Confused “Slaves” of Many Traditions

The Search for the Freedom Dance in Chiziane's Niketche: A Tale of Polygamy

Bibliographic Data

ID9250889
AuthorsMarques Marques (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume41
Issue2
Pages133
Publication date2010-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ral.2010.41.2.133
OpenAlexW2063064333
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited7

This article focuses on four ways in which Paulina Chiziane's novel Niketche: A Tale of Polygamy addresses women's oppression, gender relations, nationalism, and identity issues in contemporary Mozambique. The paper offers a study of the heroine's coming to consciousness via reflection, co-identification, and meditative freeing exercises that allow her to enter the holistic nonoppressive ontological realm and to envisage the freedom that resides in what I term the "poetic sphere" of metaphor, dance, song, and cry, and thus (spiritually) escape the various social and patriarchal control mechanisms; a survey and critical discussion of the many traditions that are behind Mozambican women's (and also men's) oppression; an analysis of how the postcolonial Mozambican subject suffers from a pronounced ontological confusion or split as a result of the many traditions that have been imprinted upon his/her self; and a discussion of what Chiziane, through her first-person narrator, proposes as some solutions for this ontological destabilization

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Dance · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Literature · Metaphor · Nationalism · Oppression · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Theology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Gender Studies · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Philosophy

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