African Femininity and the Trajectory of Love and Violence: Contemporary Realities and Responses in Selected African Novels

Abstract World cultures and their peoples have undergone diverse schisms which directly and indirectly challenge and upset the systems, and wreck the economies of many families, groups and nations. These developments have consequently imposed profound concerns, or intensified previous ones on governments, non-governmental agencies, groups and individuals, and have opened up a vista of reactions, many of which are of literary significance. A major form of reaction is violence. This paper is interested in the actions that constitute violence that women react against. It is also curious about the forms of women’s responses. Accordingly, the paper focuses on the applicability of the different perceptions of violence that are depicted in African literature, and specifically examines how femininity is affected by violence within the context of love, as well as the various reactions of the subject/victim. Deploying the qualitative methodology to appraise femininity at the convergence of love and violence, or violence-in-love, as captured in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the study establishes that the contemporary woman, unlike her foremothers, is equipped with the strategies as well as appropriate dispositions and the determination to take action, thereby debunking the age-long perceptions of African femininity as passive, weak, docile, willingly subservient and manipulable.