Portrayal of womanism  in Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Agary’s Yellow Yellow 

The portrayal of womanism  in Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Agary’s Yellow Yellow 

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the historical yardsticks for gender inequality in Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Agary’s Yellow Yellow 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.