Browsing by Author "Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory"

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    Betwixt and Between: Negotiating Parental Abandonment and Family Life in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This
    (University of Dar es Salaam, College of Humanities, 2018) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    Using African feminist and post-colonial theories, this paper examines the representation of the institution of family in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This, in order to explore the character’s creation of a third space – one that is ambivalent and traumatic – in her context of divorce and family abandonment. As depicted in the narrative, a major reason behind such family tragedies is an overlap between patriarchy and the postcolonial state. Thus, through the protagonist’s troubled identity and traumatic experience due to her family’s dynamics, the narrative questions the role of a child in reconnecting fragmented family bonds. This heroine’s traumatised hatred of her culture and of the institution of motherhood raises questions about the future of African feminism. If this ideology marginalises culture and renders motherhood as an institution no longer centrally important to contemporary African women, then it requires critical engagement. I explore how the literary genre inspired by African feminism enters established socio-cultural spaces critically and interrogates family dynamics ruthlessly. And I query whether it offers any solutions to the dilemmas of women that are uncovered and illuminated thereby. I will argue that the child protagonist in this narrative is presented not merely as a victim of circumstance – existing as she does betwixt and between family identities that are simultaneously familiar and strange – she is also depicted as attempting valiantly to reconnect the fragmented family bonds.
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    Intimate Family Affairs and Re-imagining Nationhood in Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze
    (Fountain, 2019) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    This paper examines the representation of dynamics in a family that result in the separation of family members and their subsequent failure to reunite as a family. It specifically explores how Elieshi Lema’s In the Belly of Dar es Salaam represents characters who are victims of economic and political pressures that force them not only to be migrants but also to negotiate alternative affiliative relationships in order to survive. I explore the narrative in relation to the socio-cultural, economic and political instabilities that disrupt the lives of postcolonial subjects in Africa, producing migrants detached from their biological families. Since characters in this novel move from rural areas to urban spaces, this narrative offers an opportunity to read the city of Dar es Salaam as an agential space in the production of meanings and identities. These characters are forced by circumstances to forge new identities to meet certain needs at a particular time. I thus suggest that the novel portrays the precarity of existence in the city of Dar es Salaam as experienced by marginalised groups and how these groups negotiate affiliative relationships amongst themselves. This paper is interested in answering the following questions: how do characters move from rural to urban contexts? How do these marginalised characters negotiate their survival in the city of Dar es Salaam? How does the narrative conflate Sara and the city of Dar es Salaam as mothers to street children?
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    Intimate Family Affairs and Re-imagining Nationhood in Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze
    (Fountain Publishers, 2019) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    It is an undeniable fact that in East Africa and the Horn of Africa — Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan — have been blacklisted by global communities such as the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the African Union (AU) as unstable nations because of continued civil wars, coups, violence, genocide, drought and famine that have resulted in the migration of people with their property. However, this state of instability, apart from suggesting the ‘failure’ of the post-colonial nation, it impliedly calls for ways on how to re-construct the ‘so called’ failed or unstable nations in order to resettle the displaced souls. Reading Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze from a post-colonial perspective, this paper explores how the narrative uses a family-nation metaphor to enter socio-cultural, economic and political spaces in order to interrogate the disintegration of the nation and, using family as a microcosm of the nation, proposes ways of re-building the bygone fragmented nation of Ethiopia. In illuminating how Mengiste joins other African women writers who assume authority in commenting ‘the state’ of the post-colonial nation , I try to argue that Mengiste’s narrative suggests the institution of the family as a central pillar towards re-construction of nations wrecked by wars.
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    Pracarity and Affiliative Relationships in Elieshi Lema's In the Belly of Dar es Salaam
    (Rhodes University, 2019) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    This paper examines the representation of dynamics in a family that result in the separation of family members and their subsequent failure to reunite as a family. It specifically explores how Elieshi Lema’s In the Belly of Dar es Salaam represents characters who are victims of economic and political pressures that force them not only to be migrants but also to negotiate alternative affiliative relationships in order to survive. I explore the narrative in relation to the socio-cultural, economic and political instabilities that disrupt the lives of postcolonial subjects in Africa, producing migrants detached from their biological families. Since characters in this novel move from rural areas to urban spaces, this narrative offers an opportunity to read the city of Dar es Salaam as an agential space in the production of meanings and identities. These characters are forced by circumstances to forge new identities to meet certain needs at a particular time. I thus suggest that the novel portrays the precarity of existence in the city of Dar es Salaam as experienced by marginalised groups and how these groups negotiate affiliative relationships amongst themselves. This paper is interested in answering the following questions: how do characters move from rural to urban contexts? How do these marginalised characters negotiate their survival in the city of Dar es Salaam? How does the narrative conflate Sara and the city of Dar es Salaam as mothers to street children?
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    Re-imagining Family and Gender Roles in Aminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones
    (University of Pretoria, 2017-07-10) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    This paper examines the interplay between polygyny and gender by exploring the way in which family structure and gender roles are negotiated, imagined and exercised in fiction. Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor stones (2006) is read in order to explore how the institution of polygyny changes over time and how it influences gender role negotiation. Using an African feminist approach, the paper juxtaposes the historical and contemporary institution of polygyny in relation to gender role negotiation and how contemporary writers build on their literary precursors in re-writing the history of polygyny and gender according to the socio-cultural needs of twenty-first century Africans. These changes in socio-cultural, economic and political spheres in Africa have played a pivotal role in altering family structure and arrangements. I therefore argue that the changes in familial structure and arrangement necessitate gender role negotiation.
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    Writing the City Space: Migration, Precariousness and Affilial Relationships
    (Dar es Salaam University College of Education, 2017) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
    Since independence, Africa as a geo-political space has been experiencing a number of instabilities. One among them is continued civil wars and the accompanied mayhems such as migration, exile, refugeeism and the fragmentation of the institution of the family. Through such underlying forces, the post-colonial subject is subjected to various intersecting dilemmas in terms of socio-cultural identity. Using a post-colonial framework, this paper attempts to explore how literature enters such socio-cultural spaces by interrogating the ‗failure‘ of the post-colonial state. It specifically examines how the selected narrative interrogates rural-urban and diaspora migration in relation to the ‗failure‘ of the post-colonial state, how it represents the precariousness of the city that results in the marginalisation of some social groups such as prostitutes, and it reconfigures the institution of the family by creating an affilial relationship to supress the loss of familial bond. The paper argues that the precariousness of urban spaces provides an opportunity to explore the dynamics of marginalised groups and voices from the fringes, and ways in which they negotiate affilial relationships amongst themselves as relegated or displaced characters.