Sowing Women, Harvesting a Nation: Rethinking Mozambican Female Discourses in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia

Abstract

Paulina Chiziane opens her novel, Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (translated to English as The First Wife), with a Zambezian proverb that says: “A woman is earth. If you don’t sow her, or water her, she will produce nothing”. The statement establishes a pathway into a world that has yet to be deeply explored through literature: the universe of Mozambican women represented through the eyes of a Mozambican female writer. Chiziane’s gaze into the female condition allows for a particular interpretation to the epigraph, because even though we could understand it as a compliment to women, it also raises basic questions regarding the position of females in society: Who sows and waters the earth, so it can be productive? By making a third party responsible for women’s productivity, aren’t we ignoring their capacity to be fecund regardless of interference by others? Who determines the circumstances under which women are supposed to be fertile (in every sense of the word)? Bearing these questions in mind, I aim to show how Chiziane reinvents what it means to be a Mozambican woman, and how she subverts the dominant national sociopolitical structure that denies women’s fundamental participation in the construction of a self-governing country. My argument is that Niketche explores the limitations imposed on women by society, so the consequent liberation of female bodies– physically, psychologically, sexually, socially, and politically speaking – serves as a personification of the Mozambican decolonization. If Chiziane’s protagonist, Rami, must reimagine herself as an independent woman, Mozambique must re-examine and remake itself as independent from Portugal. The female body that fuels the narrative represents the “independent motherland” in a state of auto-recognition, searching for acknowledgment (and reinterpretation) from both within and outside the country’s borders.