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Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature pp 69–94Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Diary of Intense Pain: The Postcolonial Trap and Women’s Rights

Chinelo Okparanta and NoViolet Bulawayo

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Part of the book series: Comparative Feminist Studies ((CFS))

Abstract

In “Diary of Intense Pain: Postcolonial Trap and Women’s Rights,” Eze argues that writing back to the Empire barely addresses the needs of Africans as individuals; rather it insinuates a postcolonial ideology comparable to the oppressive traditional cosmology that the African women writers are challenging. NoViolet Bulawayo and Chinelo Okparanta have been criticized, by mostly male critics, as serving the imperial needs of Western audiences by indulging in a pornographic display of poverty and misery. But this so-called poverty porn consists of instances of intense pain that African patriarchal cultures have inflicted on African women’s bodies. In this context, “Diary of Intense Pain: Postcolonial Trap and Women’s Rights,” discusses Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) and Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water (2013).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chinelo Okparanta, Happiness, Like Water. London: Granta, 2013 (Okparanta 2013).

  2. 2.

    NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names. New York: Little Brown, 2013 (Bulawayo 2013).

  3. 3.

    Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 17 (Newton 1995).

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 17–18.

  5. 5.

    Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literature, 32.3 (2001): 4–8 (Gikandi 2001).

  6. 6.

    Chielozona Eze, “Transcultural Affinity: Thoughts on the Emergent Cosmopolitan Imagination in South Africa,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 27.2 (2015): 1–13 (Eze 2015).

  7. 7.

    Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday, 1988 (Achebe 1988).

  8. 8.

    Ikhide Ikheloa, “The 2011 Caine Prize: How Not to Write About Africa” www.xokigbo.wordpress.com (Accessed February 5, 2014) (Ikheloa 2011).

  9. 9.

    Aaron Bady, “Blogging the Caine Prize,” Zungu Zungu, May 30, 2001. http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/blogging-the-caine-hitting-budapest-by-noviolet-bulawayo/ June 3, 2011 (Accessed December 7, 2013) (Bady 2001).

  10. 10.

    Helon Habila, “We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – Review,” 2013 (Habila 2013). http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    Helon Habila, ed. The Granta Book of the African Short Story. London: Granta Books, 2011, xiii (Habila 2011).

  13. 13.

    Dobrota Pucherová, “‘A Continent Learns to Tell Its Story at Last’: Notes on the Caine Prize,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.1 (2012): 1–13 (Pucherová 2012).

  14. 14.

    Ikheloa, “The 2011 Caine Prize.”(Ikheloa 2011).

  15. 15.

    Stanley Mushava, “Is NoViolet a Victim of West’s Propaganda?” The Herald. 2013. http://www.herald.co.zw/is-noviolet-a-victim-of-wests-propaganda/ (Mushava 2013)

  16. 16.

    Stanley Mushava, “Zimbabwe: African Literature Reduced to a Commodity,” 2013. http://allafrica.com/stories/201312300593.html?viewall=1 (Mushava 2013).

  17. 17.

    Binyanvanga Wainaina, “How to Write About Africa,” Granta 92: The View from Africa. www.granta.com/Archive/92 (Accessed January 2, 2012) (Wainaina 2012).

  18. 18.

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story.” www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (Accessed 8 June 2011) (Adichie 2011).

  19. 19.

    One such defense is the expression “that is my culture,” which we have already analyzed in the introductory part of Chapter 2.

  20. 20.

    Lizzy Attree, “The Caine Prize and Contemporary African Writing,” Research in African Literatures, 44.2 (2013): 40 (Attree 2013).

  21. 21.

    Liesl Jobson, “Author Interview: A Love Letter to All Zimbabweans,” 2013 (Jobson 2013). http://www.bdlive.co.za/life/books/2013/10/22/author-interview-a-love-letter-to-all-zimbabweans.

  22. 22.

    Newton, Narrative Ethics, 18 (Newton 1995).

  23. 23.

    Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945 (Burke 1945).

  24. 24.

    Attree, “The Caine Prize and Contemporary African Writing,” 40 (Attree 2013).

  25. 25.

    Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 (Ricoeur 1984). See especially Chapter 3, “Emplotment: A Reading of Aristotle’s Poetics.”

  26. 26.

    Newton, Ibid., 21.

  27. 27.

    Chinelo Okparanta, Happiness Like Water. London: Granta, 2013, 73 (Okparanta 2013).

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 70.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 73.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 78.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 79.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 81.

  33. 33.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 39 (Bulawayo 2013).

  34. 34.

    Revelations 5: 1–7.

  35. 35.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 40 (Bulawayo 2013).

  36. 36.

    Ibid, 40.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 41.

  38. 38.

    Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative, 14.3. (2006): 209 (Keen 2006).

  39. 39.

    Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, Gender in African Women’s Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 (Nfah-Abbenyi 1997).

  40. 40.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 42 (Bulawayo 2013).

  41. 41.

