Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
27th METU British Novelists International Conference, Ankara, Türkiye, 5 - 06 Aralık 2024, ss.11-12, (Özet Bildiri)
This paper explores the gynocentric metaphors derived from women’s embodied experiences that constitute the textual body of Buchi Emecheta’s Gwendolen (1989) as it attends to the affective power and emotional tenor of her language, and the affective resonances of motherhood. Gynocentric metaphors are fundamental to this novel as Emecheta’s narrative revolves around the unnameable loss of the mother, the maternal lack that resists symbolisation, hence the untimely cutting of the umbilical cord. Thus, the story is replete with such images as pregnancy, going into labour, waters breaking, birthing, breastfeeding, childbearing, mothering and menstruation. The deep yearning to relapse into the asymbolic maternal realm of the uterus permeates the whole novel. Sexually abused by a middle-aged neighbour in Jamaica, and by her own father in England, Gwendolen suffers from traumatic feelings such as shame, humiliation, guilt and fear. She becomes pregnant, yet she tells no one the parentage of her unborn child for fear that her father may be imprisoned. Gwendolen is institutionalized in a mental hospital after going hysterical. Derived from the Greek uterus, hysteria is redefined affirmatively in this narrative, as this affective experience allows Gwendolen to carve an intersubjective, in-between and liminal space for herself and her daughter. She embodies Joycean chaosmos, chaos interwreathed with cosmos, inventing a possibility of nonbifurcated life. She names her daughter Iyamide, a Yoruba name that points to her embeddedness: “My mother, my female friend, my female saviour, my anything-nice-you-can- think-of-in-a-woman's-form” (210). In this affective atmosphere, she regards her daughter in a resonating vessel as the new flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, thereby creating a way of existing that enhances life and promotes vitality through affective conductivity that knows no bounds. Differing from the image of her mother mired in her menstrual blood, the image of Gwendolen intertwined with Iyamide portrays a rhizomatic connection in the Braidottian sense of the term, as the maternal body and the infant are immersed in a porous space that has affective conductivity and permeable boundaries; her daughter becomes her mother and thus the umbilical cord is sewn back. The skin is faster than the word. Emecheta employs these gynocentric metaphors and their corporeal materiality to demonstrate that Gwendolen performatively opens a fluid space of becoming through the affective resonances of her embodied and embedded experiences. A rhizomatic contact entwines Gwendolen and Iyamide in an uncharted space where they may trace a new line of flight through dynamic thresholds, visceral intensities, and affective assemblages.