Women and Socio-Cultural Mores: Depiction of Widowhood in A Cowrie of Hope

Widowhood is the condition in which a wife (or a husband) grieves over the loss of her husband (or his wife) in the circumstance of death. In fact, the current paper aims at exploring and analyzing how widowhood is depicted in Binwell Sinyangwe’s A Cowrie of Hope. In the novel, Sinyangwe criticizes the strange treatment a widowed woman endures when her spouse passes away. The bereaved woman is looked upon as less than human whenever she loses her soulmate. She is seen as a killer, a witch, a prostitute, inter alia. Furthermore, death is perceived as an unnatural event caused by someone, especially a widow who is always accused of being responsible for her husband’s demise. As such, she is constrained to go through some rituals involving confinement, levirate marriage, inheritance disentitlement that undoubtedly infringe her rights as human. As far as the methodology is concerned, a qualitative method is used to carry out our research and stiwanist literary perspective is applied as theory to better analyze the selected novel, A Cowrie of Hope.

Keywords: Widowhood Rituals, Widow, Stiwanism, Culture, In-laws.