Feministic Issues of Textual Analysis in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come
Chapter One
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to promote the issue of feministic activities in our society by bringing out the feministic issues in Sefi Atta’s Every thing Good Will Come and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes.
The main purpose of this research is to sensitize women on the issue of feminism and the roles of some feminists in the society. This research is aimed at imparting in people the feminist ideals and positive roles displayed by women in an attempt to change some of the traditional beliefs and practices imposed on them by their male counterparts.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
Feminist issues and perspectives are the different points of view and political label for both the awareness of women’s marginalization, secondary position as forms of socio-cultural oppression and the quest for freedom. The history of feminism is the history of women’s resistance and opposition to patriarchy. Feminism is an organized political struggle that started in the West and spread to the other parts of the world. Patriarchal oppression consists of the obnoxious concept of a female essence by which certain social standards of feminist are imposed on all biological women to make it seems as if the oppressive conditions are natural.
Sefi Atta and Ama Ata Aidoo are among the best recognized novelists that discuss the problem concerning women in the patriarchal system.
When we look at African feminist novels, however, it is striking to note that all of them are well educated, highly westernized heroines, and all are set in urban environments. Specifically, we are thinking of seven books published in the last few years: Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter (1980), Flora Nwapa’s One is Enough, (1981) Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke (1982), and Destination Biafra (1982), Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1877) and Changes (1991) and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2006). The feminist heroines in these novels all have the professional and economic means to live without men and they do so in an urban world which will at least accommodates, if not encourage, their anomalous single status, that their situation is very new and still tenuous is shown in the recurring conflict between mothers and daughters in for example, One is Enough, Destination Biafra, and Double Yoke. The heroine’s mothers in these books embody traditional African values and in their incomprehension and dismay at their daughters’ behaviour their disapproval, for example, when their daughters smoke and wear trousers. They reinforce the patriarchal values of African society, like their daughters’ suitors and husbands, these mothers want to see their daughters securely married and pregnant. They cannot imagine a destiny for their daughters other than the one they have endured, a destiny portentously expressed by an editorial in the Ghanaian Daily Graphic: A woman may gain the whole world but she would have lost her soul if she doesn’t become a male’s extension or somebody’s mother.
The questions that nearly all these novels pose, in fact, is how can this conflict be resolved? How can the contemporary African women negotiate her way between the claims of tradition and modernization? How, finally, can she be rendered whole again? These questions are perhaps articulated most powerfully in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Flora Nwapa’s One is Enough. Both novels involve the painful, but ultimately successful movement of a woman from a traditional African world to a very different, westernized urban life. In both cases, the precipitating factor in the consciousness raising process of the novels heroines in the brutal imposition of polygamy. Polygamy, of course, is the most glaringly inequitable and sexist feature of traditional African Society, we can see the effects of polygamy in African women in some of these novels like in So Long a Leter. After thirty years of marriage and twelve children, Ramatoulaye, the heroine of So Long a Letter is devastated when her husband takes a second wife the schoolmate of one of their daughters. Ramatoulaye suffers as a result of her husband’s desertion, and it is addressed to her closest friend, Aissatous who not long before had divorced her husband when he also takes a second wife.
On one level the novel is a celebration of female bonding, of Ramatoulaye and Aissatous enduring friendship, of their shared world without men. As Ramatulaye Says, “The essential thing is the convent of our hearts which animates us; the essential thing is the quality of the sap that flows through us. So Long a Letter is a love letter to a dearest friend.
But it also seems to be addressed to Ramatoulaye herself as well as to Aissatou, a kind of internal monologue charting the painful process of her liberation. For Aissatou embodies the self that Ramatoulaye is struggling to become. This is shown clearly in their very different reactions to their husbands’ taking second wives. Without hesitating a moment, Aissatou walks out on her husband, leaving an explanation a defiant letter which ends, “I am stripping worthy garment, I go my way”. (P.32).
