Abstract: This research work examines The Theme Of Cultural Conflict In Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter And Nawal El- Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero. With reference to the two selected novels under investigation, African cultural practices affect the women mentally and psychologically. They are oppressing, humiliated and disillusioned by their male counterparts as seen in this two novels. The study has also revealed that African women faces lots of marital trauma after their husbands’ demise, and these women are always accurse of murder while some are send out of their late husband’s houses and neglected by the family members without care.
The Theme Of Cultural Conflict In Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter And Nawal El- Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero
The study further revealed that polygamy is another major cause of conflict in African society. Men use polygamy as an element of humiliation, oppression and disillusionment on their wives this instance would be seen in Ba’s So Long a Letter. Based on the consequence findings, the study recommended that, Widows should not be maltreated in the family, men should also put an end to polygamy and Women should not be seen as object of decoration and property bought my men.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
This study examines cultural conflicts in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Nawal El Sadaawi’s Woman at Point Zero. These female writers use their work of art to portray and examine the impact of race, class and gender on women’s relationships. The novels emphasize how women face various challenges of patriarchal domination, socio cultural injustices, and how these women are subjugated through polygamy, and the patriarchal subjugation in the society. To explore the message in these novels convectively, women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions to subjugate them through polygamy, neo-colonialism, and constraints of tradition, caste prejudices, political instability and the patriarchal subjugation.
Saadawi and Mariama to explore these issues of cultural problem in this contemporary society. However, their writing focuses on the power of patriarchy which constitutes a threat to female bonding and usually causes women’s estrangement.
Mariama Ba’s novel So Long a Letter portrays a clear polygamy issues and patriarchal domination on women’s relationship with men. She describes the plight of women owing to different forms of oppression. She demonstrates this social injustice in her female characters, how they face various marital and cultural afflictions throughout their lives. However, their struggle against the patriarchal subjugation the protagonists in So Long a Letter as examine by the author… make a stronger plea to average women to develop female bonding and financial independence to liberate themselves from the burden of oppression.
While on the other hand, Nawal El Saadawi is one of best Egyptian novelists who have written extensively on the impact of misogynist social structures on Egyptian women, the specific nature of sexual oppression and links to capitalism and imperialism. Her writings focuses on women’s life condition…uses her literary work in portraying to the entire African society how the African cultural practices affect the women.
Writings specifically portray the cultural injustices that are mated on the female folks and how the patriarchal domination affects these women psychologically and emotionally which constitutes a threat to their lives…and also causes women’s estrangement. Unlike Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter she portrays how the protagonist, Ramatoulaye gone through several cultural trauma, and oppression of patriarchal by her husband, Madou.
Mariama portrays how her main characters struggle throughout their lives in order to survive their predicament. Aissatou and Ramatoulaye have experienced sharing a husband with another woman, although their reactions to such experience are different. Aissatou divorces Mawdo after he succumbs to his mother’s pressure and takes his cousin Nabou as a second wife after twenty five years of marriage, while Ramatoulaye decides to stay away when her husband Modou marries Binetou, a much younger woman who was their daughter’s friend.
When Modou abandons her for Binetou, Ramatoulaye assumes the upbringing of their twelve children but stays legally married to him until his death. In support of this view, Nawal El Sadawi portrays in this novel understudy, Woman at Point Zero how African women are always at a disadvantages in any relationship with the opposite sex. She uses her female heroine, Firdaus in showing how the image of women as sex objects…in the hands of men in the society. Consequently, this form the background to this research work, on cultural conflicts in the novels under investigation.
1.2 Statement of the problem
Mariama Ba and Nawal El Sadawi are on the notion that, African women have to fight against an oppressive culture and its attendant discrimination against female gender. The oppressive nature of African cultures spark the reaction tired feminism, which is one of the prominent ideologies that portrays cultural conflict against women in male dominated African societies.
The Theme Of Cultural Conflict In Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter And Nawal El- Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero
1.3 Purpose of the study
The main purpose of this study is to identify the theme of conflicts in Mariama B’s So Long a Letter and Nawal El Sadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and their reaction to the oppressive and discriminating culture experienced by African women in the novels under study.
1.4 Significance of the study
The topic the theme of cultural conflict in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Nawal El Sadawi’s Woman at Point Zero will serve as a good research material to students of English and Literature and other researcher who will find this work reliable. This research will also throw more light on the causes of cultural conflicts in African societies.
