Women in Anne Tanyi-Tang Plays

Abstract

A growing body of Cameroonian literature in English has emerged from the late 1990s to the present. Anne Tanyi-Tang represents the new vintage of Anglophone Cameroonian dramatists who address contemporary societal issues. As a dramatist, her plays are gendered in nature and represents women in different socio-cultural and economic domains in contemporary Cameroonian society. This paper seeks to investigate the centrality of women issues raised in her first two plays Ewa and other plays and Eneta vs Elimo and how the woman’s defined role is inextricably linked to traditional and patriarchal conceptions. What is the place of a woman in Tanyi-Tang’s society? How does the woman resist and deconstruct cultural paradigms and redefine her role in modern day Cameroonian society? I intend to investigate how the woman has transcended that servile and stagnant position of being subservient, insignificant and only fit for marriage, wifehood and motherhood. My argument here is that first, Tanyi-Tang represents women in traditional and contemporary contexts. Second, her central characters (all women) deconstruct the stereotypes of women as indecisive, gullible and dependent and also redefine their roles in society. I propose to make this survey through a combination of new historicist, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches because no one of these approaches is sufficient to explicate Anne Tanyi-Tang’s representation of women in contemporary Cameroonian society.