Punyashree
Panda and Trina Bose
Dr
Punyashree Panda is an Assistant Professsor of English in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and
Management in IIT Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She authored the Springer title “Memory,
Empathy, and Narrative in Meena Kandasamy’s Gypsy Goddess” in the Palgrave
Macmillan title Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/ West Crossings
published in 2018.
Trina Bose is a Research scholar in the School
of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management
in IIT Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Her areas of interest include Feminism,
Postmodernism, Postcolonial World Literature, and Climate Fiction.
Abstract
Half
of a Yellow Sun (2006) by a Nigerian writer Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie and Front Lines (2016)
by an American writer Michael Grant investigate
the politics of gender construction and convention of gender roles framed in a
conservative society. They portray a strikingly diversified world of females,
where the stereotypical notions regarding gender are socially constructed by
the patriarchy that subjugates women, using manipulative and archetypal androcentric
discourses and social structure. Racism and ethnic division heighten the
process of social marginalization of women as they fall victim to both racism
and sexism and thus are doubly oppressed and peripheralised. But in the diverse
world of women, those who are unconventional come out of their domestic circles
to work in various significant social platforms. They fight a battle to get
recognition in society only on the basis of their work, transcending the boundaries
of feminine gender roles. They also come into conflict with the conventional
women, who conform to typical female roles designed by society. Hence, these
two sets of women are mutually exclusive in terms of opinion and attitude to
normative culture and tradition. The present paper intends to interpret,
through a close reading of the two novels under discussion, the clash between gender
rigidity of an androgynous society and individual performance during the disruptive
and tumultuous time of the Nigerian Civil War and the Second World War, and
analyze what determines gender identity of a person from a Postmodern Feminist
perspective and whether it reverses long-established notions regarding gender.
Keywords:
Androcentrism, women, marginalization, gender identity, racism
Introduction
Postmodern Feminism destabilizes set
patriarchal norms and fights for gender equality and the interpretation of
identity, and it also emphasises the relativity
of gender identity in society, turning down the clichéd conceptions regarding
sex and gender, and aims at achieving gender equality. The two
twenty-first-century novels from very disparate social backgrounds namely, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Front Lines
(2016) by Michael Grant, though a decade and continents apart from each other,
can be investigated from Postmodern feminist viewpoints in analysing the roles
and status of the female protagonists in the socio-politically chaotic and prejudiced time of the Nigerian
Civil War (1967-1970) and the Second World War (1939-1945). The female
characters of the two aforesaid novels are marked by heterogeneity that can
broadly be categorized as conformist and non-conformist, and they suffer from
misunderstandings and communication gap with each other resulting from their
different economic, social, and educational backgrounds. The peripheral female
characters of the novels like professor Odenigbo’s rural Igbo mother, a village
girl Amala, Frangie's mother, a poor black woman from both the texts, are
conformists and are possible representations of what is normatively expected of
women in society. Having internalized the patriarchal norms passed down to
them, they are not in a position to recognize their marginalization. In
contrast, the central female characters have rejected the typical gender roles
designed in and by a male-dominated society. The principal female characters of
both the novels are shown as actively participating in almost every sphere of
life such as businesses, educational institutions, household duties, as well as
war. This paper examines how, in the aforesaid novels, the diverse female world
is impacted by racism, ethnic violence, and male chauvinism in the turbulent
times of wars. It also looks at the collision between the orthodoxy of social
structure and modernity of the revolutionary female characters who prove and
free themselves from gender tags with performances in various commendable though
sometimes unconventional places of their time and society.
