Representation and Resistance

Front matter

REPRESENTATION AND RESISTANCE South Asian and African Womens Texts at Home and in the Diaspora

JASPAL KAUR SINGH

IMT PTF

Table Of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

2: Dominant Epistemologies and Alternative Readings: Gender and Globalization

3: The Indian Diasopra and Cultural Alienation in Bharati Mukherjee’s Texts

Preface

My name is Jaspal Kaur Singh. I was born in Taunggyi, Burma. When I was eleven years old, I went to a priest at the St. Joseph Catholic church and said, “Father, I want to become a Catholic.” As I stood hesitating, my friend Maria, tall and lanky, with long, greasy plaits hanging down on both sides of her dark, brown Indian face, nudged me forward a bit and I repeated the request.

Maria had told me that Christian children could write a long wish list, that Santa would come down the chimney (although we didn’t have chimneys, I was assured he was smart enough to find other means of entry), and that if one had been good, one’s wishes would come true. Maria had asked me solemnly, “Are you a good girl?”

Feeling a slight tightening in my chest, for I did not believe I was a good girl, I fibbed, “Yes.”

The priest, in his beautiful white habit, smiled kindly at me. “Why?”

“Because I want Santa Claus to come to my house.”

“Bring your parents next Sunday to me, and we will take care of that,” he smiled kindly at me.

I couldn't imagine my Sikh parents allowing me to convert. Sorely disappointed at not having Santa come to my house, I left the church with Maria, who was still talking about Santa and his sleigh.

I, too, was tall and lanky like Maria, and also equally brown with greasy plaits hanging down my back. My school uniform, a navy tunic with a white short-sleeved shirt, was rumpled from playing in the schoolyard after school.

Maria was a year older than me and got to be the class monitor sometimes. Our school’s name was Saint Anne’s Convent High School, run by Roman Catholic Nuns from Ireland and Italy, and other Anglo-Burmese or biracial nuns.

Every morning, we children gathered in the schoolyard for hymn singing. Our voices lusty, we would sing, “Comboly Gos send down those beams! Comboly Gos send down dose beams! Whis seefly flow in, in silent steem, from thy bight thone above! Oh, come thy father of thy but the bather!” The nuns made sure our fingers were clean and our shoes polished.

Oh, but the ones the nuns loved best were the boarders, with names like Daisy, and Rosy, and Margaret! We were merely tolerated. In fact, when my father, turbaned and bearded, took my oldest sister for admission, he was turned away. However, when my maternal uncle, a clean-shaven Sikh who worked in the British administration as a clerk, took my sister for admission, she was accepted. Subsequently, all of my five siblings and I attended the convent. My father said, “You are lucky to be in the convent school. Learn to become like the nuns. They are good women. They will teach you how to become successful in life.”

One day, I said to Mother Christine, the Anglo-Burmese supervisor of the kindergarten, “Maria told me all about Holy Communion. Can I too dress up in a beautiful dress and come to church on Sunday?”

“If you can bring your parents, you may.”

Maria later said to me that she didn’t think I could go for Holy Communion.

“Why not? My mother can sew a beautiful dress for me.”

“If you do Communion, you have to confess.”

“Confess what?”

“Everything. All your sinful thoughts in your head. Do you hate your parents?”

“Sometimes.” I thought about my simple mother with her salwar kameez and Punjabi-speaking habits, always working hard, and knew I wanted to be ... Christian and English-speaking.

“Well, you must tell the father about those thoughts as well. You have to be a good girl, you know. Because, if you lie and you take the wafer, you will vomit blood right then and there.”

I thought about all the blood covering my beautiful dress and decided that the time had not yet come for me to be a Christian.

Every Christmas, all the school-children lined up and waited for hours to get a handful of candies from England. The candies looked beautiful, like colourful jewels. The nuns, in their crisp habits, spooned the candies and dropped them in our waiting palms. They seemed like angels to us. The Anglo-Burmese teachers — Teacher Haig, Teacher Judy, Teacher Jasper - were all so special. They showed us worlds we did not know existed. I wished I could go Christmas carol singing with my friends. They sounded so melodious, singing “Silent Night,” playing the guitar, and carrying a viii REPRESENTATION AND RESISTANCE glowing lantern. My sisters and I could only peek surreptitiously from behind the curtains. Father wouldn't let us join them. He said, “You are not Christians!” We hated being left out.

