Browsing by Author "Pasi, Juliet S."

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    Exploring the girl-child’s body-mind crisis in Mahachi-Harper’s Echoes in the shadows
    (University of Namibia, 2015) Pasi, Juliet S.
    In its exploration of childhood, this article navigates the contours of the notion “girl-child” as the “sulbatern” or the “other” in Mahachi-Har per’s narrative, Echoes in the shadows. Also, in its articulation of the complexities of “childhood” in African Literature, the article endeavours to address broader issues such as the use and abuse of cultural practices in “knowledge legitimation” (Nnaemeka, 1997, p. 1) in Mahachi-Har per’s narrative. Premised on the feminist theory, the article shows how issues in feminism such as visibility, marginality, victimhood, silence, agency and subjectivity are problematised in the narrative. More importantly, the article argues that the “experience of childhood as a time of innocence, security, self-worth, and contribution to family and community” (Kurth-Schai, 1997, p. 193) is a distant fantasy for most children as shown by Vaida in Mahachi-Harper’s Echoes in the shadows. Even so, the writer is aware of the dangers of universalising the child’s experiences as monolithic and thus will contextualise the child’s experiences, specifically, the girl-child, within the Shona culture in Echoes in the shadows. The mental and physical plight of the girl-child is explored within the context in which the book is set and reveals how she is trapped in a familial institution that is supposed to protect and nurture her. Through the young girl Vaida, Mahachi-Harper shows how deeply violence is embedded in the domestic domain (Bal, 1988, p. 231). The paper concludes that it is difficult to attain social justice in a culture or society that pits male against female and adult against child; hence the paper advances for a child-centred social ethic which provides a more appropriate premise for addressing the needs and interests of the girl-child than the feminist approach.
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    Theorising the environment in fiction: An ecocritical reading of Jairos Kangira’s The bundle of firewood
    (University of Namibia, 2012) Pasi, Juliet S.
    Western perceptions of the African continent as a forest or ‘site of death’ can be traced to as far back as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness. Post-colonial readings of this text exude a literary paradigm shift that has seen African writers attempt to valourise the African forest as a possible site of development. This ecological oriented criticism (ecocriticism) has emerged as one of the fresh ways of celebrating the environment as the fi gurative site upon which human regeneration is likely to occur. The environment becomes a response to the urgent mundane socio-economic issues and provokes readers to interrogate them. In discussing Kangira’s The bundle of firewood, this paper will analyse how these texts use the environment as a narratology to deconstruct the rigid divisions that typify girlhood stereotypes; seeing these not as monolithic, but as permeable and interchangeable. Thus, celebrating the environment is a way of shifting the centre; of giving agency to silent issues and silenced subjects. It becomes a powerful metaphor in terms of the self’s constant quest for definition in a society whose social sexual matrix it (the self) transgresses. The paper reflects on the ramifications of such transgressive politics. It argues that ecocriticism plays a significant role in creating and steering ideologies around a renegotiation of relationships. The paper concludes that the environment is metonymic of so many things; in this context, the politics of exclusivism, and the self’s radicalisation and involvement in a limitless re-fashioning.