of fact, probably still constitutes what could best be termed a virtual non-presence, or at least a covert silencing, an ‘unsaying’, in postcolonial discourses generally and in African writing in particular.³ It is a surprising omission or occlusion considering that,...

Contemporary readings of thepostcolonialin literary and cultural critique often see the concept as connected in complex ways with a globalised world distinguished by transnational capital flows and widely ramifying technological networks. Thetransnationalin this respect is taken as signifying the movements of peoples, signs, goods and capital that overarch or bypass the nation. According to this view, the postcolonial, like the transnational or the global, refers to multicultural, cross-border activities and commitments, combining a focus on issues of migrancy, diaspora and nomadism, with its seeming converse, a concern with questions of home and belonging. The postcolonial world...

In some notable instances, as has been seen, women writers work to transform the male lineaments of the postcolonial nation. In others, they attempt merely to decipher and to modify its structures of privilege. Although the topics and texts discussed in this book have varied widely, the foregoing chapters have been linked by their shared concern with the strategies used by novel writers, women but also men, to recast the colonial and patriarchal symbolic legacies embedded in many versions of post-independence nationalism. These strategies, which are often interlinked, have included what has been calledliteralisinginherited gender-marked tropes – concretising...