Women's Identities in the Kenyan Landscape: The Novels of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the representation of female characters in the novels of the Kenyan writer Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. It aims in particular at examining how women’s identities are fashioned in the novelist’s fiction works under investigation: Coming to Birth, The Present Moment, Homing In and A Farm Called Kishinev. These novels show how ordinary women, being them black protagonists looking for self-fulfilment and emancipation or European main or minor characters finding a sense of belonging, are affected by historical and cultural changes and how their reactions and choices shape their identities in colonial and post-colonial Kenyan society.

Because of her British origins, Macgoye Oludhe Macgoye occupies a unique position in the literature of Kenya, her adopted motherland. She is a writer of European background, her point of view however is that of the “insider”, completely assimilated and immersed in Kenyan culture and society. Like the majority of Kenya’s indigenous black authors, Macgoye is interested in tracing the country’s recent history and the troubled formation of a national consciousness, by devoting her attention to ordinary people and the marginalized groups of her society. The first part of my work provides an overview of Kenyan literature in English, concentrating on the role of women writers and highlighting how Macgoye’s oeuvre integrates into this literary scene.

The analysis of Coming to Birth and The Present Moment, which represents the nucleus of my dissertation, focuses on black female characters challenging customary and traditional practices relegating women to preconceived roles and social spaces, in order to bring power and authority into question. The fashioning of their modern identities covers a number of strategies and opportunities ranging from social and geographical mobility, education and economic independence, to political awareness and activism. With the conquest of these various spheres of emancipation Macgoye’s female characters gradually find their place in Kenyan modern reality, while the writer takes the opportunity of bringing to the fore issues of particular interest to women in Kenyan ever-evolving society.

Homing In and A Farm Called Kishinev, featuring British settlers and a Jewish family trying to find their “home” in Kenya, represent a peculiarity in Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s fictional output due to the choice of the characters and the themes discussed. My analysis, however, examines how the female characters, the protagonists of Homing In and the minor characters of A Farm Called Kishinev, struggle to adapt themselves to their new “home”, being it the adoptive country or the Jewish culture, strongly connected to their sense of belonging and, consequently, to the fashioning of their identity. Contrary to the black protagonists of the previous novels, the women’s precarious status as inhabitants of a “limbo” makes it difficult for them to successfully adapt and shape their identities to the Kenyan reality.