Mapping gendered nations: Reading reconstruction in the works of Nuruddin Farah and Dambudzo Marechera

The frequency with which male African writers deploy tropes equating woman with tradition, nature, and nation is astounding. The ease and comfort so many African male writers convey in writing of Mother Africa, Mother Nature, and the prostituted nation figured as woman make an interesting contrast with the notable absence of these tropes from the works of female African writers, many of whom have been have acknowledged by women critics as complex feminist writers. Unlike many of their male African colleagues, Nuruddin Farah, from Somali, and Dambudzo Marechera, from Zimbabwe, acknowledge the inherent problematic of these tropes that ignore, as well as perpetuate, the social subordination of women. Through destabilizing the connections among woman, tradition, nature, and nation, both authors similarly question the construction of gender and nation as signifiers, as well as signifieds, in their respective nations, and call for a reconstruction of the production of meaning of these concepts.