READING CHIPO’S SILENCE: POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST TESTIMONY IN WE NEED NEW NAMES (2013) THROUGH CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY’S FRAMEWORK

Abstract

The focus of this study is the representation of Chipo's silence in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013) as a space for the postcolonial feminist critique. The study seeks to show, using Chandra Talpade Mohanty's Postcolonial Feminist theoretical lens (1988), that Chipo's silence and the eventual absence of a response from her only confessionary testimony highlight the fundamental shortcomings of mainstream feminist theory of testimony in the context of postcolonial African female subjectivity. The study, which relies on close textual analysis, will show that Chipo's silence is not simply a status of victimhood or even a straightforward refusal to speak; it is a structured state of silence, a condition produced by the violence of patriarchy and communal dispossession and by the lack of institutional frameworks that would receive and respond to her testimony. Bulawayo's conscious formal decisions denied interiority, confession, and narrative ellipsis are a literary claim in opposition to the testimony mandate of the Western feminist discourse. The study is concluded with the proposal that the postcolonial feminist critique should radically reconceptualise silence as an important mode of testimony and not a representational void.