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Paper short abstract:

To develop my paper on Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool (1975), I intend to establish the intersectionality between postcolonial ecocriticism and methods culled from ecofeminism, transformative feminism, and the aesthetics of proximity in order to develop a framework of "Postcolonial ecofeminism"

Paper long abstract:

At the present moment,there is a dearth in the consideration of gender issues in regard to literature that deals with nature and the environment in East Africa despite the fact that women writers and activists from the region have always highlighted how the effects of a patriarchal view in regard to human beings’ relationship with the environment in African society negatively impacts upon the lives of women in the private sphere, and how such issues have been symptomatic of a malaise in the larger East African society during the colonial and postcolonial period.One such writer is Rebeka Njau, whose manuscript entitled “Alone with the fig tree” won the South Africa Writing Committee Prize in 1964 and was later published as the novel Ripples in the Pool (1975). The novel is characterised by what Cajetan Iheka would define as an “aesthetics of proximity” due to its suggestion that humans and non-humans share the same agency, and because it provides aspects of the landscape with a form of spiritual vitality critical to the development of the plot of the novel. Thus the subdued critical reception of the subsequent novel that has been left out of the literary canon of texts published in the 1970s.With the development of cogent critical approaches in the contemporary period, it becomes increasingly evident that what may have been seen at the time as the text’s weaknesses, were really its strengths, hence the need to revisit the text and situate it within the framework of postcolonial ecofeminist criticism.