Teacher Maggie, whom I used to adore because she could speak such good English, was quite astringent in her way of speaking to us children. One day, as we were gathered around her looking at some pictures of Indians in the English Reader, she mentioned that the Indians were quite dirty and lived like rats. In my thirteen-year-old brashness, I said, “Teacher, if the Indians are dirty, why do you call all the beautiful furniture and curtains Indian-chair, or table, or curtain?” The term for them was kalaga, for curtain and kala htaing, for chair. Kala, I thought, meant Indian. Her eyes behind her thick glasses gleaming, she said, “Oh, those are not named after you Indians - kala mai. They are named after the English — kala phew.” Mai means black and phew means white. Kala are the ones who crossed the waters and came to Burma. It could also mean black. I looked down at my skin and realized it was quite dark and greasy. I smiled, foolishly.

It was a sunny day in May. We all went on a picnic with my fourth grade class. Teacher Betty, a Muslim Burmese, cooked coconut chicken noodles for us. The picnic was at the dam built by the Russians. After a whole day of playing games, such as passing the parcel and catch-catch, we were walking back home. My Sikh friend Amarjeet, looking really worried and pale, said, “Jaspal, I think the chicken was halal.”

“What are you saying! It is against Sikhism to eat that, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

I went up to Gurdeep, another Sikh friend.

“Gurdeep, did you eat the chicken noodles? The chicken was halal!”

We walked all the way home, worried sick to our stomachs that something ominous would befall us soon. Only Muslims ate halal meat.

As soon as we reached town, Gurdeep, Amarjeet, and I ran to my house and walked upstairs to my grandmother’s room. She had an altar with the Gurugranth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, where she always kept some amrit, the holy water.

“Here, let me drink some first.”

Taking a large gulp, I passed around the bottle. We all drank the entire bottle of holy water, asked Waheguru to forgive us, and, then, looked at each other with fear.

“Do you think we are forgiven?” asked Gurdeep.

PREFACE ix

“I think we might be thrown in purgatory for all eternity,” I answered.

“You think?” said Amarjeet.

“Well, it is better than hell. At least, there will be no hellfire and brimstones there,” I said.

Then, when I was fifteen, I cut my hair. While it was just a tiny bit of hair right in the middle of forehead that I had snipped, I was terrified that I would be discovered and punished by my parents. Not to mention the fear of hell that started to plague me as soon as I did that. I took my father’s fixxo, the glue that he used to keep his beard in place, and stuck the hair back to my forehead. That night, I dreamed of eternal hell.

The next morning, we had to go and get passport pictures as we were contemplating “returning” to our “motherland.” The Ne Win military regime was becoming increasingly brutal, particularly to Chinese and Indians. I still remember the passport picture with the hair sticking up on my forehead!

My grandmother, who accompanied us to the photo studio, noticed my hair, and smacked me on my head. “Badmash kuri,” she said. Bad girl.

Rubbing my head, I asked, “Why is it that the Burmese are not punished and sent to hell when they cut their hair?”

“They are junglees. They don’t have religion.”

“Where do they go when they die?”

“Shaitaan, you ask too many questions! You will go to Narak!”

“But why must the Sikhs never cut their hair? Didn’t Guru Nanak say we must not believe in blind faith?”

“Htair ja! Just you wait!”

And as she lumbered to her feet to come get me, I ran all the way to Khin Mala’s house. She was my best friend, and I specially loved her for trying to help me turn into a Burmese girl.

“Khin Mala, I wish I could have a nose like you, flat and Burmese.”

“Sit down and close your eyes,” Khin Mala would say with a twinkle in her eyes. “Now, wish hard.” Then she would bring out the mortar and pestle, pound it seven times, and touch it lightly to my nose. “Tomorrow, when you wake up, your nose will be flatter and you will be one of us.” That I never turned Burmese was somehow my fault, I used to think. I was not good enough.

As I reached Mala’s house, I asked her mother, Ah Daw Gyi, “Daw Daw, what happens when the Burmese people die?”

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“They attain Nibana.”

Nibana. Nirvana. Moksha.

“How?”

