Moving the Margins: Gender Inequality and Homelessness in Amma Darko’s Faceless

Abstract

Many African women writers have engaged with issues of social justice, development and the need to pay attention to the persistent inequalities that eat away the fabric of many societies. To this day, they continue to be at the coalface of the daily struggles that many African societies must contend with. Our paper focuses on one such African female writer, Amma Darko, whose work speaks to what she calls ‘grass roots people’. While Darko has written several books, this paper specifically engages one of her novels, Faceless, which wrestles with the structural violence which bleeds into people’s homes, affecting their everyday experiences. We focus on Darko’s engagement with gender inequality and how women continue to struggle for their place in society and the complexities they face as they juggle between the multiple roles they must play within and outside the home, with consequent effects on their children, leading to their homelessness and abandonment. The main argument in this paper is that gender inequality provides a fertile ground for violence and disorderliness.