SHE THINKS, HE SAYS: THE VOICE OF THE OTHER IN NOBEL LAUREATES’ GENDERED LITERATURE

The gendered language system is often used in literary works to present distinct character perspectives however, the issue of representation is accentuated when a writer presents a perspective of a different gender. Kawabata Yasunari and Gabriel Garcia Marquez who depicted female perspectives in their stories, have to face the issue of reliability of representation: theirs is argued asa patriarchal perception of a female’s perspective. Employing Spivak’s argument in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this paper positioned her statement as “through the perspective of the West (men), subaltern (women) become/s dependent on them (men) to speak for their condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.” This paper discussed the gendered language by examining the characters’ uncertain finitude utilizing Asher-Greve’s established gender markers to identify gender associations. Withthe stories of the two Nobel Laureates, this paper has established that through exploring the narrators’ usage of gendered language, both writers have inadvertently revealed their own male biases. The narrators of both writers turned out to be the voice of the other not because they have truthfully and successfully spoken for the marginalized; instead, they have become estranged voices of the subjects they are supposed to represent.Hence, the voices that cry for connection and understanding

Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the  analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of  the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth