From Silence to Voice: Postcolonial Feminist Negotiations in Tsitsi Dangarembga and Her Contemporaries

Abstract

This article investigates the progressive passage from muteness to articulated identity in African women’s fiction through the lens of postcolonial feminist theory. Concentrating chiefly upon Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), the discussion simultaneously subliminally interrogates the novels of Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta to recohere comparable motifs. Under the guiding premises of postcolonial feminist criticism, the text postulates that the fictions of African women enact dialectical exchanges between culturally enforced muteness and the strategic, emergent appropriation of utterance. Tambudzai’s episodic port narrative constructs Nervous Conditions as a chronicle of epistemic violence in the Spivakian sense: colonial-­patriarchal apparatuses relegate women to the closet of the non-sublimated. Nevertheless, Tambudzai’s postcolonial retrospective syntax gestures toward trauma reparation as the emergent, inscriptive orality transforms psychic retention into narrative existence. Nyasha’s even more fractious insubordination, conversely, teases forth counter readings through inverted corporeal resistance and psychic disintegration that refract and intensify Tambudzai’s experience. Collectively retrieved silences, solarised interruptions, disembodied patriarchal narratives, and capitalist dividends are countered, articulated, and finally refrained as re­narrative balancing. An eclipse of utterance unequalled by any postcolonial lapse binds and tethers the violent incompatibilities of colonial discourse, which Emecheta’s and Orientin’s disembodied ability to project is raptured by the projected successes of the colonial Edison believes. Positioned against Dangarembga, Aidoo and Emecheta converge to assert retaking and reweaving, weaving into logic pungent against collusion in colonial-­patriarchal epistemologies. This focused re-examination thereby elevates narrative voice to the horizon of feminist strategy and the tectonic function of colonial critique, framing the intersected fictions as an expository enclave of discourses, this axe Republic.