Papers by Sonja Darlington
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2013
‘I don’t want any arguments later as to whether I said this or that. The form, please, officer—I’... more ‘I don’t want any arguments later as to whether I said this or that. The form, please, officer—I’m literate, you know.’ She glared back at him. ‘How old are you?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you a TSP?’ He was trying to figure out how a girl her age had the guts to question a man wearing a police uniform—he was used to dealing efficiently with obedient villagers, regardless of their age. ‘What relevance is my age?’
Journal of Visual Literacy, 1992
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2007
... To begin an investigation into the merits of Head's writing as representative of... more ... To begin an investigation into the merits of Head's writing as representative of ecoliterature, one approach is to begin with Lawrence Buell's work ... While eco-literature may be ably critiqued by either method, critics in the field, aside from Buell and Woods, provide any number of ...
African Journal of Teacher Education, 2015
Two Tanzanian activists, Ruth Meena and Elieshi Lema, resist identification with their local ethn... more Two Tanzanian activists, Ruth Meena and Elieshi Lema, resist identification with their local ethnic groups in deference to their identity formation with nationalism and feminism. Both maintain that ethnicity is a politically charged term based on a colonial construct that favors patriarchy and describes all women’s ethnicity generically without questioning their positionality. Meena as a political scientist at the University of Dar es Salaam and Lema as a writer and editor of E & D Publishing, provide evidence for their professional roles having moved beyond ethnic boundaries due to their educational opportunities and the influence of feminist thinking. In the construction of their culture, as activists, scholars, teachers, and writers, they have re-imagined how to live their lives, so that they could actively participate in the struggle for nationhood, gender equality, educational access, economic independence and community development. Meena and Lema have also demonstrated throug...
Transformations, Mar 31, 1995
Middle School Journal, 1994
Research in African Literatures, 2003
Research in African Literatures greedy Ghanaians and their tyrannical rulers bears a heavy resemb... more Research in African Literatures greedy Ghanaians and their tyrannical rulers bears a heavy resemblance to Beyala's novel in its narrative struggle against similar forces. However, neither Armah's protagonist, Allison's Bone, nor Beyala's Tanga should be remembered simply as victims of determinism. Doing so would reduce these novels to being articulate examples of nihilistic literature. Tanga does not name herself a victim and deny her own agency. If this were the case, then readers would see Tanga only in terms of their own potential victimization, and they could easily succumb to feelings of hopelessness. Rather, readers are implored to gather themselves up as does bell hooks in "Refusing to Be a Victim" and to argue along with Nada Elia that women such as Fusena in Ama Ata Adoo's Changes embody defeatist attitudes and need to be contrasted with women who counter such perceptions of victimization. Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi argues in Gender in African Women's Writing that Your Name Shall Be Tanga counters such perceptions of victimization by investigating issues of women's subjectivity, sexuality, and identity. She maintains that signifi cant links can be drawn between Tanga's mother's power and her daughter's objectifi ed body, sexual abuse, and questions of identity. According to Nfah-Abbenyi, one of the radical protests in this novel focuses on the idea that women can stop other women from contributing to forces leading to their abuses (90). While I do not disagree with Nfah-Abbenyi on the power of women over women, I want to examine the psychological, social, political, and economic forces that determine the lives of female children and, just as important, to demonstrate how Nfah-Abbenyi's notion of "theorized fi ction" (149) can be applied to this text. By examining the deterministic elements in this novel and also by investigating the discourse related to issues of knowing, being, and becoming, Nfah-Abbenyi's analysis can be developed a step further. My position is that Beyala's contribution to African literature consists of two aspects: one, her brilliant manifesto on behalf of the girlchild-woman through which she critiques the ideological determinism that thwarts the development of girlchildren and women; and two, her ability to use fi ctional theorizing to demonstrate a girlchild-woman's efforts to know and to become a human being. In Beyala's theorizing on indigenous knowing, emotional knowing, and imaginative knowing, she radicalizes thinking about contemporary African childhood as well as African womanhood. Because Beyala's fi ctional theory is grounded in her critique, the following discussion will be divided into a two-part argument: the fi rst part will address Beyala's manifesto, and the second part will address her fi ctional theorizing. Beyala reviles classifi cation, a methodology from which ideological determinism benefi ts most and a labeling system that eludes the grasp of women and children. This is a system that makes children and women objects rather than subjects. As social and political groups, women and children have not had control over who has the power to classify, why they can classify, and how they classify. In Tanga's world the individuals who are able to classify are men like Hassan, the clitoris snatcher and rapist. As Tanga says of herself in relationship to Hassan, "And, because I am a girlchild-woman, and not the fi rst one to occupy his bed, a girlchild-woman
Research in African Literatures, 2003
Tanga, a girlchild-woman in Calixthe Beyala's Your Name Shall Be Tanga, like the manchild in ... more Tanga, a girlchild-woman in Calixthe Beyala's Your Name Shall Be Tanga, like the manchild in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born or the manchild Oskar in Nurrudin Farah's Maps, is one of those significant fictional characters that can be called "widowers of their childhood" (Beyala 47). The protagonist, Tanga, as a girlchild-woman is challenged to live as a girl-child without a beginning known as childhood, though much of the world readily accepts childhood as a universal experience. In that the referent girlchild-woman appears a minimum of thirty times throughout the text, the classifications of girl and woman as well as child and adult are blurred. By categorizing Tanga as neither a child nor a woman during the entire novel, Beyala suggests at the very least an ambivalence towards such categories and at the most a view that "child" and "woman" are theoretically inadequate terms by which to classify Tanga. Your Name Shall Be Tanga is not a developmental novel about a girl-child becoming a woman. The text does not follow the physical, psychological, and/or social trajectory of a young individual moving towards maturity despite numerous complex obstacles as in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. Neither is Your Name Shall Be Tanga a depiction of an age of innocence as in Camara Laye's Dark Child. Beyala cannot be criticized for her so-called glorification of African childhood and/or precolonial Africa. Neither is Your Name Shall Be Tanga a story about conflicts to be resolved, as with the young heroine overcoming a series of trials in Flora Nwapa's Efuru. Beyala does not present the reader with a young figure who endures countless tribulations and still succeeds in overturning established tradition. Finally, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is not a novel filled with stories about admiration, assimilation, or rejection of a colonizer. Her story cannot be neatly labeled a Bildungsroman as does Nedal Al-Mousa for six Arabic novels in "The Arabic Bildungsroman: A Generic Appraisal," wherein he argues that the art of living is replaced with heroes who reconcile two cultures. Instead, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is in part a manifesto. On one level, it is a political manifesto drawing attention to the civil rights of children. On another level, it is a political manifesto for the rights of women: socially and economically. A significant part of the argument lies in a fight against free market capitalism, which determines the value of girl-children and women through the demand for their bodies. The novel is a social critique like Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Your Name Shall Be Tanga strongly contests illegitimacy: it focuses attention on a young female child's right to have others acknowledge her birth, a female child's right to have others value her existence, and a female child's right to control her body. In a real sense, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is an ideological war being fought against psychological, political, social, and economic determinism. A similar war is fought in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah's critique of corrupt and
The Alan Review, May 1, 1998
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Papers by Sonja Darlington