Unmasking Women's Pushback for Emancipatin against The Backdrop of Social Change in Zimbabwe: An Analysis of Works by Dambudzo Marechera and Shimmer Chinodya

Abstract: This paper aims at spotlighting the bumpy path towards women"s emancipation and the latter"s full whack to find a way out of the social or traditional norms the aim of which is to have women knuckle under men"s will. Having for decades been under the yoke of male dominance, women"s all-out drive to break the shackles of a two-pronged system of patriarchy, (a system informed by both tradition and colonialism), is given undivided attention. Thus being, Shimmer Chinodya and Dambudzo Marechera in their fictional works bring on surface traditional systems and cultural practices such as polygamy that continually wreck untold psychological havoc to Zimbabwean women. The paper, as well, looks at women whose feministic bent in the post-colonial era for the de-phallocratization of traditions and cultural norms appears as a foil to the single-mindedness by men to fence off their power and authority. It further delves into the social cum psychological changes that, to some extent, favoured gender balance, which is then the sense in which modernity can be seen as an open sesame to the end social stratification and women"s silence.