African Women as portrayed in "Ancestor Stones"

As I started thinking about the topic of this blog being about African women and how they are portrayed in Ancestor Stones, there was a certain part of the book that caught my attention again, like the last post, and made me think more about African women and what they deal with.

Here is what stood out to me this time: Mariama is talking about her mother's illness and the effect it had on her family. She makes this comment:

"When a person dies our people cry and sing. The drums sound. The house is home to many visitors. When my mother went away there was silence. My father's house was still. The silence slid down the mud walls. Great drops stretching slowly down the eaves, smothering the thoughts that hung in the air. I clotted every crevice. It rose in the back of my throat when I tried to ask about my mother, and threatened to make me retch. It filled the house until we could no longer open our mouths for fear of drowning in it."

This quotation really made me consider for the first time how African women felt. I felt that Mariama felt like she wasn't worthy to talk about her mother, not only because she was a child, but also because she was a female. The "father's house" really made me think this. I also think that she wasn't allowed to talk about this because her mother's illness was rare and considered as embarrasing.

The descriptive language in this paragraph also caught my eye. The description is rare and unique and helped me to understand the situation. I could almost see the scene and feel the frustration of wanting to talk about a hard situation and not being able to.

It is interesting, too, to think about the difference between the relationships of the daughters to their fathers and their mothers. Here, Mariama is definitely frustrated with her father and I think that she has the right to be. It is interesting to look at her relationship to her mother as well because she held great respect for her even in this time of her illness and especially when others lost respect for her mother.