Feminist Enthused Prose-fictions: Rewriting the History of Love

in #writing6 years ago (edited)

Hi Friends,

This is long overdue, really. Having spent a reasonable length of my life glossing through the pages of several literary work of arts and drawing symmetrical motifs and patterns across the many books I read, I am quite disposed to addressing work of arts, especially prose-fictions, not as mere entertaining pieces that glue the eyes to the heart, but as critical references refracted from life, a sort of go-to when seeking past, present, or future memoranda that bear truism to real world situations.

In this regard, love, being the very essence and of life, has received many a treatment in several prose works. Almost in every novel, one is prone to find elements of love and romance woven into the plot or sub-plots. But due to the complexity of love, the inexpressibility contained in its four letters, only a few work of arts, very few in fact, work their plot beyond the most basic understanding and interpretation of love. Many novels, however complex and deeply stylised, ride around the purest form and theme of love, you know, a man meets a woman in the most common or rarest of ways- they either make love the first time or go on and on in a sizzling romance intercepted every now and then wit
by feisty challenges - they come out of these challenges either scarred and irreparable or stronger than ever- And voila, the end! If you've already searched your mind for one or two of the novels you've read with your heartbeat skipping too many beats, then you can reckon with what I have just said.

But then, there are some novels that have not just deviated from the Romantic/idyllic view of love, they have also broken through norms and patterns to rewrite the history of love. I won't exactly say they entirely rewrote the script of love as it plays out on the stage of life. Instead, I would rightly say they overcame the numbness and dizzy spell that came with translating love as it happens in real life into words, fickle as they are, and then onto white sheets. Giving love the right denunciation without any paratextual or semiotic backing is quite a task. And it is for this reason that I am enlisting these literary prose fictions here.

Before I proceed, I would like to proclaim a spoiler - the works outlined below are all written by females. And this is not an admittance to the unfounded claim that female authors write more profound love stories. In actual fact, authors of the masculine bearing tell variegated intriguing stories that border on love and a whole lot of other things; talk of the earliest American literary pacesetter, The Scarlet Letter by from whence the very phrase, the scarlet A derived its connotative meaning; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby dwells on a psychopathic, materialized love that is both maddening, thrilling and electrifying at the same time. And then there is the more recent homosexuality infused plot of Walking in Shadows by Nigerian Jude Dibia. These novels make Love wet its pants whilst giggling amusingly at how it has been demystifyed.

Against this backdrop, my selection of female authored novels is steeped in the deep realisation that novels written by them carry a somber reflection on love that is dreamlike, surreal and yet thoroughly realistic, so realistically induced that you can almost read an encrypted enigma in each line. Charged by the quest to rediscover the female self again and again, love, or the lack of it, is thoroughly probed, questioned and eventually given a new identity different from how we know it to be. You will see this for yourself. One more thing, given my cultural placement and proclivity for indigenity, most of the novels are Africanly. But notwithstanding, they are true and relevant across cultures and races. I have said too much. Let's get down to it already.

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1. Stay With Me by Adebayo

I am starting with this novel because of its currency, having been published only last year. The title of this award winning novel "Stay With Me" is a direct translation of one of the character's name, Durotimi. Important as this character is, it is not actually her that this story puts in the limelight. It is her mother, Yetunde. Yetunde met, fell in love with and got married to Akin while in school. Apart from the fact that she had to shield her marriage from the barrages of her past polygamous setting, she also had to face the merciless confrontations of her in-laws. She was barren. And the fact that she leaped from mountains to valleys to avert the situation didn't stop these in-laws from getting her husband a second wife. The trauma of a second wife, of breastfeeding a goat in her quest for motherhood plunged her into pseudocyerosis (false pregnancy claims). Through it all, her husband stayed loyal to Yetunde, to refusing to sleep with the other wife. As if his loyalty paid off, Yetunde became truly pregnant and gave birth to a son. But she lost the son too soon. Another baby, another loss. Another baby... She was on the verge of insanity. But Akin, he kept it all together. He had to be strong for her.

