PROTAGONIST AS A VICTIM OF CIRCUMSTANCES : KAINE AGARY’s YELLOW YELLOW AND SAM OMATAEYE CROCODILE GIRL

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PROTAGONIST AS A VICTIM OF CIRCUMSTANCES : KAINE AGARY’s YELLOW YELLOW AND SAM OMATAEYE CROCODILE GIRL

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews protagonistas a victim of circumstances : Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow and s Omataeye’s Crocodie Girl and argues that the challenges of environmental degradation, poverty and lack of infrastructure evident in most parts of Nigerian towns and cities have a great impact on the women folk. The purported exaggerated effect of underdevelopment on women in the novel is discursive, the reverberating societal values and systems of meaning that promote male dominance and demean the woman as the weaker breed, and non-resistant appendage is also looked into. Based on these, questions such as ‘Why are the ills of underdevelopment so evident on the women than the men’ are asked. Applying a critical discourse analytical paradigms of gender studies which views the woman as the “other” in society, this paper examines the discursive roles of women in the novels and argues that the construction of women as cigarette-smoking delinquents and poverty stricken harlots do not just reflect social challenges but are in fact a reflection of the historically specific systems of meaning which form the identities of women rather than the present global reality of rights, opportunities and sufferings.

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Throughout the history of humankind, there has been a belief imposed on women that they were inferior to men both in physical strength and in mental caliber. They were denied freedom to act independently, even to get an education and were considered unfit for any task. In a way woman accepted and found satisfaction in being slave to men. During her childhood days, her father protects her, and after marriage her husband takes care of her; during old age her sons look after her. This was the general belief in Indian and other societies. Slowly, during the British rule and with the emergence of reformers, the condition of women underwent a tremendous change. Woman were given education and participated in social, economic and political affairs.

Deshpande solemnly declared in an interview that she is a feminist writer ”I am a woman and I do write about women, and I am going to say it loudly; I don’t want to dissociate myself” (Shashi Deshpande) (Sue Dickman, 1998:133). Casual study of her novels makes one understand that she has not only much concern for women but also she has tried to understand and suggest remedial measures for their everyday problems in the patriarchal society.

The protagonists of her novels are woman who have to struggle for even trivial things in their troublesome life. They have to face the challenges in their day to day life, and that may help quench their thirst for freedom, to say the least. This book examines literature and the unconscious with emphasis on disorientation and the female experience in selected novels by African and African American women writers. The novels to be studied include: Maru and A Question of Power by Bessie Head; Our Sister Killjoy: Or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint and Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo, (Africa); Sula and Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Women of Brewster

Place and Mama Day by Gloria Naylor (African America).

The study seeks to establish that much of what people generally regard as disorientation are actually subjective interpretations of character traits and that what determine character traits reflected in works of literature and particularly fiction by the

women being examined, are unconscious secret forces. The work intends to demonstrate that though socio-political and cultural factors have immeasurable influence on character formation and human actions, those factors require other factors that are not easily observable to complete the process of human behaviour. These factors, which operate within the unconscious of the individual characters, facilitate greater understanding of

behavioural traits of such individual characters. This is because most psychologists and psychoanalysts have unequivocally established that a character’s behaviour is better understood when the unconscious mind is properly analyzed.

A large corpus of novels by African and African American women writers have come to be seen as reflecting female characters who exhibit in conventional reasoning ‘unwholesome’, ‘deviant’, or disorientative behaviour.

A possible explanation is that most women writers focus on the predicament of women in their works. And because of the so-called precarious situation of women imposed by men, the characters created by these writers are interpreted as victims of socio-cultural and historical factors, such as patriarchy, colonialism, apartheid, slavery, sexism and others. However, to a large extent, racism, colonialism, apartheid and other

institutional constructs targeted at some people have ceased to govern social relations in the world today. Even a cultural construct like patriarchy has seemingly lost its initial verve. Nevertheless, the behavioural patterns engendered by these cultural institutions still seem to strongly influence the psyche of victims as reflected in the characters of the works to be examined.

Consequently, more emphases are laid on social factors in identifying causes

of disorientative behaviour in female characters than on psychological factors. Most critics and readers of works of African and African American women writers who address different dimensions of these social historical factors concentrate on those ones that operate on the physical realm or conscious level to the disregard of the psychological dimensions of human behaviour. It is therefore difficult for analyses of character, which exclude their psychological dimensions in preference for observable phenomena to adequately reflect the complexity of the individual and truly reveal the

causes and effects of disorientation.

All the novels examined in this study present characters whose actions or inactions one way or the other require reexamination, since some of those actions and inactions are at odds with societal expectations. Lionnel Trilling posits that “man is an extricable tangle of culture and biology” (289), and certain degrees of conformity to social norms are expected from him. When some character traits propel some people in ways that they fail to meet these social expectations, these people are usually branded and considered by such societies as disoriented. Sometimes, such characters engage in or exhibit destructive tendencies that are inimical to the interest of either themselves or

others around them.

And this is always an indication that some unresolved psychological conflicts are at play in the unconscious of those characters. Because human beings (characters) shape themselves and their environment through the working together of the conscious and the unconscious, this book will examine the selected novels for this study in order to determine the extent to which the unconscious has contributed in influencing the behavioural traits of the female characters in the narratives, taking cognizance of the situations and circumstances these characters find themselves as women.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

During the abortion scene, various strands of the displaced male-image turn out to be figments of Zilayefa’s projections as she is confronted with the reality of the consequences of forbidden pleasures. Once those projections are made, the figures projected onto respond accordingly, leaving her the way she is. If she were to give a retort to an inquirer’s questions probing the process that has led to her present misery, I suspect she would possibly concur with Shug Avery’s acknowledgment to Celie in The Color Purple that “Man corrupt everything. […] He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t” (204). The changeable image of the male in the work, whether as a father, lover, friend, deliverer [God], seductive autocrat, or a careful blend of these, turns out to be only what the mind can conceive and which cannot be conceived unless it is first equated to what is concrete and sensible, man. These conceptions and equations give Zilayefa’s undercurrent motivations a shape.

In other words, the projection occasioning the displacement of the male-image of the absent male in the present character, besides other sundry factors, is steered by the pleasure principle natural to characters, especially Zilayefa, through whom all is perceived. The image of the male, thus guided and projected in Yellow-Yellow, is, to my mind, the reason why this work bears the marks of the important literary epoch Emenyeonu aptly terms “new voices” of the twenty-first century Nigerian literature (ix). This novel expresses one of those voices, and I surmise that, contrary to existing critical remarks, Yellow-Yellow significantly undermines the depiction of those peculiar environmental problems of the region the sneezing of which causes not only Nigeria to shudder, but also a considerable segment of the world whose oil needs are served by her. In sum, Zilayefa is culpable of her many woes, though they were notably compounded by displacing the male-image.

1.3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVE

1. To portray that the challenges of environmental degradation, poverty, lack of social amenities evident in the Niger Delat society have a great impact on the female folk, especially as portrays in Yellow Yellow.

2. To fight for social justice, minority rights and freedom of black Africans.

3. To expose the socio-economic predicament of the people as well as explore the debilitating effect of poverty on the feminine psyche among women in the Niger Delta region.

1.4 SCOPE OF STUDY

This research work deals with the protagonist as a victim of circumstances. It entails textual analysis of the two text; Yellow Yellow by Kaine Agary and Crocodie Girl by Sam Omataeye.

1.5 RESEARCH METHOD

The primary and main source of information includes articles, Journals, internet materials and other written research work.

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