Black women’s naked bodies: Poetic and Political Axes of African Women’s Literature

Abstract

In African countries in general, colonial power found in black women’s naked bodies an axial instrument for the material and symbolic exercise of violence and appropriation. Embodiment was discursively constructed to legitimate the imposition of a social order codified by race and gender. As anticolonial and independence projects were built for these countries, again black women’s naked bodies were handled as a fundamental discursive instrument by a power which was now black, but still male and patriarchal, and that likewise objectified, dominated, expropriated, controlled and violated them. It is important, thus, to consider the ways in/by which black women contest this appropriation and resist this violence through incisive voices that reclaim their bodies. Women writers and poets create new poetic grammars to display their femininities, their nakedness and their marked black skin as the true locus of articulation of violence and resistance.