Oral Literature and the Representation of the Image of the woman in the Contemporary African Context: The Study of Nso, Mbum and Idoma Proverbs (Published)
The paper investigates the representation of the image of the woman in oral literature using selected proverbs from Nso, Mbum and Idoma oral communities. The paper is anchored on the prediction that these proverbs are both ideologically and aesthetical relevant to the communities that produce them. The thrust of argument of this paper resides around the premise that the languages of the people are vectors of their significant view points, and collective cultural experiences. The study holds that as an aspect of oral literature, proverbs serve various functions and one of such is that as mirrors of the social and cultural experiences of the people they can be read as instruments that reveal how women are viewed, thought of, expected to act, live and behave in the society. From the functionalist perspective and the relevance theoretic lens, the paper sees proverbs as contributing in uncountable ways to the positive transformation of oral communities due to their dynamic and transcendental character. The analysis revealed that the selected proverbs under scrutiny in this study are effective instruments through which one can perceive the representation of the image of a woman in most African oral communities for a better transformation, recognition, and reevaluation of developmental policies.
Keywords: Oral literature, Proverbs, Representation., image, woman
The Arab Woman in Confrontation with The Forbidden Trinity (Published)
The oppressive reality of the Arab woman has undoubtedly made Arab feminist literature its own features. The woman’s search for freedom is undoubtedly more able to express her injustice and oppression than the man because she suffers most from tyranny and oppression. Thus, feminist literature is the best experience for the woman to extract her rights, restore her deprived freedom through writing, raise her voice and exercise the freedom of expression that she has been deprived of for so long. She took out her pen and started “talking like Shahrazad”, reveʿAling with her tongue her experiences and desires, and expressing her concerns and pains. In recent years, she is no longer writing to defend what has been stolen from her demanding change and freedom. Writing for her is no longer a defensive device, but an offensive system in which she condemns and retʿAliates against the man. In her revolutionary feminist narrative, she demonstrated her offensive tendency against all the taboos of the forbidden trinity: politics, religion, and sex, and demonstrated a clear challenge to social norms as well as the literary norms that were established by the masculine establishment. This study, therefore, shows how Arab women writers are able to break the forbidden pillars of the Forbidden Trinity by presenting each other’s experiences and testimonies in their quest to challenge this oppressing trinity and to face its censorship powers.
Keywords: Arab, confrontation, forbidden trinity, woman