African American Woman

1288 Words6 Pages

In most of the reading up till now, in our course on African Literature, we have read poems, novels and stories written by men. For example, the Sub-Saharan Africa’s Literary History in a Nutshell, by A.S. Gerad only mentions scholarly articles, novels and stories by men. Which leads one to believe, that according to A.S Gerad only male authors have cultivated African Literature. This belief exemplifies the dominance of men in African Society. According to Nura Abubakar, Fullbright Scholar of Foreign Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, till date in contemporary African culture women have traditional roles of giving birth and raising children while men have the roles of being providers. In the late 1980’s Africa saw an increase in fiction written by women for women in Hausa language, frequently referred to as love literature the books draw inspiration from Hindi films. As a person of Indian descent, I could immediately draw parallels between the Sub …show more content…

In Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home, By Balaraba R. Yakuba, a Nigerian author who writes in her native language of Hausa, she provides a glimpse into the life and probability of achieving independence by a contemporary African woman. In the film Black Girl set in 1966, by the Senegalese author and director Sembene Ousmane, he describes the journey of a young women in Senegal who moves to France to work for a rich French couple. Misled by the French couple into believing that she was heading to a life of opportunities and success in France, instead she is relegated to work as a full time slave. Her awareness of her of her life situation in France forces her to question her existence. Both these works exemplify the capabilities of women when they take charge of their own lives instead following the dictates of a patriarchal

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