Abstract
The longstanding history of Black women’s marginalisation and silencing has led to powerful narratives of reclamation offering them the potential to retrieve their stories from the clutches of oblivion. Twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Ntozake Shange as a powerful African-American author who lent voice to the lived experiences of women from her community. In her immensely powerful novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Shange inverts the narrative of patriarchal and colonial control by offering her unique and ecologically empowered female perspective. She achieves this by invoking the mythical legend of a woman named Blue Sunday. This character draws references to the rape culture that Black women faced during the times of slavery, but she is not bereft of power as nature shares in her suffering. Every time the white master comes near her, the seas get fuming and swing whips of salt water around his house. The proximity between this woman and nature functions to empower her leading to the retrieval of her silenced voice from the seas of patriarchal noise.
This paper also deals with a more contemporary author from Uganda: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Published in 2020, Makumbi’s novel The First Woman traces the ecological roots of female empowerment through a string of mythical stories told by the village-witch, Nsuuta. The presence of ecological elements contained within references to water and nature metaphors in Nsuuta’s myths foreground female agency. Makumbi also explores the role of water/ rains as ecological entities activating female sexual desire. The ecofeminist connotations underlying female empowerment in Makumbi are read parallel to the reclamation of women’s voice in Shange, thereby leading to a comparative analysis of the two in terms of ecological voicing of the silenced female perspective.
Bio
Malini (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Based in the department of English, her work broadly focuses on the African-American women’s writings from the twentieth century. Her research interest lies in the field of ecofeminism and queer studies. She is also a tutor at her university, currently teaching the course on English Literature post 1789. Malini also acted as a reader in judging the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction in 2020 and 2021.
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