Inventing Women: The Black Female Voice in the Post-Apartheid Writings of Farida Karodia

Abstract

This study examines the voice of the South African woman writer, Farida Karodia, as she writes in the post apartheid era. Specifically, it analyzes the writer‟s language as it gives voice to the black woman‟s revelation of self as she transforms silence into visibility and action. To do this, this study uses Karodia‟s post apartheid novels and short stories to derive contextual evidence of historical silencing and identify the distinctive language employed to voice the unique oppressions of race, class and gender endured by the black woman. Our theoretical framework combines the strategies of a Womanist perspective and Interactionism. Womanist theory allows us to interrogate the writers‟ premises and assumptions of the black woman on self and community while interaction theory gives us a chance to link women‟s interactions with the process of meaning construction and invention. Karodia not only attempts to define the nature of the contemporary black female voice but also invents a black woman through her distinctive choices of characters, worldview, use of conflict and union. She also uses language as inventive in its depiction of women‟s existence and shows their circumstances as evolving in nature with their ability to transform realities. The transformation for women occurs, we revealed,when women gives expression to conversial ideas, accept and learn to live with paradoxes, claim the situation,hence getting liberated by new perspectives and they are open to new understandings of their experiences. Also, the acknowledgement of their personal strengths and weaknesses allows for insight that leads to new awareness for women‟s progress.