Journeys Across Time, Space, Memory, and Life: Ekomo as A Feminist Travel Narrative

Abstract

María Nsüe Angüe’s Ekomo (1985) has attracted critical attention as the first Equatoguinean novel to be written by a female author and also for contesting established traditional patriarchal paradigms. It tells the story of a young female protagonist, Nnanga, whose husband (Ekomo), having travelled to the city and lived an adulterous life while there, returns home (to the village) very sick. She travels with him from place to place in search of a cure and when he eventually dies, she has to see to his burial all by herself. While the ground-breaking role the novel ascribes to Nnanga in Equatoguinean letters cannot be denied, there remains a crucial element of the protagonist’s development that remains unexplored. We refer to the effect traveling with her husband had on her physical, psychical, and linguistic development. The journey in search of a cure for her husband also turns out to be a journey through time and space, memory and experiences, thoughts and speech, and across contexts and barriers. These “journeys” have a transformative effect on Nnanga which warrants critical attention. Drawing from the conceptual frameworks of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and African Feminism, we submit that Nnanga’s is a journey of formation and self-discovery that ultimately cements her place as a bona fide figure for conceptualizations of feminism within an African context