Ever since then, I have been seeking. My search has led me to many parts of the world. Navigating various cosmologies, ideologies, and economies, first in Burma, then in India, Iraq, and now in the United States, I am mindful of words, meanings, and truths.

What I learned most from the search is that due to the many cultural influences and border crossings, and the various ideological underpinnings that I was exposed to in my childhood, I don’t know which answers are right. Or are there things that fall into categories of neither right nor wrong but something else? This book is the culmination of my inquires and sensibilities, where I try to uncover similar pitfalls of language and consciousness in postcolonial writers so that we may all, readers and writers, critics and students, know that there are other realities and truths, as well as other universalisms, that are equally valid.

This book, then, examines how certain postcolonial female Indian and African voices are fragmented and conflicted, formed as they are by oppositional discourses of modernity and tradition, East and West, local and global, and how their representational subjects, too, show their ambiguous and conflicted stances in relation to modernity and tradition.

The collection of mad female voices in this book reveals the ambiguities embedded in their psyches, and more importantly perhaps, their treacherous co-optation by vested interests of globalization and other elite institutions in order to further dangerous strategies. The continued use of the idioms of modernism by many postcolonial female writers and artists writing resistance to gender identity constructions is troubling and, indeed, dangerous in the present global climate. Some of the representational mad subjects of these female-authored texts, who continue to speak in the language of modernity and globalization, when co-opted, contribute to the continued violence against and brutalization of many men and women in the Global South.

One need only examine the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, where U.S. imperialism’s deployment of the rhetoric of civilization - “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 120) - is redolent of colonialist ideals. See, for example, the December 3, 2001, issue of Time magazine featuring an Afghani woman on the cover with the caption: “Lifting the Veil: The shocking story of how

PREFACE xi the Taliban brutalized the women of Afghanistan. How much better will their lives be now?” Thus, the burqa, purdah, and the veil are once again seen as the markers of uncivilized nation-states, whose borders need to become more porous for the penetrative need of globalization, the rhetoric of which is then couched in terms of liberation and freedom.

Ultimately, I will posit a methodology of criticism for these female-authored texts representing madness which will encompass the legacy of modernity and globalization and their inter-connections to gender relations in postcolonial nation-states and their ideological and representational spaces.

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Acknowledgments

As I think of writing this acknowledgment page, I think of hands, old hands, young hands, hands that held mine in encouragement, soothed my forehead, patted my back, wrote critical comments, cooked, folded in prayers, and, today, I shall name them, as they are not separate from the persons who helped me along in writing the book.

First and foremost, I wish to thank my mentor and friend, Mona Fayad, who opened the door to my becoming a scholar. Her encouragement and support are always with me and I appreciate her greatly for them. Without her guidance, patience, and tolerance, I wouldn't have embarked on this project. She not only taught me postcolonial theory and literature, she lived it. Thanks also to Anita Helle, Janet Leigh, Julie Lesage, Linda Kintz, and the late Alan Woolfe for their help, encouragement, and support. I am grateful to Olakunle George for his discussions, critical feedback, ongoing support, and especially for pointing me in the right direction. Thanks also to Vinay Lal for helping me to complicate the historical analyses of the texts and for his mentorship. Thanks are due to Indrani Mitra and Sondra Hale for being there at a critical juncture. I owe a great debt to a number of friends who added significantly to the book with their discussions: Jean Amato, Rodney “Bene” Ferrao, Barbara James, and Sheila Shafer; Uzma Ahmed, Meera Prem, Narrinder Chona, and Mumtaz Bengali for endless cups of tea and talk when they were most needed.

Thanks are due to the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, for research support. My postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, provided me with the time needed to shape and write down my thoughts.

I am indebted to my colleagues at Northern Michigan University, particularly Katherine Payant, Toby Rose, and Robert Whalen, who were generous with their friendship, critical analyses, and support.

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This book would not have been completed without the support, encouragement, help, and guidance of the faculty, staff, administration, and especially the students of Northern Michigan University. I would like to acknowledge and thank Northern Michigan University for a year-long sabbatical leave.

I owe a large debt to the readers of this book. Their input and suggestions were insightful and extremely helpful. I am indebted to Peter Enman, staff editor of the University of Calgary Press, for his careful reading and great patience with the ongoing editorial changes.

