Melancholia And Maternal Estrangement: A Comparative Study of Alice Walker’s Meridian and Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer

Abstract

Both the male and female Black novelists emerged in the realm of American- African, Nigerian and Kenyan literatures in the recent times. They successfully occupied their unique place in the world literature and vitally contribute with considerable works for the growth of novel writing.  This article is an earnest attempt to compare the themes of melancholia and maternal estrangement in Alice Walker’s Meridian and Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer. The article examines the relationship between fractured mother-daughter relationships and female subjectivity in the contexts of African American and postcolonial Nigeria. Alice Walker describes maternal ambivalence as being bound up with political activism, racial struggle, and the psychological weight of revolutionary commitment in Meridian. In the book Night Dancer, Chika Unigwe embodies the concept of maternal absence in silence, secrecy, and social stigma, as an indication of the way patriarchy and moral policing breaks intimate relationships. This paper relies on psychoanalytic feminism and trauma theory to explain that melancholia in the two works is not always a result of individual loss but rather a set of historically determined relations of gendered oppression. By contextualizing maternal estrangement in the wider context of a socio-political reality, it is argued in the paper that Walker and Unigwe redefine the motherhood as a battleground of pain and resistance along with identity negotiation instead of sentimental idealization.