how to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis

She finds out her mother left her father after he got their servant girl pregnant.

When her mother Ezi dies unexpectedly, Mma is confronted with a past she knew nothing about. On the other hand, ‘Night Dancer’ is set in Nigeria and tells the story of Mma, a young girl to whom life has not exactly been kind. On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe-and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives (Adesokan, 2012). Although Unigwe’s situation as a black middle class author in the Flemish literary field can of course not be conflated with the position of the four Nigerian women working in the sex industry described in the book, parallels can be drawn between them, as Adesokan wish to contend, in the ways in which their agency is established in the performance of certain cultural configurations which have seized hegemonic hold. Deploying Becoming Black in Seven Lessons as interpretative lens, an author, Adesokan argue more specifically that their self representations reveal the mediation of dominant historical images and Western symbolic meanings and their attempts to wrest control of the construction of their bodies away from the distorted visions of dominant culture. However, the African sex workers in On Black Sisters’ Street become black in Belgium and how they negotiate a sense of self vis-à-vis the already pronounced social order. Stating that blackness has no connotation on its own, but is assigned meaning from the outside, Unigwe’s literature reminds us of the social construction of blackness (Adesokan, 2012). These lessons further include dressing in an authentically African way, always to be prepared for police control or to be able to dance. That she had to be grateful for the opportunity granted to her to be in Europe”. “It was revealed in the literature that being black means that the person is perceived as a charity project. She goes on to describe with great irony what she has learned about blackness since living in Europe.

In this column, Unigwe writes that before coming to Europe she had no clear idea of what it meant to be black, suggesting that she did not experience race to be the defining social identity in Nigeria. The Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe wrote the satirical inspired by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s piece “How to Write about Africa”, and which is also digitally available as “How to be an African,” albeit in revised form.

How to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis