Mapping female consciousness: A feminist stylistic analysis of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chimamanda Adichie’s Zikora (2020)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18592/let.v16i2.20265Keywords:
Becoming Abigail, female agency, feminist stylistics, narrative technique, transnational displacement, ZikoraAbstract
Contemporary African literature has increasingly explored female subjectivity, trauma, and self-determination, yet limited critical attention has been given to how the stylistic features of these narratives articulate female consciousness across Nigerian and Western contexts. While existing scholarship on Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Zikora (2020) has addressed their thematic engagement with trauma, motherhood, and identity, the linguistic and formal mechanisms through which female consciousness is constructed in these texts remain underexplored. This study examines how linguistic choices and narrative techniques construct female subjectivity in Becoming Abigail and Zikora, with particular attention to how the body functions as a site of resistance and self-authorship and how female voice and agency are negotiated within transnational spaces of displacement. Drawing on Sara Mills’s (1995) feminist stylistics framework, the study conducts a comparative analysis of both texts across three interconnected levels. The analysis reveals two interrelated thematic formations: (1) the inscription of female pain and memory onto the body as a somatic archive of resistance and self-authorship, and (2) the negotiation of female voice and agency within transnational contexts of displacement. These findings contribute to broader discussions on how contemporary African narratives employ linguistic and structural innovation to represent women’s negotiation of changing sociocultural landscapes, and they propose the concept of a “syntax of resistance” as a framework for analysing how marginalised subjects use formal experimentation to contest dominant modes of representation.
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