Negotiating a Breathing Room from the Intersections of Mother-Daughter In-Law Relationships, Othering and Sexuality: An Examination of Mame Wolo’s The Kaya-Girl and The Purple Violet of Oshaantu by Neshani Andreas

Using as a stepping-stone The Kaya-Girl by Mamle Wolo and Neshani Andreas’s The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, this paper sets out to address intersecting forms of oppression which represent an albatross around the African woman’s unwavering drive to break the shackles of subordination. The research article argues that over and above the positioning of patriarchy as key to teasing out the woes facing African women, there exist other forms of subordination that interlock to grind them down. The raw deal of Kauna at the hands of her husband and in-laws alike, not to mention the dogged struggle of Faiza against a hidebound society that socially excludes her on class-based grounds, encapsulate the wanton cruelty of the female condition. Both novels highlight the driving necessity to think of the multifaceted woes of female subjection in Africa as springing from a bunch of causes that mutually reinforce each other, and whose resolution calls upon a holistic approach. That is, positive transformational change can only be mediated by tackling head-on the strictures crippling the African woman’s dogged effort to full-blown freedom. To put it differently, the issues of class, othering, in-lawism, sexuality, patriarchy, gender, the burden of marriage, female infertility and the stigma of having a child out of wedlock cannot be successfully dealt with in isolation. The female protagonists in the novels in hand are conspicuous by their resilience and stiff pushback through what Bell Hooks terms ‘political solidarity’, and friendship. The objectification of women of black descent does not occur out of the blue. Rather it is man-made and can, accordingly, be rolled back through an intersectional approach. Methodology wise, the author draws on the concept of intersectionality, as well as perspectives from the social sciences, in an endeavour to do justice to the topic at hand.