Subverting Male Hegemony in Patriarchal Spaces in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map Of Love And Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter

Gender issues have been of great concern in many literary discourses over the past two decades. Research done on gender and related areas identify patriarchy as a cause of discomforts, hurts and pains to the female gender across all cultures. Additionally, feminist scholars have regarded these patriarchal injustices as retrogressive, uncultured and destructive to the growth and development of women in society. Thus, many contemporary literary writers have come up to expose these patriarchal injustices through their fictional works, giving their female characters noble and elevated positions that relay them as important as their male counterparts. In this regard, this study joins the corpus of literary discourses in assessing the different ways through which male hegemonic practices affect the well-being of women and how they have tried challenging these prejudices in their contexts as expressed by Mariama Ba in So Long a Letter and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love. It uses Feminism Literary Theory as propounded by Simone De Beavouir and Hellen Cixous to assess the different injustices exercised in these societies and how the affected females navigate their ways to survive in such toxicity. The study establishes that male hegemony and its effects on females is ridiculing, degrading and sickening. These practices are also universally experienced by women. However, the females have tried to voice their traumatic experiences and come up with ways of subverting these injustices such as education, friendship, sisterhood and self-narration. Thus, both Soueif and Ba have contributed significantly in conveying messages concerning women’s identity and associations and that they support feminist views which encourage females to fight for their freedom in the patriarchal world.