Gendered Experience of Migration in West Africa Fiction: Exploring African Female Protagonists in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

This study investigates a few texts written by four female West African authors who explore the concept of home as it is viewed through the prism of migratory narratives. Unigwe's on Black Sisters' Street (2009), Darko's Beyond the Horizon (1995), Adichie's Americanah (2013), and Mbue's Behold the Dreamers (2016) are among the works that examine how the experience of migration is gendered in addition to being complicated by issues of citizenship, class, and race. Analyses of the protagonists in the selected works by these authors demonstrate how subjectivity is problematically impacted by the dynamics of home and diaspora. Using textual analysis as a methodology to gather, arrange, analyse, and evaluate information about the gendered aspects of migration as it is expressed in the four texts that are the subject of the study even though each text has been the subject of numerous studies, this article brought them all under one methodological scrutiny which expanded their semantic potential by highlighting a novel "way of reading" and pointing to additional key opportunities for interacting with migrant experiences. In addition, it was not lost on the researcher that emigration is a world phenomenon affecting other areas such as Latin America and other parts of Asia. The results of this study among others explain why female immigrants are found in the Western hemisphere of the world and findings are hitched on economic lack of the migrants among other factors.