Why should women wait?

“In ‘woman’ I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above nomenclatures and ideologies” . A wife that resonates stoicism, a woman who waited on the side lines for the worlds saint and saviour Nelson Mandela while he languished in prison on Robben Island under the South African apartheid regime, her reward vilification in the last few years before his release. This marvellous piece or work, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, a novel that uses the story of Penelope from Greek mythology, to analyse the untenable position of women whose husbands are nowhere to be found for the longest of times. This book was written from a post-colonial and feminist view of the world, and it also draws our attention to the flaws of a post-modernistic society where expectations between genders vary. These women’s stories are intertextual and even go as far as providing a transformational dynamic, even though in this particular text the pain of yesterday is not realised or relieved until the end. In this regard what I aims to do or attempt at least ;is highlight the hardships women are subjected to, furthermore an argument that rejects the reductionist mentality that has been often associated with defining women or their struggles.
The frame of reference throughout the book is Homer’s Penelope, the eternal symbol of the constant wife trapped in a social law created by men that demands an inhuman fidelity. Of the four women, Mannette breaks Penelope’s law of waiting and goes in search of her husband, who left the highlands of Lesotho for the mines but has started another family. Deli bides her time in an East Rand township while her husband qualifies as a doctor abroad, only to find herself divorced for having a child in his absence. Mamello, or Patience, declares herself “fine, but mad” after her politician husband returns from Robben Island, marries another woman and departs for the northern suburbs. Mara faithfully buries her “washout” husband after years of his sleeping around what could be described as a slow process of departure. With this as a backdrop one can understand the different situations these women faced and how this manifested in the decisions that they ended up making. However what we must be mindful of is the fact though all women were waiting in their respective manners and their decisions are a result of their differing circumstances. “Representations “contain ideological and hegemonic properties that represent historical and sectional interests. In no way simple, they express a high degree of social and poetic complexity. As a result no single story tells the story of all women, for that would be going with the assumption all women live the same lives. “our ability to empathize with the circumstances of others give us the vehicle to bridge whatever gaps exist between women of different nationalities, classes, and sexual identities ; also between different communities of women and men regardless of their location in the global economy” This extract an indication of what could be achieved if society where to pay attention to women as a people instead of a sub-human creature made for mans pleasure and intense judgement. In the book "each woman interrogates her own history by telling her story while addressing and questioning Winnie Mandela in her role as another abandoned wife. The accounts are by no means uncritical of Winnie Mandela, but an image is conveyed of how dauntingly difficult her personal life has been. Each woman tries to make sense of her own memories and comes to terms with her pain of abandonment, but the feelings are so intense that none of them can find closure.” Winnie Madikizela’s story tells the story of millions of women who have gone through unimaginable horrors or life, women that experience them now and what future generations of women will experience if nothing is being done to change this systematic oppression of women. Women have no voices in modern society and those that do are often misinformed so to provide a blinkered view of what women are. “What seems to have happened is that the passage of time which brought forth our freedom has given legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voice” this a confirmation that indeed women’s voices have been silenced however with a growth in feminism (in its different faces) change will ensue ,to this realization we might be in a space where Winnie’s Story makes sense on its own, without the need to paraphrase womens struggles through her to validate them. The reductionist orient who places women as far as the kitchen; should be done away with and women provided a platform to express their views and the crucial problem of how power differentials between the genders might be adjusted in order to prevent such injustices..