African Ecofeminist Resistance in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Monica Arac de Nyeko’s “Strange Fruit”

The growth of African ecocriticism marks a renewed interest in African literary classics. Scholars increasingly explore literary representations of African environmental philosophies as forms of resistance against (post)colonial environmental injustices. While rural African women’s gendered positionality offers critical environmental perspectives, there remains a gap in addressing the intersection of gender, resistance, and environment in African literary criticism. Scholars are also yet to engage ecocriticism with renowned Acholi Ugandan works Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitek and “Strange Fruit” by Monica Arac de Nyeko, works that reflect gendered environmental relationality and resistance directly relevant to present-day socioenvironmental issues in and beyond the Great Lakes region. Drawing from Black ecofeminism and African ecocriticism, this project aims to develop an African ecofeminist analytical framework appropriate for interrogating gender, environment, and resistance in Song of Lawino and “Strange Fruit.” With specific focus on the parallel between domestic breakdown and environmental devastation, I argue that narratives of everyday gendered environmental relationality both resists cultural and environmental degradation and creates alternative ways of being with the nonhuman environment.

Hello. My name is Jasmine Okidi and I am a senior English major in the English Department’s Honors Program. Today, I will be presenting my Honors thesis which focuses on African ecofeminist resistance in two renowned northern Ugandan texts, Okot p’Bitek’s poem Song of Lawino and Monica Arac de Nyeko’s short story “Strange Fruit.” Song of Lawino is set during the late colonial period in Uganda, and is a poem sung by a rural Acholi woman, Lawino, who laments her husband’s denunciation of Acholi culture after he moves to the capital city for higher education. Strange Fruit is set in the late 20th century during the beginnings of the 20 year civil war in northern Uganda, and it follows Lakidi, a woman who relocated from the capital city to the rural north to marry her husband who is abducted by rebel soldiers. Both works narrate the plights of woman protagonists whose husbands have been removed from the domestic sphere, portraying domestic breakdown through or in tandem with environmental imagery to reveal the interconnectedness of physical and social environmental change. In recognizing the resistive and generative forces of these works, I develop an analytical framework appropriate for interrogating the intersection of gender, environment, and resistance in African literature, and apply this framework to understand how everyday gendered environmental relationality both resists cultural and environmental degradation and creates alternative ways of being with the nonhuman environment.

A growing branch of African literary criticism, African ecocriticism pays attention to how African literature represents customary knowledge production in relation to environmental philosophy. For the Acholi, an ethnic group of northern Uganda, cultural texts reflect how the environment is deeply intertwined with Acholi lifeways, laws, and social organization. These customary human-environment relationships become vital for conserving culture and physical environment in the wake of prevailing external forces that threaten to degrade culture and deteriorate the land.

Namely, the colonial period from 1888 until independence in 1962 created high ethnic tensions and stereotypes that socially and economically disadvantaged Acholi, and a 20 year civil war from the 1980s to the late 2000s that obstructed the practice and observance of custom and drastically altered the social and physical landscapes in northern Uganda.
In such settings, cultural texts including literature serve to not only resist total erasure through cultural conservation, but also create and proffer alternative ways of being against colonial and conflict impositions. In his book Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature, Cajetan Iheka carries out an ecocritical reading of several postcolonial African literature and its engagements with environmental crises, modeling how African writers represent how Indigenous African environmental thought and practice is taken up as a way to resist colonial oppression.

Song of Lawino and “Strange Fruit” both assume this function; however, scholars are yet to perform ecocritical readings of either text for the forms of resistance they portray that are based in human-environment relationships. Scholars including Iheka are also yet to thoroughly consider the crucial role of gender in environment relationality and resistance in African literature. I intervene in this gap by integrating Iheka’s framework with several frames from across disciplines, notably including Black feminist ecocriticism. Scholar Chelsea Mikael Frazier develops a lens called Black feminist ecocriticism that helps appreciate the intersection of race, class, gender, and environment in cultural texts. According to Frazier, Black women thinkers have always developed their own alternative understandings of the interconnectedness of all things and these ecological understandings have centered the health, well-being, and sustainability of Black, African-descended women across the Diaspora since time immemorial. To respond to how underengaged this relationality is, she develops Black feminist ecocriticism, an analytical framework committed to understanding the intersections of gender, race, and class and bringing these commitments into a larger discussion of ecocritical approaches to literature, art, and culture.

Extrapolating from her and other scholars’ arguments, I develop a framework for reading gender, environment, resistance, and productive agency in African literature. When applied to Song of Lawino and Strange Fruit, we see that because Acholi gender roles positions women in regular, closer relation to the nonhuman world, women’s relation to the nonhuman environment produces distinct place-based environmental knowledge important to understanding Acholi environmental ontology. Across both texts, women leverage this environmental relationality, not only to resist oppression, but also to exercise their productive agency in creating and offering alternative ways grounded in custom to be in and with the nonhuman environment.

Now, I present a few examples of how the framework I develop can be used through close reading to yield a better understanding of the resistive and productive power women exercise through their connections with the nonhuman world.Here is are two related excerpts from “Strange Fruit”nd Song of Lawino, respectively that illustrate women’s environmental relationality.

In the Strange Fruit excerpt, we see that the nonhuman environment is not just a backdrop to women gathering, but a site that actively facilitates communion among women who share experiences of domestic fracture during the war, coming together through customary practice and labor.

Similarly, in the Song of Lawino excerpt, we see how women’s regular interaction with the nonhuman world through cultivation and gendered labor within the domestic sphere. Rather than relegating these women to domestic labor, the domestic environment is a site for connection and communal creative production otherwise derided by colonial norms. In both cases, the physical and social environments are integrated through cultural practice that faces the threat of erasure by external oppressive forces, not only to offer solace to women but to portray from women’s perspectives the healing potential of this interconnectedness.

Lastly, I present an example of how Acholi women exercise their productive power in authoring narratives of human-environment relations that counter patriarchal narratives of women and environment. In Strange Fruit, Lakidi recounts an Acholi folktale that upholds patriarchal domination over women; however, Lakidi reinterprets the story in a way that gives agency to the woman of the folktale, and her rendition that recurs throughout the story. Instead of being a nameless female figure relegated to the moon, Lakidi gives power in naming the tale’s protagonist, and throughout the story refers to Nyadwe in times of crises to admire her power. Lakidi subverts the conflation of women and environment through her retelling and alternative regard for Nyadwe, while still maintaining the environmental relationality from which she draws inspiration.

As demonstrated with these examples, what an African ecofeminist critical framework aims to achieve is a fuller analysis of women’s contributions, both literary and culturally, to African ecological thought. My aim is that this analytical framework will support the due recognition of women’s roles in cultural and ecological conservation and integrated sustainable practice.

Thank you for your attention to my presentation. I would like to thank Dr.’s Jessica Hurley and Kristin Samuelian and my peers in the Honors Thesis writing seminar for their immense support of my project.