A postcolonial ecofeminist comparative analysis of war fiction: The case of Arundhati Roy's The God of small and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a yello sun
The main focus of the study was to comparatively analyse The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from a postcolonial ecofeminist perspective. Postcolonialism focuses on issues pertaining to power, culture, and religion in relation to humanity, whilst ecofeminism explores the links between the environment and women, connecting women to the epistemological understanding of nature. The research aimed at exploring the plight of women and the environment in a wartime postcolonial era through the literary lens. The application of postcolonialism and ecofeminism to the analysis of the texts necessitated the consideration and inclusion of themes such as; hybridity, gender trauma, subjugation, relationships and beliefs. The study is a desktop qualitative research and it employed content analysis in the interpretation and analysis of the two novels. Women were portrayed as destitute who stay in subservient conditions, at the mercy of patriarchal societies, with no voice; sex objects for the husband’s pleasures and that can be exchanged for material wealth. Nature is used as an agent of resistance in The God of Small Things (1997). For instance, Ammu uses the Meenachal River as an escape from patriarchal entrapment and psychological imprisonment where she goes to find peace and listen to her transistor. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Kainene profits from the civil war in the beginning, later becoming conscientious to the needs of the less fortunate and women are subjugated by both white and black male counterparts through exploitation by both the mercenaries and Biafra soldiers. Contrariwise, Roy and Adichie depict women as perceptive and sensible thinkers. In The God of Small Things, Ammu is protective of her naïve children because she is well aware of the evils of this world, most of which she herself has been a victim of. The study found that by reading The God of Small Things (1997) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) as contemporaries, there can be testament to some wealthy accounts as the novels provide a coherent shape of the realistic operations of postcolonial ecofeminism in totality. The thrust of this study is to draw interconnections between men’s domination of nature and the subjugation and dominance of women as depicted in the selected creative works. The study concluded that future studies need to consider the use of ecofeminism as a theory in the analysis of novels; merging ecofeminism with other theories in other genres such as poetry, drama and genocidal literature in the analysis of different literary works.
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