ipl-logo

Nneka's Short Story: Growing My Hair Again

1236 Words5 Pages

In the short story ‘growing my hair again’, the author explains how women in the African traditions are held captive by the traditional culture and their struggles to trying to break away them using the main character Nneka. In Nigeria as well as in the other parts of Africa, culture was and still is given a lot of emphasizes especially when it comes to the traditional practices and beliefs. The culture however vary from one community to the other and ranges from the rights of passage, religious beliefs to other religious practices such as offering sacrifices and the role of women in the community .Nneka was married to a rich man in traditional Nigerian community and as in other areas, women had a role of being submissive to their husbands and subject to other cruel traditions. This traditions literary took their freedoms to make decisions or put strict boundaries to their extent of interacting with other people. When Nnekas husband died, she was required to shave her hair as a sign of mourning. According to the traditions of this community women were required to shave as a sign of their loss and the mourning had to continue for a period of one year even after the burial of the diseased (Faluyi and Dioka 110). This traditions were not favorable and to any liberal minded woman with the sense of modernization such as Nneka, it would be difficult to still endure the primitive practices months after the death of Okpala. However according to the author, there was no much choice

Show More
Related

  • Gender Roles In The Woman Warrior

    433 Words  | 2 Pages

    Maxine Hong Kingston's use of talk stories in The Woman Warrior emphasizes that individuals will find a more fulfilling life if they defy the traditional gender norms place on them by society. While contemplating beauty standards in Chinese society in “No Name Woman” Maxine Kingston thinks, “Sister used to sit on their beds and cry together… as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins” (9). From a young age girls are expected to be binding their feet and are told that it is to look beautiful, but in reality that is not why. When a womans feet are bound they are restrained and silenced. These girls could be free and happy but they are restrained by men through this binding.

    Read More

  • A Border Passage Sparknotes

    720 Words  | 3 Pages

    The practice, according to Ahmed, was not generally observed in her society and was seen by women who practiced Islam as a cultural tradition that was not mandated by the religion. Instead of being a religious requirement, circumcision was viewed as a cultural rite of passage for women. In contrast, male Islam routinely performed female circumcision and considered it as a religious need. Men felt that female circumcision was required to preserve a woman's chastity and purity and to keep her from having sex before marriage. Ahmed claims that female circumcision is not an essential Islamic ritual because of the harm it might cause and because of her own experience with it.

    Read More

  • A Song Of Longing Summary

    789 Words  | 4 Pages

    It is also a story of intercultural marriage, the foreign population of Addis Ababa in the early 1970s, and a descriptive narrative of the early years of the Ethiopian revolution. The book keeps repeating the descriptions of ritual and village life, rural travel, problems for women in a society

    Read More

  • Personal Narrative: My Love Of Cosmetology

    514 Words  | 3 Pages

    Since the age of 14 I knew being a cosmetologist was what I wanted to do I have always been very passionate about beauty I have always enjoyed the feeling of doing someone's hair or nails one of my favorite things was watching my friends faces after I did a manicure and how they love the designs and them being so amazed at my great work. It is such a great feeling to make someone feel that way. I have had numerous people tell me a cosmetology is my calling. But I already knew that. I could sit here and go on and on about everything I love about cosmetology but that would be a very long essay.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Body Ritual Among The Nacirema By Horace Miner

    598 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” he describes various habits and traditions the Nacireman people go through in everyday life and throughout the year. Miner also describes different places and how the people interact with each other as a society. While describing some of the customs, he points out how barbaric and sometimes inhumane the rituals are. Another reoccurring topic is the Nacireman people’s ideas of beauty and what ways to make themselves better looking. Miner concludes with the fact it is arduous to understand a different culture other than our own when only looked at face value.

    Read More

  • Things Fall Apart Gender Roles Essay

    946 Words  | 4 Pages

    Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a book based up on pre-colonial Nigeria back in the 1890s and it focuses on on traditional society’s and colonialism. The author presents the book Things Fall Apart through the eyes of the main character Okonkwo who was a respected elder in the village. Women in the book were all housewives and they were shown as weak, and as second class citizens of the Umuofian society. The roles of women in the Umuofia society is presented through several events that happened in in the village of Umuofia.

    Read More

  • Essay On Gender Roles In Things Fall Apart

    1083 Words  | 5 Pages

    Many aspects of their lives have men as the prominent heads of their households, but women also have some importance in many of the concepts. In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe presents the idea of how Igbo culture and religion define the roles for each gender and examines how unequal roles in society can lead to conflicts between each gender in order to illustrate how they can lead to permanently damaged relationships. The main driving forces behind gender role beliefs in Things Fall Apart are a result of the ideologies set by the Ibo people. Their culture dictated men as stronger people who did more work, while women were dictated as individuals who were weak and inferior because they did household activities.

