Conflict of Tradition and Modernity in Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke

Abstract

The ever-entangling conflict of tradition and modernity has always captured the literary world of most of the African writers. The long years of denigration and subjugation by the colonizers to the native Africans has left a hurt psyche for the colonised; thereby incapacitating them to exist meaningfully in both the traditional world and the modern world. This is the predicament of the native Africans who had been exposed to the western culture brought in by the colonizers. Buchi Emecheta’s novel Double Yoke (1982) shows the conflict of tradition and modernity in the modern Nigerian society. The traditional values, customs, and beliefs are central in the lives of both men and women in the Nigerian society. However, modernity with western education and lifestyle contest the previous tradition which results in a conflict of the two forces. In Emecheta’s novel, when tradition tries to hold the centre, modernity decentralizes it. Emecheta also uses the concept of patriarchy to highlight the hardships that women face in the modern Nigerian society. The paper attempts to critically analyze the encounters of tradition and modernity present in the novel from the theoretical perspective of structuralism and post-structuralism. The study depicts that the conflict creates a dilemma for the modern educated woman in the Nigerian society to cope with the two conflicting forces.