COMMUNITY AND CONVICTION IN THIRD WORLD WOMEN’S WRITING

Abstract

The question of embracing an African identity is inseparable from the restoration and recovery of historical memory that is central to African women writers’ dialogue. This is because awareness of one’s traditions and heritage may have helped women of Africa and the diaspora to survive the horrors of servitude and slavery and enabled them to keep the notion of their origins alive. Thus, for them, this orature has been a fount of material as well as of strength to write, in spite of the opposition.Where slavery and colonization sought to dim memories of African presence in the world, women writers have sought to recreate that presence. and where African sense of self confidence and dignity was undermined, the writers created characters who are ready to accept and embrace who they are and reclaim their self-esteem and dignity. However, despite the connectedness and power gained from one’s heritage,women still suffer the limitations handed down from their African forbears, compounded by the otherness of being black and female in a patriarchal, Euro American society. Thus, women writers of African descent are already maintaining a black feminist theory which is largely concerned with re-informing and re-defining cultural and gender imperatives unique to the experience of black women throughout Africa and the diaspora. Their fundamental purpose has been to re-educate and re-inform and also for most black women writers (African and African American), to explore how they could pass on their cultural heritage to future generations, to continue the work done earlier by their foremothers and to look back into the experiences of women. The goal of this education, self-recovery and reinvention calls for African women writers who create images of courageous and confident African women ready to tackle today's tasks guided by African cultural and historical memories. Such images call for an alternative process of revalidation and reinvention of African humanity, the reconstruction and reassembling of fractured identities, the restoration of self-confidence, self-awareness and dignity and the reassertion of African world outlook. The tasks of repossession and reconstruction cannot be achieved by a puerile retreat to the past but by utilizing culture,1 as lived philosophy of life, to rearrange the African landscape into a site of resistance and healing.