In
the novel Front Lines, the three
central teenage girls strive to be soldiers on the front lines, and the novel
details their sufferings, psychosomatic struggle, and valour in the battlefield
of the Second World War. The girls named Rio
Richlin, Frangie Marr, and Rainy Schulterman are from different backgrounds,
religions and cultures. Rio is a White girl from a small town in northern
California, Frangie is a Black girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma that has its past with
racism, and Rainy is a Jewish girl from New York. The young girls are
expected, based on their physique, by some of the army officers they come into
contact with, to perform the typical feminine gender roles endorsed by the
conventional society. According to Simon de Beauvoir, “the most important
question about woman and her body is not what she historically and biologically
is but what she can become” (Shusterman 12). In Front Lines, there are indeed some
obvious reasons behind the participation of the girls in the war as Frangie
says: “I don’t aim to kill anyone. I aim to try out for medic” (Grant 71). Rio
joins the army to honour her dead sister. Rainy is Jewish and she wants to
bring down Hitler by killing Germans on the battlefield. However, when they are
on the front lines, they are not spontaneously willing to face the
inevitability of death despite their hard training and psychological
preparations and thus are not glorified or idealized as conventional war
literature though they fight in one of the bloodiest wars of the world i.e.,
the Second World War.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Olanna and
Kainene, the two central characters, are
poles apart from the traditional Nigerian female world. On one hand,
Olanna who sincerely loves Odenigbo seeks certainty and security in her
relationship with Odenigbo when it is at stake because of the supernatural
fetishes of Odenigbo’s mother, and on the
humanitarian ground, takes the responsibility of Baby, who is an illegitimate
child of her boyfriend Odenigbo. But in contrast, Olanna appears as a
revolutionary and strong character like her twin Kainene when the situation demands so; for instance, she refuses
the proposal of indirect prostitution for a business profit of her parents. She
also does not spare Odegnibo for his betrayal and sleeps with Richard,
Kainene’s boyfriend for taking revenge. But later she regrets this when she
realizes her mistake in choosing Richard, who was her sister’s boyfriend, as a
sexual partner. She is quite rational about relationships, love, and mutual
trust, and that can be perceived when Odenigbo
goes to her looking troubled and informs about Amala’s pregnancy, Olanna starts
laughing. Olanna refuses to let Odenigbo present himself as the victim in that
context, as it is quite clear to her that the real victim is the rural girl
Amala, “who did not have a voice” (Adichie 250). While arguing with
Odenigbo about his betrayal she says, “I never blamed Amala” (Adichie 246). She again says: “It
was to you that I had given my trust and the only way a stranger could temper
with that trust was with your permission. I blamed only you” (Adichie 246). In this situation,
she is an epitome of psychic strength and power. She also protests against her
father’s wrongdoings and remarks that it
is mean on his part to have a relationship with another woman, and in addition
to this, he has purchased a house for that woman where Olanna’s mother’s
friends reside. She blames him by saying that it is utterly wrong on his part
as he visits that woman when his work gets over and his driver parks the car
outside the house. He does not care for the society, and this is why such scandalous
activity is like “a slap” (Adichie 218)
on the face of Olanna’s mother.
Front
Lines portrays the horrors of the Second World War, and the
narrative informs about a court decision taken in the United States of America,
which, for the first time, approves women as subject to the draft and eligible
for service as soldiers in war. Mathis also discusses:
In World War II, the government used propaganda to
communicate the need for changes in women's roles for the duration of the war.
These changes enabled women to enter factories by the millions, and proved that
women were capable of much more than having babies and washing dishes. The
propaganda certainly helped the government to achieve its goal of mobilizing
American women. (94)
But
in Front Lines, the hypocrisy and
chauvinism of the male-dominated society stand exposed as the common people also
like the male soldiers comment sarcastically about the girls in the army that
they “must want to be raped by some of them Japs, yeah, that’s what she wants”
(Grant 76), and thus they
view this unconventional endeavour of the girls in a negative light. It is as
if the sexualised body of a female is the only
and the most pertinent thing to be taken seriously into consideration even
after such a radical decision of the government. As Spivak remarks, that “…between
patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the
figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a
violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman'
caught between tradition and modernization” (102). In Front Lines, according to social orthodoxy, the body of a female
that can be violated sexually becomes the
primary marker of identity for the young girls who are going to the front lines
and who are as ready to fight their enemies as their male counterparts.
As rural
women like Odenigbo’s mother Mama and Amala in Half of a Yellow Sun are far away from modernity. They are unaware
of and powerless enough not to bother with or critically judge the
long-established social customs and beliefs. The two sets of characters, i.e.,the
traditional and the modern, in the novel can be regarded as two binaries or at
least as not at all alike. In Half of a
Yellow Sun, the rural women are superstitious and conservative,
and they do not approve higher studies for women. Odenigbo’s mother does not
endorse the unconventional notion that women can be equal to or better than men
or can control or defy men. It is also pointed out by Folashade Yemisi Fashakin
that, “among most Africans, men have been culturally constructed as natural
born leaders and head of the families while the woman is seen as the other “
sex, the subordinate one in the relationship” (12).
The presence of Odenigbo’s mother in
the text highlights her generation’s obliviousness about such socio-political
peripheral status of women in the androcentric African society, and thus they
retain their unquestioned loyalty towards age-old social practices. Bell Hooks
opines in “Racism and Feminism”:
American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of
American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in
the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy.
