Social Responsibility and the Female Self in Women’s Autobiography: Emecheta and Angelou
Keywords:
Social responsibility, female self, reclamation, re-writing, autobiographyAbstract
There is a general neglect of autobiographical narratives by women in African literary scholarship. This neglect is rooted in the overall traditional perception of the woman as an appendage, the other that completes the man but who cannot be on her own. From this conception, the woman is because the man has been; after all, it is assumed, she exists and derives her value in a man’s world. But of recent very few women have taken to the pen, the instrument of power in the hands of the man, and wielding it to account for the female self. In these accounts we witness not only a projection of the female self, a woman’s individuality, and a conscious recognition of the uniqueness of self, but recognition that she is answerable to society; that a sense of self imbues on her an authority to act and to decide independently. These core concerns of re-writing the female self, of freeing herself from “the danger of the single story”, to recall Chimamanda Adichie, animates the autobiographical accounts of Buchi Emecheta and Maya Angelou. We will explore these concerns by focusing on the representation of the inter-relationship between social responsibility and the female self in Head Above Waters and The Heart of a Woman. The discussion is organized in four main sections. It begins with the background account on real stories of women trapped in the discourse of patriarchy. This is followed by the enunciation of the feminist theory of reclamation as a tool for re-writing the story of the woman and freeing the female self. This is followed by practical acts of re-writing the female self and her acts of social responsibility in Emecheta’s Head above Waters and Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman. Ultimately, the autobiographical works of Buchi Emecheta and Maya Angelou challenge patriarchal discourses by reclaiming the female self through self-representation. Their narratives highlight autobiographical writing as a powerful tool for women’s empowerment and social change.
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