Research Articles (English Studies)

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Browsing by Author "Moolla, F. Fiona"

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    Her heart lies at the feet of the mother: Transformations of the romance plot in Leila Aboulela�s minaret
    (University of Western Cape, 2021) Moolla, F. Fiona
    Sudanese-British writer, Leila Aboulela�s novel, Minaret (2005) transforms the plot structure of Western literary and popular romance forms and develops further the plotlines of African-American Muslim romance novels. It does so by foregrounding the dissenting mother as obstruction to the union of the hero and heroine, against the backdrop of the unique status of the mother in Islam. Thus, the ending of the novel is neither happy nor tragic. Instead, the lovers are separated, and closure requires reconciliation on the part of the couple with the concerns of the mother. In addition, because of the significant difference in age, the heroine is in some ways like a mother to the hero. Final contentment of the heroine is undermined by her questionable actions at the end, resulting in psychic and spiritual contraction. The novel is therefore opened up to ambiguity and uncertainty in the closure, notwithstanding the faith of the heroine. The specific form which closure takes, is determined by the dissenting mother as obstruction in Islamic romance.
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    Love in a State of Fear: Reflections on Intimate Relations in Nuruddin Farah's Dictatorship Novels
    (Routledge, 2016) Moolla, F. Fiona
    Romantic love, shot through with passion and the erotic, has extremely rarely been the focus of the study of African oral traditions or a theme considered in African literature criticism. This situation prevails despite the fact that love is a powerful catalyst in most oratures and literatures in both indigenous and European languages from the period of their origins. This lacuna in scholarship is partially addressed through foregrounding the love which seems to be a ubiquitous but erased presence in African novels through an analysis of the dictatorship novels of Nuruddin Farah. The novels studied are Sardines (1981), Close Sesame (1983) and Gifts (1992). Farah�s novels foreground a number of dominant ideas about love but also unique conceptions about intimate relationships in the context of an authoritarian postcolonial state where the dictator himself demands a form of love and love itself holds the threat of becoming a form of dictatorship
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    The polygynous household in Lola Shoneyin�s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives: a haven in a heartless world
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) Moolla, F. Fiona
    Despite Lola Shoneyin�s public condemnation of the impediments to female autonomy, equality, freedom, dignity, and self-realisation inherent in polygamy, the polyvalent nature of her contemporary Nigerian novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives, suggests the necessary material and moral complexity of any analysis of plural marriage in postcolonial Africa. Parodic play in this novel highlights how the apparently monstrous patriarch and the daily perversions of traditional marriage and household ideals represent the only security for both relatively advantaged and disadvantaged women in twenty-first-century Nigeria. I embed my literary analysis of the novel within a survey of history and religion to show how monogamy confirmed the moral superiority of the colonial and Christian missionary projects and justified their social interventions. To contextualise this study of the novel, I also use socio-anthropological literature that connects the global forces promoting romantic love as the sole foundation of monogamous marriage with, ironically, the global flows that create the punitive economic and social conditions to which plural marriage is an entirely rational response shaped by local cultural contexts.
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    Zimbabwean foodways, feminisms, and transforming nationalisms in Tsitsi Dangarembga�s nervous conditions and no violet bulawayo�s we need new names
    (Brill Academic Publishers, 2016) Moolla, F. Fiona
    Food studies are a productive lens through which to view the impact of social, cultural, historical and political shifts on conceptions of female identity. Nervous Conditions (1988) and we need new names (2013) are two novels which link the coming of age of two young women with the development of nationalism, in the first case, and the forced transnationalism of Zimbabwean refugees and exiles in the second. The story of these female and national identity transformations is conveyed, in part, through food-its production, sale, preparation, consumption, and cultural significance. The replacement of sadza and mbodza by the British cuisine of the 1960s in the novel of colonialism and national independence is paralleled in the replacement of food scarcity (symbolized by ngo beans, maize, and sugar) with the fast food of American consumer culture, and its impact on the Zimbabwean diaspora in the later novel of transnationalism. The centrality of the cultivation of mealies, which paradoxically both burdens and "liberates" in Nervous Conditions, occurs only as a pastoral backdrop to caricatured indigeneity in We Need New Names. In the later novel, the nutritional and cultural significance of maize is reduced to the mealie meal handed out by ngo workers. Maize's centrality is replaced in We Need New Names by constipation-inducing guavas. But in this novel also, maize finally holds out the symbolic possibility of new senses of belonging and home.