I would like to thank Greenwood Press for permission to reproduce parts of “Studies of Bharati Mukherjee” from Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source Book (2000), edited by Emmanuel Nelson, in Chapter 3; Michigan Academician (2003) for permission to reproduce large parts of my article “Globalization, Transnationalism, and Identity Politics in South Asian Women’s Texts” in Chapter 8; to South Asian Review for permission to reproduce my articles “Representing the Poetics of Resistance in Transnational South Asian Women’s Fiction and Film” (2003) in Chapter 8, and “Transnational Multicultural Feminism and the Politics of Location: Queering Diaspora in Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night” (2005), edited by K. D. Verma, in Chapter 9.

This book is written in memory of my parents, Tej Kaur and Prabjoth Singh, who taught me love and strength through simple living, walking the true path with awareness, and journeying through various cosmologies with dignity and joyfulness. Without their encouragement, their belief in my abilities, their pride in my work, and their eternal presence, I would not have had the courage to start this project, let alone complete it. Thank you, Ma and Papaiji.

I also want to thank my siblings, their significant others, my nieces and nephews for their questions and efforts in trying to understand my journey and my work.

My children Gitanjali and Gautam sustained me during the most difficult periods with their boisterous, sometimes persistent, sometimes playful, but always understanding and loving presence and support. Their passionate and intellectual interest in my ideas, their critical feedback, and their own examples in choosing the paths of their lives sustained my strength in the writing process. This book is because of you and for you. Thank you for you.

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Postcolonial Women Writers and Their Cultural Productions

Examining middle-class female South Asian, Caribbean, and African cultural productions in contemporary postcolonial and transnational spaces, I investigate their fragmented and conflicted voices, formed as they are by oppositional discourses of modernity and tradition, East and West, local and global, and seek to understand how their representational subjects, too, show their ambiguous and conflicted stances in relation to the aforementioned discursive systems. The representations of mad female subjects suffering gender oppression by Western-educated, middle-class South Asian, Caribbean, and African women in postcolonial spaces and the West betray notions of the liberal and neo-liberal stances of these writers as they are formed by modern knowledge systems. Finally, I argue that the collection of mad female voices reveals the cosmopolitan knowledge of the writers, which leads to the continued misreading of their texts. Such misreading adds to the ongoing disempowerment of people in the Global South when their voices are co-opted to further globalization’s capitalist agendas.

The continued use of the idioms of modernity by many postcolonial female writers and artists in relation to gender identity and the constructions of “Third World” subjects is troubling, and indeed dangerous, in our global climate. Some of the representational mad subjects of these female-authored texts who continue to speak in the language of modernity and globalization may be said to contribute to violence against and the continued brutalization of many people, both men and women, in the Global South, as can be seen by the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq. The burga, the purdah, and the veil are once again seen as markers of uncivilized nation-states, whose borders need to become porous for the penetrative need of globalization, the rhetoric of which is then couched in (neo)liberal humanist terms and the coterminous espousal of liberation, freedom, and choice.

Ultimately, I will posit a methodology of criticism of these female-authored texts which will encompass the legacy of modernity and globalization on gender relations in postcolonial nation-states and their ideological and representational spaces in transnational diasporas.

In the years since independence from European colonialism, a large body of literary work in English (and other European languages), written primarily by members of the Western-educated, urban, upper- and middle-class elite, has proliferated in many parts of the world, adding to the dominant ideological construction of (postmodern and postcolonial) identity and informing social structures. As can be seen throughout the postcolonial world, the ruling classes then become responsible for the construction of cultural norms and mores in the post-independent, neocolonial spaces. Formed as they are by colonialist ideology and through gendered oppositional discourses, the ruling classes too engage with those same constructions and discourses in their ongoing cultural relationships and formations. Many women, using the female narrative voice to investigate colonial and patriarchal constructions of identity, inhabit these privileged spaces.

It is important to locate postcolonial female narrative voices within these conflicted spaces and learn to critique them through the political and cultural conditions that produced them in the first place. For instance, if a female writer represents the “mad” female subject who is suffering brutal, patriarchal oppression, especially when she is trying to negotiate an individual identity for herself, we have to keep in mind the writer’s class and her location when we examine how she addresses such complex concerns. Such concerns, no doubt, need to be raised and addressed in order for social change within existing oppressive institutions to occur, but how and where they are textualized highlights the condition of the postcolonial female writer and her representational subjects. We need to locate such writings within a particular historical and cultural context in order for a successful postcolonial/transnational/multicultural feminist methodology to occur.

