Representations of marital rape and abortion in Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

Ama Ata Aidoo (1942-2023) and Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017), representatives of the first generations of African female writers in English, portrayed the lives of Ghanaian and Nigerian women in Africa and in the exile. Both authors, despite the cultural and contextual differences between their two countries and between the Igbo and Akan communities, portray the development of new female identities in their well-known novels Second-Class Citizen (Emecheta, 1974), Kehinde (Emecheta, 1994) and Changes: A Love Story (Aidoo, 1991). In their struggle for offering these alternative identities, Aidoo and Emecheta highlight the importance of education and careers as tools to escape from patriarchal contexts that can be considered constraining for their characters. This paper aims at exploring, from a gender perspective, the vision of marriage as a restrictive element in these novels as regards female independence; in particular, it will analyse the role of marital rape, which has been normalised in the traditional families and communities in the novels. Moreover, it will also consider the representation of the consequences of those abuses –whether constant pregnancies or forced abortions– as a way of subjugating or limiting female characters and their independence.