One measure of the success of such indoctrination is that we perpetuate both
consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us. (374)
In Half of a Yellow Sun,
the traditionalist village women like Odenigbo’s mother and Amala have
similarities with these aforesaid Americans as unwittingly they are the victims
of “interpellation” (xxviii) in the Marxist critic Louis Althusser's term. Ironically,
Olanna is looked down upon for her university education by Odenigbo’s mother
who says: “Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that. It gives a
woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of a wife
will that be?” (Adichie 98).
She further remarks that girls who go to university for pursuing higher education
“follow men around until their bodies are useless” (Adichie 98). This is how Olanna
has been thrust upon herself the identity of a morally ruined “loose woman” (Adichie 98) owing to her higher
education. It is analysed in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism that
“the construction of ‘third world women’ as a homogeneous ‘powerless’ group
often located as implicit victims of particular socioeconomic systems” (Mohanty
et al. 57), and such type of oppressive homogenizing discourses of Western
feminism can also be found in Half of a
Yellow Sun as it is evident from the perceptions of Susan, an English
expatriate, according to whom, all Black women, including Kainene, are equal
and powerless. However, this type of exploitive discourses of racism and sexism
appears to be irrelevant in the context of the Igbo female world of Half of a Yellow Sun. It explicates the heterogeneity and
juxtaposition of Olanna and Kainene who are individualists to the rural and uneducated
women like Amala and Odenigbo’s mother who does not suffer from any sense of
marginalization and powerlessness in the male-driven society and blindly
supports the societal system, serving as a representative image of the conservative
African woman.
Ethnic divisions frame the
fragmented and segmented structures of society in Half of a Yellow Sun. Henry Louis Gates reflects on the expansion
of the problem of ‘the colour line’ formerly mentioned by Du Bois:
Ours is a late-twentieth-century world profoundly fissured by
nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And the only way to transcend
those divisions –to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both
differences and commonalities-is through education that seeks to comprehend the
diversity of culture. (xv)
On
the one hand, Half of a Yellow Sun
which is set against the backdrop of the Biafran War reveals the aforementioned
sort of fissures and cracks in the society. Women are exploited in inhumane
ways for their ethnic differences during the Biafran War, and the war plays as
an opportunity for violent rapists to satisfy their crooked desires. Women of
both Igbo and Hausa tribes are sexually exploited amidst the destructive war.
On the contrary, Kainene who is an educated Igbo crosses her racial boundary to
embrace her lover Richard, an English expatriate, despite the opposition of
Igbo society to such an interracial relationship. When Richard feels helplessly
weak in front of racial hostility of the Igbo towards his relationship with
Kainene, Kainene replies to Udodi, in cold yet clear English, that “my choice
of lovers is none of your business, Udodi” (Adichie
80),
and in this context, Kainene is a fearless girl who asserts her free will and
thus successfully combats racial stereotyping and violence.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, the postcolonial Nigerian society is
dominated by the evils of racism, religion, gender, nationalism, and in Front Lines, such social malice also
shapes the lives of Frangie and her mother who are from the marginalized
section of society due to their race and poverty. When Frangie, a peripheralized coloured girl joins the army, she receives
both encouraging and derogatory remarks. Sergent Tell remarks: “Girls in the
army. Never thought I’d see…” (Grant 85). Then he ignores it and again, in a
stern tone, says: “Look, ladies, it’s not sir. Sir is for officers. I work for
a living. You call me sergeant” (Grant 85). Here, his remarks can be taken as a
positive one. The narrative informs that it is just over five years since the
courts decided that woman may serve, and just over a year since deciding that
women must serve as soldiers. The government feels it necessary to appoint
women as soldiers and tries to rise above the biases and prejudices in the
crucial time of war. But chapter Eight of the novel begins with the line that
“women soldiers are an abomination” (Grant 91). This is a typical remark of
biased patriarchy that does not consider women as worthy or capable of being a
soldier. In Front Lines, on the battlefield, Frangie helps the helpless while
the male officers criticise her with derogatory remarks without offering any
help to the ones in distress, and thus she comes across as the one who retains
the essential humane qualities. Like the instance mentioned above, many more
such contexts from both the novels ensure that the unconventional female
characters of both the novels prove themselves to be morally superior to men in
terms of their kindheartedness and responsibility. The female soldiers like
their male counterparts, struggle in the front lines, but instead of glory that
is reserved for men, they are scorned. Rio wishes to be appointed as a driver but
is assigned on the front lines for fighting. Frangie tries her level best to