What, then, are the political concerns of many postcolonial female writers? More importantly, as cultural critics, how do we critique their writings successfully? The critique of patriarchal oppression is not something new, and in fact is closely connected with nationalism and nationalist reconstruction during anticolonial movements. Much of early African literature, mostly written by men (see Elleke Boehmer, Carole B. Davies, Chiwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Florence Stratton, and Susheila Nasta, among others), deals with colonialism and its social and political implications, while it also emphasizes man’s (not humans’ or woman’s) struggle within it. According to Sheila J. Petty, “The Négritude movement of the 1930s helped recover the image of ‘savage’ African males who were in need of ‘civilizing,” but did little for African women (22).

Here is an oft-quoted example of Négritude poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor:

Naked woman, black woman

Clothed with your colour which is life, with your form which is beauty!

In your shadow I have grown up; the gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes.

And now, high up on the sun-baked pass, at the heart of summer, at the heart of noon, I come upon you, my Promised Land.

And your beauty strikes me to the heart like the flash of an eagle. (Prose and Poetry 105)

While the Négritude poets wrote to counter the representations of “the inherent inferiority of the black race - a myth which provided the ideological rationale for European imperialism - their re-visioning was bitterly contested” (Stratton 40) by African women writers. According to Stratton, while many other male writers since Senghor (Ousmane Sembéne, Okot p’Bitek, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, for example)! revised the trope of Mother Africa, “what emerges ... is an intertext that dominates the texts, a mastertext that neutralizes the difference in their ideological projects. For underlying the trope that is embedded in all of the texts is the same old manichean allegory of gender we uncovered in Négritude poetry” (Stratton 51). This trope, finally, “elaborates a gendered theory of nationhood and of writing, one that excludes women from the creative production of the national polity or identity and of literary texts” (Stratton 51).

Essentially, Petty, along with Odile Cazenave (2000), Susheila Nasta (1992), Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (1996), Elleke Boehmer (1992), Florence Stratton (1994), Phillipa Kafka (2003), Charlotte Bruner (1993), Oyeronké Oyêwùmí (1997), and Stephanie Newell (1997), among others, suggest that mythologizing the African woman as the Great Mother Africa keeps her in a conventional role in the domestic sphere and denies her equal participation in a national vision. Petty argues that “Women’s function” in male-authored texts is to “embody the male vision of Africa as a ‘nation” (22). She adds that the Négritude poets’ rendition of Africa as “Great Mother” did little for the African woman, and in fact, “the binary opposition of Mother Africa as the past or nation restored versus prostitute as the nation present degraded forcibly links woman to the male quest in the [texts] and defines the boundaries within which she is allowed to function” (22).

As can be seen from the above argument, the ideological inscription within the discourse of patriarchy that romanticizes women as the Great Mother in control of traditional cultural practices in the domestic sphere effectively closed off the public spaces for their reinscription. Therefore, the representations of women - first in colonialist and then nationalist texts, in limited terms - reinforced power relationships that became characteristic of many patriarchal cultures in colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial spaces.

Additionally, as Carole Boyce Davies argues, colonial institutions chose males over females for education, and “then too, the sex role distinctions common to many African societies supported the notion that Western education was a barrier to a woman’s role as wife and mother and an impediment to her success in these traditional modes of acquiring status” (2). In fact, with few exceptions and for a long time, girls were kept away from formal and especially higher education. Therefore, first the colonial administrators and then the nationalists used existing cultural practices to ensure secondary positions for women in (post)colonial African societies, argue many African feminists.

As Elleke Boehmer notes, “Nationalism ... found in existing social patterns the models of hierarchical authority and control, all with the blessings of earlier colonialists and indigenous patriarchy” (“Stories” 7). Women who participated in anticolonial struggles expected to benefit from the social reconstruction that took place in a post-independent era, but found that they had to wage another struggle against men - the same men alongside whom they had fought for national independence. Thus, women found that “Mother Africa may have been declared free, but the mothers of Africa remained manifestly oppressed” (7).

