Rereading and rewriting African women : Ama Ata Aidoo and Bessie Head

This thesis explores female subjectivity in the works of two African women writers, Ama Ata Aidoo and Bessie Head. Reacting against distorted and limited androcentric assumptions about femaleness, these two writers have inscribed an African female-centred consciousness that contests women's marginality in African literature." Their thematic concerns, genre choice, and narrative strategies contribute to an understanding of the ways in which they use language to construct an historically specific female subjectivity. Questions such as audience and narrative distancing are considered in order to establish the problematic nature of interpreting culturally coded texts from a first world feminist perspective. The contextual framework identifies three areas of "male constructs" used by Achebe, Armah, Soyinka, Ngugi, Sembene and Farah. Specific texts that employ female characters for their mythical, allegorical or metaphorical potential are analysed to establish the ways male writers often deny the diversity and importance of female experience, seeking to reify it within fixed parameters. By contrast, Aidoo and Head create a variety of characters who voice individual and communal gender-specific conflicts produced by their sociohistorical realities. Their perceptions and sensibilities as African women are influenced by their different backgrounds and relationships to their communities; their narrative perspectives, which involve the use of oral storytelling techniques, dramatize the fluid and complex nature of the subjectivity they inscribe. Their use of language to establish a distance between themselves and their non-African readership is examined in order to illuminate the political difficulties inherent in deconstructing feminism within an international framework.