dc.description.abstract | This study seeks to examine how female agency is constructed in David Mulwa’s prose-fiction,
the novella We Come in Peace and the novel Flee Mama Flee. In the selected texts, Mulwa’s
re-imagines slavery and colonialism as systems that doubly marginalized women, yet, he
deliberately portrays female characters who can acquire the power to make individual decisions
against the backdrop of this marginalization. The study begins by (re)conceptualizing the
notions of ‘power’ and ‘agency’ within the context of slavery by interrogating the extent to
which Mulwa depicts female characters, laughter and voice as acts of agency. The study then
examines characters within the binaries of white/black, colonizer/ colonized, man/ woman, and
master/slave to determine how this construction leads to the ‘othering’ of women within the
context of colonialism. Moreover, the study recognizes the author’s attempt to create women
capable of subverting the forces that ‘Other’ them. The studyviews this representation as the
author’s ‘enlightened compassion’ to restore agency to women. The study employs the theory
of Narratology and Postcolonial theory as the interpretive grids. Narratology focuses on the
structural and textual choices the author makes in the texts, and Postcolonial theory focuses on
issues of marginality such as Said’s notion of Orientalism to examine how marginal groups
articulate agency in relation to the social contexts. Besides, the study models Spivak’s
approaches in representing the gendered subaltern to read the depiction of female characters in
Mulwa’s prose fiction. The study concludes that by constructing typical female characters and
then depicting them in a manner that foregrounds their voice and agency, Mulwa’s prose fiction
breaks the powerlessness associated with the situation of the woman along the Kenyan coast.
Definition of Terms
Female Agency
In this study, female agency refers to the ability of the female characters to have control to
make decisions over the course of their lives, economically, politically and culturally. With this
power, they can question the socio-cultural norms or even establish new standards for
themselves. By writing the women into a historical context in which their voice has been
shadowed, Mulwa’s approach is similar to that of the Subaltern Studies group. Led by Ranajit
Guha, they attempted to reclaim the history of the Indian masses, which they argued had been
either glossed over or silenced in the colonialist historiography and the nationalist narratives by
the elite Indians. They espoused the idea that there may have been political dominance, but that
this was not hegemonic. By tracing the voices of these ordinary individuals, they shifted the
focus from the subaltern to “subaltern agency” which emphasized the power of the individual.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak developed on the work of the Subaltern Studies Project by
introducing two aspects into it, namely: the position of the gendered subaltern and the
representation of subaltern in literature. Regarding representation, the Subaltern Studies group
provided two ways of doing this: either reading the elitist books against the grain to identify the
silences and glosses or examine the representation of the subaltern agency in works that overtly
attempt to give agency to the ordinary people. In “Can the Subaltern Speak”, Spivak focuses on
the position of the gendered subaltern who is deeply in shadow and therefore cannot speak.
Instead, she needs someone to speak for her. In this approach, the contribution and condition of
the subaltern would be presented as part of the history of the nation. This study uses Spivak’s
approach toexamine the representation of the female subaltern in David Mulwa’s prose fiction. | en_US |