Bullshit! The truth?

Akin was the barren one. He was impotent. And because he thought a hard or limp penis did not make any difference to his virgin wife, he crossed his legs and watched her sell her soul even to the devil to bear a child. When he couldn't take the endless quest any more, he lured her to his stepbrother's bed over and over again, but this brother could o b y give her children ridden with sickle cell. What Akin didn't know was that his secret was not so well kept. From the wild, erotic talks of her customers at the saloon,, from his brother's own confession, Yetunde knew her husband was impotent, she was only waiting for him to tell her himself, to reinstate their love through a warm confession.

When her husband made it clear that he would rather tolerate the hanging silence in the room than say a word about his impotence, when the political fall of a political giant against who the novel was sociologically set colluded with the spasmic attack of her last daughter and only hope, Durotimi, Yetunde made a run for it. She had been the one loving Akin all the whole, bearing insults for him, going mad for him. But there is only so much a woman can take.

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2. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie

Ok, this novel is quite widespread, so there will no need for a sprawling epistle. But I would like to call your attention to how Adu hie rewrote love's history on several levels. First, there is the Father, the Catholic faithful himself. You must admit with me even if faintly, that he loved his family a lot. But to him what better way to express love than to purge their souls of every weakness and beat the devil out of them? Ironically, this was his own weakness, the need to be a demon of goodness. Compare him to his sister, Aunty Ifeoma and her children, they have been taught that love is best expressed through freeing channels. This informed Amaka's knack for painting and Obinna's love for scientific miracles. Aunty Ifeoma poured her love on her pagan grandfather. Kambili and her mother, Susan, due to the utter repression that characterized their lives, gave their love to things they cannot have. Kambili falls madly in love with Father Amadi, a priestly celibate. She became God's very own rival. And her mother was quietly in love with broken figurines and a plan to murder.

The most deepening expression of love, however, was portrayed in quiet, accepting JAJA, Kambili's brother. Though silent and obscure, his love spoke volumes. It was this unexplainable love for his family that made him take the blame and beating for his sister's misbehaviours. It was this love that made him take responsibility for his murdered father, despite knowing his mother was to blame. And in spite of everything, he never felt he had done enough. He was the purple hibiscus, the one that despite being huddled in harsh conditions - an oppressive military dictatorship, an abusive father and a worrisome teenage hood blossomed silently but strongly.

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3. I am China by Xiaolu Guo

Loving someone from afar can be the most painful yet blissful kind of love. This is the fate of Jian and Mu, two Chinese hipsters, whose love story receive a telling through a Chinese translator, Iona, hired to translate the deeply entrenched letters of both lovers into English. Within these letters, she finds the strangest kind of loving that is not challenged by anyone but by the different ideologies the lovers possess whose chasm is further widened by the hostile, communist state they find themselves in. While Jian, Mu's Peking Man, believes in combating the stringent communist dictatorship of China, his girlfriend, Mu, believes in the principle of live and let live. They clash on several occasions especially when Jian treats the death of their son with levity.

But it is until the state arrests Jian during an anticommunist performance and leaves him seeking for asylum on various countries that Mu leaves Jian's side. Even at that, they keep communicating through letters even as Mu tried in vain to get him to tell her his location. It is Iona, the translator, who has been deeply affected by their love journey, a far contrast from her uncanny obsession for sex and Chinese, that finds the dead body who was said to have drowned in a far sea after running too many times. Iona was meaning to take Jian back to his lover. But she had come too late. China had had the last laugh.


I get the feeling that if I go on, I am going to be sued for some crime that lacks a name. So, I will just halt here even as I hope that you can sufficiently see the several layers of love peeled off to the naked eyes. The characters, male and female alike, have been used as candid representations of the ungraspable depth of love and the inexplicable consequences of the same. Love indeed has a history which cannot be told at a stretch or in biographical memoirs; but can only be expressed through the experiences of tired and harrowed lives a little bit at a time.

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