    Read More

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie's The Danger Of A Single Story

    1179 Words  | 5 Pages

    Adichie then talks about how she was amazed by how little people knew about Nigeria when she moved to the United States. Her college roommate knew nothing about her or the culture that Chimamanda is from. Adichie explains to her audience how dangerous can a single story be, and what it can do to a person if only knowing a single story. In this essay I will be analyzing some of Adichie’s events in her speech, and those events are misjudgment, storytelling, and culture. First I’m going to talk about misjudgment.

    Read More

  • Narrative Essay On East African Culture

    954 Words  | 4 Pages

    My humble home, tucked within our modest suburb, is brimming with East African culture. The scents of freshly fried chapos permeate through my bedroom walls, plastered with cloth paintings from Kenya and South Sudan. The sound of Kiswahili, the fresh chai burning my tongue, these sensations are my comfort. I am an East African, by blood and by heritage. Dark, ebony skin and lean legs that extend for miles mark me as a typical South Sudanese girl.

    Read More

  • Thesis On Women Empowerment

    1845 Words  | 8 Pages

    The state or plight of women would be analyzed through the help of three films, ‘Dry’, ‘B for Boy’, and ‘Wives on Strike’. An analysis of these movies would be done to reflect on the plight of women in the Nigerian society. Due to lack of time and insufficient funds this research would be limited in its research methodology. An experiment to test the outcome of this survey would have been ideal, but the researcher was limited by funds and time.

    Read More

  • Things Fall Apart Post Colonialism Analysis

    1837 Words  | 8 Pages

    S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee these Post-colonial writers have all dealt with Africa in their own individual and unique ways. Achebe does not treat the African culture and ways of life as something hybrid, complex, dependant for its significance on the Western style of perceiving things or neither has he shown Africa to be existing only in relation to its difference from or consonance with the Western form of religion, culture, identity, and discourse. The major theme of the novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ centers around the destruction of Africa’s intricate, almost incomprehensible but unique way of life and culture in the wake of British colonization and forced or maneuvered conversion to Christianity. The administrative as well as religious changes that the British tries to impose upon the native Africans has the disastrous effects of uprooting the indigenous people from their original root and tradition and can be seen as some instruments of subjugation, subordination and subservience which starts with creating distrust, doubts and insecurity in the minds of people for their Igbo tradition, and its cultural and religious practices and ends with making them internalize the Christian way of life and British administrative apparatuses. Another theme that is explored in this novel is the inherent fault of the central character Okonkwo, who is ambitious, industrious, honest, masculine but is rash, and unthinking and his sense of self and identity is wholly dependent on the approval of others in his community and he thinks of anything that intrudes into it as a threat and he tries hard to be a man though in a flawed manner.

    Read More

  • Things Fall Apart Feminist Analysis

    878 Words  | 4 Pages

    Feminist Theory In Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, they recognize the life of the Igbos which are a tribe in the village of Umuofia during European colonization. There are many topics brought up in this book like the effects of colonization, culture and tradition, religion, race, etc. It is relatively easy to read “Things Fall Apart” as an anti-feminist text due to the face that the Igbo clan’s customs and traditions seem to side towards masculine features, such as power and strength. The novel is told through a male protagonist’s point of view in nineteenth century Nigeria, while women there do not have much rights, they do wield heavy influence over the leaders of the clan.

    Read More

  • Informative Speech On Female Genital Mutilation

    1861 Words  | 8 Pages

    Informative Speech: Female Genital Mutilation Specific Purpose: To inform my audience about female genital mutilation and where the controversy of it all lies. Central Idea: Female Genital Mutilation is a tradition in certain parts of the world. Most of the time these procedures aren 't carried out safely and the final outcome of the girls that have been mutilated are to work as sex slaves. INTRODUCTION (Attention Getter)This is Kizibianca of kenya, africa. At a mere fifteen years old she was woken up at 5 am and led outside of her hut by the the local traditional brothers and female elders.

    Read More

  • Purple Hibiscus Analysis

    2273 Words  | 10 Pages

    This novel is centred in these aspects of violence in which the narrator tries to outline them in different stages of life in the postcolonial society. In this essay I will discuss the connection between these forms of violence and link them to the characters and their encounters in the novel. Coercive violence. In this living time Nigeria is in a state of extreme violence and the illegal taking over of the “Big Men”.

    Read More

  • Masculinity In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

    1794 Words  | 8 Pages

    Chinua Achebe’s 1958 literary classic, Things Fall Apart (Achebe, 1958), is renowned for its authentic account of the black African experience. Set in post-colonial Nigeria, the fictional novel discusses the cultural roots of the Igbos and follows the life of the tragic hero, Okonkwo. This acclaimed novel deals with strong patriarchal ideals of masculinity within the Igbo culture and how Okonkwo is a direct manifestation of this. Achebe depicts the relationship between masculinity and both male and female characters, and how this, in turn, has an effect on Okonkwo’s relationships. The strongest relationship in the novel is between father (Okonkwo) and daughter (Ezinma); their bond is strong because Ezinma is everything Okonkwo would want in a son.

    Read More

More about Nneka's Short Story: Growing My Hair Again

Open Document