Androtexts and the Materialisation of Women’s Bodies in Helon Habila’s Fiction

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of women’s bodies in Helon Habila’s four novels – Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water, and Travellers – with attention to how female corporeality is constructed, mediated, and politicised within male-authored African fiction. Employing feminist textual analysis grounded in African feminist theories and feminist new materialism, the paper interrogates the dual operations of androtextuality and materialisation. It examines how Habila’s narrative strategies inscribe women’s bodies as sites where histories of political repression, ecological devastation, and migratory precarity are written. The analysis reveals that although Habila’s fiction often reproduces androtextual mediation through male narrators, it simultaneously destabilises patriarchal representation by emphasising the irreducible materiality and resistant agency of female characters. Women’s bodies emerge not only as symbolic constructs of national and ecological trauma but also as tangible, suffering entities that bear witness to structural violence while asserting endurance and agency. The study concludes that Habila’s oeuvre embodies a productive ambivalence: it both participates in and critiques patriarchal narrative frameworks, thereby contributing to contemporary feminist and postcolonial discourses on gender, embodiment, and power in African literature.