'Armah' s Women' by Sara Chetin: A Rejoinder

With crusading and, probably, feminist zeal, Sara Chetin in an article entitled 'Armah's Women11 sought to expose Ayi Kwei Armah's male biases in his presentation of the female characters in his novel, Fragments. Interestingly, however, Ms Chetin's own biases made her blind to some of the novel's possibilities: or to put it another way, to read as a woman may well be an inevitably dualistic exercise in simultaneously revealing and concealing. Thus under the ironic gaze of a deconstructive surveyor, a feminist reading becomes just another moment in the multilayered unfolding of the text's possibilities. And it is with a profound awareness that I in tum cannot possibly be free of bias that I wish to express disagreement with certain claims made by Ms Chetin. I am male and West African - but I suspect that this confession is not an adequate explanation of my particular biases.