Engendering Women in Onwueme’s Drama: Then She Said It Discussed

The corpus of Onwueme’s plays highlights issues that impact on women. Her writings, like those of most other female writers, reify women as buffeted by all manner of repressive traditions, taboos and a myriad of other dos and don’ts. She also projects issues of the female quest for space within the Nigerian socio-political milieu. Furthermore, her plays interrogate issues that border on governance, morality and justice. In all these she deliberately constructs the woman as an indispensable partner in the quest for solutions besetting the society. Therefore, unlike the poor, hapless, vitiated pictures of the woman projected in previous Nigerian drama, she enlivens her female heroine, imbuing her with power hence her ability to contribute in moving the society. In this paper, we shall attempt an analysis of this female gendering within the Niger Delta crisis in Nigeria as discussed in her play Then She Said It and the role that women play in resolving the problem.