CHAPTER THREE
FEMINISTIC ISSUES IN CHANGES
Changes is about a protagonist named Esi Sekyi, how she encounters frustrations and dilemmas in her attempts to claim a space of her own as a woman. After the collapse of her second marriage, Esi has only make shift solutions on how to carry on with life. Nevertheless, her intelligent and sustained struggle to be true to herself and to her relationship points to possibility, if not of change in one then of “change” in the making.
Narrating Esi’s experiences and those of her family and friends, Ama Ata Aidoo rewrites a number of familiar fictions concerning women’s lives in a male dominated society. When, for example, Ali decides that Esi should marry him and become his second wife, she has no reason to object, given that he has courted her with all the charm, liberality, and eloquence to be found in any romantic best-seller, given, too, that his decision has the sanction of custom, at least within the mythologized version of traditional society, “wives stock turns being wives”, the man not supposed to” have favourites, and “The serious business of living” was done “with our heads, and never our heart” pg. 93, 94). However, romance and myth prove short lived. Once the wedding is over, Alis charm begins to bear a certain resemblance to deviousners, his gifts seem like bribes, and his eloquence sounds like deception. The version of womanhood that now lies in wait for Esi is one familiar to her grandmother:
CHAPTER FOUR
GENDER CONFLICT IN EVERYTHING GOOD WILL COME
Everything Good Will Come is a truth to life novel, the novel evokes the sights and smells of African while imparting a wise and universal story of feminism, love, friendship, prejudice, survival, politics and the cost of divided loyalties. The writer portrays her female characters to be more radical compared to the male characters. The writer, Sefi Atta is a radical feminist who believes that women has equal right as men.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
This study has looked at the feministic issues in modern African novels by analyzing the works of Ama Ata Aido and Sefi Atta. Ama Ata Aidoo and Sefi Atta in their works consider the intellectual powers of women in every aspect. The novelists believe in women liberation and emancipation and through their works. They try to educate the illiterate women on the necessity of women liberation and emancipation against patriarchal oppression.
In African and in the world at large the different face of feminism is put on. Women are given the right and opportunity to partake in all spheres of life. The only area of human endeavour that appears to be too static to be ameliorated is religion and its doctrines. Apart from religion, many other aspects of life seem to have been touched by feminism successfully.
Feminism has done a lot to human race. The marginalized women are being released from the bondage of gender oppression of all kinds. These are serious amendment for the benefit of women for instance women are allowed to choose whoever they wish to marry; and at the death of their husbands, they are not allowed to take over their husband’s properties.
Sefi Atta in the novel Everything Good Will Come uses her character Enitan to portray a good example of a free woman, Enitan feels that she leaving her husband’s house will make her achieve her ambition, she have to leave the husband’s house with out any problem.
Ama Ata Aidoo in the novel Changes also uses her character (Fusena and Esi) to portray a good example of an oppress woman and a modern independent woman.
Fusena Ali’s wife who is the oppressed, is being deprived of her future ambition in furthering her education and also her job as a teacher by her husband so that she can attain to the family. In (chapter 12 p. 115) When Ali tells her of him marrying a second wife she says in anger and regret. . . she has a university degree? Esi on the other hand is an independent modern woman. She comes to represent the emergence of a new feminine identity. One that can compete equally with men in terms of financial and personal security she has the freedom and independence she needs to go on with her life and career even when her husband seems to intrude she decides to divorce and that shows the right she has as a woman to decide and do whatever she wish.
African women are fighting to take back their rightful in the main stream of affairs; for inclusion in all aspect of life endeavour; for equal rights and opportunity, which is the human right legitimate citizens. They are opposed to marginalization on the bases of sex. It can then be explained that African women are seeking greater recognition in the society than they are getting right now.
Thanks to feminist, all the social political ropes that have held women on the fringe for centuries have begun to loosen gradually and women are now breathing their air of freedom.
WORKS CITED
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- Nwapa, Flora. One is Enough. Ibadan: Hernemann Education Books Ltd., 1981.
- Oyeronke, Ofewumi. African Women and Feminism. Ibadan: Africa World Press, 2003.
