The Unsaid or Empty Speech: The act of Being Silenced: Language of Silence of Women and its Implications in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This paper explored how women are silenced in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It drew on Parpart’s (Rethinking silence, gender and power in insecure sites: Implications for feminist security studies in a postcolonial world. Review of International Studies, 46(3), 315–324. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021051900041X) insight that a person who is silenced, who cannot say what is on their mind or speak out against injustice, can quite rightly be seen as lacking agency. Our critical reception of the works of Darko and Achebe revealed that women, or the female characters have been built, programmed and oriented with weakness, zero authority and playing second fiddle to their male counterparts. We argued that the nature of the silencing of the women: (1) depicted the various instances of women’s subjugation, subordination, submission, and compliance, amongst other things, in male dominated traditional societies, (2) encapsulated the hegemonic issues in the patriarchal society feminist scholars vehemently write against, and (3) demonstrated that silence is a marker for empty speech, the unsaid, or keeping something to the self. The paper is a contribution to further studies on gender roles and the discourse on gendered power imbalances.