African women’s search for [re]insription in modern Africa

Abstract

This thesis aims at dissecting the workings of the patriarchal ethos as denounced by the two African women writers, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta and the Algerian Malika Mokeddem. The corpus is selected on the basis of a variety of literary sub-genres: autobiography, fictional narratives and war novels. This corpus falls in the category of resistance literature as the novels selected portray women’s victimization by patriarchy and women’s attempts and ways to stand against it. Consequently, the study is backed up by the feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic tools of analysis that explain how the girl/woman is conceived of by the patriarchal society and how the woman inverts this image as both an expression of her rejection of this ethos and an articulation of her selfhood. This study is also based on the comparative approach. It highlights that though the two women writers belong to different countries and eras, they are similar in more than one aspect in their reflection of how patriarchy frames the girls’/women’s existence in the family and in society as a whole. The study also shows that Buchi Emecheta and Malika Mokeddem are different in the intensity of their refutation of patriarchy