become a medic yet her gender and race prevent her, and Rainy who is
multilingual, gets appointed to work in intelligence. Their sufferings and toil
on the battlefield get intensified due to social injustice and gender
discrimination in the military.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, the
black skin colour of a girl is contemptible for a white person (like Susan) as
well as not psychologically desirable by
a Native African (Ugwu for example) who yearns for a white-skinned woman in his
sub-conscious. Ugwu, Odenigbo’s houseboy is impressed by the light-skinned
beauty of Olanna. It is as if white skin colour is still considered superior
even by a Native to the more prevalent and organic black skin, even after the
end of the colonial period. Biased personal
observations based on race can be found in Half
of a Yellow Sun where Kainene,
an educated girl, is considered by Susan only in terms of her skin colour, and
Susan can only perceive Kainene along with her culture as a change of taste for
an Englishman like Richard. She cannot make out how a white-skinned Englishman
can have a genuine attraction for a black-skinned tribal woman. She says to
Richard, “But I did want you to know that I shall keep busy while I wait for
you to finish with your dusky affair” (Adichie 237), and in such an assumption,
she disregards Kainene’s capabilities. According to Christopher J. Schineider, “…postmodernists argue that all knowledge is
seen as subjective and is always influenced by personal, cultural, and
political values” (95), and such Postmodernist view can be perceived in Half of a Yellow Sun as Kainene is
judged by Susan based on a prejudiced view and partial truth, which only
includes her African origin but does not incorporate her education, profession,
and independence. By associating an Igbo woman with mere sex, Susan
lives up to the stereotype imagined in a racist mind. In “Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie: I Became Black in America,” Hope Reese has pointed out that in this
talk on racism, while talking about her own real-life experiences about racism
Adichie says: “I wasn't black until I came to America. I became black in
America” (n.p.).
The insidious influences of racism
can be felt in Front Lines and the
word ‘black’ is used several times; it sounds unpleasant
as it connotes negativity and inferiority in almost all the situations. For
example, a white lady like Miss Ellie considers Frangie
and her mother Dorothy Marr as inferior squarely due to their race. She
insultingly says, “I reckon I could scour my pans bright with that brushy Nigra
hair of yours” (Grant 36). A woman like
Miss Ellie pays Dorothy Marr for her labour, and she does not even forget to
complain about the dress as it is
mentioned by Frangie. Even when Ellie
insults Frangie, her mother remains
silent and tolerates and this confirms the authenticity of Nasrullah Mambrol’s interpretation of Hooks’s views regarding racism and black identities as he points out:
Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans
to acknowledge the way in which the class mobility has altered collective black
experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our
lives. Such a critique allow us to affirm multiple black identities, varied
black experience. (n.p.)
In Front Lines, in
utter frustration, Frangie says that “one did not talk back to
white folk or object to words like pickaninny or Nigra, no, not even when it
was your daughter being referred to with casual condescension and unearned
familiarity” (Grant 37). The mother is too powerless to complain about her own
daughter’s unjustified humiliation. Frangie
is fed up with their ways of living and hopes that “maybe it’ll be different in
the army” (Grant 37). While Frangie imagines that she might escape discernment
in the public sphere such as the army, even in that glorified space, she is
called a Nigra by the military officers. Frangie has strong will-power to
become a medic despite her physical weaknesses and lack of strength of wielding
a gun. Frangie is unlike her submissive and traditional mother, Dorothy Marr
who suffers from racism, but silently puts up with it. Teresa E. Ebert comments that “every woman, in and of herself becomes
individual and unique in her particular race, class, national and age
possibility- that is, in her difference from other women” (902). In both the
novels under discussion, the female protagonists are strikingly discrepant from
each other having quite dissimilar types of an identity crisis and facing
similar yet varied sorts of invisibility due to racial and sexual
discrimination in a male-centred society.
Though Frangie’s mother tolerates
abuses, she encourages her to continue her studies and prepares herself to be a
doctor. She argues that as there are “a lot of coloured
doctors around” (Grant 37), Frangie can also try to be a doctor. This is said
in such a way as if it hints that
coloured people who had been neglected and deprived before in society have now
progressed academically in a good number. The word ‘coloured’ seems to be given
extra emphasis in this particular context. Doon criticizes her by saying that
so many people still didn’t believe females belong in college, let alone “coloured
ones” (Grant 45). Thus a coloured female is doubly marginalized for being female
and as well as for being Black, and Frangie seems to have two prominent social
identities, i.e., a female and black, thrust upon her by the representatives of
the prejudiced society that might overshadow her identity as a soldier.
