The Society And The Girl Child In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison And Kaine Agary’S Yellow Yellow
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The Society And The Girl Child In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison And Kaine Agary’S Yellow Yellow
Chapter 1: Introduction
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a society is a group of people who share common conventions, laws, and so on. It can also refer to the state of being with others. (1129).
A girl child is defined as a female child aged between infancy and early adulthood. During this stage of the girl child’s development, she is under the care and supervision of adults who may be her parents or guardians, as well as older and more mature siblings. As a girl grows, her experiences have a strong influence on her.
She models her behaviour at this developmental stage by observing and imitating people on whom she relies, and her physical, mental, and emotional growth begins and culminates at this stage.
In order to build the interaction between society and the girl child, we ask essential questions about how she is welcomed and interacted with in her current society. What are the problems, challenges, and oppressions that girl children face? What factors contribute to the problems and discrimination that girls face?
From the family circle to the public domain, the girl child has faced numerous challenges and been immensely dehumanised. This is due to her perceived inferiority to her brother. She is worthless, and, as Buchi Emecheta depicts her, she is a second-class citizen in a society dominated by male chauvinism.
In most African communities, the girl child has been assigned a lesser rank for which she is continually shown as daunted. This inferiority stems from the patriarchal worldview in society, which places undue importance on the male child.
As a result, men go to great lengths to denigrate women in order to impose their values and ideologies on society. African society and the diaspora have a tradition that values men over women.
This patriarchal mindset has influenced how male writers represent female characters in their literary works. In most literary works, female protagonists invariably wear one of these images: prostitutes, girlfriends, courtesans, and workers, as shown in these novels.
In Chinua Achebe’s No Long at Ease, Clara is Obi’s lover. In A Man of the People by Achebe, Elsie is Odili’s girlfriend and eventually becomes Chief Nanga’s girlfriend. Olama is Odenigbo’s boyfriend in Chimamanda. These images of female characters support Chukwumma’s assertion.
In African fiction, the female character is often stereotyped as a quiet member of a household who only bears children, feeling disappointed if she doesn’t and handicapped if she only has girls. Docility and utter obedience of will are required and imposed upon her. (Chukwumma 1990, 131).
They portray the girl character as a passive, insignificant thing. Male writers painted a picture of the girl kid as one whose fate is determined by the whims of her male counterparts.
This research will be conducted using a primary source. The womanist tenet will be highlighted as it sheds light on the subjugation of girls as depicted in African literary works. Womanism is often referred to as the black feminist movement.
Alice Walker coined the term to explain how black people survived. (Walker 1984:89) Womanism promotes respect for the family unit among Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.
Womanism is communal in nature and extends beyond the husband-wife context. This idea of womanism prompted Africans and African-Americans to highlight the black woman’s struggle in her culture. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and KaineAgary’s Yellow Yellow both provide this information.
Writers are heavily influenced by their environment and historical circumstances, which have helped shape their culture. We should all agree that Toni Morrison and Kaine Agary’s work depicts their civilisation.
According to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow, the oppression and suffering experienced by girls can be attributed to the traumatic encounters between Africans and white racists (xii).
It is claimed that the contact between whites and Africans has caused distress among Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. These concerns are the product of the terrible means by which the meeting occurred: slavery and colonialism.
A brief, detailed analysis of both authors’ historical backgrounds will serve as the peg to tie the goat, as Achebe would say. Toni Morrison is the most renowned African-American female writer, whereas Kaine Agary is a prominent Nigerian contemporary writer.
Toni Morrison’s Biography and Historical Background
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. Her father, George Wofford, was a shipyard worker, while her mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, reared the family.
Her family’s movement from the south and north is similar to that of the Breedloves in The Bluest Eye. Morrison was the second of four children. She grew up hearing folktales in her family and community, including stories about slavery, emancipation, prejudice against the white majority, and magical themes. Morrison married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison.
The Bluest Eye is set in 1941 in Lorain, Ohio, as well as the rural south in the early twentieth century. The novel begins following the Great Depression. African-Americans prioritise economic security due to limited prospects compared to their white counterparts. (www.cliffnotes.com).
Following the end of slavery in the early nineteenth century, Africans experienced significant dehumanisation. They were the descendants of Africans who were abducted and transported to America as slaves. These captured slaves were forced to work on white landowners’ plantations.
They farmed and produced crops like sugar, cotton, indigo, and other tropical goods. Following the abolition of slavery, they were assigned to the rural part of society. Their environment lacked fundamental necessities for survival, and combined with their slave past, life was harsh, and their region was impoverished.
The blacks faced racial discrimination, as they had no work in the white milieu, which was metropolitan and provided all essential services. Competition for existence became exceedingly difficult and intense, leaving their residents with no other means of life, pushing them to resort to various sorts of criminality such as overdrinking, prostitution, incest, and wife beating as a means of escape from the unrelenting terrible conditions.
KaineAgary Biography and Historical Background
KaineAgary was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She spent much of her life at Port-Harcourt before moving to the United States of America. She currently lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where she is the editor of Takai magazine. Agary earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology and economics from Mount Holyoke College in the United States.
Yellow Yellow takes place in Nigeria’s oil region, more specifically in Port Harcourt. In the early nineteenth century, the British entered Nigeria under the pretence of religion. They took over the ancient governmental system, abandoned and eclipsed our traditions, and referred to Nigerians as barbarians.
They exploited both human and natural resources, capturing men and women as slaves and transporting them home to cultivate and till their land, while the resources were used to expand their culture.
By 1937, oil exploration had begun in Nigeria, led by the Shell Development Company of Nigeria Limited, based in Warri. During the exploration process, the first well was dug in 1951 to the northeast of Warri, when oil was discovered in commercial quantities by shell at Oloibiri, in what was then Rivers State.
In 1958, the first crude oil cargo left the Niger Delta via a pipeline connecting Oloibiri and Port Harcourt. At 6,000 barrels per day, the oil industry accounted for 95% of the country’s foreign exchange profits, with Shell leading the way.
After reviewing both authors’ biographies and historical backgrounds, it is clear that the problems and experiences of girls are influenced by their interactions with white people, which have degraded them (xv).
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