Widowhood Levirate Rites and The Politics of Choice in Julie Okoh’s <i>Our Wife Forever</i>

Abstract

The problem in the relationship between man and woman as free beings, has been that of understanding the place of other, the desirability of being in objective terms, and the value of reconciling gender differences in the politics of necessary interaction. Further to the above thrust in Simone de Beauvoir’s The second sex, this paper also indulges the radical theoretical position in Barbara Johnson’s “Nothing fails like success” which anchors thought on the function of the disruption in the interpretation of the identity of the sexes, especially as this inclination avails a complementary theoretical threshold to Beauvoir’s aforementioned approach. Based on the foregoing framework, this paper has analytically examined the intricate contradictions inherent in the practice of levirate system among the Etsako people of Nigeria, re-enacted in Julie Okoh’s Our Wife Forever, exposing the fact that blinded by tradition, the people of this community derive values from their cultural mindset which regards human right in relation to patriarchal order, at the expense of the female gender. Regarding such a cultural backdrop, this paper revealed that failure to reciprocate the recognition of gender differences between the sexes is a function of contending contradictions; the failure on the part of people to experience their ignorance concerning the otherness of the sexes, by their individual actions, explain the lack of consciousness to recognize the need for the complementarity of the sexes based, on the failure to apprehend the differences of the sexes as aspects of identical classification.

Key Words: Patriarchy, feminism, levirate rites, contradictions, otherness, marginal characterization