In Front Lines, there occurs a reversal
of traditional customs and beliefs in presenting the three females on the front
lines of the Second World War. Rainy thinks:
It has always been that the men went off and the women kept
and waved. There is no blueprint for what is happening now. There is no easy
reference point. People don’t know quite how to behave, and it’s worse for the
men in the station who are staying behind and feel conspicuous and ashamed. (Grant 92)
When Rio joins as a soldier, the narrative informs about Rio’s
hair cut that “her black hair is cut short, almost as short as a man’s” (Grant 110). While it has been tried to give the girls looks
of a typical army man and similar responsibilities, army Sergeant Tilo Suarez
comments negatively, the presence of women in the army is “a mistake” (Grant 199). According to Rainy, the expression
“virtue of their sex” (Grant 102) is perhaps designed for deliberate
misinterpretation by Colonel Derry as he addresses to the soldiers that “a
natural order that has decreed that woman shall bear children and tend the
hearth, while men shoulder the harsher burdens of life’s vicissitudes” (Grant 102).
These are the expected and usual gender roles of men and women in a norm-driven
society, and the rigid and egoistic male world intends to continue old
belief-systems to retain their position and dominance over females by limiting
them within domestic circles. The marginalized soldier girls combat such
repressive notions and win on the battlefield with their performances.
Half
of a Yellow Sun depicts Nigerian tribes, and
simultaneously, it resists any stereotyping or glorification of the so-called
exotica explicating the social evils and injustices. Olanna and her twin Kainene,
are economically independent as Olanna is a professor of Sociology at Nsukka
University, and Kainene initially runs her father’s business and then a refugee
camp when the war begins. Sadia Zulfiqar
remarks that Olanna and Kainene are independent women and “they are the real
political agents in the novel, the driving force of the narrative” (97). Progressive
characters like Aunty Ifeka, Olanna, and Kainene are conscious of their rights
and status in social life, and they are writers of their history by not
conforming to the stereotypical feminine roles and codes of conduct fixed by
society. For example, in Half of a Yellow
Sun, Olanna lives with Odenigbo without marrying him. Kainene falls in love
with Richard, an English expatriate, going against racial prejudices prevailing
in Igbo society. When they are betrayed by their boyfriends, they do not remain
passive. Olanna’s aunty Ifeka asserts unconventionally when Odengbo, Olanna’s
lover deceives Olanna by sleeping with Amala during her absence. She says: “You
must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me? Aunty Ifeka
of Olanna said. Your life belongs to you and you alone, soso gi (sic)” (Adichie 226).
Quite confidently, she remarks about her principles that her life will change
only if she wants to change it.
The portrayals of the society of
both the novels inform that the conservative sections consider sex as the only
determiner of gender identity while race and social status also serve as tools
of further marginalization. Silke von der Emde remarks that “Morgner does not
deny the existence of differences between men and women and between individual
persons, but she shows that these differences are always operative in specific
political situations and can never be locked into fixed categories” (123). But
the politics of androcentric society confuse and problematise gender and
sexuality by equating them as identical in the two novels under discussion. In Front Lines, the girls who refuse to
give up despite humiliations and criticism and join the army preparing themselves
for the war confirm Jane Flax’s observation
that “the experience of gender relations
for any person and the structure of gender as a social category are shaped by
the interactions of gender relations and other social relations such as class
and race” (623) as true.
Therefore, in
the two novels under discussion, progressive women are treated as a
marginalized section of society, and whenever they try to cross their limits
that are determined by the orthodox society, they are humiliated. Patricia
Waugh remarks that there lies “…in postmodern the only possibility of critique
and opposition from the margins which gives a voice to feminists,
post-colonials, ethnic, racial and sexual minorities” (348), and the stability of a position in society can be gained
with repeated performances as it is explained by Judith Butler, an American
gender theorist. As in Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler remarks:
When the constructed status of gender is theorized as
radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a floating artifice, with
the consequences that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female
body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female
one. (6)
In Half of a Yellow Sun
and Front Lines, the central female
protagonists, who had so long been peripheralized despite their abilities,
attain identities based on their “repeated” (Butler 7) performances and works reversing the set societal
notions regarding gender roles.
Conclusion
The racially marginalized and sexually oppressed yet
struggling nonconformist female characters of both the novels affirm, with their performances in
numerous significant fields, that race or biological construction has no role
in forming social or gender identity. They fight not only with the male-driven
society but also with the sections of conventional women of unquestionable loyalty
towards conventional social rules and regulations, perhaps due to ignorance or
fear. Though such unorthodox females are different from
each other based on their diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, they prove themselves to be far better
than their gender-assigned roles. Thus despite overt gender-biases and racial
prejudices of the two novels, the active presence and unusual professions and
performances of the strong female characters discussed from the aforementioned
novels can be interpreted as a kind of reversal and refutation of the age-old social
organism of male dominance and female inferiority in society in the name of
gender, a biased social construct.
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