"Re-grounding through Estrangement: Myth, Technology, and Identity in African Women’s Migration Narratives"

This chapter examines the pervasiveness of fantastic, mythical, and folkloric tropes in contemporary non-realistic African literature employing the “engaged humanistic model” of “migration as translation” (Bertacco and Vallorani 2021: 4; 1). It focuses specifically on fiction by women writers that defies easy categorising, exploring the impact, functions, and effects (Hall 1997) of this narrative feature—perhaps the most widely shared trait within African multifarious literary landscape—on the representation of embodied and gendered identities related to, resulting from, and being forged through migration. The selected novels, written by “Naijamerican” author Nnedi Okorafor (2019), depict migration as a physical, cultural, and emotional journey that enables the protagonists to reframe and reshape their sense of self and belonging through border-crossing, uprootedness, and re-grounding. Drawing on Bertacco and Vallorani’s notion of translation as a two-way act of relocation (2021: 1), the analysis highlights how the hybrid, in-between subjectivities shaped by such experiences act as catalysts for transformation and serve as linguistic and cultural mediators thanks to their “plurality of vision” (Said 2000), where “domains of difference” overlap and are displaced” (Bhabha 1994: 2). Okorafor’s female characters are deeply rooted in the fluid and non-normative materiality of their bodies, calling for a kind of relocation that adopts an Africa-centred standpoint and rejects binary approaches to the separation of body, mind, and soul. This perspective also challenges the biological determinism underlying Western assumptions on gender relations and performances, often internalized by African women as well (Oyewùmí 1997: ix, xiii). Instead, hybridity and multiplicity are associated with the ability to harmonize differences, facilitate communication, and create new meanings by blending African and Western languages and incorporating traditional, futuristic and foreign elements. As readers engage with the fictionalization of—willing or forced—displacement and the conflicts it spawns, fantastic and magical elements prevent the domestication of the other, who is otherwise frozen in stereotypically familiar shapes through the petrifying gaze of Medusa (Bertacco and Vallorani 2021: 96). The fusion of these elements with futuristic and technological motifs engenders a form of estrangement which dissolves the (neo)colonial gaze, while Okorafor’s deconstruction and reimagining of myths, proverbs, anecdotes, and folktales that justify African women’s marginalization contribute to reshaping oppressive mindsets and provide them with empowering strategies and tools (Signe 2004: 263).