Portrayal of Oppression and Resistance in Nigerian Women’s Prose Fiction: A Generational Study of Amaka Azuike’s Violated and Other Selected Short Stories
Keywords:
Oppression, Resistance, Patriarchy, Gender, ViolenceAbstract
This paper discusses Amaka Azuike 2019 collection of classic short stories to commemorate the historic 1995 global demand for gender equality and development as ascertained in the Beijing Declaration of the 4th Word Conference on Women. The creative writer joins her global counterparts to assert women’s rights by challenging the male status quo and overall position of women in the society. Azuike’s Violated, as situated in womanist discourse, as argued by Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Mary Kolawole is set to break the culture of silence on the daily oppression of women as wives, lovers, sisters, daughters and staff. In Violated and other selected short stories, her female protagonists are depicted as vulnerable and victims of male oppression and violence. The five stories treated in this paper highlight sexual molestation / abuse, incestuous crime, harassment, physical abuse and emotional blackmail among others. While emphasizing the consequences of being a woman in an abusive relationship as tantamount to losing vital privileges such as education and financial security; Azuike’s collection of short stories depict real life events that have eaten deep into the fabrics of Nigerian, and of course other African societies where women are raised to be dependent and submissive. While incest, marginalized voices, cultural expectations physical abuse and disempowerment become cultural phenomena that abuse relationships entail thus engendering women as victims who consequently remain in bad situation with no means of financial support. The creative strategies of encouraging comprehensive education and professional skills as a weapon against masculine abuses, amplify the prose writer’s voice in proffering negotiation or defiance to engender a meaningful balance where both male and female should be accorded their fundamental full respect as homo-sapiens.
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