    In Chapter 4, I argue that female genital excision is a technology of power. It can also be seen as society’s obsession with women’s “thing” because it knows that women derive their strength for love of self and the power of resistance from there, as Cixous and Lorde have argued.

  42. 42.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 42 (Bulawayo 2013).

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 43.

  45. 45.

    Sylvia Tamale, “African Feminism: How Should We Change?” Development: Supplement: Women’s Rights and Development; Association for Women’s, 49.1 (2006): 38–41. (Tamale 2006).

  46. 46.

    Joanna Zylinska, The Ethics of Cultural Studies. New York: Continuum, 2005, xii (Zylinska 2005).

  47. 47.

    Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 192 (Rorty 1989).

  48. 48.

    I acknowledge that some readers might be shocked by some stories. Such stories as these achieve effects other than empathy; indeed, they might achieve its exact opposite.

  49. 49.

    Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood. London: Routledge, 1991, 21 (Ricoeur 1991). [Emphasis in original.]

  50. 50.

    Ideologies such as racism, sexism or patriarchy package individuals as finished products.

  51. 51.

    For more on narrative understanding, see James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds, Understanding Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994 (Phelan and Rabinowitz 1994).

  52. 52.

    Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 23 (Ricoeur 1991).

  53. 53.

    Ricoeur includes poetry and drama in his understanding of narrative. We do not need to hear every detail of the life of a character in order to come to a narrative understanding. Sometimes a particular incident suggests a more humane understanding of a given person.

  54. 54.

    We know, of course, that we are dealing with narrative works of fiction. It is true that there may be very negative characters in stories. They may not even be candidates for empathy given that they may have been responsible for their ugly fate.

  55. 55.

    Okparanta, Happiness, 35 (Okparanta 2013).

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 41.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 40.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 45–46.

  59. 59.

    Dave Beech, “Beauty, Ideology and Utopia.” http://www.uwe.ac.uk/sca/research/vcrg/proj_beech.htm See also Dave Beech, ed., Beauty: Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009 (Beech et al. 2009).

  60. 60.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 67 (Bulawayo 2013).

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 67.

  62. 62.

    Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 327 (Nussbaum 2001).

  63. 63.

    Okparanta, Happiness, 23 (Okparanta 2013).

  64. 64.

    Flora Nwapa, Efuru. Great Britain: Heinemann Publishers, 1966 (Nwapa 1966).

  65. 65.

    Marie Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1998 (Umeh 1998).

  66. 66.

    Okapranta, Happiness, 23 (Okparanta 2013).

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 25.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 28.

  69. 69.

    Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 170–178 (Althusser 1971).

  70. 70.

    Okparanta, Happiness, 32–33 (Okparanta 2013).

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 33.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 34.

  73. 73.

    Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.” http://gos.sbc.edu/c/clinton.html (Accessed May 15, 2013) (Clinton 2013). See also Hillary Clinton, Helping Women Isn’t Just a ‘Nice’ Thing to Do.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/04/05/hillary-clinton-helping-women-isn-t-just-a-nice-thing-to-do.html (Accessed May 15, 2013) (Clinton 2013).

  74. 74.

    Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 19 (Scarry 1985).

  75. 75.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 89 (Bulawayo 2013).

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 90.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 113.

  78. 78.

    Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Africa for Africans or Africa for ‘Natives’ Only? ‘New Nationalism and Nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa’,” Africa Spectrum, 44.1 (2009): 61–78 (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009).

  79. 79.

    Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 120 (Bulawayo 2013).

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 121.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 122.

  82. 82.

    Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997, 46. (Kant 1997). I will discuss Kant’s idea more fully in Chapter 5.

  83. 83.

    Martha Nussbaum, C., “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, 4. (Nussbaum 1996).

  84. 84.

    Pinkie Mekgwe, “Theorizing African Feminism(s): The ‘Colonial’ Question,” QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie, XX (2008): 21–22 (Mekgwe 2008).

  85. 85.

    Denis Ekpo, “Introduction: From Negritude to Post-Africanism,” Third Text, 24.2 (2010): 177–187 (Ekpo 2010).

  86. 86.

    Gikandi, Ibid.

  87. 87.

    Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975, 71 (Achebe 1975).

  88. 88.

    Stephen Castle, “Mugabe’s Presence Hijacks European-African Meeting,” New York Times. 2007 (Castle 2007). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/world/africa/09summit.html?fta=y&_r=0.

  89. 89.

    Associated News, “Europe, Africa Seek New Relationship at Summit.” 2007. (Associated News 2007) www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/08/europe/EU-GEN-EU-Africa-Summit.php (January 30 2008).

  90. 90.

    BBC News, “UK Caused Cholera, Says Zimbabwe.” 2008 (BBC News 2008). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7780728.stm.

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    Chielozona Eze

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Eze, C. (2016). Diary of Intense Pain: The Postcolonial Trap and Women’s Rights. In: Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40922-1_3

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