According to Boehmer, “The dilemma is that where male nationalists have claimed, won and ruled the ‘motherland, this same motherland may not signify ‘home’ and ‘source’ to women” (“Stories” 5). Additionally, and more importantly perhaps, Boehmer claims,

To “Third World” women and women of colour these concerns speak with particular urgency, not only because of their need to resist the triple oppression or marginalization that the effects of colonialism, gender and male-dominated language create, but also because their own tactics of self-representation are often usefully adopted from the older and more established nationalist politics of “their men.” (“Stories” 5)

In this milieu, women have felt they must rewrite their (her)stories, and to do so, they have to resist, recreate, and re-empower themselves. As Boehmer suggests, “Where women tell of their own experience, they map their own geography, scry their own history and so, necessarily, contest official representations of nationalists realities” (“Stories” 11). Or do they?

Such struggles, as well as the persistent inequalities, are represented in many postcolonial women’s texts. However, the reception of these texts in the Western academy reinforces the colonial ideology that defines these cultures as backward and in need of continued civilization. Such texts persist in fostering notions, perpetuated by colonialist writing, that characterize many cultures as inferior to the West and still in need of its paternalism, which takes neocolonial forms through the rhetoric of globalism. How these texts are read and disseminated needs to be part of literary criticism, otherwise myths of enlightenment and humanist ideology continue to be fostered in the West and in Western academia.

The writers and artists from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean that I will examine in this book, namely Mariama Ba, Myriam Warner- Vieyra, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bharati Mukherjee, Aparna Sen, Agnes Sam, Gurinder Chadha, Farida Karodia, Nisha Ghanatra, Meena Alexander, Deepa Mehta, Shani Mootoo, Samina Ali (a.k.a. Zainab Ali), and Mira Nair, question social and patriarchal practices. As colonized nations have been repeatedly represented by colonialist discourse as feminine, requiring “paternal governance,” nationalism too repeated the same symbolism during nationalist movements to represent woman. As women wrote to counter such representations, the ideas of “motherlands, mothercultures, mothertongues” (Nasta xix, original emphasis) became appropriate tropes for re-imagining. According to Nasta,

Clearly mothers and motherlands have provided a potent symbolic force in the writings of African, Caribbean and Asian women with the need to demythologize the illusion of the colonial “motherland” or “mothercountry” and the parallel movement to rediscover, recreate and give birth to the genesis of new forms and new language of expression. (Nasta xix)

Nasta is particularly aware of women’s “unwritten stories” that are “just beginning to become all that they can be” in their search for self-identity (xix).

What of the writers’ class then? In examining postcolonial writers, Ania Loomba refers to Aimé Césaire’s assertion that Marxist thought must be revised because the division between people was not class but race, and she relates a similar problem that exists within feminist and gender studies.

Women’s oppression was ... seriously under-theorised within Marxism... The crucial question - how does the oppression of women connect with the operations of capitalism (or other economic systems)? - remained unanswered till feminists began to interrelate the economic and ideological aspects of women’s oppression. The question of race and colonialism demanded rethinking for similar reasons. (26)

For colonized races, the focus was the interrelation between economic and the cultural, or ideological, aspects of oppression. As Partha Chatterjee asserts in his essay, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Colonialized Woman: The Contest in India”: “Nationalism ... located its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and hence undominated and sovereign” (Chatterjee 631). This space was the spiritual or domestic realm. Thus, if women, who have been reconstructed by nationalist ideologies, resist the idea of new woman, what idiom do they use? How do they critique nationalist reconstructions?

For African postcolonial women, one aspect that complicates a necessary feminist critique is that it “presents the double challenge of critiquing the scholarship produced by African men for its gender blindness, while sharing the concerns of African male colleagues with the imperialist, colonialist and racist connotations of mainstream constructions of Africa” (Charmaine Pereira 28). Pereira adds that “considerable dilemmas for feminists arise when ‘African culture and traditions’ are viewed as the subjects of contestation, as is often asserted by masculinist scholars once feminists challenge hegemonic relations” (28). Thus a conflict arises, and African women writers can no longer be sure about their critical stance: should they criticize “those features of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ that oppress women and affirm aspects of the same ‘culture’ that uplift women or that have social value but have been distorted by global agendas” (Pereira 29)? Such distortions are particularly troubling, especially when they are disseminated in the Western world and the Western academy by so-called “Third World Feminists.”