Shifts and Gendered Role Reformation: Establishing the Overturns of Binaries in Moses Isegawa’s Snakepit and Abyssinian Chronicles

Abstract

The traditional gender roles assigned to women are nurturance and caregiving. This for a long time has entrenched  their  relegation  and  domestication.  Presentation  of  women’s  dehumanisation  and domestication in fictional works reflects the marginal space they occupy within their actual societies. Most stories curated within the African communities emphasise the severity of the disadvantaged position of women without reiterating the resilience these women build in the face of their traumatisation to combat oppression. As a result, little attention has so far been paid to triggers of shifts oppression evokes in female characters who reconstruct their positions of subjugation after encountering violence. I discover that Moses Isegawa despite being a male writer vividly exemplifies how continued traumatisation incites psychological shifts in victimised characters to be perpetrators of crimes themselves in his Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit. Isegawa narrates the story of self-discoveries, resilience and dominance as delineations  of  power  in  victimised  female  characters.  These  depictions  of  proliferations of unpredictability in expressions of assigned roles attest strongly to the similitude of power operation as capable of deconstructing polarities in the imagination of roles and women’s personalities. Hence, the submission of this paper aligns closely with the fact that although encounters with pains and traumas, in general,  are  devastating,  they  sometimes  reinforce  humans’  determination  to  assert  their  autonomy without respect to anatomical distinctions.